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Episode 205: Moderation vs fanaticism in life pursuits, Social media as pleasure trap
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my brother never does anything in moderation for example if he starts working out he'll organize his entire life around it he'll stop all social drinking and everything else now mmm then he will eventually feel empty and complain that he's burnt out now it was a combination of university in an internship consuming all of his time he complained about no longer having a social life and generally made depressing noises then one day hungover he informed me that he was drinking again I can't tell if he stepped back towards the ego trap or he's just negotiated some relaxation with himself my question is is he destined to live in this open unstable rollercoaster ride or can I give him some advice like Harry Brown style advice that might help him find his place well this is it's not likely that we're gonna give much advice it's going to be very helpful the that's a rare event in in human affairs the despite the fact that we have a podcast so certainly I don't know how how young or old this person is it sounds like he's in his 20s probably or so relatively young person and sound sounds like he's got a lot of push so there's a lot of conscientiousness and some openness and those two things are driving him into into going all you know all-out you know in pursuit and then burning out on it and then going to the next thing so this is part of what we're going to call genetic niche picking it's a it's sort of you can think of an animal's behavioural program that there would be a certain percentage of of its life energy and its lifespan that it should utilize in order to take a survey of its domain so that that's why openness is a experimentation and risk-taking there is useful so think of a cockroach that's in an area where there's a bunch of quite a few predators God knows I don't know what would be maybe maybe they're my cats and cockroaches are in my house so just think about and that cockroach is trying to figure out what the best place is to live and it could be the case that thirty yards away things will get a lot better gets the other side of a fence no cats and suddenly life gets a lot you know essentially a lot safer so you can imagine that this would always be the potential case if you're a dung fly or your chimpanzee or a human or a bird or anything else under the Sun that right on the other side of some barrier or just a just some unit amount of effort the situation could improve dramatically so the way the way we get so nature would have to embed in organisms a cost-benefit analytic process by which we would try to figure out whether or not it is worth continuing to explore the and you can you can actually see how people could wind up wasting a lot of energy for example if they get very lucky early in life and then they maybe get a little bit lucky a little bit later then they might spend their whole lives chasing an unrealistic dream like for example being a big fancy actor so maybe they as a child actor they get a part and it happens to be a hit and so now they think you know they have they spend the next twenty years chasing Hollywood around trying to you know have this big thing happened because it looked like it was going to happen based on very early good feedback so you can see that very early good feedback isn't necessarily a good thing that what the organism can is attempting to do is take into account what happens as it make puts out energy and tries to explore it's a it's dumb in the adaptive domain and then see what the feedback looks like so this is a precisely what goes on in dating it goes on in job hunting it goes on in niche speaking for careers it goes on in deciding word is that you're going to live it goes on and everything and so the idea here is that you know this guy's probably from the sound of it like I said relatively young and he's pretty open and he's pretty conscientious so he has he has a lot of push and he'll throw himself into things what he's doing is he's niche picking he's attempting to find the a really good spot within the adaptive domains that are available to him the that's fine and the we hope we hope that he doesn't drown in a pleasure trap pleasure traps being a particularly vicious potential trap for individuals that are open the they're more likely to try dangerous things they're more likely to try addictive things and they're more likely to be trapped by those things just by virtue of their openness so that's a bizarre bizarre modern penalty to the openness chip in the moderate environment that was never there before so there was no no such price to open this ten thousand years ago so the so he lives with some susceptibility sounds like so that's a bit bit of a problem there's not too much we can do to talk open people out of that their their openness is is pretty defiant and pretty obstinate you know whatever genetic level it's set and so all government attempts try to get people to not drink or not use drugs I mean finally they've given up like look what's happened in the last five years like when I was a kid marijuana you know that that was like a terrifying word that that would like drive you crazy and you lose your mind and that's what I learned when I was six years old you know in the 1966 yeah so now it's like it's legal you've got CVD ads all over the freeways you know finally they just went belly-up and said okay we're just going to tax it so the reason is you're not going to stop open people you can do so at great expense with great tragedy if you try to do that you create black markets Al Capone and and and every every gangster crossing borders with drugs etc etc and non-enforceable contracts etcetera so finally they just throw up their hands to say alright forget it you know we're we're no longer gonna lease this and we're just gonna you know just going to make it a an open commodity fine good a lot of lives will be saved there but a lot of open people will get little hooks in their mouths so it'll be a problem and but they were gonna probably do that anyway so your your brother's got some openness he's got some push he he doesn't he doesn't just sit idly by and let life flow past him he jumps in with both feet then he gets burned out because it turns out that the the open person often jumps into things and then finds out that they're extraordinary optimism or somewhat distorted optimism over the Seabee of that of that endeavor turns out to be not