Is Psychology a Fake Science? with Paul Bloom

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Everyone's talkin' money focuses on relevant, inclusive, and forward thinking conversations around money and just helps you get in a better relationship with your money no matter what your goals are. Do yourself a favor and subscribe to everyone's talkin' money podcast. On Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can get access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHues.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q&A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Paul Bloom. Paul Bloom is a renowned psychologist, professor, and author currently teaching at Yale University and University of Toronto. He's published many books, including Descartes' Baby, How Pleasure Works, Just Babies, Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot, and the topic of today's conversation, Psych, the Story of the Human Mind. This episode will be discussing a broad summary of the field and findings of psychology, touching on its various branches and exploring the complexities of human behaviour. We talk about whether psychology is a real science. We talk about the reality of the unconscious mind. We talk about the legacy of Freud, the advantages of self-delusion. We talk about the hard problem of consciousness. We discuss artificial intelligence and its implication for rival theories of human language and for the future of art. We talk about the potential dangers of AI misalignment. We talk about the definition of intelligence. We discuss nature versus nurture and much more. So without further ado, Paul Bloom. Okay, Paul Bloom, thanks so much for coming on my show. Thanks for having me here, Coleman. It's good to talk to you. As I just told you offline, I've been a long time admirer of yours, read many of your books going back, at least in my life, at least six or seven years. So it's great to get you on this show. I've heard you on many podcasts, including The Very Bad Wizards, Sam Harris and others. So I think some of my fans will be familiar with you from those books and those podcast appearances. But the occasion of this podcast is you have a great new book out, which is, I think, broader in scope than any of your other books called Psych, which is basically a summary of all of the solid empirical findings of the science of psychology up to the modern day, including some of the history of science story about how psychology has evolved over the past, you know, 100 to 200 years or so. So it's a really big think book that is probably the best introductory book to psychology broadly that I could think of. And it's really, I'm really glad that you were the person to write this kind of book. So we won't cover everything in there today, but I can really recommend to my followers go out and buy this book Psych. Thanks very much. That means a lot. You're right. This is by far the biggest book I've ever written, both sort of physically in size. It's kind of a heavy one. And also in scope, my other books tended to push a particular argument, like, you know, the morality of babies or the problems with empathy. This book is meant to, as you say, just cover all of psychology. It's not supposed to be a textbook. It would kill me to write a textbook or boring or difficult to read. It's meant to be a fun way to introduce yourself at a pretty high level to everything in psych. So lots to talk about. So let's just start big picture. Me and my girlfriend have a joke that psychology is a fake science. She's some joke is kind of hurtful. It's more of just a straight up, non-funny insult than a joke, but she comes from a neuroscience background and we have grown up in the age of fat psychology of the sort that I talked about in my podcast with Jesse Single a while ago of TED Talks demonstrating so-called psychological effects that don't replicate. And in a general background where things like physics, sciences like physics, seem to have just more solid predictive power in some ways compared to the softer sciences like psychs. Combine all these factors and one can get the impression that the psych major on a college campus is doing something less serious than the physics major. I rarely start out an interview by insulting my entire guests field. I like that. I like that. But can you say something in defense of psychology as a real science with a capital S? Yeah. Well, first thing in kind of an equally prognacious mode, we could talk about neuroscience and their replication crises that have hit neuroscience in a difficult, it's in that area. But you use it a lot of tough things about psychology. I think each and every one of them is true. We're certainly not a science in the sense that physics or chemistry is a science and developed sciences enormous theoretical power to explain and predict the world. We're very far from that. We are also an area where there's a lot of hucksters and shams and failures to replicate in poor studies. There's a lot of, particularly this sort of psychology that hits the popular press. A lot of it's terrible. There's enormous motivations to tell people here's how to cure your mental illness, here's how to be happy, here's how to succeed at school and work. And these things get blown out of proportion and most much of what you hear say in a TED talk or in a popular article shouldn't be trusted. So all of that's true. But I wouldn't have written a book if I believed that the story ended there. I think that psychology though it suffers from all sorts of problems replication and scope of our analyses and so on has made some extraordinary discoveries. Discoveries that have changed the way we think about the world, discoveries that have a difference and makes a difference in people's lives. I'll just give two examples. One example from work I've been involved with myself is there's been some striking discoveries about what babies know suggesting that the story that somebody like Plato or Descartes or Kant would have where there's built in inborn knowledge of physical social world is basically true. Here's this what's wrong, we come into the world with some understanding of it. And the second example I'll give you is memory which is there's a very common sense notion of memory which is when you remember the world you have this veritical tape recording of it and then maybe you lose track of it and then a helpful therapist or competent police investigator will bring it back to you. Turns out it's not true at all. Memory is largely a reconstruction of the world and so we get psychologists can easily implant false memories. Most of what you're sure about in the past is almost certainly false and there's good research on that and I could go on. I could go on to other discoveries. It is a surprise to many people how much of human differences is caused by genes and it is maybe even more of a surprise how much of human differences is caused by factors that aren't that are environmental but don't have to do with family. So we have our discoveries we've earned our keep to some extent. So I guess let's sort of talk about some of the major strains of psychological thought beginning with Freud. We kind of structure the book as a commentary on Freud, a commentary on Skinner, a commentary on Piaget. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. So let's start with Freud. As you say in the book, Freud is probably the one psychologist that almost everyone listening to this podcast has heard of and they've heard the words Freudian and they've probably heard the words Oedipus complex and they probably have some notion of the Oedipus complex meaning that men want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers and the notion of an unconscious mind and the image of a patient leaning back on a couch having a therapist sort of analyze them. So, you know, who was Freud and what is his legacy? Was he a crackpot that should be relegated to the dustbin of history? Was he right about everything or is the truth somewhere in between? Yeah, somewhere in between. You know, there are friends of mine who look at my book and say, that's a great book. Why do you waste a chapter on Freud? And at the same time I get an email saying, you talked about Freud, but you didn't talk about his famous student, young. You only didn't vote too much energy. Nobody's happy with Freud. And my take on Freud is that on the one hand, just about everything he said was false. There's not much evidence in the oral stage and the anal stage and the Oedipus complex and Piene's envy and all that stuff. That's just bogus. His theories of mental illness are unscientific and unsupported. Just about everything he said was mistaken. But I think Freud is an extremely important figure. One reason what you mentioned, which is his cultural importance, you know, you just got to know for his phrase shaped how a lot of us think about the mind. But another reason is that despite getting everything specific wrong, I think he got the biggest thing right, which is the power of unconscious. So Freud was not the first to think about unconscious, but he pushed it to a greater extent than anybody else. It made the argument that a lot of our fundamental decisions, what job to do, who we fall in love with, who we hate, who we interact with, is shaped by factors outside of our control. And modern psychologists reject everything else I can do with Freud. But we accept that. I know political psychologists and they say, we're really interested in why some people voted for Trump and other people voted for Biden. And you might think, well, just ask people and I'll tell you. But nobody would take that seriously because they sort of would say, look, even putting a side to fight people lie, you could be motivated to vote for Trump or Biden for reasons entirely out of your knowledge, out of your control. You might think you voted for the guy for one reason, but actually did it for another. And so too, for every other aspect of your life. So that's what Freud got right. In some way, the entire cognitive bias literature, you know, whether these results replicate or not, let's just, you know, for the sake of argument, say they do the concept that I'm more attracted to the same woman if she's wearing a red dress for some reason. Red is just a sort of magic color in terms of human sexual drives. Or if you're standing on a bridge and the bridge is swaying back and forth and you have a conversation with someone, you subconsciously mistake your fear of falling off the bridge for an attraction to the person because, you know, your heart is pumping and that makes you more attracted to the same person more than you would be had you just met them on the sidewalk. All of, can all of that be seen as yet more vindication of the fact that we have an unconscious or subconscious mind and that it really does influence our conscious mind and our behavior and decisions, so forth? It could be. I'm going to, as you know from the book, I'm kind of skeptical about a lot of that implicit priming stuff. It's very, very, very much in vogue that, you know, you have a vote inside a school that makes you support school policies more. You just washed your hands, you're more strict about sexual