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Episode 53: Flakes, gays, and cougars
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all right happy Valentine's Day dr. Lyle Thornton very good well alright how are you gonna be that go ahead good alright well today we're going to be talking about the name of the show is how do we deal with flakes and I was looking at a peer-reviewed journal called cosmopolitan I guess is that pure yeah right there you go sense pleasure piers yeah yeah yeah so it was cosmopolitan very very prestigious peer-reviewed journal and the one of the articles I saw was ten reasons why your friend is flaky now this is written by an author that the writer is is the flaky friend so she's basically explained to everybody why she's flaky so we're going to go over this article and and then we're going to dissect it and then and then go from there but yeah we begin can you explain to everybody what does it mean when someone is slakey well it means essentially that they're irresponsible I mean that's your that's from the perspective of the individual call and somebody else a flake is essentially saying that they are they are unreliable and irresponsible and essentially it's that they lack conscientiousness and it can't be counted on so that's that's what this is it's definitely it is the exact polar opposite of the concept of that you're reliable and that you are can be counted on and that you are conscientious so that's what it is it's a it's a signal to to the village as we use that word to describe individuals and and essentially impose reputational costs on people when we when we use that term mm-hmm now are there any other words that are that are I remember when we talked about personality you said that there's so many words that they all kind of boil down to those six characteristics right what are some of their words that describe somebody who's on the continuum of conscientiousness now let's see unreliable irresponsible you think what else need a thesaurus but deadbeat would be you know more modern term things of that nature so I can't man you know that's all I've got limited verbal ability that's all right well at least I got to stump you with this one yeah so good yeah okay and then so I remember as well does this have to do with like tension that they're feeling their nervous system about doing the right thing like what's yeah what's going why are they flaky right they're flaky well remember all behavior is a derivative of cost-benefit analysis and so the person that we're calling a flake the reason we're calling them flake is that we believe we understand what the cost-benefit analysis they should be running on a a behavior that that makes sense to us so for example you know somebody doesn't pay their bills and they they they don't call people back that have important information for them etc and you're you're saying what a flake I can't believe they're doing this and then it just turns out that they'd be given a terminal cancer diagnosis and they're going through something huge or their mother's in the hospital it's like all kinds of reasons why in principle the cost-benefit for an individual could be to let some very consequential behavior go and and let it you know let there be negative consequences for their inability to perform as expected if there were other things that were more important okay so it's all about we call people flakes generally not because of a single incident where they quote flaked out but when we see a pattern of behavior over time where we know that there couldn't possibly have been you know 17 incidents in the past two years that warranted huge emergencies what we're observing is that they simply don't very much anxiety about living up to expectations that the others have for them about you know tacit or explicit contracts that they were supposed to live up to that's what we call a flake so I remember an old therapist describing this to me early in my career about people that would complain about how their cars were having troubles and that's why they couldn't get to class so they couldn't get their job or they couldn't get the therapy or whatever and she just said unreliable people have unreliable cars which was her telegraphing of it you don't know if they're telling the truth or not but if you're a responsible person you don't have an unreliable car for very long because it becomes too costly for you reputationally and so you're going to do what you can to hustle to see to it that that card gets to be reliable and if it's consistently unreliable then that simply means that you are an unreliable person and so car car complaints are a shady way for Flakes to hide for a while but pretty soon they're exposed hmm all right let's go over this article here ten reasons why your friend is flaky written by the flaky friend okay well she starts out saying I'm sorry but number one is I try to please everybody and end up overextending myself yes right yeah the this is this is different than being a flake this is this is being overly agreeable and getting overextended and so that's different so you can you can look like you are if you are highly agreeable individual the problem is is that if you're too agreeable then you wind up with a problem of looking like you are lower in conscientiousness than you really are so this this can certainly happen and this can happen easily in situations where someone is living in a situation where they have what I call a fractured village where the different parties that are requesting things of them don't have any knowledge of each other so the individual themselves has a bunch of independently sequester dominance hierarchies that they are answering to job mother-in-law Church PTA etc in-laws and so as a result of this they they they are agreeing to to do things for one of the hierarchies and then it's running into conflicts with agreements that they've had with another hierarchy and then they put themselves in a bind so obviously people with with some brains and some foresight it they don't they don't actually appear as flakes they will occasionally look like they're a little bit flaky but the reason why people are frustrated is because that these people are often