worth it that's what openness is by definition openness is optimistic yet say by definition being more open than the average is having a distorted view of the the value of exploration that the new domains are going to be better than the existing domains it's inherently optimistic and so what happens to people that are inherently optimistic they get disappointed that's that's what's gonna happen okay we thought it was gonna be this great thing it turns out it's not oh oh well and so this sort of so asking the question is he destined to have some instability in this life the answer is probably yes behind the the openness is sounds like his he doesn't have super stable person riding shotgun for his openness so as a result of that you know open people are gonna be all things being equal they're going to be more inherently volatile they're gonna get more excited about things and then they're gonna wind up with some disappointments because they're gonna take risks that appear to be like they're gonna pay at pan out but then they won't that's just the way it goes open people are very very typically entrepreneurial in some fashion in those domains they they're also they're also a far more likely for example to get divorces because they believe that they can get a you know a better situation than the one that they're suffering it the they're more likely to change jobs what's that so anyway the relaxed kind of advice you know that if you're a brother I mean the person mentions you know Harry Brown type of advice I think Harry Brown himself is is maybe one of the best things you could do is you buy him a copy of how I found freedom in an unfree world and and that's you know he's probably might be open enough to read it and in that he might he might glean and organize some good decision-making strategies that would serve him well that's one highly open you know very beautiful philosopher speaking to a young person that sounds like he's got a lot of chops but that but has a personality that could you know wind him up into various troubles and also whine about up into various frustrations so how I found freedom on free world is a is a quiet a way of sort of getting across many of the points that we make here which is that it's about discovering your own identity and then also respecting of the fact that other people's identities won't change and so those those two those two insights are really key insights we instead of calling it identity we call personality so discovering your own personality you may think you why would you want to do that well you about you discovering what in the world you find interesting and what seems worthwhile for you to be doing and then the second part of that you know that's the learning yourself or knowing yourself but the second part of that is another insight that comes alongside is super important and that is that you're not going to change and neither is anybody else so the dynamics between two individuals are going to be remarkably stable over over their lifespans because the personalities are set and so a lot of life is about discovery not only what general what general opportunities are fit well for your personality but also finding additional aspects of your ecology that would be ideal for you including your social ecology ie who are the people and so you know respecting the fact that we're not going to fix relationships we're going to find them okay you don't create a love dynamic you discover it and so of course you know these relationships take time in order for you to make assessments of who those people are and whether or not there are mutual interests but otherwise you're not going to change the dynamics the and so these these lessons you know a thing like how I found freedom in free world might be one of the better things that a brother could give a brother or you know a friend could give a friend as an encapsulation of some very good advice that you don't have to give them you could just give them a very entertaining thoughtful humorous and deep book on the subject that I think encapsulates a lot of great lessons thank you dr. Lila I resonate with this question a lot just because the high openness and you know I one thing that that I really enjoy from this podcast is you've you basically said is you know enjoy your time on this planet and enjoy all the you know all the open things an open person are going to want to get into but just don't get anyone pregnant don't get pregnant yourself and don't do the hard drugs yeah that's really you know everything else to just just enjoy everything else is play you got it yeah yeah as a fellow super open person I'll just chime in there and say also like I my wayward crazy open youth I frustrated a lot of people in my life like this guy's frustrated with his brother like you know people who were less open and and close to very open people have this kind of like are you ever gonna get your act together feeling about super open people oh and I definitely was on the other end of that a lot and you know as as dr. Lisle saying there's there's a lot of like the the openness is driving that optimism and the adventurousness and you're getting you're just fully diving into whatever opportunity is in front of you at any given time and the threshold is just so much higher for how much data you need you an open person is not satisfied they don't close down the see beyond any opportunity until they just get more information and then other people would be so that's that's part of what's going on too but the good news is that as an open person becomes older and wiser and has more experiences and develops more correlations if they have any IQ in there as well they do they do get wiser about the choices they're making because they're better able to detect oh this open crazy opportunity resembles another crazy open opportunity that I had in the past and I've already kind of done that one and I can anticipate that there's gonna be a similar result in the following ways and so my C B's not gonna lead me back down that yellow brick road quite the way that it did before so you you will you will generally watch people you know they look like they become less open with time they're not becoming less open they're just getting smarter about which opportunities they're jumping fully into and and what kind of data they need before they can make run a accurate CB on it that's fascinating doctor hawk and not not to mention the crazy wild stories from the older open people I mean I've met a few in my life and it's just it's really fun to hear all the