morality. There's a lot, there's so many sexy findings like this. And you're right, there kind of have a Freudian flavor to them where something outside your control you don't know awareness of has moved you. I don't think that kind of work holds up. But I think what does hold up is the idea that even for decisions that might seem deliberative and contemplative, we're often drawn by factors out of our control. And the factors don't have to be, you know, a woman's wearing a red dress or something like that, a funny smell in the room. They could be factors from your past. I mean, one way to look at it is, you know, suppose I asked you, why do you have podcasts? I'm sure you have an answer. You've been asked that a hundred times, you have a can answer that. As opposed to I kind of had a good look at your life and somebody asked me, why does this guy have a podcast? So we both come over answers. Common sense says your answer is going to be better on my answer because you really know it's you after all. Freud says that could be wrong. Freud said that you have no privilege access and it could possibly be that me or your shrink is a better sense of what you're up to than you yourself. That's a really humbling notion. I've had experiences in life which vindicate that in the sense of I can think of off the top of my head in my adult life two moments where I spontaneously burst into tears for reasons I had no idea about in the moment and only after could piece together. So I'll give one example where my mother died when I was 18 and it was a very difficult informative experience for me taking care of her as she got cancer and her body changed and she eventually died. And years later, probably five years later, I had an experience where for the first time I was taking care of my girlfriend through a health scare that she had and I was very supportive and felt in control of the situation though it was sort of something of an emergency, not a life-threatening one. And at the end of it, when she got a surgery and everything went well, I just we were fighting about something totally unrelated. We were having a totally separate fight and all of a sudden I just break out into uncontrollable tears, absolutely uncontrollable tears. And I realized after the fact that the experience of taking care of her reminded me so much of taking care of my mother and that's the only explanation for I'm not a person known to just burst into tears like that, right? And that's there's one other situation that happened too but this is I think many people will have similar experiences where an outside perspective has as much information or knowledge about you or at least could in principle as you have of yourself. That's right and I think that's a deep point. My example is there was an appointment, you know, I'm supposed to go to and I missed it and then I made another reschedulate, put in my calendar very clear and then it goes by and just don't go. Somebody who's close to me says, why don't you want to go to that appointment? And I think, no, I want to go to the appointment. It's really, I really want to talk to this person and I finally didn't. And I think everybody, every sort of contemplative person is like, now this doesn't mean that the sort of more florid, Freudian stuff about, oh, you know, no, it's not really you were traumatized by death of your mother or your mother or your mother. I think a lot of that's nonsense. But it's a nice example of how when you burst into tears, there were things going on inside you that you were not at the time aware of and only later. And if you, and you might have been a particularly dense person, your girlfriend might have pointed this out. I wanted, this is reminding you of when you took care of your mother. And so, so that, that stuff Freud got right. Let's face it, money is the one subject we all need to deal with, but no one actually wants to talk about. The good news is there's a podcast helping you learn everything about money no one taught you. No one's talking money hosted by me, Shawna game. Everyone's talking money focuses on relevant, inclusive and forward thinking conversations around money and just helps you get in a better relationship with your money no matter what your goals are. Do yourself a favor and subscribe to everyone's talking money podcast on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is what we're talking about in some way is self deception, which is, you know, I think a fundamental part of human psychology and, you know, I know you know, Robin Hanson and I think it was Kevin Simler's book, The Elephant in the Brain, which is all about self deception and how ubiquitous it is. Can you talk a little bit about the logic of self deception? Because naively, I would think it would always be better to know exactly what's in my mind. You would think that that would make sense. Yet there are all these situations in everyday life where it's actually better for my self interest to not know what's going on under my own hood. So what is that about? Yeah, it's such a neat, such a neat set of questions and cuts across philosophy and psychology and all sorts of domains. This comes into why do we have an unconscious in the first place and the sort of standard answers. Well, you have so much, so much stuff going on. You can't conscious this, conscious is a limited resource. It can't take on too much, you know, like listen to a podcast in one air, like listen, but I put on a different podcast in the second year, I could flip back and forth, but my content just can't absorb them both and my powers are limited. But this evolutionary biologist, Robert Fiverr's, one of the most creative people in the field had a better idea. And he said, part of what goes on to keep things unconscious is that it's adaptive. And the logic of the adaptation there is that it helps you deceive people. So suppose we were in a confrontation and I wanted to persuade you that I'm not going to back down and we're a physical, very serious one. Well, how could I best persuade you of that? The answer seems to be for me to honestly believe I'm not going to back down, even if actually well, because then you're looking at my face, you're scanning me for lies, you're looking at my emotions and I am a man who's not going to back down. And because I fool myself on the believing itself or on the flip side, imagine you want to persuade somebody your head over heels in love with them. That's the best way to persuade somebody to really believe that your head over heels in love with somebody. And so deception could evolve, self deception could evolve as a trick in order to deceive others. It's kind of like a poker game, which is, suppose I'm bluffing and I have like a 27 offsuit and I have my face just bleeds out everything I know. What I would love for the moment when I'm facing everybody else is to be confused and think I have two aces because then no one's going to think I'm bluffing, not wolf this face. And so self deception is a way to the fool others. That was Trevor Spley. And Trevor's was an evolutionary psychologist. So when he says it's a way to fool others, he doesn't mean it's a way that smart, clever people, a mode we click on in order to achieve our goals, he means it's an evolved setting, essentially that we have and that our ancestors that were better at self deception or had no better settings at self deception left more of those genes in the gene pool. And that's how we came to be, how we came to be, right? That's the argument. And an argument is that's right. So the argument is even for non human animals, you see similar examples. I think he gives example of a jackrabbit being chased by a predator and is bouncing back and forth. And if at any point prior to moving back and forth, it knew what it was going to do next. It could give it away in his posture and it'd be lunch. So there's some advantages of putting information on a need to know basis for people. The argument is that certain otherwise paradoxical emotional expressions are emotional feelings like losing your temper or falling head over heels in love exist partially because they are sort of signals to other people that actually persuade other people that you're doing what you're doing. But it works best if you believe it. So in some way evolution has evolved. It's been certain confrontations to just lose our temper. And then the other person sees us losing their business. Wow, this person really isn't going to back down. Even if under the surface for some calculations going on where the person says, yeah, things get a bit too heavy. I'm going to go run. And yeah, so Travers gets that insight. The analogy I thought of when reading this was of basketball crossovers. I don't know if you're a basketball fan at all, but not enough. Go ahead. Yeah, but I mean, it would work in soccer too, I guess. But ankle breakers are a big phenomenon in basketball where I'll fake going to the right convincingly to get my defender to bite. And then I'll go left. And if you do this effectively enough, the defender sometimes actually falls down because they've they can't they try to switch directions faster than their body allows. And these are like the illicit the ooze in the eyes. And this is a very coveted moment in basketball. And Alan Iverson was excellent at it. Tim Hardaway. And now there are modern people like like James Harden and others who are sort of known for this. But the best crossovers are the ones that are not planned by the person doing it. It's when I had every intention of going to my right to the basket. And then I get blocked and immediately instantaneously go the other way. So those are really the best crossovers are the ones that are not even planned because those are the most honest signals that can't be faked in a way. That's right. The best bluff in the world is some poker player who's nearsighted with dirty glasses. And he looks at his pair of twos and thinks he's holding two aces and you know goes all in. And then and then people who are extremely good at sussing out their intentions look into this guy and say he has to nuts. He has this great hand. And yeah exactly same. Your example is exactly right. That's the you don't fake right. You really go right with all intentions of going right. And then something else. So this brings up another question which is about consciousness itself. The hard problem of consciousness and and how to reconcile that with evolutionary psychology. So what we've been talking about here is that we have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. A mind we're aware of and a mind we we actually can't sense but is there. And one of the great problems in the philosophy of mind is what trauma called David Chalmers called the hard problem of consciousness which is why there is anything it's like to be a person at all. Why there's any feeling or awareness associated with the physical processes of any part of the brain right. Like we assume that my laptop is not feeling anything right that there's no consciousness. There's no awareness in the laptop. But for some reason when you put neurons together in a certain configuration the lights come on and there's something it's like to be this collection of cells. But you know it would seem