really quite conscientious and they know that they're conscientious everybody knows that their conscientious so when they have when they flake out it is clearly behind an over commitment and an over agree ability then than it is actually low conscientiousness so yes but this can happen and it does happen with some individuals and it's not the number one cause of flaky behavior by a long shot but it's the cause of some of it and I wouldn't say that it's ever the cause of someone having the reputation of being a flake people are able to see through and understand the frustrations of the overly agreeable person and they could see it and they know that that what's at root and the reason why is the over agreeable person will just gush with a bunch of guilt as they as they try to process and explain and throw up their hands and cry and everything else under the Sun whereas a true deadbeat doesn't have any anxiety and they don't have any guilt they just flake so that that's where those two things are different hmm well that was perfectly into the number two excuse I mean reason is I am NOT self-aware enough to realize that I'm not going to follow through with the plans hahahahahaha yeah there you go I mean it's a beautiful beautiful statement on the part of I'm sure a highly conscientious writer that's it's sort of imagining in mind reading their way into a into a flaky head and that's correct the flake essentially may agree to something on Tuesday but it becomes inconvenient on Friday and they don't see it coming and that's because they are they're sort of motivated by short term convenience the whole point of a flake and what a flake is is the lack of conscientiousness is is is causing a lack of ability to actually calculate through a inter woven set of cost benefit propositions with respect to one's behavior and so we wouldn't call it a flake if there weren't significant consequences for bad computations and poor planning and an essentially short term impulsiveness at the extensive longer term more more rewarding behavior so including defending one's reputation in in the in the social arena for not being a flake ie irresponsible and letting people down so yes that number two is the hallmark of a flake here we go so they weren't ever going to follow through they just didn't realize it they didn't sort of realize it it sort of seemed like a good idea to to make that agreement at the time but then when it came around at the time they didn't really feel like coming over they didn't really yeah you know they really weren't going to show up for your birthday party after all all right number three I'm really not flaky when it really matters yeah well I mean this is this is a the issue about the following we call somebody a flake because we observe that repeatedly they fail to follow through on social contracts and so the so now all we're talking about is the degree of magnitude of how often they flake and how big are the consequences you know how are they computing these things so if they show up for their mother's funeral what are we supposed to you know give them an award for this the truth of the matter is is that what we call a flake is someone whose reputation that we are able to observe over time but they are consistently less responsible than the average person and so when they say well I come through when it counts it's like well counts for what and to him you wouldn't have the reputation if you had not repeatedly let people down and disappointed an inconvenience to other people as a result of violating contracts and so yet you may not be the supreme flake of all time but if you've got that label you earned it and there's no such thing as delineating social responsibilities into quote when it counts and when it doesn't count if it always counts to some degree and and when you make an agreement and then you flake out on it it counted to somebody on the other side of that contract and account and they noticed okay so it might have been saying hey listen I'll call you back in an hour and then you don't call back in an hour and you do this repeatedly and don't think they're not noticing and keeping score because they are and they are they are accurately triangulating on what percentile that they need to assign you on the conscientiousness scale and that becomes part of their analysis of how valuable you are as a human the what the nature of value and how valuable you are is really the issue of cost-benefit analysis and the eyes of other people and the very nature of value is that isn't essentially the benefit minus the cost equals the value and so people are analyzing each other in terms of what benefits do I have from from a relationship with this individual - what costs are involved equals the value that the person it has and so the flakier you are the more costly you are because people are are essentially or orchestrating socially dynamic processes for there to be a steam processes involved there they can enjoy and so if you that they're angling for reproductively relevant resources now they don't know that they're doing this or they certainly do if they're throwing a wild party and they're hoping to invite a bunch of good good-looking people of the opposite sex and hope they show up and they're hoping to score so at that point it's conscious but most of the time people are only vaguely conscious of why it is they're doing what they're doing but what they are doing is they are essentially attempting to translate their behavior into reproductively relevant outcomes that doesn't mean they're trying to have kids it means that they're trying to go through the processes associated with success in a swirling cauldron of social relationships which include sexual and they also include friendship and they also include trade so in the final analysis that very nature of life is literally the transmutation with energy of physical materials into nucleic acid what what life is is the process of of the expending energy in order to reproduce DNA that is what life literally is at its most basic level and at the most basic level for a human being it's using my energies most effectively to try to get to gain esteem in the right way from the people that matter that's actually