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Episode 114: Evo Psych in academia, advertising, music
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all right good evening everybody it's Nate G here along with dr. Doug Lyall dr. Lyle how you doing this evening good can you hear me okay can you hear you're pretty good yeah you're on a cell phone okay yeah I'm on a cell phone tonight unfortunately so we'll do the best we can okay no problem and uh all right well before we start I came across a little study with Yale from Yale was done maybe I'm about a month ago and it was accepted in October published in March but the name of the study is called social psychological skill and it's correlates basically the conclusion was that people who are more introverted prone to melancholy are exceptionally good at accurately assessing truths about human social behavior without any formal training or tools their conclusion was basically that lonely sad introverts are natural-born social psychologists now self-admittedly did not read the entire article because it was beautifully well so I only have your abstract to go on okay that's that's enough for us to criticize it just go ahead and I'm not trying to say that you're sad and lonely or that anybody listening who seems to be pretty good at picking up on behavior is sad and lonely but I did get me to think that that they might be on to something maybe they're not entirely correct but perhaps that certain personalities have certain characteristics that make them better social psychologists and other personalities what do you think about that yes now that that is that is very good thinking and we would expect that that would be true in other words it would be indeed a surprise if it turned out that all personalities were equally adept at all different angles of social cognition so so whatever it is that they picked up on what these people probably did unconsciously is the investigators probably self selected for something that that intuitively made sense with respect to possible superiorities on for introverted people and they found it and they probably found a very fault small effect size playing around with very small potatoes here mmm but it turns out that undoubtedly they selected in they did not select an unbiased sample of a universe of social situations from which to test accuracy social psychological acumen they they instead tested some subset which wound up with with confirming their suspicions and so I I don't know that this is true this is just my eyeball estimate the reason why I believe that in my theory as opposed to their theory is that that their theory on a prima facie basis it doesn't make any sense from the standpoint of evolution so it it makes sense that that certain sensitivities to certain issues would lead you to overestimate certain issues and underestimate other issues so if we measure it just right you're going to look good and if we measure it other ways you're going to look bad let me give you sort of an example that would fit this if we talked about the anxiety and care and concern for appropriate amount of care and concern for low probability high expensive events it will turn out that your OCD people or highly conscientious people will be quote more accurate judges of cost-benefit analysis for mitigating actions than an average person however that just so happens that we set the thing up in such a way that you know it was like the Exxon Valdez and it turns out that had we had people with higher you know conscientiousness looking at the kids we wouldn't have the excel Valdez crash it's like that's true but we've got millions of other cost-benefit and let extent on millions of other problems in the world and it's going to turn out that on average collapse across all of the problems the average nervous system is running the most optimal cost-benefit analysis but if we we narrow the field down to a certain type of interaction we're going to find some advantages for people out in the tails let me give you another example it turns out that in in for example hi Artie got into trouble with my friends from speech pathology a couple weeks ago so we're gonna now we're gonna take her to here we're gonna be old Olay but let's go this time look at our wives I got your home my detection cues are terrible so you'll have to guide that's right all right well I think we're going to go for used car salespeople okay now let's just look at used car salespeople the used car salespeople hopefully I hope they have a lower degree of conscientiousness than the general population I hope this serves them very well okay now the so we're going to see that there are you know that these nervous systems nitch pick their way around and the optimal nervous system is going to one that's going to be sitting in the middle so the on average collapse across all normal variances of situations that human beings would ever find themselves in so the the anybody thinking that introverts have some special powers discernment when it comes to shows social psychological dynamics that makes no sense to me whatsoever and I am I'm sure it would be child's play for me to look at their research and then and start dreaming up a way that I can put extra verse into a situation and see if the extroverts can out ferret the introverts when it comes to figuring out the important social cues and information I have no doubt that I can do so the so anyway that's that's what I think of their study but I bet the but you you actually have stuck your foot on the crucial issue here and the crucial insight that's more important than the one that