from the perspective of evolutionary psychology that consciousness as an adaptation wouldn't be advantageous or necessary right or at least at one level right like opposable thumbs help us do stuff intelligence helps us do stuff. But what is awareness in addition to all the competence get us right. So do you view the hard problem of consciousness through the lens of evil psych as well and what do you think the current status of thinking is on that problem. Yeah it's a good set of questions and I think you nicely use a phrase like levels. So some notions of consciousness make perfect sense from an adaptive point of view. So what you mean by consciousness is that some bits of information get so you could contemplate them and ruminate them and talk about them and understand what other people talk about it. It's that's what some people even might it's conscious like right now my blood pressure is in conscious but but the fact that my microphone is in front of me that is conscious I could just tell you about it and tell the story right now that makes perfect sense that's good for communicating animal would want to be able to talk about what is aware of. It's essential for for animals to feel pleasure and pain for all sorts of simple adaptive reasons like you know you burn your hand in a stove you avoid to stove you know food tastes good to eat more of it and so on and it keeps the animal going. But the question that remains is why does it have to feel like something like why isn't it enough that I touch something go out out and then stay away. But of course that description is incomplete just also the actual physical feeling of it the pain the pleasure of having you know eating and eating some ice cream when it's a hot day out and you're hungry you know holding your newborn against your chest you know the first kiss slamming your hand in the car door these all have what's philosophers called qualia and where does that come from and the way you frame it is is kind of a common answer which might be right it comes from neurons you get the neurons piled up in just the right way the glial cells the blood rushing and outcomes consciousness and another way of putting it is when the computations become of a certain sort then you get consciousness and this is of course is a matter of actual real importance as computers get smarter and smarter so I don't think my the GBT for that I run on my computer and use it to write funny limericks and everything I don't think it's conscious but at a certain point when it starts getting say smarter than I am and is eloquent and seemingly empathic and understanding and I'm talking to it I'm talking to it like I'm talking to you I don't know you I assume you're conscious now you made a flesh and blood so that's a good inference but there may be a point where where we're almost forced to at least confront the question of can a computer not made out of flesh be conscious and I don't have to foggy say they would answer will be yeah I was I remember being influenced by Colin McGinn's book on this where he basically says that when the brain tries to understand itself it's going to reach a limit and you you make kind of reference to a similar idea in the book which is that we might there might be some mysteries that our brain as a tool is ill suited to actually solving because we just actually can't grock it we can't understand it much like chickens can't understand calculus right presumably there may be questions we can ask but can't answer because they're ill posed or they're we're just not actually the kinds of creatures that could even understand the answer if we heard it and more and more I think consciousness is that kind of problem the hard problem that is he gets he gets the idea from Chomsky who distinguishes puzzles from mysteries and puzzles are like really hard like you know I don't know how does gravity work and how do you have you build a machine that goes fast as light or how do you that and they're really working and it might take centuries but you know what you're up to you know what the problem is you know what it means to solve it for consciousness a lot of people would argue that we don't even know what an explanation would look like it connects to questions similar question but free will and so on so so Chomsky and followed by McGinn believes that the funny feeling we get when we have no idea is the feeling that a calculus gets when looking at the fact that a feeling that chicken gets when looking at a calculus text you know it's just it's not it's just beyond our powers now I don't know I mean I certainly think that's true or find a terry beings we're not angels and so there's going to be some problems that are just too hard for us you know it was problems that are too hard for chicken and problems that are too hard for dog there's going to be problems too hard for a human though one could wonder how we do supplemented by the proper AI but I just think as a sort of a strategy you got to keep plugging away and see you know sometimes it could be surprising you may be able to solve something yes so let's pivot a little bit we've talked about chat GPT or GPT 4 now and and no I'm Chomsky and this brings a set of questions that I've been thinking about and many have been thinking about in the past few months as we've had so many revelations with first GPT chat GPT 3.5 and so forth we're now we've now encountered an artificial intelligence that that just can speak and understand English as well as you know the large majority of of English speakers I think that's now undeniable though some have tried to deny it I think and in fact a few weeks ago there was an article by none other than no I'm Chomsky the father of modern linguistics in which he he he seemed to allege that chat GPT could not answer certain kinds of questions and then almost within minutes people pose those questions to chat GPT and it did a very good job of answering them so and I suspect this was because chat GPT refutes certain aspects of some of Chomsky's ideas and I think you'll you'll be able to explain to me if that's true my broader question here is does chat GPT a GPT 4 its extraordinary proficiency with language does it change or challenge any long held beliefs about how humans acquire language does it in any way inform the long standing debates on how human beings acquire language I think it does I'll say you know I was I was I went to graduate school at MIT I took courses with Chomsky my dissertation was on language development from very much of a Chomsky perspective I have a enormous respect for his work and though I thought the New York Times article was pretty bad it's very glib and dismissive so there are a couple of debates here one debate and this Gary Marcus is very engaged in it is whether or not the sort of fact that these things work by deep learning by prediction mean that there's going to fall apart at a certain level they don't create models of the world they don't have symbolic structure on logical structures there's certain things that in and they won't be able to do and it's hard to see them because they're trained on so many examples in fact the very examples that people use as counter examples to say GPT 3 end up as part of training set for GPT 4 so we could be a bit less impressed that it can handle them well it's kind of somewhat as teaching to the test but to answer your question I think it does there's there's an argument that Chomsky and Chomsky and used to make which is that there's some aspects of language that we possess that could not be learned unless we have innate language specific structures and yet these large language models seem to possess seems to have the knowledge without the innate structure seem to be the existence proof you give it enough data it will just figure it out on the other hand and here's where I'm skeptical three year olds four year olds will learn to talk with amazing fluidity and a deep grasp of language and all sorts of subtle knowledge and everything and they didn't get I don't know what is 50 billion sentences from the internet in order to do so they get a much smaller data set it's not clear then that it might put this way it might be that there's two ways to learn language the way humans do which will work on a very small data set and does involve an eight structure and the way these models do which involves no innate knowledge but an enormous amount of data and if that's true then the models don't refuse don't don't bear directly on the theory how people do so is that what you would favor right now that they're we're just learning there's a whole nother way to learn languages yeah I think so I think at minimum what we've learned is that these large statistical models are capable of learning and commanding domains that in some ways that bear no resemblance to how people do it so we know how people learn chess you somebody gives you the rules you practice something you get better and better and better if there's no relationship to how these models learn chess we know how people learn learn how to do multiplication you know to time you learn it the 12 times tables you get better you carry this you do this and those machines learn the multiply in an entirely different way so it seems as if there's another way to do things out there yeah I think one way of seeing that is seeing the kinds of mistakes humans make versus the kind of mistakes a eyes make this has been one of the frustrating elements of the conversation on chat GPT is people point out all the mistakes it makes but won't point out all the kinds of mistakes human beings make right they'll they'll point those mistakes out as if they're ever joined or to the idea that this has achieved a certain human level competence and language when humans make all kinds of mistakes right we make spelling errors which you know if GPT we're making folks would be pointing that out we make errors of logic all the time I mean there are whole fields dedicated to the reasoning errors that we make and that you know so and you can say the same about you the same about chess you know I'm like a chess fanatic and you know on chess.com they will have bots that are you know not the strongest but are kind of tailored to be mid-level bots but they don't play like mid-level humans what they do is they play perfectly six moves in a row and then make an absolutely idiotic mistake that no human would make really even a even a much worse human wouldn't make whereas humans make different much more human kinds of mistakes and so and yet you know a bot can be as good as Magnus Carlson so there can be different paths towards the same level of competence at a skill and that may be part of what we're learning here yeah I think I agree I think there's a sort of a bad argument and a good argument like you pointed out the bad argument say oh my gosh you know chat GBT made a mistake let's trash the whole thing let's make fun of a little thing a self-driving car got into an accident oh let's don't use them at all this when it comes to practical usage those are the wrong arguments to make you have to compare it to people you know if it turns out that self-driving cars you know cause an accident one at every million times they're on the road and