what it is that the human being is attempting to do that means with respect to mates friends and trading partners we are assessing their characteristics what they look like how athletic they are how old they are and also how healthy they are and the big five of their personality characteristics and their intelligence and their knowledge and their social connections we are attempting to analyze in some what value they have to us what benefits do they bring to the table and what costs do they impose it's if you've got a friend who's quote Nobel Prize superstar that would Wow all your friends with his knowledge of her knowledge of this without of the other and you're bragging about it trying to get social cachet behind it and you've invited him or her to five parties so you could show him off and it turns out they've flaked on all five then there you know they said they were going to come and then they didn't their value to you has dropped substantially they have been very costly to you as you have made promises to your social environment that you could not deliver on and so the fact that that in principle how they could have large benefit their flakiness is increasing the costs that they are imposing and therefore their value is dropping so that's why I would say in answer to this response here that their quote there's no such thing as I come through when it counts the issue is all of it counts and you know all of it counts all the way down the Rhine and people are counting and they are watching these reputational issues and they are appropriately assigning you pretense percentile scores and they are entering this in to their complicated matrix in their head as they assess your value to them and that's how much esteem you have with them so flaking out will cost you esteem and it may be worth it yeah because you may have other priorities that come up but obviously if you're a flake and you hold that label there's there's considerable evidence that you have a cost there as a result of your genetically driven lack of conscientiousness that people are picking up on mm-hmm no yeah it goes beautifully into the next point when she says someone's flaky on you a lot as much as it sucks it might be intentional and the program have no good way to break up with their friend or their lover or something so this is just their way of saying yeah you know see yeah you know that's very true there's no question about that in other words it's sometimes it is easier so that's good that they did this because that's actually a different a different motivation for this so someone could be perfectly conscientious but they are sufficiently agreeable that that they do not want to essentially send a clear signal to the other party that they don't want the relationship and so what they do is they start imposing costs on the relationship and the costs that they impose are by being a flake and so that's uh that's very good and that's that's how they reduce their value to that individual without having to confront them and basically say gee I got some tough news you know cost-benefit analysis from my side of the table is that you're just not that worth it okay so they would rather they would rather than essentially insult them and say that the that the wounded party simply doesn't qualify to be a friend or to be a business partner or trade partner or to be a romantic partner instead of confronting the issue directly highly agreeable people who who it's uncomfortable for them to sometimes have these sorts of showdowns or delineations sometimes the good move is to become flaky and therefore weasel your way out of the relationship through that tunnel very good I wouldn't a lot of that but of course that's obvious yeah okay well we actually have a caller that just called in so we're going to put put them on caller you're on with well dr. Lila Nate how you doing hey date-nut dr. Doug I got what I think is a good question dr. Lyle um is you know people talk about sexuality and being a choice you know the hole is being gay a choice or whatever and I'm not some like crazy defender of far leftist liberals or anything like that and conversely I'm not some right-wing and crazy conservative either but I'm just saying in the context of is being gay choice I think it's clearly not because just like being straight into a choice and if I look at say like a super hot supermodel female I have no choice but to be attracted to her so it's not a choice so my question is if sexuality isn't a choice then what is a choice for anything from what you choose to do to your career to but you you know what kind of food you like or anything yeah great question what's your name it's Robin II Rob okay yeah Rob this is uh this is fabulous this is a great deep question that goes all the way to the heart of the you know probably the greatest philosophical question which is freewill and and so it - of course in my judgment there is there's going to be no choice about your sexuality at all that that these are these are neural impulses that this is this is essentially data coming in and hitting an existing neural circuit that you had no choice about building and you are it's simply in you in the same way that you don't have a choice about what your hands look like those hands were born and orchestrated by the genetic code and they look the way they look you don't have a choice as to what it feels like to put an ice cube in the palm of your hand it's not going to feel like it is it's not going to feel as the same as the taste of sweet tastes on your tongue you don't have any choice as to what that feels like it just is what it is and so I complete agreement with you here and of course many people that are bitter or you know just shall shall we just simply say ignorant doesn't mean that they're they're mean or mean-spirited or anything else by any means necessarily they're just ignorant they don't understand the nature of human psychology and as a result they have been unfortunately mean and and problematic unnecessarily problematic to to people who are persuasions that are that are unusual and disturbing to them so sex is sexual preferences not a choice and you are correct that I don't believe that anything is choice so I