they are they're attempting to promote which is the notion that different types of personalities or different personality styles will have different strengths and weaknesses with respect to social cognition as well as other issues and that of course is going to be true so good good thinking Nate well done all right fantastic in it it brings us to our first question of the evening which is about evolutionary psychology in academia and the question is there's a lot of professors evolutionary psychology get fired or have troublesome careers in academia because of what they teach this particular listener had a professor who sometimes engaged and taught the class in a way that challenged any religious convictions that may people may have had and some students would give them offended they'd walk out of a classroom or they allowed lis challenge what you're saying this particular professor hasn't been fired but going by how sensitive people can be when they're told they're just plain wrong is it even worth being an evolutionary psychologist in an academic setting because of the large current that seems to be flowing against this area of science and are there better way getting the system psychology out there yeah I mean there's a lot of there's many layers of questions too commentary in this question it's a complex question the first thing that I would say is that there there one of John Wooden's famous Maxim's is we can disagree but let's not be disagreeable and so you can disagree with people without being disagreeable so anybody that's walking out of classes you know offending people it's like hey well we're not and we're not we're not doing this thing the way that it should be done and so we want to be respectful the fact that people believe what they believe and they don't have a choice about what they believe and if we hit them over the head and tried with a sledgehammer and we're trying to essentially belittle them in any way this is no way to treat human beings to disagree with you and have their own complex set of reasons why it is that they believe what they believe so I'm no fan of that kind of blunt instrument approach particularly in a situation where there is a power imbalance between professors and students I think that that's uh that's no way to do things and so it doesn't matter to me whether the professor from my perspective is quote right or wrong it's it's it's the improper way to approach the subject of learning and educating and so I you know I would hope that any professor using that that kind of tactic no matter how theoretically noble it would be I would hope that they would feel the heat from the administration because that's a disrespectful way of approaching disagreement the so that's that's the first thing I would say now in terms of difficulty in academia behind these types of ideas of psychology difficulty yes I think that that's true and I think that academia is not a is not a place for free thinking and open inquiry it's it turns out that that's not what has transpired in academia not not at this state not at this juncture in history and so if you have ideas that that actually stomp on an awful lot of people's cherished beliefs you can better believe that you there's going to be some rough headwinds but you could survive you have to disagree well not be being disagreeable and many many evolutionary psychologists have thrived others have found controversy and but most of them I think are dedicated enough scientifically that they have they have fought for their position and understood that they are that they're fighting a dominant paradigm and that this is a this is a classic scientific revolution and we can't expect it to be bloodless you know we can expect that there's going to be some 10 years blocked and that there's going to be some jobs and the giant jobs not obtained it should have been behind this kind of thing this is the good news is that is that we don't live in a land where where people literally can't survive because they believe the wrong things there's other ways to make a living and if there weren't and you weren't going to swallow the party line maybe you shouldn't have put all your eggs in that basket but if you've got a PhD in psychology and you've ever been in academia you have options in this life and one of those options is to actually find areas from within psychology that narrow down or reduce the amount of controversy and you can contribute to science in a way that looks pretty antiseptic and so that's certainly a way to do things but all in all the the word of the day is esteem and we you know if you're in trouble we want to maintain the most positive possible esteem dynamic that you can and that means signaling respect and esteem for others and and in doing so you increase the odds that you will get some degree of latitude and respect in sent back to you and kind fantastic all right on the same topic the question now is is I guess this is a different listener but I guess it's on the same top yeah how do we influence people I mean the question is just how influential is the media the repeated information the slogans people are exposed to I like because you deserve the best and you know just do it and all these advertisements how do they work do they promote trust through familiarity or spontaneous recovery of craving do they actually increase consumption or they just divert away from okay just I guess the question is how does advertising work essentially the way advertising works is it's a it's meant to disturb the person's cost/benefit equilibrium so if you if you think about your life your and things that