people cause an accident one hundred fifty thousand times yeah you just you go for the proportions you go what safer so the mere existence of mistakes right now there's countless millions of people playing with these ais and everybody finds a mistake goes on Twitter to talk about it you know I think how many mistakes people that's the bad argument the good argument is the mistakes they make seem to be of a different carrot than the mistakes people make and from a sort of scientific point of view that's that's interesting that's suggested doing things differently you had a nice chess example I heard um uh this this guy I think it was Stuart Russell give a go example where apparently there's a machine there's a ferocious uh ai go player that can be fooled using extremely simple tactics that just guy I don't know enough go but just put a couple of ball around something and just it falls apart if you just do exactly the right thing in a way nobody at that level would fall apart and as a psychology I find it interesting if I'm interested in people but I'm also interested in how these strange entities work and the differences strike me is really cool let me tell you about a new and exciting podcast called iam story in 1968 black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee took a courageous stand for dignity and respect they went on strike after two workers were crushed to death by a faulty truck the men could no longer stay silent they would no longer tolerate degrading working conditions they wanted recognition of their union and recognition of their basic humanity the signs they marched with said it all four simple the powerful words I am a man their struggle caught the attention of dr. Martin Luther King jr who traveled to Memphis in a show of solidarity that would ultimately cost him his life listen and learn about one of the signature moments in american labor and civil rights history one that still resonates today the iam story podcast takes you inside the extraordinary fight for racial and economic justice go to wherever you get your podcast to subscribe okay so another question about ai and an artist and this is brought out to me by by your your book on how pleasure works this is from many years ago now but you had this thesis in that book that humans are essentialists with regard to pleasure which explains why for example we will pay millions of dollars for an original vermeer but very little money for a literal atom for atom replica right in terms of physics these are replicas they're perfect replicas and so if it were just about the pleasure that i'm getting from atoms arranged in this way and the pure beauty of the painting i shouldn't care but i do care right and and that's because we feel well vermeer touched this one right and that imbues it with some essence etc and there's a lot of things you can't understand if you don't understand that principle in life and and so i i wonder about what this means for the future of of art because we are in the age now we're mid journey and dolly too have proven i think that ais can create art at a human level certainly can create art better than i can actually better than most humans can and as good as professional artists and that's only going to get better music right now is lagging a little bit behind visual art in my opinion but i think it's very close it's going to be very close music large language models and and so forth i'm curious if if um if you would project 10 20 years in the future when music it may not be that long when music can really make the next Drake song exactly as good or better than Drake meaning Drake didn't get in the studio all you did was put a line of text into a program and it came out with the next Drake and the next Kanye or the next Harry Styles song every bit as good are people going to be interested in that product knowing that it wasn't the hand of Harry Styles or Drake or whatever that that created it yeah i mean right now everyone's going to dolly and similar things that you know get me a painting of you know Donald Trump in New York in the style of Picasso getting new Picasso is out and um i i wondered extent this will even happen in literature you know i like Richard Russo i like his short stories make me another one make me 10 you know i think that there'll be tremendous interest in this that should be fascinating to have new albums in my Drake that aren't by Drake but but such that note you can't tell and i don't think i don't think we're very far from from that but the question now is what will we think about and i think you're right i think there's a whole lot of research as well as sort of common sense observation that finds that the source really matters and we're going to downgrade contributions that are not made by people because they're a machine mate they're less intimate they're less personal and uh and so you could imagine in the future most most any sort of writing competition or artistic competition that's blind to uh to the contributors would say AI no AI allowed we just want people um and this shows up all over the place i've been reading about about uh online therapy and the claim is which i'm a bit skeptical about is GPT this pretty good therapy but i don't think people are very happy and there's some research that once they discover that their therapist is uh is a line of code not many lines of code so yeah authenticity is going to take an ex it's going to become extremely important if i had to invest in a word for the next decade that would be the word because distinguishing human creations from AI creations and also and this is our talking to Sam Harris about this also the case of um all the deep fakes that that AI could easily create there's going to be such a premium on some way of marking things that this is real this actually happened this was not a creation yeah i mean if i use the chess example i think chess is useful because AI has been ahead of humans for many decades now and so we've seen the practical consequences of that and one is people do not invest nearly as much time or money in watching stockfish play which is the best AI as they do Magnus Carlson who is much worse than stockfish it's not that there's no interest in stockfish games there actually is but it's several orders of magnitude less than the best human players i was gonna ask you that fits my estimation people would care more about watching who's the best person alive playing chess and who's the best program right i mean at any given time there's a whole twitch account dedicated to playing the best versions of various different it's a it's a computer competition an AI chess competition between different ais and it operates 24 hours a day because they don't get tired right and i've watched i've spent probably an hour and a half of my life watching it and at no point does it really have more than a hundred or 150 viewers whereas if hikara Nakamura boots up his laptop and streams he will have easily 20 to 30 000 on any given day so i think that if that and so far as that's a good earmark for where things are going i think that will probably hold true to some extent for music and literature and it's also reassuring because there were predictions when when really good chess computers came out this is going to kill chess no one's going to care anymore once the best person can be beaten by any any good AI and apparently interest in chess has gone up people think about imagine a variance and using AI to improve their games and so on so this you might have a similar thing where you know music and literature poetry whatever where either they're sort of we put put that all aside and let humans or interest what do people do or people use AI to facilitate to get better at it i don't know i don't know how many musicians we you know more than me do do people in music use AI to help so i have a friend right now who is a producer he makes sort of the beats and the music behind songs that under the structure basically and he has begun using two different ais that will essentially flesh out an idea that he has so he'll have a simple idea he'll put in the basic melody say he'll put it into the AI and then the AI will come up with you know a B section to that A section right it'll it'll supplement and often he'll find okay sometimes it's not so good but sometimes it actually gave me an idea with a small tweak it could cut your work time in half on creating a song or it could just generate lots of decent ideas that help you generate quote unquote original ideas so it's just like it's like having a tireless assistant in a way and the assistant may not be a genius but it's tireless so that's worth that's really worth something i'm i'm ready an article right now and and i'm playing around with uh with the open AI GPT for to say you know here's the first couple of paragraphs give me a couple more paragraphs along these lines you know make time to review this literature it's very tempting you just get a lot of words on a page that way the minus is that hallucinates so it makes that I usually notice it makes up citations it makes up there's something sounds cool it puts it in so you had to be extremely careful with this yeah totally um but again you know human being to hallucinate false memories and and all the rest i've i've hallucinated things that i thought that i read or things that i thought someone said and so there's that it's fair enough in some way this this blurring of the past is one way in which these ais are surprisingly human you know and and one way i've seen this put is it's almost a form that the prime directive of many of these things is basically make the user happen so so i was writing something and i said give me um i'd like some quotes this is when i was writing about replication crisis action psychology there's some quotes from prominent people on how psychology is a disaster because of replication crisis so it had a quote from from uh naseem teleb and a quote from gurgy grunge they were perfect quotes the teleb one was rude and and obscene and spicy the gigurge one was more thoughtful but company angry and and i think this is great and i look them up and neither of them existed it just gave me just what i wanted that's funny so i mean on that note many people especially in the sort of rationalist community have worried that ai is going to take over the world elan musk and others have famously signed a request to put ai on pause for six months to prevent a world takeover you know whether that world takeover occurs because you know the ai be you know actually wants to take over the world becomes conscious and like an sort of super intelligent evil human might do engineers of the world you know like the like the plot of a very good science fiction movie or whether it's the more nick boshdram idea where the ai really has no ill will no evil intent whatsoever but we ask chat gpt or or some future version of of gpt to do some task such as you know eliminate suffering in the world and it does that by killing every person in an honest attempt but it just doesn't understand certain common sense human notions because it has this sort of machine-like intelligence um do you worry about these scenarios at all and given your your observation