don't think that you can choose to believe anything and I do not believe that you can choose to feel anything so this this puts us in an interesting place and it is well then how could you possibly say change anything in your life in some way that would be in a positive direction now what I will argue is that the system has some very interesting dynamics to it and that good information is extremely useful in promoting positive changes for humans not only on an individual level but we can see it collectively on a societal level as is also true so the in fact I will argue that human beings are inexorably moving towards better better and better existences for humans as as the future comes towards us because they because of the of the possibility and relentless probability that new information continues to correct mistakes so a so what choices we have you don't have choices but what you do have is an interesting characteristic that's the nature of animal life in general and that is that you have curiosity and you have so you have two things happening you have both curiosity and you also have what curiosity is going to be is it's going to be a sensually an energy budget that is going to be diverted to for the animal to move around in its environment or spend neural energy in the case of humans trying to contemplate and think things through in its imagination that that what this creature is going to try to do is expand its knowledge base about the the entire set of possible relationships that might exist between the self in its environment so if you can imagine a I don't know maybe a rabbit or a gopher let's suppose it's a rabbit and that rabbit is born and within within a month of its existence it has explored within a hundred yards of the rabbit hole that's as far as it's gone now you can imagine that when it comes to reproducing rabbit DNA it could be the case that variances in the local in the local environment or such that it's very likely that at 150 yards there's something very good at 150 yards and it's uh relative to the costs of actually getting out to 150 yards and they're either risks associated with it and the energy associated with it the benefits would outweigh the costs in that case the genetic mechanisms inside that rabbit that would lead it to have a curiosity to investigate its landscape greater to increase the size of the concentric circle around the its existing home base that it would feel an inexorable drive to get out there another 50 yards okay now at some point what it's going to do is it's going to be it's going to have a mechanism inside of its head that will limit its curiosity and that's because the cost benefit analysis that the genes are being selected on or building neural circuits in such a way that the curiosities are limited okay so the and it has to have this because the the the DNA is aware that it sits inside of a body that is only going to live for so long so essentially what it has to do is it has to have a certain amount of curiosity that that matches the the natural history of that species looking at cues from its environment about variances and values that are in the environment if the environment looks unbelievably uniform like for example it looks like a desert landscape that goes on for miles and miles and miles for as long as you can see and as the rabbit moves 100 yards around its landscape nothing changes every square foot is exactly like a previous square foot then we would expect that organism would say it's not worth being that curious sit right where you are and make the best of it as you can out of the materials that you're going to get in this very local environment but if the environment is variant the the machine should basically say aha I see X amount of variance in the environment and therefore is statistically likely that I'm going to be able to find something very significant within the energy budget that I could that I could actually apply to this problem of getting more information and that I have X amount of time in this lifetime in order to use information that is likely to be y amount of increased value so you can see that the organism if it's a short lived organism and the environment is highly invariant then it should be very encouraged that's how it should work if it's going to turn out that it's a very long-lived organism and its environment is highly variant in terms of the values that are the things that are valuable for this organism Bennis should be extremely curious about its environment and it should devote a high budget to exploring that environment so you can imagine that for example and you can watch the behavior of investors so in the investors in 1950 we're all looking to the Dow Jones Industrials and figuring out where to put their money and there's like I don't know you know 500 stocks and that's that okay but you can see that the world got more curious when other countries started to develop markets and in those emerging markets there were opportunities for capital to come in and match with labor that would result in very high rates of return more so than there would have been in mature industries in the United States or England and so it causes investors to get extremely curious about where else that they can put their money for higher rates of return and there's a certain amount of time and energy that is going to be spent looking for that information so that we can opt and optimize our rate of return on capital that makes perfect sense it's exactly the same problem as the rabbit faces so it's going to turn out that that I argue you have no choice but to be curious okay that curiosity will lead you to some amount of flow of new information about the environment that new information with the that you get out of the environment is highly likely to cause you to have an increased accuracy at your ability to estimate that environment now it won't necessarily have an increased likelihood of accuracy because you could if you're some worm you could go to the right and it turns out it's sticky and you go to the left and it turns out it's smooth and now you think everything that the right is sticky but it turned out you just happen to run into a sticky patch and so if you're a very