things that they learned lessons from sure yeah we have we have a lot more fun in are you all right well the next question is dear doctor dear doctors I've heard dr. Hawk talk about social media as a potential pleasure trap and I was wondering if she could go into more depth on that what if circuits being hijacked and what advice would you give to a low-key social media addict yeah I complain about the about the various traps associated with social media all the time in part because I've you know have found myself trapped by them myself so this is you know ripped from the headlines of my own life I'm I'm in that sort of bridge generation where I I'm old enough to remember what it was like before all of this existed but I'm also completely dependent on it and enmeshed in it and have definitely been trapped by social media and all the ways that people are I think there there are two major major issues with social media and the social media trap the like one is that just the distraction of it so people are not able to you know concentrate as deeply as they might like to or they're they're constantly fighting their attention you know being grabbed by their phone and by their notifications and they're you're swiping through things all the time and they're there going from app to app and so they they're losing that ability for sustained concentration which I think people are aware of and they're distracted on their phone when they want you know might otherwise want to be engaged deeply in some kind of conversation with somebody all that kind of distraction stuff but then the other thing that I have talked about a lot and the thing that I think is riskier and more just more detrimental for people is the the nature of the pseudo esteem trap that is associated with social media and the the ways in which social media is hijacking all of our really beautifully evolved attunement to social cues and and really reading those cues and and leading us down avenues that are really bad news for us so they think you dress both of these things in different different ways so the distraction piece you know I I think you have to just white-knuckle your way out of that addiction like any other addiction and prepare for the fact that it's going to be uncomfortable and that you're going to recalibrate to it so I think a lot of people can't really do social media in moderation they try to but it doesn't really work some people can do that some nervous systems can manage that but a lot of people just have to outright delete the apps I at one point I read that the the Facebook engineer who developed the like button for Facebook had to delete facebook from his phone a deleted Facebook from his phone and he deleted all his other apps from his phone and then he installed parental controls on his phone so he couldn't redownload the apps like these are the links that you have to go to if you're finding yourself just absolutely distracted and constantly going back and constantly scrolling the other thing that I realized at some point is that the these these apps including Facebook and Twitter and Instagram all of them they are very actively consciously mimicking slot machines in a lot of different ways down to the like the pull and scroll routine when you're pulling it it's literally like a fog machine where you don't know what's gonna pop up so you pull the screen and and the data is showing that we we swipe our screens on our phones on the order of 3,000 times a day it's how often we're on average swiping these things so we're just scrolling and it's like oh it might be an ad or it might be a picture of a cute puppy or it might be some you know it might be a dating app and it might be someone you could go out with it's like incredibly reinforcing so these guys who engineered these things know this the little the flag on the Facebook notification alert is red for a reason it's it's red because it's an alert it's getting your attention it's danger it's like your eye is drawn to that little flag on that notification button you know very deliberately so we we were being actively pulled into this process so it's not like a some kind of personal failing that you've become addicted to your app Siri this is this is by design so so I have deleted most things from my phone I usually will lapse and reinstall them and then I'll delete them again I try to basically only let my my attention get sucked in by Instagram these days because Instagram is like the least fraught with all of the pseudo esteem stuff that I'll talk about in a second it's mostly just like pictures of dogs and food and there's there's less kind of status associated with it Twitter Facebook some of the others where you're you're you're carving out a position in the community that's associated with your self presentation that's a slightly different deal so so either deleting the apps there are they're fun apps that I got to manage my productivity on both the the computer and the phone with especially when I was finishing my dissertation that made concentration more possible like I never could have finished my dissertation without a without a application called self control which allows you to whitelist certain websites and and it blocks the rest of the internet to you for a certain amount of time even if you try to restart your computer you you are not able to do anything other than go on the specific sites that you whitelist so that was very helpful the phone has a great little app that you can get called forest which you set a little timer on forest and it starts to plant trees for you and if you interrupt it to go look at Facebook or go look at Twitter you kill the trees I have a it's yeah these are like little little tricks that you can use to keep yourself out of just idly scrolling on the phone and and giving away all of that time and attention in a way that you wouldn't want necessarily want to be doing and you know there are people who have just completely ditched the smartphone gone back to the the old-school phones you know ditched you know cut off their internet service people people can go to all kinds of lengths to maintain their maintain their attention especially if they're trying to finish some sort of big project that requires sustained attention so all kinds of different points on the spectrum that people can do but the but the pseudo esteem is the real problem so it's like you got to realise that you you were you were an animal that has these if this is like exquisitely of hypersensitivity to the most subtle of social cues to let you know how you're doing