that chat gpt at some level seems to each iteration is built to please us more and more at at some level because we're creating it so do you worry about these scenarios you know i heard sam harris give a talk a while ago but ai risk and he said the funny thing that ai risk is you look at these other risks and of nuclear war and pandemics and global starvation everything is horrible ai risk is so cool that it makes it difficult to sort of feel so science fictionate and everything i i don't worry as much as most people mainly because i find it hard to see sort of exactly what happens that leads to so much trouble you know i can't imagine somebody linking chat gpt to you know give it an ability to launch nuclear warheads and then see what happens you know so what harm can it do and the answer is you can put on social media and it can do harm that way but having said that i'm convinced that the odds of it doing something really bad are what like five ten percent and those are huge odds so i don't know whether to respond to it or shut it down for six months i'm not part of the problem there is not every country in the world is going to do the same shutdown so there may be somewhat of a race here so i just don't know i'm fairly agnostic but i don't think the shutdown people are being unrealistic i think they're just taking very seriously small risks what do you think well i've paid attention to both sides of this debate and i think over time i've come to see the critics like steve pinker and kevin kelly and robin hansen as as having persuasive criticisms so to take i guess two criticisms one i think is you know that the idea the idea that it's going that an ai will ever have a kind of urge to dominate or an urge to oppress or or even something as simple as an urge to survive its own termination is is falsely attributing to it human motives and this and i mean the reason humans have an instinct to survive is because we evolved by natural selection there's nothing about intelligence that is inherently connected to the will to survive right it just so happens that the same process evolution built both of them into us there's no reason a machine would have that unless we programmed programmed it into it so so that's sort of the easier one i think to knock down and i think to be fair to the other side i think fewer of them are compelled by that disaster scenario then by the misalignment scenario and and there there i'm less sure of what's what's worth worrying about but i think pinker and hansen or i certainly pinker would say by definition if we've made something super intelligent that intelligence will include understanding our implicit instructions right understanding that eliminate suffering in the world does that that we also mean don't kill us right it will it will if in so far as it's super intelligent it will intelligence just is understanding all of those unspoken desires and commands right so i mean and that's agnostic on whether we actually can build true like general super intelligence that might be a concept that it might be an ill post concept in that intelligence what we think of that as intelligence might be oh well this is this question i'll put to you what is intelligence like what is this is this is intelligence a knob that everyone has at a certain level measured by something like iq and in theory the knob could just be cranked all the way to the right or is it a collection of you know sub skills of modules built into us by evolution that sometimes all correlate in quote-unquote very intelligent people what is intelligence so there's a lot going on here i i to answer your last question first i think intelligence really is better thought of as a bunch of separate knobs that can return separate capacities that have different neurological architecture different developmental origins different evolutionary origins the sort of intelligence that goes into being good at math is a different intelligence than being able to manipulate and understand people which is different from being good with words it so happens with people there's sort of an intercorrelation between these intelligences so you call them iq or g which is you know some people it's a 120 it has to be good at all of these someone who's 80 has to be not not as good on all of these but it's an important question to ask because a lot of people talking about ai talk about it as if you know oh my god it now has an iq of 90 you know in a week it'll have 95 you only have 100 and it's going to zip right past us and then it'll have and then it'll will crush us and that's not the right way to see it and in fact we already know it's not the right way to see it because apparently chat gpt4 does um does really well at l-sats and sat's and the medical exam much better than any person can do at all you know does that mean it's already much smarter than us well i've dealt with it and you know it's very smart at answering certain questions and also in some other ways incredibly stupid and unimaginative you see the sort of disconnect between different sorts of intellectual abilities versus others i will however disagree a little bit was under you mentioned and attributed to the pinker enhancing and so on which is it's true that these ais don't have don't typically have any desire for self-preservation wired into them yeah that really isn't that that it's magical thing to think that just being smart comes with it my calculator is really smart at math it doesn't have any self-preservation in however if you give an intelligent being a goal whatever the goal is unless the goal is kill yourself implicit in this is survive and there's actually been simulations finding that ais doing simple goals will stare at a trouble and try to keep alive because survival is necessary in order to do the goals so you may end up with an ai with a sort of fairly strong desire to live and not get shut off and not get destroyed just because it's in the service of another goal which is made perfectly reasonable goal all right so let's uh let's pivot from the artificial intelligence is back to the uh well the real ones i'm not even sure that that that naming is good natural yeah the natural ones you know the nature versus nurture is a is a perpetual question and curiosity that people have to what extent are my traits my attributes my personality my competency my skill to what extent was that a function of the genes i was given at birth and to what extent was that a product of the environment i grew up in as a kid to what extent is it a product or just hard work and sweat equity as people would say what uh how do you answer that question based on the best evidence we have so there's not it's an important question but it's just actually just two important questions one can ask that question concerning universal set all humans have so i'm interested in language acquisition we can ask what's the relative role of innate biological machinery and environment learning language and we know it has to be both and you know bricks and dogs don't learn language so plainly has to do it the fact we have human brains but if you're raised in soul you'll learn you know korean if you're raised in florin children or Italian your environment playing in terms what language you learn so some sort of comp very complicated combination the question you're asking is subtly different and it's a question a lot of people come to ask which is forget about the universal what about differences between us maybe you're more extrovert than i am maybe i'm more agreeable than you are and you're the personality of an impact um some people are straight some are gay some some are neither some um some people are very very intelligent very verbally gifted others aren't some people good at math or whatever where does that come from and that's the business of behavioral genetics which and it's has some surprising findings so one of which i mentioned before is genes matter for every every trait you could imagine every trait that allows for variance genes matter for anything about your your about you which differs across people how quick you are to anger how quick you are to tears your your your sense of humor whatever if i could get your bio data from your biological mother and biological father their own traits i could extrapolate to yours with reasonable success um even if they never raised you just like if i have to ask if i have been looking how tall you are or how strong you are looking at your biological parents he is some some senses some it's heritable so that's like and then people say on average it's like 50 percent and it so happens 50 percent it's about right it depends depends what you're asking for so some traits are highly heritable others are much less heritable um but then where does the rest come from well it's not it's not jean's environment but environment covers so many different things it covers um what your mother was eating when you were in her womb it covers whether you're bullied at school it covers whether whether your parents read to you it covers um what the language people spoke around you and a big debate is determining what aspects of what of the environment play what role and the big finding is and you've been sure you've heard this before even the people you talked to is surprisingly how people are raised matters less than you'd expect for their personality and intelligence if it mattered a lot for instance you'd expect adopted kids into a family to turn up pretty much the same as their biological uh the biological kids as their siblings but they don't tend to they tend to be quite different their personality and their abilities this doesn't mean jeans are a hundred percent they aren't but it means that the environment that molds us a lot of it seems to come from outside of family so when you say outside the family are we talking you know the school the peers the wider culture television are we talking about you know do we know what aspects of that i guess would be called the non-shared environment do we know what aspects of that are doing the are pulling the lever in terms of the environmental component of how people turn out or is it just sort of the sum total of everything that's not your parents and household so it's by definition the sum total but then of course you could ask your question sure but what plays a role and um i think the answer is nobody knows a lot of people believe and Judith Rich Harris who's an independent scholar who wrote a nurture assumption got a lot of this argument going argued as peers so the idea is that how determines determines how dominant a person is well jeans in part where's the rest well in peer groups sometimes people are at the top sometimes people at the bottom and that sort of that sets you up for rest of your life so that's the hypothesis and there's a logic to it the evolutionary logic the person actually be shaped by people around you there's not a huge amount of evidence for it and remember the non-shared environment could be anything it could be you know gamma rays it could be you know it could be a random thing that happened to you when you were seven and not your sister exactly and all we know so all of these measures of behavioral genetics and um and the more