dumb little worm without branch curiosity in your mind then you may not actually explore out to the right very you know ten feet when you've gone ten feet further and you may miss something very important and you may actually have an increase in distortion of your understanding of your environment okay so however in general and statistically what we are going to find is that the greater investigation that an animal has of its environment you have a reduction in distortion in terms of its understanding of how the values are distributed in the environment so the the essentially the longer you live as a human the smarter you get okay you've seen more of the world you know what things cost you can compute probabilities on all kinds of things better than a 16 year old can do and so that's why I would not risk my my money following the quote genius of some 16 year old I'd rather take somebody that's 56 because it's exceedingly likely that the 56 year old has a much greater understanding of the environment you can actually then think about in principle do you want to trust your legal case to a 25 year old lawyer or do you want to trust it to a 65 year old lawyer the answer is all you know anything reasonable equal you trust to a 65 year old lawyer because they know a tremendous amount more about the landscape including the judges who's sleeping with whom you know what these kinds of cases seem to settle for what the probability is likelihood of a verdict what it's going to cost in order to bring it to trial what are the odds that we can get a good settlement all these things okay tremendous amount of information can be in a head so the longer it lives it gets smarter and smarter it gets what we're going to call wisdom it's getting it's getting intelligence about the environment that it finds itself in the same thing that is happening on an individual level for an organism that following its curiosity and it doesn't even have to didn't even have to be that curious it could sit right there in that same courtroom for 40 years and even though it's not that curious it yet by nature more interactions come towards it and it as long as it survives those interactions it gets more intelligent about how to about how to manage those challenges and opportunities so the so we're going to find out that an individual the longer that they live the smarter that they're going to get the less distorted is going to be their understanding of their universe and that's a very that's a useful thing to understand that that's what's happening now if they live too long then what's going to happen is there's going to be brain deterioration of the organism and it's going to start to reduce it's likely its ability to make those computations so there's at some point that that the organism reaches its apex in terms of its ability to problem-solve solve problems accurately but we're going to forget about that we don't really care what we're really seeing is do you have choices no you don't you can't say well I choose to like the taste of silver I'm going to put silver coins in my mouth and chew them up you cannot you cannot like the taste of it you cannot say well I choose to believe in God you can't it's impossible if you could quote choose to believe in God and you don't believe in God you can choose to believe in the tooth fairy and you don't believe in the tooth fairy either so there's no choice there what you have is you have a deep and integrated genetically built set of algorithms for reasoning through the truth that is critical not only for humans but it's true for animals as well so when jean piaget you know 60 or 70 years ago talked about these little reasoning processes that were natural to people he was a very early developmental psychologist even sort of fascinating playing little games with his kids and I remembered certain P as ed in law's that we were taught in developmental psychology like the law of object permanence like there's a point at which you know the brain development the kid knows that when you hide the ball from it that there's still a ball you know behind this the still a ball and you know behind the little curtain the this this makes sense to us and I thought oh that's an interesting principle of course it turns out it wasn't long before we're rolling our eyes and realizing this is no grand pronouncement of a developmental process of humans for God's sakes my cat has object permanence okay so when my cat kicks the little toy under the under the couch the cats reaching under the couch can't see the damn thing but it knows it's in there and so the object permanence is in fact a characteristic of nature and therefore animal brains are born with inferences about object permanence if it was there before it's still there it didn't go anywhere okay the now so your brain is designed with some extraordinary subtle and brilliant mechanisms of making inferences about the truth one thing that's very interesting about people despite their extraordinary ability to reason and to to understand truths even though they can't articulate why it is that they think something is true they have logical operations that are operating unconsciously that actually can arrive at very very sensible conclusions even on complex data sets particularly social so the you don't have a choice about the conclusions that you draw your boss acts a little bit funny turns out you know this guy's a flirt and it turns out that they just that there's a new girl just got hired in your section you're a heterosexual male or you're gay male or let's suppose you're a heterosexual male and you're kind of nice-looking and you're more of this girl's age and he's ten years older and now suddenly you're in trouble and you start picking up on little things about his behavior towards you a little bit critical and you're like uh-oh I'm in trouble okay and your mind can already be computing the probabilities that you're in for the axe or you're in for a transfer or this is going to be a mess okay based on what almost no information almost none you just computed it you saw them talking and you saw him a little bit animate and he's showing her something and he's sitting in her desk and he etc and she's giggling and said it's