in the village at any given time like that is what humans are it's it's you were you were looking for somebody to slightly roll their eyes when you say something or to give you a slight cold shoulder in the village square and you're integrating all of that information and using it to estimate how you're doing and what people are thinking of you and what that means for your place and all of these competitive domains and so social media has taken that sensitivity and that's this highly evolved ability and it is just absolutely blown it super out of proportion and hyper exaggerated it with likes and retweets and and you know who who is valuing you for what you're saying and this sort of artificial public square and the idea that you would you would have some kind of awareness in a Stone Age village of all these people talking about you and and just not care and not and be able to tune it out and not engage with it and not have it bother you of course you would care of course you would be wondering what they were saying of course you would be just hyper hyper hyper attuned to it so these are these are the pathways that are getting absolutely intruded upon by social media in this quasi anonymous space and people are people are really susceptible to it for really absolutely predictable and natural reasons so I think there's there's also the the the phenomenon that happens where when you make a public declaration like you for instance you even if you post a tweet that expresses some kind of opinion on Twitter you're you're essentially what you're doing is you were increasing the cost of reversal on that opinion so you're digging yourself into this public statement that is now linked to all of the status in the community of you are associated with this opinion and and the cost of reversing it even in the face of evidence becomes much much higher so things just get more polarized debate declines and quality and and it's just it's just a total mess so there's so many terrible things about social media people would do really well to be aware of all this I understand absolutely how addictive it is and how difficult it is to pull yourself out of these traps but you know it's important to be aware of what's going on and then of course meanwhile they're harvesting all this personal data about you and marketing to you and it's it's being used against you to sell you your worst fears and to mobilize you in political campaigns so you know just delete the app really Wow spectacular I could I could rant I could rant at length but Doug probably wants to jump in there with others truth is I know very little about it because I'm not on these things the I I got exactly one interaction on Facebook about seven years ago I seven or eight years ago I yeah I just found out about this thing Facebook and so then I I tried to contact an old basketball friend of Alan's in mind Jim Souders and like a week or so later he got back to me says oh what are you doing up in Sacramento that was it I didn't write back though so that's the that's the sum total of my facebook career and yeah I terms of I can I can see the value obviously in posting things and announcements of you know for I don't know maybe for for people that are close to you for communication purposes or for business commerce commercial purposes they have what I have seen is I've seen I've seen a lot of hurt feelings you know I've had I've had a lot of clients that were that had bad things things went badly between them and other people on Facebook and or whatever I mean Facebook's the only one that I really am in touch with it all people talk to me about so I mean is it an evil thing no it's not an evil thing but it's a but it's a it is like the pleasure trap and the sense that you know a glass of wine now and then might really add value to people's lives but if you're susceptible and it traps you and then it can be a mess and in the same thing with with food you know this what the pleasure trap was is the story of supernormal stimuli and and of any kind including gambling as just as Jenna was talking about so gambling food drugs and now we have a new one which is essentially it's a steam so it's the esteem processes of humans have now are now subject to supernormal stimuli and oops we can expect you know quite a bit of mess and some excitement just like hey listen a piece of chocolate cake vegan chocolate cake that's a supernormal stimuli and I'm glad it exists and no matter what Alan says I'm gonna get mine ok so it's not like supernormal stimuli is inherently evil or bad it's just it always winds up being a two-edged sword and so it's you know we got to be careful of the sharp edge yeah I mean this is the thing is like especially when you're you're sort of living your life and a in a very like talked about niche picky and you know in the evolutionary psychology world it's very hard to find like-minded people out there without some social media involved so it's like how else are you gonna find fellow travelers who are interested in the same kinds of things well this is where Twitter hashtags are incredibly useful and finding different little communities but you you are really playing with fire because in this quasi anonymous public square this is this is not a situation that you would have had in the Stone Age where people where you know trolls are running the show to such a degree in this in this anonymous way and having such a disproportionate effect on the hyper agreeable the hyper conscientious the the slightly less emotionally stable like if you have any one or all three of those characteristics you're gonna be so much more susceptible to criticism online and have such a harder time dealing with trolls and letting them sort of bounce off of you I my hyper agreeableness makes me it makes its really really difficult thing for me to deal with criticism online and to the point where I I'm not even in the beat Eugene's has a has a Facebook fan group that a lot of listeners are members of which has you know a bell-curve distribution of agreeableness in it and and there are there are people in that group who are pretty disagreeable and talk some shit and and it's very very hard for me so to watch that happening just like if it were happening in the village square I would have a hard time but at least I would be able to defend my honor in the in the village square in a more legitimate kind of way and people would not be able to hide behind quasi anonymity they'd have to tell me things to my face there would be a more kind of legitimate process of all of that