sophisticated measures where they just look at a bunch of genomes or segments of genomes from a million people and just do math on them are good at parceling out what's the factor of the genes and what's the environment they aren't good at figuring out how the environment does this trick and they also aren't good at figuring out how the genes do their trick so it's very tempting to say you say you find a genetic contribution to people end up going to Ivy League of schools versus who don't and you say oh wow those genes wire up people's brains to make them smarter say but that by no means follows for instance if it's easier to get an Ivy League school if you're obedient and non-rebellious and no-gendotrouble and and panstrain maybe the genes code for for docility or agreeableness if it's easier to get an Ivy League school if your skin is one shade versus another maybe the genes code for skin shape so so the so genes can have their power but through all sorts of ways so that it would work one way in one society in another way in another society yeah so i just did my 23 and me i just got my results like two weeks ago and i don't know have you done that i haven't you're the second person i spoke to just had it and i think i'm gonna do it any surprises yeah well so no surprises in terms of my ancestry i'm it pretty much is almost exactly what i would have predicted given my knowledge of where my mother mother and father from but they have this whole health section where they give you just dozens and dozens of your variant of a gene and you know for for instance one was that you know 67 percent of people who have my variant of this gene are unafraid of public speaking whereas you know 33 the other 33 percent are afraid of public speaking 33 percent of people with my variant are afraid and vice versa for the other variant so i can read into this oh this this gene is the reason that i'm so comfortable being a podcaster and people ask me to speak from time to time and i i genuinely don't get too much stage right i get i get a little bit but you know it defies belief for me to think that one gene could really have a deep causal connection to public speaking specifically rather than something much more general or or something in any case i find it very hard to believe that this one gene is actually quote-unquote the public speaking gene i think we know enough to know that that's not how genetics works and yet on the other hand it got a few things very wrong about me the most surprising of which was that it got my asparagus p thing wrong which is i think yeah i don't know if everyone knows this but some people when you eat asparagus your p smells extremely weird and extremely pungent it's very noticeable and for other people it just smells normal for me i get the pungent odor every time i eat asparagus it's impossible to ignore but genetically i don't have the variant that 23andme says predicts this i have the other variant which other means they're just very wrong or it's governed by like lots of different genes which that seems like the paradigm case is something that would be just one gene i that's that's more plausible to be some sort of amino acid gets stripped or something like that but like public speaking the idea of a gene for public speaking is ridiculous so anything but first thing there's not going to be anything evolved for public speaking but for a bunch of traits involving like you know more sociability lack of social phobia and so on and it's not going to be a gene so there's these three laws of behavioral genetics that irritate our primary develop but then recently people come up with a fourth law which is that any interesting human trait is going to be on the command of hundreds more likely thousands of genes there's no gene for intelligence gene for courage gene for schizophrenia rather there's going to be that cluster of genes each contributing a fraction of one percent but they are or for height for that matter there's no gene that tells you how tall you're going to be just a bunch of genes that all work on your body in different ways together giving rise to height and that's not to be interesting it's interesting for studies to try to explore the genetic base or different categories it's also i think throws a little bit of cold water on genetic engineering claims so you know if you want a genetically engineered kid to be smarter don't imagine you're going to be tweaking one little gene you're taking a thousand genes you know and you don't also know what other things they go for so a friend and i were having this discussion recently and you you just referenced this that we share on average 50 percent of our genes with each parent and which and with each full biological sibling and i think that number if i'm correct halves as you get to grandparents and to half siblings and so for aunts but that's that's an average right which means you could share less than half your genes with a parent or a sibling based on how the i forget what the process is called when the dna kind of scrambles in each in each sperm cell and i'm tempted to say mitosis or mitosis but i could cry again or there's some like randomization that goes on in there this random shuffle is a random shuffling of the dna so but i'm not aware of like what is the range of of likelihood is it that like what's the bell curve on how much genetic material people like two siblings share for example is it like does it go from one to ninety nine percent or from 25 to 75 do you know that there's enough genes that when he's going to do the math you you shouldn't end up like ninety nine percent your father or nine nine percent your mother it's just you're flipping a bunch of coins and so it should come out um like for the most part enough coins as you come up 50 50 so but rather than having knowledge i have an anecdote a friend of mine who i talked to about 23 and me i talked in like last week actually another another podcast for that says he got his ancestry and his sister took it too and her ancestry was different but it was just because his parents are different ancestry and she got more or less from the mother versus the father so it's like it might have been like 55 percent 45 percent for one of them and 50 50 50 for the other so yeah you could one during there are many reasons why you're different from your sibling but one of them is you just get a different mix a different mix with possibly different proportions okay so let's pivot to um to happiness presumably this is something that psychology would have something to say about i mean so i mean i guess my first question is as as an expert in psychology do you feel do you feel any of the insights of psychology have made you happier like by by implementing your knowledge has any of this knowledge led to greater happiness for you specifically i think i may become happier through reading some more philosophically motivated books um and sources most of them which say don't worry too much about happiness like books about stoicism and um and sources about meditation and arguments about flow by chixen mehai which is very much of a non-happiness sort of thing the answer is is no i feel that um i haven't really benefited from psychological literature on happiness on the other hand and just to go back to your original cynicism i think psychologists have discovered some interesting things about happiness you can decide how useful they are one i'll just tell you if you one of them's obvious which is happiness uh goes up with money up to a point you're so strange if that weren't true since money you know buys you food and safety and free time and travel and and good medical care in a lot of places and so on of course there's a diminishing returns you know once you have um hundred thousand dollars another five thousand dollars and that made much of a difference but if you have twenty thousand i'll make a huge different common sense some things which aren't common sense what's non-common sense is that happiness over age shows a u-shaped curve in real surprise so a guy your age you're still pretty happy you're going to be dropping on average till you get to your mid 50s till you get to your mid 50s and then you start to creep up again and say you by the time you're you're like in your 80s could well be the happiest years of your life interesting yeah why do you think that is you know so it's not very intuitive because we know happiness correlates with health and 80 years aren't poor health happiness very strongly correlates with status we get really old you don't get much status i don't know i'm tempted sort of more pop cultural explanations like um david brook talks about a two mountains he says when you're young you're aspiring for status maybe for sex for money for power you get a bit older certain age a sort of second hump you're looking at relationships friendships meaningful acts eulogy virtues he calls him as and uh maybe they're more connected to happiness so one finding about happiness is my friend dandh gilbert said this is number one finding is the biggest correlation with happiness is good personal relationships they did a study once of the happiest people in the world they just took this they do it always serve big survey studies the people who from scale one to ten said i'm a nine or ten out of happiness from a scale of daily enjoyment said i'm ten out of ten and he said what do these people have in common and some of it is they're pretty rich they're healthy they don't smoke they're curious they're this but also they say they have people in their lives who love them that they're in regular contact with they feel respected they care for others and are cared for by others it might be and to go back to the answer of your question which is for many old people not only many old people they have family connections they have friend connections and then they nurture those instead of the mad dash that maybe younger people get into to make more money travel have more experiences or hookups more whatever that's interesting uh so i mean there there are a few questions that brings one is this question of hedonic adaptation which i think uh it's a it's a concept many people will be familiar with but i think is under discussed because it's it's just it's so profound when you think about its implications it's like we spend so much time pursuing pleasure but our our internal bar for what gives us pleasure changes often along with our success at getting that pleasure and you could i mean i i'm thinking of disney world just because i i just went there over the past weekend with my friend's family who he has small children and i was thinking about the rides that were available to me when i was their age which would have been 20 years ago not that long but like the tron ride for example one of the best roller coaster experiences i've had and they went on the rides that i liked as a kid and they were very bored by them right because they have they have exposure to these much better rides it's a treadmill effect where we can make a lot of progress but not actually move the needle on how much we are enjoying something and i you know another example for some reason i always think of is how fun it was to stay up late when i was a kid