you do you do the same types of things and you've literally the same actions over and over again and the reason you do those is that you are tracking your way through a cost-benefit space as you have experimented and deviated slightly from that path and found that this path that you're on you know you go to this Starbucks you go to here for lunch you order this particular thing from the menu you call your mother once a week you take your you're close to this laundromat you tend to fill up your car at this gas station probably pointing this direction in other words what you do is you repeat behaviors because those behaviors appear to be optimal relative to your options in terms of cost-benefit analysis so that's why you talk to you talk to you worship where you worship those who you vote for and and cheer for who you cheer for and listen to the things that you listen to so and the reason you do that is put your way instead of other people's way is that each individual is a unique independent point of consciousness that has its own set of history and its own nervous system preset mechanisms that some people I know a lady that I would like that if she liked to watch basketball because I would like her to watch me play basketball because I'm pretty good and then she would esteem me work I would like for this to happen but it won't happen for the simple reason that she cannot stand the squeaking of shoes on the floor okay she just can't okay it just troubles her nervous system terribly so I've just totally out of luck here now your pullout that's it that's it so that looks good I'll suggest that so anyway the point is is that so the what what advertisement does is or any marketing program what it's doing is attempting to disrupt your equilibrium because it's difficult to get you to change because change involves risk and you have and you essentially depends upon your the amount of openness to experience you have but despite even if you're very open your behavior has all deal of stability so even if you're very open it's very likely that you buy the same on typer sprint maybe for several years in a row okay yeah it's very likely that you'll buy the same toothpaste for several years in a row so it's going to turn out that getting you to change from one brand to another or divert resources from one type of resource ie to get you to buy I don't know check cereal instead of buying bagels so in other words we're going to try to divert resource from one one style of food to another style of food in order to do that we have to just we have to change your assessment of the cost-benefit analysis and so in doing so what you're going to find is that what advertising is doing is attempting to either signal a an advantage with respect to cost or an advantage with respect to benefit relative to the competition and it's going to use a device's to do this for example it's going to use imitation so it's going to turn out that human beings watch other people make decisions and then they will imitate them if those people look like they are particularly good good models and good models means people that are a little bit fancier than me younger hipper cooler better-looking more sexually successful that's who it is that we want to imitate okay I didn't say it could be they could be older than us if you were if you're quite young yourself but when you're old like me we're looking for yuk yuk people as big as they're like a lot of you like the cool young people what's that they're like an age where everything converges to like a you know 30-round for female or twenty-five-year-old for female sure just look at the corona beer commercials then we'll see what it's all converging to so so anyway so we this imitation that's going on here and the imitation is is selling the concept that I've called the fistrick which is the the fact that that the humans and other animals are subject to imitation of what appeared to be successful members of their species and so that's and that's what advertising is doing so another aspect that this person mentioned which is today activate cravings etc yes they can because you're the way your memory systems work you're they can be reminding you of an experience that's very positive and that you haven't remembered for a while and so therefore it just hasn't been up in the queue and so by by showing you a big pizza and showing you an attractive person taking a big square out of the pizza and taking a big bite out of it that that imitative mechanism activates a bunch of those memories and therefore those memories have attached to them affective valence is so you will you will have a assemblance of the experience of eating that pizza just by watching somebody do it and so that will then increase your motivation to do that so that's one way they do things they also do things by like I said the fish trick which is a method of garnering status for a choice based on the fact that high status individuals did this and otherwise sometimes directly by cost/benefit simply by telling you the cost is lower or telling you that the benefits are higher so I can't tell you for how many years as a kid it got to be like a joke but they kept doing it it was tied tide kept coming out every time you would hear new and improved it's like I can't believe this I was hearing this when I was 3 years old and I'm hearing it when I'm 23 years old like for 20 years they'll keep telling me there's new and improved PUD and then they'd started to do things to try to sell the idea that is new improved but they put little speckles in it it was like oh well now now I must really get the stuff