like uh-oh I'm out I'm in trouble and you're very very possibly to be right and if you're not right it's only because he didn't have the power to do it or would have been too inconvenient or she's married with a big rock or just told him she's married or whatever the cost-benefit analysis is going on in your head and you are you are accurate in a way that a four-year-old could never figure this out because you've got logical operations that as you got older and your brain developed you became more and more sophisticated you became an adult human being and with by being an adult human being you're able to do very sophisticated particularly social reasoning processes as you try to accurately map out the threats and opportunities in your environment standing between you and reproductive relevant resources you don't have a choice okay you have to think those things you will feel those things etc what choice do we have none you don't have a choice about your curiosity but this is the great value of really good information and it's the great value of people that are very smart that have excellent brains and have excellent information in those brands those people once you've run into them they become highly valuable essentially they're a place to mine informational gold okay so for a long time I read at Richard Dawkins I haven't read everything that he ever wrote but I read most of it until it started to get redundant when it got redundant like I'm done I got the message okay but I read several of his works no matter how complicated they got I knew that this guy was an absolutely stellar brain and as a result I continued to mine that brain and then I went on to people that I knew that he valued and that he respected and that valued and respected him so I widened out the expertise from there okay so this was a process of trying to use my time and energy as effectively as possible and as I broadened it out I got smarter and smarter and smarter as I learned more and more and more didn't get any more quote in my hike you didn't grow but my information did so are in this very same way as is happening on an individual basis with individual humans it is also happening collectively for human the human experiment in general as humanity becomes more and more and more and more intelligent now one of the things that stands in its way is actually very bad ideas very bad ideas that may be useful for some individuals and where there's conflicts of interest between them and other individuals like Nazi socialism okay like certain religions around the world and certain practices and beliefs in the world that are extremely counterproductive to human freedom and human happiness these things can can can stop human beings from actually reaching their potential because it's going to turn out that if they're located in some brains and those brains can actually influence other brains in such a way that it's advantageous to them then we they can actually be essentially essentially exploiting individuals in a way that that are good for them and bad for people on balance and in general but what we're seeing in the world today and we've been seeing for hundreds of years is we've seen that good ideas actually wind up driving bad ideas out okay and so that's what's happening the world is getting better despite the fact that for example awful lot of very religious people are very upset about homosexuality and they think it's bad and they think that this is you know God frowns on this and it's awful etc and that it's a choice and people are making an immoral choice these are all really bad ideas they are incorrect ideas and and interestingly enough where human beings are sometimes it's very unable to actually see accurately so even though they have logical operations in the head which will which will lead them to the truth as best they can map it it's going to turn out that there's going to be a spectacular method that the mind can use to block that process and the blockage of that process happens is an overarching cost-benefit analysis to the best interest of the genetic code it will come up with the wrong answer inside of its head and its belief system if it turns out that it statistically increases its likelihood of genes survival to do so let me explain how this would work suppose that you are a mutant brilliant human being in the 15th century and you've been talking to Copernicus and so you start figuring out that he's right and everybody else is wrong and the whole world looks different than everybody thought and it turns out that from there you quickly infer that everything that you've heard about how the earth was created and how its set up is wrong so therefore if that's wrong then all the stories that go along with it are likely to be wrong and then you start figuring out that maybe the way your brain is looking at this thing that if you have an atheistic view of the world all of the evidence is starting to be confirmed as best you can is best you're considering it and it contradicts nothing and the only thing that it's contradicting is going to be the the vast majority of human beings that are in your adaptive landscape and let's suppose that you start to observe that as any of these ideas are bandied about they're heavily penalized so it's very possible at that point for the brain to be sufficiently adaptive as to figure out that the right thing to believe is something that is illogical okay now this seems like it's cowardice or it seems like it's preposterous that it couldn't be true but of course it could be true this thing you can imagine this happening over and over again in the storage Stone Age throughout the natural history of the species through its evolution that you could see where there would be a situation where you spec that the leadership is wrong but they're so sufficiently powerful that your brain is in cognitive dissonance and you surprisingly can find yourself maybe agreeing with them even though you've got nagging doubts the brain is not a singularly integrated set of cost-benefit analysis by by logic in fact it's a set of interrelated microcomputers that can be reaching different conclusions on the different places in the brain you can be sitting chomping