and wasn't allowed to right like if there was one night a year i got to stay up till 11 p.m this was like magical to me and once i was able to do that all of a sudden it meant nothing uh and and so many things in life are like this we you know we chase something that moves farther and farther away as we chase it i mean what is the what is the proper response as a human being to the fact of hedonic adaptation right like what is how should we should we stop pursuing things or or should we just understand that we are wired to pursue things that are going to uh that aren't going to satisfy us when we get them and we have to just accept that we're on this sort of treadmill and just keep running that's a good question i read this crazy book i won't tell you what the book is i want to do this crazy boy guy by a psychologist described hedonic treadmill says you know i was kind of married to my wife and you know we'd be intimate we turned out kind of got less fun less interesting bit boring bit boring i got a new wife that's kind of made it more interesting that got boring too so beyond taking on multiple partners pretty soon that kind of got a bit less and so he's going through this kind of fantasmagoria of increasing variety and trying to outrun the treadmill as it is wonderful this wonderful image but i don't think an end that's gonna work i think an end you will simply burn yourself out and run out of earthly pleasures and then where will you be so there's all sorts of strategies to get around it you can restrict your pleasures if there's a really good ice cream treat that you enjoy don't eat it every day if there's a musical band you really like to listen to don't always have it playing on your headphones you get sick of it you will hold back you know the advice for a couple sex life is is obvious from this perspective space everything out just kind of takes a lot of willpower but this is a way to stretch out hedonic experiences the other approach which i think is the right one and i actually wrote another book called sweet spot where i made kind of made the case for this in more detail is to say happiness in a hedonic sense pleasure seeking a pleasure it's great it's just one part of a life well lived there are other things in life that give rewards that are different from hedonic awards and so don't suffer so much from from the treadmill like think about training for marathon not running it but training for it none of it's fun in a simple sense but there's a feeling of satisfaction as you get better and better relationships a good a good long friendship good long love affair romance the excitement might fade but it has other values raising children so in some way the answer is give up a little bit on on the hedonic aspects of life i think uh i'm thinking again about this sort of u-shaped curve and our efforts to extend our lives i mean there's a lot lots of money and time invested in figuring out how to get human beings just to live longer and i think almost in so far as you have a good quality of life as an old person pretty much everyone would argue that it's better to live longer right on almost any any philosophy of happiness i'm interested in why there isn't more effort devoted to figuring out how to make experiencing a typical day feel longer right sort of extending life from the inside out and there is a short passage of your book where you talk about the subjective experience of time right and i think it was Julia Gaylef who i had on this podcast a while ago who made an observation that's always stuck with me which is that she she often goes on small vacations and notices when she's on vacation that time slows down a little bit and that therefore going on vacation effectively is a way of extending your life at some in some way whether or not that's true for everyone it does seem like there is something to your you know how you experience time moment to moment you know if you smoke weed you find time slows down or if you do another drug it speeds up it seems like this is something that maybe can maybe can be manipulated and to the extent we care about extending the life we should there should be some interest in you know how do you make your typical day seem longer without it becoming more boring is that possible is that a crackpot line of i think that's a great question i mean i mean you gave away to punchline of the answer which is i don't know if you've ever read catch 22 i read a long time ago but um but one of the characters who is terrified of dying wanted to live as long as you could before he would end he would be done during wartime he was a soldier on dangerous missions and so what he did was he aspired to make himself as bored as possible because the time would do it's like immortality the time would drag on now so so that's and that's the solution there you got it you want you want you want you want 10 you're 10 minutes to last really while you put down your phone just sit shut up and sit there for 10 minutes is presumably you want to extend your your time without being bored i don't know what the trick of that is that's actually this is an interesting question i might be smoking lots of weed um yeah except if you're me then you spend all the time in a paranoid upset yeah i'm like i'm exactly the same way that's why i can't touch it but it's it's you're making what i think is a very clever point which is you know longevity is isn't is properly thought of not as how much your body lives how much your body lasts but rather the length of your experiences i mean while we're at it abolishing sleep would if it saved people a third of their lives would give people say an extra 25 years right well but the problem with that is that i think i prefer being asleep to being awake like it sleeping well is one of my favorite things although at some maybe i what i really what i really mean is like being about to fall asleep knowing that i'm tired and gonna get a really good rest i guess and in in that case it's not the sleep i'm enjoying it's like the falling asleep yes there's going to be very delicious about the feeling of being so tired and to sleep is right it's not clear sleeping feels like anything itself but how much would you give and this is a complicated question for the gift to be able to put your head on your pillow and use it and then you open up your eyes and you're fully refreshed and the second is gone yeah i mean that would be worth that would be with a lot of my money it would be yeah although i'd wonder it would be in a sense there's a feeling you'd go mad without ability to to really experience and nothingness of sleep but imagine we factor that out no i mean it'd be it'd be huge it'd be amazing i mean i i have a feeling there are some people that by how much they get done must be living that way but but that's not me okay i have a few other questions for you before i let you go here one is uh you know i had nita ferahani on this podcast a few weeks ago and she has this new book called the battle for your brain where she really impressed upon me that mind reading technology is you know essentially here in in certain spaces the capacity to get an e g scan of your brain correlated with you know certain words or behaviors and really read your mind to to a degree that i think most people currently don't realize as possible and this tech is already being used in some chinese factories where they are hooking up workers to e g scans and being able to see via e g signal who is you know slacking off essentially are you have you paid much attention to this and and um if so what what are your thoughts on mind reading technology i haven't paid much attention to it the mind is the brain so there's no in principle reason why an fmri machine or an e g machine can't in some way capture to going on of the mind at various decisions and there's been some clever studies for instance which have people look at a screen and then there's an fmri scan and then it could capture in a almost an individual image what the person's been looking at you could imagine conceivably being able to eavesdrop in people's dreams that way assuming the visual cortex is is let is activated in this but i don't know i mean so far these are gimmicks they're sort of they're actually some one i can't resist this wonderful case of this where people in comas who were thought who was in locked in syndrome i talk with this in my book who are thought to be vegetables and so psychologists put them in fmri machine and start talking and it says if you hear what i'm saying imagine playing tennis and then like then the motor cortex would light up as if you're playing it and through this way they could communicate people in locked in syndrome so that's sort of mind reading down i got tremendous spoon when it comes to sort of dystopian things i just i think it's all possible in principle before i believe in the specific cases i'd like to see sort of serious peer-reviewed articles this area has so many people making extravagant claims often companies often people a lot of skin in the game and uh and so i've nothing against idea in principle in practice i'd like to see um i'd like to see critical scrutiny okay a few other questions here um one about mental illness we've talked about happiness let's talk about the the other side of psychology the dark side of psychology you know it seems to me you know we have the the dsm manual which categorizes all of these mental illnesses you know what how do we even define a mental illness right because this is it seems like i'll just put what i what i worry about on the table one is there's a certain kind of mental illness where the the symptoms would be a detriment to any person in any society right like like paranoid schizophrenia major depression like there's no human society barring crazy thought experiments where that set of symptoms would be good for the person and good for the people around them but when i think of something like adhd you know i i think i know people who have the symptoms of of quote unquote adhd but in a you know in in certain contexts those symptoms seem to serve them very well but you put that person you ask that person to sit in a classroom for six hours a day and and suddenly they're a very poor match for their environment but then that same person becomes a brilliant musician has no trouble focusing on something they really you on practicing their instruments say and ends up having a very successful career a rich social life and no symptoms of or signs of mental illness or deficiency so i i kind of wonder like what is the criteria of by which we separate let's say like a neurodivergent but perfectly functional type of person from someone with a quote unquote mental illness yeah i talk about this in my in my second last chapter and and it's a it's a matter psychologist and psychiatrist who work on a dsm and study this they aren't dummies so they they sort of appreciate these are really hard problems and so there are the things and this is where i part company of neurodiversity i kind of agree a few paranoid schizophrenia major depression bipolar disorder uh serious social phobia obsessive compulsive disorder um there's always new which is horrible to have i think schizophrenia is a disease