clean [Laughter] start the get uh there's a little more benefit about okay so when you look at what advertising is to understand it its most fundamental route it's it's designed to cause disturbance to the cost/benefit equilibrium to try to tip you into taking a risk of thinking that it's going to be worth it to go outside of your comfort zone to go to their product or service and that's and they will use typical imitative mechanisms to do that and that's how advertising works whether other other specific colors that are more pleasing to the eye or color spectrums that are color schemes that are more pleasing to the eye than others sure you bet they are and so the those are those are being hammered out you know pretty well these days by I think industrial psychology probably has worked out a lot of this stuff the but it's also I mean this is why on the internet there is so many analytics that go on towards whether the background should be blue and green or whether it should be this about or the other and you know obviously most websites are just throwing spaghetti at the wall but not all of them some of them are grinding this out you know empirically and getting these color schemes just right so one of the more interesting things that I I found was that you know I thought about different tack of this day when I started my website the other that's like oh forget it I don't need to bother the but it turns out that if you show a picture of an attractive person particularly like an attractive female looking at a computer screen about to order that product then you are like considerably more likely to order the product so it's extraordinary so it's the so she has to be looking at basically the same website you're looking at and so she's clicking on that imitative power is really striking I don't know like I read one thing that sales went up like 80 percent based on having that that little slide included so yeah imitation it said the where the where the world is going by the way it is obvious to me and anybody else that's even slightly aware is that the what advertisement used to be an advertising agencies they used to be these free-for-alls of these highly open creative people that would bounce off the walls and then they'd go shoot baskets need popcorn and they're just looking for some incredibly bizarre created penthouse that's like the dream of Madison Avenue and that was how it was for a long time well you can forget it now because now it's all about algorithms so now now the the big companies can grind out algorithms and literally make a thousand market tests and know that actually the green should be 38% of the background and the pollution be sixty-two instead of the green being 41% of the blue fifty-nine okay that's how they're going to do it and so the creativity is actually considerably reduced as we're going to wind up with very uniform basic repetitive processes that work and the the wild-eyed imagination is probably more or less a thing in the past why risk it you know if you're if you're Coors beer or what are you going to do you're going to run very similar ads to how you're going to run it before very similar ads to your competitors you're going to be aiming at a specific market niche in a way that's not quite their market niche and you're going to be selling a certain cost-benefit analysis one of the big things I just saw a beer commercial that indicated that their light beer was 99 calories I thought that's interesting you know somebody believes that yet it's going to be a winner that people aren't going to think that the calories mean anything of its under a hundred so these are that's just ie cost/benefit people are drinking beer and some extent some of them are worried about their weight so we're going to go after that sub market with that ad so that's now we know I've you know talked more than I wanted to about this but the bottom line is now you understand advertising marketing etc that's what it is it's all aimed at the machinery of the human mind that's what it is maybe one day we'll see like commercials for like steamed vegetables because I would really love to get ratings for that what I want to do I don't have to stick to that it's just not happening yeah it right happens when I'm really hungry but you know gotta go ask for a few days for that sure got it so like why do people love music dr. Lisle well I can tell you why I think they love music and and this was this was an original idea of mine in the early 1990s and so I haven't seen anything that has completely deformed this idea although we could we could expand it and modify it a little bit the what you're going to find is that that I believe that this begins with mother-infant interaction and so the it's going to turn out that infants infants and parents but mothers specifically and more importantly are going to be in a in a little dyadic loop and so children are going to to have certain facial expressions and activities that are going to endear them as well as alarm the mother it's going to keep the mother engaged and it's going to keep her intent on trying to serve that kids needs and that kid is remember unbelievably self-interested to the point where it's going to want to draw attention away from you than other other issues enough that the mother is essentially miss allocating her resources towards the child from the mother's perspective and appropriately or ideally for the child's perspective so what children are is there what I call J rods they are junior resource acquisition devices don't even ask what an S rat is we'll get the bat another day all right now so it's going