exaggerated and it's sucking up hours of your day where your yeah we're looking for cues you're looking for you know any sort of you know or they are they are they talking about you or they what's going on with what's my status what's my esteem where where am I in the hierarchy which are all the things that we're doing all the times what human life is that's all you're doing and so here it's this incredibly exaggerated version of that where the highs are higher where you feel very you know you get you get praised and you feel secure and you feel like that this is a super normal hit of belonging and value but then at the same time if you've got you've got some kind of vulnerability where people are criticizing you that immediately becomes much more relevant for your potential survival and and reproductive so you're just your genetic survival in general because if you don't you can't identify the exact nature of that threat and how significant it is and how much it's going to infect other people's opinion of you it's it's again not a Stone Age situation that you would have a whole kind of separate identity that other people had created to describe who it is that you were that wasn't linked to your actual actual interaction with you there there wasn't this kind of pseudo esteem the way that there is now and it's it's very tricky and it absolutely hijacks these these highly evolved abilities and and requirements that we attuned to other people's social cues and it's a it's a disaster for happiness for people now dr. Lyle you've said before you've talked about the the fractured village and how this creates stress because people are essentially trying to become the most valuable coalition members of every every group that they're in this this adds essentially an infinite number of people in an infinite number of villages oh yeah and this is you know this is a conversation I've had with a bunch of people and a bunch of very accomplished people that that are that will talk to me in you know some of you some of our listeners know me through the hyper health arena and some of them don't but in hyper health arena I know a lot of the movers and shakers listen how important I am okay but the but the thing is is that I know that in this last decade they've had times that when they were that when they were upset about criticism and these are marvelous people I could name several examples but it's their sort of their private affair but one was very public which was Colin Campbell was was being just raped completely unfairly and like an unbelievable human being the Colin Campbell is he painstakingly carefully educated the critic the critic it was Anna me it's like only Colin Campbell's so heartbreak only Colin would have done something like that I wouldn't have that I you know I would have responded with a mcdougal like vitriol that's how that's how I am I'm not the great professor okay and it's your toxic toxic masculinity privilege talking right there and you know I got many my friends you don't have that same agree yeah many might yeah many my friends are have you know had been bruised up fat fabulous people that do great things and then again a little sand ruins a great cake it doesn't matter if you're if you're chef AJ making that cake you're somebody could throw try to throw some sand in it and you're out there just trying to do great things for people and or Colin or se or mcdougal or Alan Alan doesn't care [Laughter] so you guys anybody out there that wants to criticize dr. Howard go hammer trust me it won't hurt his feelings it's not worth the trouble but the rest of us are like real lessons are legitimate people yeah when I was in when I was an intern at true north for the first time there was a staff suggestions and a patient questionnaire that and and Alan dr. Goldhamer would have a little box where where you can put drop off the you know the evaluations of the center and you know anything like that and where was this box located in the oven talk about a signal Oh a minute I'm gonna be with chef AJ at her birthday celebration in Florida in March yeah so I don't know if if anybody wants to join us I don't know how you how you find out about it but you can go to her website it's gonna be great fun all right let's go on to something else all right so something else is we have two callers on hold right now so our first caller so we're gonna try to get to both of them our first caller is Mike from Florida Mike welcome to the show hey hello hey how you doing hear me hi good yeah yeah all right I just had one question for you guys I was listening and a couple of shows back um talked about single mothers and the outcomes the children of single mothers aren't aren't as good as an intact family and you guys talked about how you know the general consensus is it's the parenting but you guys just said it's the genes showing up in that child and that is um conscientiousness and IQ and he kind of went on without going over too much I just I had a couple questions because I'm conscientiousness that makes sense but I know that in the 1950s the out of wedlock birthrate was like two percent and now I'm like 50 percent and back then abortion was illegal birth control was illegal even for married people sometimes and I I know a lot of those kids got adopted out or were raised by the grandmother and they pretended it was a pregnancy late in the grandmother's life by the pose that would take into consideration those those situations as well although there was shotgun marriage as I suppose to kind of counteract that and so my question is like it's just that the Seabee shift is so much where that in the fifties they were like okay if you have a kid out of wedlock you know I can't you interest you're just gonna starve to death so it was like that it was that serious that people just the Seabees shifted that much that people didn't have kids out of wedlock and also the question I had about IQ was I understand conscientiousness affecting that but IQ um we guys just think that people with lower IQ might not understand that the government can come in might not understand the extent of the government can come after them the men for example for resources and that's kind of linked if you have two parents you can have more resources and the data seems to show more resources gives causes better outcomes which which makes sense I was just wondering if that has something to do with it too because if you have two parents you have more resources for the child as opposed to one and some help from the government and or child support or whatever