like cancer it you know it destroys people's lives it leaves you unable to function it leaves you at the mercy of others dependent on others leaves you miserable you know it's under any notion of what an illness or disease is it's that but then you have all of the more difficult cases so severe autism to me is a disease like that of somebody it just needs to be protected from harming themselves they can't speak they can't act in a coordinated way but what about people with asperger syndrome who do speak but there maybe there they seem to act in ways that the neurotypical people view as odd they're focused on routine and so on and horrible anxiety where you can't get out of bed is terrible but sometimes in some circumstances a little bit of anxiety maybe a lot of anxieties just to think i quote an an evolutionary psychiatrist uh nessie who says you know people with too much anxiety you see him in psychiatrist's office people with too little anxieties you see him in prisons and morgues so you know so so the right amount of so you're right there this there's there's there's there's no there's no simple answer oh here's the cutoff particularly since the law needs things i'm going to continue and and you sort of are we we decide on where to cut off is as society and in the end i think this is not just a psychological problem it's sort of a moral problem and a political problem to say where do we say where do we say okay that's just a person we don't like a personality type we don't like call him a narcissist you know uh call him dependent but that doesn't make them ill versus when did we say now it's stepped into illness and now your insurance company could pay for your medications you can get treatment of this sort and so on and so forth it's it's a difficult problem and and and then there's other issues which is to what extent do you grant free choice a role like so i think there's a debate over sex addiction and they said no one i'll put it in it but alcoholism isn't yeah no i mean that it's it's so interesting because like there's a part of me that says well who doesn't like sex right so how can how can you know like and then there's a famous cliche about men thinking about sex every seven seconds which is definitely not true but but also directionally accurate in some way especially uh you know pubescent a puberty aged boys and and so forth but then there's another part of me that you know i've really i do i have met people that are fixated on sex to a degree where it's like half or more of their life is devoted to the direct pursuit of sex right and it's like you you can't talk to this part you can have a conversation with this person for ten minutes without them texting their tonight's hookup right it's like and that seems to be really really actually abnormal and so that's that's that's probably one of the toughest cases just because it's it's like it's something we all do want but has been taken to an extreme in that particular person so one measure which applies for these things is i'd be very unwilling to call us an addiction whatever you want to call it i mean we want to call it as a mental illness or something at least treatment if the person who's addicted is happy flourishing does well in life okay just a different way of living you know i might say dude you think too much about sex but who might i say on the other hand if they're miserable if it's destroying their lives if they themselves seek treatment that's kind of a different story one thing i worry about here is you know like i get i'm i'm constantly getting these ads on instagram for quote-unquote adult ADHD just you know every other day i'm getting ads to take thesis or whatever like whatever some product i haven't looked into it but they i'm the algorithm is clearly told thesis that i'm you know a prescript perspective buyer i'm not a person that you know my capacity for focus it can be dependent on how interested i am but i got very good grades in school you know i'm i'm by no means an ADHD candidate i think but i do feel constantly distracted right i i like almost everyone i talk to feel constantly distracted i go to my computer yeah yeah you know i go to my computer to do one thing and my fingers type in twitter before even i've decided to do anything and it's 20 minutes later and i meant to respond to that email that's the whole point of why i came to my laptop and i still haven't done it so that happens to me regularly and i feel you know i worry about the incentives of this because there's a lot of profit and money to be made in convincing someone like me that i have this thing called adult onset ADHD and it's not social media and smartphones it's just you know it's just something i have and i need to be medicated and i need to pay someone for these meds and you know i worry about that phenomenon right now that we're convincing people they have mental illnesses that are really just a product of the way society is structured there seems to be two separate questions here one question is i got it should review what you have as an illness because you're distracted by twitter this seems pretty pretty plainly not what about a kid who can't sit still for eight hours straight in the classroom same same deal this is not what we're this is these are weird things the world imposes upon you and then they call you ill if you can't do it this doesn't sound weird so i kind of agree with you i think there's different cases and it's gets a friend a depression so on but here's the second question suppose it wasn't framed in terms of an illness suppose somebody was offering you these pills you want to increase your focus take these pills there i don't i know some people have a moral objection to people using medications to get better in some way i don't quite have it when i'm sleepy i drink coffee when i want to get relaxed i drink whiskey if i was to add some sort of atterol to the mix i'm not sure there's anything inherently wrong with it no i don't think so either i i mean i think if you don't object to caffeine um you shouldn't object to really in principle any other drug but i think often maybe that objection can mask the fact that so few drugs work for lots of people right like caffeine seems to work for like most people the side effects are not so bad relative to what it gives you atterol i've done many times but i don't do it because the for me the the come downs are so bad i become very irritable and very short-tempered and it should that's it's absolutely not worth the focus that it gives me yeah so let's see if i have any questions for you before i let you go i guess i have one one last question because because you are a psychologist and this this question is very interesting to me from a psychological perspective is this this concept of social contagion right and this is this is uh most talked about now with respect to the issue of uh transgender identity but it's actually much larger than that it's just a general phenomenon right you have instances where a whole school will get hiccups right at the same time and they'll see if it's the water supply or or something else and it just turns out that it's spread via social contagion right and it's not a biological cause you have there was an Atlantic article last year about tiktok terets did you see this yeah so it was just an outbreak of terets like symptoms and doctors were racking their brains trying to find out what is caused this sudden uptick in terets and it just turns out all their new terets patients followed tiktok influencers that had terets and who made these very compelling videos letting the world in on their terets symptoms very interesting content but then gets wrapped up in all these influencers having millions of followers and kids wanting to be like them and this goes back to the very beginning of our conversation the the unconscious mind the kids coming into the doctors with terets they weren't putting it on in the sense they weren't frauds it was they really felt they were having these symptoms but upon closer examination if they're if they're made to realize that it's a product of the tiktok the symptoms actually can go away yeah the symptoms can go away like if if they're made to realize that they're the path the path the path to their symptoms is not the same as the path to that that a typical terets patient would have so i'm curious if social contagion is something you as a psychologist have looked into if you have any general commentary about it as a phenomenon and if you have looked into it at all with respect to the issue of the the uptick in transgender identity among teenagers especially girls i have in at all it's just i i know a lot of people are talking about that but i haven't i haven't looked at at at all i more generally i'm very interested i study moral psychology and a sense of right and wrong different aspects of behavior and children and adults and there's an extremely important and maybe rather obvious insight which is we're social creatures we pick up in a million ways what other people do and and we're focused on one of two things either if everybody's doing it we'll do it you know how you just put you if you're in a place people are talking in a certain way or walking is really pretty soon if you're a normal person you'll start doing that yourself it's this and if you know it or not and then the second thing you focus on above and beyond the groups is status and this is the the tiktok people which is that if there's people you recognize as high status you'll be driven to copy them and emulate them now to me is an open question to terets or whatever to what extent you could explain it in those terms or other terms but the idea that we are very very that we that social activities are contagious everything from covid masking to wearing a hat seems to be you know an undeniable truth about our minds all right uh paul bloom thank you so much for coming on my show and once again the book is called psych and i highly recommend it to anyone interested in the human mind which is probably everyone listening besides that is there anywhere else that my listeners should go to follow your work or your musings or anything else i got a website at paulbloom.net and uh a twitter paulbloom at yale even though after tweeting a lot recently my twitter account has not gone up interesting i'm blaming this on elan musk yeah i don't see your tweets i think i follow you there we go i'm shadow band don't end on that yeah perfect perfect all right thank you paul thanks a lot great talking with you thanks for listening to this episode of conversations with colman if you enjoyed it be sure to follow me on social media and subscribe to my podcast to stay up to date on all my latest content if you really want to support me consider becoming a member of colman unfiltered for exclusive access to subscriber only content thanks again for listening and see you next time let's face it money is the one subject we all need to deal with but no one actually wants to talk about the good news is there's a podcast helping you learn everything about money no one taught you meet everyone's talking money hosted by me shawmickame everyone's talking money 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