to turn out the Little J rads are born with a bunch of equipment in there in order to accomplish this and one of them is going to be emotions that are going to be attractive so psychologists don't think in terms of emotions being sexually selected for example entities they just think that you have feelings and that's how that works and they don't even know why they have okay so but if we look at these through the eyes of the brilliant Jeffrey Miller we realize feelings could usually be sexually selected so certain types of feelings are more attractive than other feelings and therefore just like certain shapes of breasts in certain shapes of torsos and shapes of faces are more attractive so are certain feelings more attractive and if certain feelings are more attractive the way the engineering of the mind is certain thoughts have to change drive those feelings and therefore certain thoughts are more attractive than others etc etc so the way you think isn't because you think independently and scientific landed by ously a great deal of the reason why you think the way you think is that there are thoughts and therefore feelings that are more attractive and therefore more more valuable to have with respect to evolution now one of those things is going to be a delight in certain kinds of sensations and so for example I want you to imagine living your life with a bunch of people that when funny things happen nobody laughs it's like why out okay how about going out on a date with somebody and you're on a fricking roll for some reason you got your little witty chip is on a roll and all you see is this flat effect on the other side okay our dad not get tortured and you can test yeah you can see how awful this is see how how terrible my life is no matter how witty I am it's just flat line all right so let's so what we're going to do here is we're going to see that children are going to have an oceans that are going to make them more attractive to their mothers and therefore more likely for them to be invested in by those mothers so they better smile and they better laugh and I'm telling you if you haven't been around little kids there's nothing like a smile and laughter little kid it just lights up you know the adults sit around unless they're Psychopaths so this for Alan Goldhamer either way I just I could resist that all right so the point is is that that this is a you have this sort of it's a mechanism in there so it's going to turn out that that mother's like will mothers and fathers will use sing-song in baby-talk where the sounds of the voice are very very similar to music very very similar to singing and it's all parents basically do this so even parents that have sworn up and down that they don't do baby talk to their kids because they wanted to be adults who want to be mature they wanted to learn faster and they saw it in the Baby Einstein book to not do baby talk to your kids well guess what they are baby talk to their kids and I believe it was hand for an all was a professor at Stanford studying like a really childhood linguistics I believe it was she that put put little tape recorders inside the attics people all over Colorado that had kids and then listen to those listen to their their verbalizations to their infants and it turned out that no matter what they said all of them were talking baby talk to their kids so this is a human Universal to talk baby talk to your kids and what baby talk a lot of it is very singsong very musical hmm we're also going to see that mothers are going to sing to their kids have you ever heard of a thing called a lullaby for God's sakes okay so moms will hum to their kids and they'll sing to their kids so you can imagine what if your kid gives you a stone like stare just like all the women give me when i crack a great check what are you thinking you're thinking I'm in the wrong place okay totally unappreciated like why the hell should I keep keep this up so if you have a kid that it's not responsive to your singing then you're thinking this is freaking duster okay this I just drilled for genetic oil in West Texas and I got nothing but dust out of this oil well this kid is a loser okay and so now your feelings of love for that child are going to be substantially less and you're going to invest less in that child because you can recognize you've got some kind of social psychological basket-case which you do okay now so normal human beings are going to love music they're going to love music because they better be able to demonstrate to their mother that they love their mother so they better be having emotional reactions the liteup mom why isn't light her up as they smile and giggle and and sigh and snuggle up to the lullaby etc etc in other words they better be lovers of music so this is why I believe that human beings love music I believe it is in his essential component of parent-offspring attachment particularly mother infant attachment and I think I think it then later you know carries on and morphs and probably got from what was originally probably a survival selection a natural selection uh variants it probably then became a sexually selected variance you see that it isn't just mom singing but it's also then people like jazzier people clap their hands people make these noises you don't have to learn how to do this people also raise their arms and triumph in the same kind of symbol that we use for a touchdown or a 3-point shot in basketball this is the signal of victory these are sort of there's natural sounds and natural movements etc of excitement and you know when you see people when you see some music that is in a major