so that's all that's you know I just found that fascinating you know and it makes sense from that standpoint but I just I was just really really interested in what you guys had to say about that as opposed to the standard the standard explanation that its de parenting you know it's the genes expressing themselves instead that's that's wrong mm-hmm you want to go yeah uh well I mean it's it's I remember you this from a couple of weeks ago and I think you you were the you were talking a lot about this I mean it's generally this is a correlation causation difference you know that we talked about before so there's you know you're seeing a lot of outcomes that are traveling through the same jeans that are traveling through the family and the environment is like an artifact of those genes so kids are growing up in chaotic environments that from that are that are being sort of the environment is being created by chaotic genes essentially so it's it's not that the the environment is not causally creating who this person is becoming they're becoming the person that they are in some sense hardwired to become regardless of the environment because of a genetic predisposition whether it's a level of conscientiousness or predisposition to alcohol or predisposition to divorce or anything else all of these things are this is why we talk about blueprint so often the book by Robert Plomin which is tracking these changes throughout the course of the life so I remember though that you got into a lot more detail when you were answering this question beyond just the sort of correlation causation confusion yes so might raise the number of a number of issues or observations and questions and so one of them is you go from 2% out of wedlock to some huge number now Mike you're correct it's about the cost-benefit analysis so in it's hard for us to imagine in 2020 just how poor people were in 1950 they were unbelievably poor okay so you're we can't what we would now consider just a horrendous low-rent disastrous tenement would have been good solid middle-class or above in 1950 so you're the so we can't we can't imagine what a tremendous threat it was to a woman to be a single mom and to not have support that that was very bad news the I believe if we looked at the data I think I looked at one point maybe in 1968 or so about fifty percent of the United States was earning the minimum wage so I think I said this before the lady across the street from me in my a middle-class house with my middle-class parents the lady across the street the people cloths were blue-collar so he was a mechanic he worked unbelievably hard and he'd come home and drink and he was irascible and and his wife was just incredibly sweet lady and she worked at some store in the shopping center she rode her bicycle they had one car and she rode her bicycle to work and rode home and I somehow I figured out that where she was working at the time but that was just a maybe I'm sure it was in retrospect because I didn't know it at the time but it I realized oh my goodness that lady was working a minimum-wage job and yeah you know which was a dollar fifteen an hour or whatever it was in 1968 and I when when you go back and look at that it's like that that's 1968 that's massively wealthier than 1950 so the country was incredibly better off by 1968 than it was in 1950 so people were poor as Church mice in 1950 and as a result you better believe that it was sex was very very dangerous and expensive and women guarded it carefully they had to there was just too much on the one so so that's changed and and with it everything has changed and will continue to change so single mom hood isn't isn't the horrific poverty threat that it was you know 70 years ago now Mike makes other comments about wouldn't it be true more resources causing better outcomes no that's incorrect so more resources is not causing better outcomes more resources anatec FinTech families are correlated with better outcomes and that's because the genes are driving at all so that's that's a very interesting mistake to make and it's it's it's such a powerful illusion that it will be you know it's basically impossible you can't you can't tell that to a politician you can't tell that to an educator you can't tell that to you know just about anybody they can't choke that down they they would have to you have to have an education behavior genetics to understand this so and nobody's going to get it and not from people no experience either where it seems like their life is so much better when they have more money so it's like it's it's like oh well obviously the more money you have the better your life outcomes are gonna be better schools you're gonna get into the better all the way down yeah when the truth is is that that now another very interesting point made by rubber plumbing this is a fascinating point and that is that the outcomes were not as genetically determined in 1950 as they are now and that is because of deprivation causing you could have someone who is a genetic star but there was there was racial ethnic financial religious familial obstacles put in their way and not enough opportunity and they couldn't get to the other side of the obstacle and get to where it is that they could thrive so that and we we all know that that's true and that that's a that's part of human history and it was certainly a part of American history and however as the environment becomes more open and more wealthy and now now whether or not you're if you're a single mom whether you make thirty thousand a year and that's what you can support your child with or whether you make sixty it doesn't really make any difference the the the child is okay there's plenty of food they're not malnourished they're not in a dangerous place and so as a result of that they they can if they have the chops they're going to rise and head towards whatever that genetic capacity is that's what's going to happen and we know this because the correlation coefficients are rising over the decades the genetics becomes increasingly predictive of outcomes as time passes this is because you're effectively controlling for the environment when everybody is like in the in an equal you know essentially an equal opportunity environment above like you there's a there's a certain threshold where it's like yeah people aren't living in this grinding poverty where they are truly deprived of basic opportunities but this is what this is also how you get the paradox in Scandinavia that has vexed many leftist researchers with that you don't have as many women as