key with a with particular cadence people like love to get up and dance so this is a these are probably there may very well be sexually selected characteristics in other words think about the guy who sits there with you know the Beatles jamming on I want to hold your hand and it's just sitting there doesn't feel like dancing at all it's like well guess what not going to get laid anytime soon not with that attitude and but where the guy that's dancing is indicating some normal emotional variants and residents to that stimulation and therefore that is more attractive so yeah I think that I think it is both I think humans love of music has both been a survival selection as well as sexual selection and that's why it's such a big deal for humans that's just fascinating I was having to discuss with my dad about music a couple weeks ago and we are trying to figure out if there's certain personality characteristics or until you know IQ points that first certain types of music to others classical as you know rock you definite whatever no there's no doubt the big five is am+ IQ is definitely correlated to musical tastes there's no doubt about it so people that are that are more open to experience or much more interested in experimental music stuff that's weird you know stuff that I couldn't stand people that are more disagreeable are going to be more interested in screaming completely cacophonous rock head heavy metal etc so you're going not that any of my preferences are being leaked out the point is is that this is what you're going to see and so people that are going to be more conventional or still going to be listening to Lawrence Welk if you're on the left-hand side of the equation not that you know who that is Nate oh yeah we do ask but just yeah don't ask okay yeah the point is is that yes your musical preferences are definitely correlated to the big five that is accurate that's why incidentally incidentally that's why they wind up being a useful screening tool for people looking for partners okay and that people's discussions of their musical preferences is actually a pretty good facsimile for a Big Five screening okay classical music what do you what what are some of the big Five's or country music just just we well yeah country music is going to be less open it's going to be typically it may be lower in intelligence because the themes are pretty simple uh depending upon the country music it obviously country music has a quote quite a few different themes and so forth but you tend to see the conventionality of family and the I think in for example you can have higher conscientiousness issues in country music than you might have in rock music so you have more what looks like people aiming it's to build stable conscientious you know pair-bond lives etc ie it isn't sex drugs and country music no that's not what it is the so this is uh so yeah there's going to be definite differences classical music is is it is an enjoyment of the advertisement of high IQ you know high conscientiousness I'm not not particularly open and emotional stability I would think generally is a big signal there and probably less extraversion than some other things so yeah possibly more possibly more introverted so yeah these are we'd have to look and see what they are but they're definitely there yeah I would have always liked to have been a person that could really like classical music but to make myself appear fancier sorry about that I just can't get away with it uh but but I'd like to run fairly conventional with that said Lawrence Welk will do is that that what it wasn't yeah yeah close enough towards what we'll have to do that sounds good to go my god when I was alright you know when I was when I was in college I really I kind of bounced around being different taste music and after classical rock I tried a little bit of like the heavier metals like Metallica Megadeth Pantera things like that and then one of those sports I was playing I got a concussion and now I I think I lost consciousness for a few seconds but the next couple of days I couldn't stand any of music and actually what turned out happening after that is I couldn't stand any that music ever again and I actually gravitate more towards some of the calling music so that was really I've always wondered what was going on there it looks like drama yeah that is amazing that that is a great story and I haven't heard of anything quite like it and I just would have never seen that coming but thank you for sharing that that's the that's the value of having people reporting and paying attention to some unusual things in their life like this so we can learn sometimes we can get cues to things about how the brain works that we wouldn't have otherwise ever looked for really great thank you for telling me that I just I never would have expected that the idea of being of wanting things simpler and quieter after concussion makes sense but the notion that your taste could ship substantially after that is really quite a remarkable report good thank you yeah maybe one day a PhD aggress didn't can compete out with more control what what that yeah that was okay I could pilot very good alright yeah maybe one us a lot yeah we go got one more question I think what guys think dynamics of a leader or of leadership and also what do the big five personality traits plus intelligence look like for successful leaders this way to look at at leadership well I'm always a little bit amused at the at the notion of leadership whenever I look at some book you know this cues for leadership let's everybody run out and buy it and let's somehow cultivate this or something the the truth of the matter is is that there's a phrase in horse racing called that there's horses for courses and the and this is absolutely the truth about leadership so you know you've got people that lead differently because the demands are of the situation entirely different who they're leading is different the stakes are different etc etc and so you know there's patent and then there's Steve Jobs and there's Nelson Mandela and there's Vince Lombardi and it's John Wooden these people you know may share some similarities but they're going to have tremendous individual differences and so to just say that there's a profile for leaders would be a mistake the clue there's going to be certain characteristics that will certainly run through leadership that that makes sense that that would be useful in other words first of all intelligence is going to be a very very important coveted characteristic and leadership simply because you are the job here is to calculate all kinds of variables and to try to come up with the best solution path towards whatever that the group's goals are that you know this is smarter the brain the more likely they are to come up with a solution so that's of course on the table and it should be on the table in a big way however now it depends upon what what is your space that you're in what is the what are the nature of the risks that you're running and you know what do you what are you trying to get accomplished here would you rather have George Patton or would you rather have Steve Jobs and depends upon what you're trying to do you're trying to march through Europe are you going to try to mark march through IBM and so the these are individual differences the like a Vince Lombardi and a John would both of them in sports both of them you know really at the very top of their of their game in terms of you know outstanding at their craft and yet different a lot of similarities super-high conscientiousness super attention to detail so very you know smart guys super high conscientious but one of them considerably more disagreeable so Vince Lombardi much more disagreeable person and has a much more emotionally volatile person and so that did it work yes and did some of that volatility was it probably useful probably was would wouldn't have been more effective had he been more emotionally volatile unlikely probably not different kind of game okay football is a territory taking smash them in the mouth we are defeating and intimidating you physically kind of again basketball is not okay basketball is much more about finesse precision teamwork also a lack of ego in the individual players to try to optimize the team process as opposed to any kind of individual process there so this is an the in football that happens by dismiss necessity so it's not as much of a coaching problem in football whereas in basketball it is an unbelievably big coaching problem it becomes maybe the most important coaching problem in the NBA or at basketball in any serious level is to actually get the people the individuals to subjugate what would be in their personal genetic best interests ie to hit a lot of cool shots to actually optimize the behavior or the group which would therefore their behavior would personally look different in order to optimize the group behavior you don't have that problem in football so as a result the kind of coach who would who would get people to buy into that and the system that it would be necessary the personality to drive that would be a different personality than a Vince Lombardi so this is so the issue of leadership is that each kind of leadership problem in principle would have an ideal or a perfect personality for that leadership problem and so really the the success of someone as a leader is going to be really how closely are they aligned with the perfect personality for that particular niche in in the human problem it's always fascinating hearing your esteemed dynamics of all these problems and then with regards to leadership yes some leaders they they know essentially it's kind of ingrained when to give a steam when not to give a steam when to you know kind of process plays out can you talk more about yeah so there it's a big part of leadership what this is is we're talking about motivation if we're talking about meditation talking about cost-benefit analysis and if we're talking about cost-benefit analysis we're talking about the main cost-benefit analysis that people do in this life is they are running a steam cost-benefit analysis which that's the biggest prize that people are after is the steam and so people's motivations are a competition of alternative courses of action that they have like motivation strategy number one number two number three number four so let's look at what these could be one of them could be I'm going to stay six hours late after work tonight because I want this report to shine because I want the boss to be overwhelmed because I want him to say something an open group about how great I am and what an incredible thing I did because I want to make sure that I get a promotion because because because I am saying so that would be one course of action the next course of action would be I'm going to stay two hours late to make sure that I look good enough okay because I just want to make sure that I keep my job and I keep the options open for promotion later but it's probably too early to worry about it I want to make sure that I don't embarrass myself etc so option number three is you know I'm going to do the minimum like what do I really care about you know I think I'm going to keep my job