you might like to see going into science and technology jobs because the the personality expression becomes more elevated in an environment of equal economic opportunity right these are even controlled for for access and so what you see the difference in the data becomes driven by personality differences and and that looks like girlfriends exactly the same thing true across history when we talk about wealthy people being obese right okay because right only the wealthy people that had access to the rich food but by 1990 everybody has had access to the rich for the United States and so now what you see is it's not your wealth that is predicting whether you're obese it's your genetics so the genetics go from not being able to predict obesity in 1922 you know obviously they probably predicted it you know 0.3 where as wealth was a bigger predictor so environment was a much bigger predictor of obesity in 1920 and then by 90 by the year 2000 wealth is not any predictor at all of obesity yeah zero because everyone is royalty everyone is royalty and so now the genetics wind up being I think what is it 80% of the variance yeah yeah 80% of the variance so that's a that's extraordinary and so the same thing is true with intelligence and education achievement and the same thing is true and also not not completely and not to be unfair or brutal but the now the the award that we would use is that the environments are functionally equivalent so I grew up obviously in a functional equivalent environment to to somebody whose parents you know John D Rockefellers kids it's like what's the difference when you you go to Harvard sorry sorry John just head hit that one again yeah you gotta and I go to UC San Diego with the middle class kids what's the difference really it's the same textbooks it's that my professors were Ivy League people it's like hey it's the same information so you get functional equivalence and now at this point in history the the the bottom 20% is not there because of obstacles they are significantly there because of the genetics and so the not not entirely we want to we don't want to make that case but it is largely the case so as a result of that that's why more resources do not cause better outcomes at this point that's not going to be how that goes down so yeah excellent question complex question and the the concepts run the gamut from you know across many interesting domains and important domains of human action Mike thank you very much for the phone call we really appreciate it thanks Mary all right thank you all right we have our next caller caller what's your name where you calling from hey hey hey all right Rob nice fire when ready hey go ahead Naida Nate I don't know what you're trying to do by putting those two super brains of dr. Hawking dr. Lisle together on one show but I mean just how some are you're trying to make the rest of us average IQ people beyond today haha we just to rob we fire away yes just to national treasures we got here but we're running out of time so I get a chill out on the circuit flooding but um I got two quick questions as possible um dr. Hawking dr. Lao I'm trying to understand how to properly understand the difference between bad habits and bad personality traits in the context of like to say that so much somebody can't you can't change a personality right but so there's bad habits you know someone's alcoholic they're calling the pleasure trap they're doing drugs most people agree on what bad habits are but then you have bad person and personality traits in the sense that people they they think that not as there's some subjectivity there and what you think different people are going to disagree and agree on what's a bad personality trait so for example let's say you're dating someone and a few months into dating them you find out that when you go on and driving the road with them so something trivial like this you drive on the road with them and they get really upset at they have like road rage and they're in the passenger seat you're the one driving to the point where it gets really it ruined your whole day is that a bad habit or is that a bad personality trait and because you can't change a person can they change that or or another thing like you know like I don't like cilantro you know you've talked about this like dark cloud like I don't like to know how much Amy its genetic I even did the 23andme which says that I have the genes to to not like stroke so if my partner makes a dish with it you know and it hurts it likes and she likes it it's like there's nothing like that's not a that's more I guess that's more of a genetic thing but you understand the gist of what I'm saying yeah yeah yeah I think that with the road rage those are two slightly different things so the road rage is is like an indication it is a habit but it's the habit that is emerging from a personality trait so so definitely that that you know if I don't know how hypothetical this example is or not that that habit is expressing itself as a function of the cost-benefit analysis of that person relative to the position of power in the relationship with you and the predisposition to sort of have a little bit of instability and that would create a condition of road rage so definitely if you if you were to raise the stakes in that particular relationship and say hey listen like this road rage thing of yours is an absolute deal breaker and I am out of this relationship if you continue to express this when we're driving together like I cannot deal with it it makes me feel really unsafe and I can't continue to be in a relationship with you you're you you have the potential in that relationship if that person also has enough conscientiousness and they're sufficiently rewarded in the relationship with you they can change the Seabee based on based on new information that that emerges in that relationship to alter that behavior and quote-unquote change that habit so they're not they're not a person who can you know there's certainly some people who don't have that conscientiousness no matter how over rewarded they would be they wouldn't be able to control that level of reactivity if they're sufficiently unstable and sufficiently disagreeable it's just gonna happen with them but most people if the if the cost/benefit becomes you tighten those screws enough people can adjust their behavior relative to any value proposition in a specific relationship the the cilantro thing it strikes me as just sort of it like maybe she liked that I don't again I don't know how hypothetical that is but that really just