the odds are that I will and it turns out that you know there was a good-looking girl in the bar down there last last three nights I'm going to go down there see if she's there today okay so in other words every individual is running their own individual cost-benefit analysis and the leadership is to try to get those individuals to put out more more energy you know you know in order for the whole group dynamic to be as effective as possible and how are we going to do that it's going to be tricky going to be you're going to want to be wise with your currency about how it is that you give esteem keys and you're going to want to do it in such a way that optimizes the output now that being the case it's going to turn out that you can kind of see the handwriting on the wall here that this is going to line up to what I call the political principle and the political principle is going to be the principle that the politician who actually convinces more of the electorate that they that they electorate that their section of the electorate has more even with that politician than they do with the other politician in other words if I can convince that 60% of the electorate that that they are all in the top half of my concerns and the other guy is not able to do that he's only able to legitimately and truthfully convince 50 percent of the electorate that they are the top half of his concerns then I win so the politician that is actually most effectively deceptive is the one that actually will get the actions more of the access required to take over and get control the same thing is going to be somewhat true in the leadership process the leadership process is going to involve the political principle it's going to involve hanging out carrots and sticks in such a way and protecting your capital and essentially selling the upside it's going to be doing essentially advertising on the expenditure of people's time and energy for the cause very fricking tricky okay so great leadership believe it or not involves deception but in it involves deceptions where you don't get caught just like a politician that manages to get reelected because they convince 60% of the electorate that they're in the top half and then it turns out they convince them again four years later two years later but it's still true so this is so I sort of it sounds a little jaded to break down leadership in this way to some degree but some degree but there's truth in this so one of the ways as a leader an athletic scheme is that if the guy is number seven on your number eight on your bench you might suggest to him that if he works hard he's got a shot at being number seven or number six even though your odds as you estimate that he he may only have a 20% chance of that happening you may leak it to his nervous system that it's more like 30% at which point he expends more energy okay and if he expends more energy you've distorted were disrupted the equilibrium of his cost-benefit elseis and gotten him to buy in more and put out more energy if you can do that okay if you can also sell the possibility that the team as a group can get a bigger pie and they can achieve more than what they thought they could but you don't sell it too high but you sell it higher than their own estimations are and you get it and you could do it in a way that's convincing all of these things add up to greater expenditure of energy on the part of the individuals and wind up being more successful leadership okay so all this is a swirling cauldron of esteemed dynamics and deception and political principle and cost-benefit analysis and marketing it's all in the game and it's all you know this is this is what it makes what it makes that's how it works fascinating yeah I always assumed that that just deception by itself is more of a low conscientiousness thing but what it sounds like is more of a higher high intelligence type of thing conscientious Mexican deception is a deception is an inevitable consequence of the value of an species that that evolves communication systems so as soon as you have communication systems are more valuable to have than not have it's go there's this soft underbelly of the extraordinary utility of communication systems is going to be fact that they can be exploited and so there's going to be some degree of exploitation up and down and around you know communication systems that just that is the way it will be so its leadership involves to some degree you can think about Winston Churchill essentially suggesting to the British people that we are not going to we will not surrender under any circumstances we will feed the son of a bitch okay now notice what that does if you are effective in doing this and that is that you will get more energy being outputted by those individual than if you tell them well the way things look now is it looks like we got about a 25% chance of not having to fold our cards and come into the Third Reich what would happen then okay what if we had an honest accounting of that system and that's what it is that we said it turns out that if instead we actually inflate the perception of success we then we then wind up getting maximum effort out of the system instead of an intelligent amount of effort out of the system and as a result what do you know we're more effective than we would have been so these are this is why you know leadership is can be tricky business and and why a big part of what goes on in Silicon Valley is people being credible enough and grandiose enough to have people work until midnight every night looking for the big score
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