seems like an educational hey I really don't like cilantro please don't make things with it and if that continues that seems like more a sign that that this is not a person who really is very rewarded by that relationship and that's just kind of more fundamentally shitty than the road rage example so I would see those as kind of springing from slightly different places and and the cilantro thing is a lot easier to fix because it's not an emergent quality of the personality like the road rage thing is so that would be my my general take on those things people can absolutely change their behavior in a specific context if the cost/benefit is it tilted in a direction that forces it upon them it doesn't mean that it changes their personality though yeah and I would say oh can you still there let me add a few things first of all this is cup this is what's called getting to know people so the you you see things that you don't like that are disturbing and obviously we're gonna give them some feedback about it and then we're gonna see what happens and so we're gonna find out just how modifiable you know our feedback you're essentially how what that personality characteristic really looks like and how susceptible it is this kind of CB changes the gents talking about so usually I mean when this is sort of this we have a word for that red flags okay so that's like uh oh that's where that personality is and you can change somebody's CV if I'm putting a gun to their head but that doesn't really make it a person that that we want to be hanging with so the the other question that you're you you sort of wander I mean you sort of we touched something else this notion of habits and there's a there's a class of habits that are very interesting and important to understand that there's some there's some wiggling worms and in our in our scheme here that we have to account for and that's going to be what we call both conditioning processes as well as neuro adaptive so the you can have what you call a really bad habit food cigarettes you know drugs of different kinds gambling etc and one of the problems with some of these things is that they can be tar pits because of neuro adaptation so you you get changes in nerve function that for example make make healthy - food taste bad it just doesn't taste very good because you're now got dulled senses or you can't get through the day without you know six lines of cocaine because you're going into withdrawal and and everything else seems dull and flat so as a result of that that that isn't a personality problem the the openness may have got the person into it but supernormal stimuli has a hook in their mouth now so that called what you like you can call it addiction which gives it a chilling you know accurate warning but what else would you call it a bad habit that's exactly what it is and so the bad personality in principle any any personality to matter how unpleasant has an ecological niche where it's great low consciousness is disagreeable it's a great hit man you know what I mean quite a good deal and the what's that yeah totally there's nothing there's no value judgment at any end of the spectrum here like it thought there's always somewhere that it's gonna be absolutely the ideal type for a particular job that's right the but whereas bad habit we can see that that isn't true it's a bad habit because it's it's consistently gonna result in bad outcomes and the one reason why that's going to be true is there's some kind of distorted process and the person's ability to learn from the Seabee that Gong's it over the head with prices and one of the problems is is that we're not designed by nature to to for example snort cocaine feel the high and then connect that to the really bad feeling that we have later we're not designed to make that connection you're not designed to make the connection between the high of alcohol and the hangover the and so as a result the the obviously you can consciously connect it but you're not designed to make that connection so your CB your ability to run the CB on the next round is not good and that's why that's the that's the trap of the pleasure trap is the disturbance the the the cheating of the CB leads us inexorably potentially into these messes that are very destructive those are bad habits and those can absolutely because if you get out of the environment and you get away from the the the the substance itself for example is exacerbating a Seabee process but we get far enough away from the substance then we can re-establish appropriate CV so a lot of people have you know built beet alcohol a lot of people some people beat heroin I got a friend of mine that did it the pretty pretty rough you know unbelievable guts but did it like just flat-out beat it the many people had beaten aspects of the pleasure trap and walked walked away and gotten distance from them and never gone back so they they had horrendous you know behavior patterns that looked disastrous and that they then their lives took tremendous changes for the positive so yeah bad bad habits and bad personality are absolutely two different things bad personality is something that isn't going to change and it's going to recurrently have a certain behavior pattern under certain conditions and you know I II unless we change the see beyond those conditions we're going to see it so if we get someone who's repetitively road-rage count on it they're going to be raging when they're 80 like my dad and even even if you can't get them to stop the road rage like in the in the specific context of your relationship it's whack-a-mole with the personality traits that are driving the road rage so it's like it's important to like look at those kinds of habits as to as tells of the larger high concept of what personality trait is contributing to it because it's not just a specific road rage circuit it's coming from a from an equilibrium of instability disagreeableness low conscientiousness although all the things that are going to pop up in other areas of that person's life when they're under sufficient stress and have the right opportunity so when you're seeing that early in a relationship like like dr. Lyle say and that's a red that's red flag and it's it's something that's upsetting you for a reason so even though you can you can tighten those screws and change that specific behavior under very specific conditions with enough threat or enough incentive it's the the personality that created it is still there and it's it's going to emerge elsewhere
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