down a very bland salad that you don't really want to eat but you're saying this is really good for me there's bunch of Kalin and i've got heart diseases and it's going to help my endothelial cells etc and you don't want to do it but one part of your brain is is believes that there's a causal chain that's going to be helpful from doing this and another part of your brain says what are you crazy there's a Snickers bars right next to it and yet this brain can be having two different conclusions about what's optimal the same thing can happen with major belief systems so you can see that there's going to be potential resistance on the part of some people about thinking basically that that that homosexuality is a choice and they you know God says is a bad thing and people are being immoral by pursuing this and that we've got to fix them or they're going to rot in hell behind this and this is terrible etc okay I got to protect my children from it because it's like leprosy that somehow they're going to catch it if they see it or they even hear about it okay this is obviously very ignorant but it's also potentially resistant to enlightenment because of the in-group out-group dynamics that can come from the individuals who collectively hold that and what their interrelationship is to each other with respect to survival and reproductive values this could be the church you go to this could be the women that you're trying to sleep with this is going to be the friends that are going to be the insurance policy in case you get injured or you become disabled or you can become broke this is you know this is it potentially everything might even be you're literally your business in life not to mention your friends so literally if the entire Coalition believes X even though your logical operations start to hear from outside sources that the truth is why you might largely believe X you believe X 80 or 90% even with some nagging doubts these kinds of things beliefs in socialism beliefs in communism these are these are systems of organizing economic systems between people that are horrendous they are they are just horrendously bad they are massively inferior to to a limited constitutional government capitalism where where markets and profits and prices actually drive incentive and helps the information helps human beings process information that allows the resources to be utilized most opulent immediately Moore's most efficiently and more accurately for human life satisfaction okay so socialism communism whatever you want to call it it's all the same thing fundamentally when it comes to what its accomplishing and that is the stopping of that information flow and the stopping of the ability for the profit motive to accurately drive the the utilization of land labor and capital to optimize human life satisfaction that is a mistake that mistake is extremely costly to human beings and you yet you see the very same problems that you see with religion is that you see people not wanting to let it go you see the left you know despite many of them brilliant people unable to let that go because of the status loss that would be involved in letting the scope they they continue to revere Karl Marx in the very top universities in the United States and undoubtedly around the world in long after these ideas have been thoroughly discredited both theoretically and objectively in the realities that we see bad ideas are very expensive they're very expensive from the level of the individual and they're very expensive from the level collectively what we're attempting to do here is one tiny little piece of trying to get people the right information and and so we look for brands that are intelligent and we look for information that is maybe inconsistent with our own beliefs so we see that in those inconsistencies there may be something that we can learn if if you can find individuals that have that amount of openness in their personality and they have high enough conscientiousness and their personalities and they have high enough experience in their in their places in the world to learn their natural curiosity can can result in spectacular accumulation of understanding in their subject area I don't listen to Richard Dawkins on economics because he doesn't know anything about economics okay I but I will listen to them in evolutionary biology and evolutionary theory and can learn a tremendous amount from him in those areas in the same way an individual with behind their curiosity they continue to move in concentric circles as they try to learn more and more about their environment like that rabbit and what we can do now in the modern environment is look for the fine minds who can open our our eyes and therefore reduce our distortions of our understanding of the world and in this way we can feel more confident excited about how to utilize our time and energy in an optimal way to try to optimize our life experience all right that's the answer that thank you very much what a great question is that something the question command naked-eye answer that real quick follow-up yes yeah absolutely you bet dr. Lao what what is it in the females in females like straight heterosexual fille male psychology from the ages of 35 to 55 who were single or sometimes not single where this suddenly the the physical attractiveness of a younger male is suddenly really important to the so called cougar whereas that's less important to the 18 to 34 year old yeah I actually think it's a great question and a great question Rob so clearly your mind is infected with evolutionary thinking which is great and it will continue to like spin and open up loops and I hope I hope we hear from you many times I believe that what you're going to find is following and what it is that you're looking at I think that which we're looking at is actually all women have very similar preferences and those preferences are going to the fundamental preference is to go back to our fundamentals every decision is being made by cost-benefit analysis and the cost-benefit analysis is the analysis of value so people are running benefits minus costs and it's going to turn out that if a woman is 50 I believe that typically you're going to find that a typical female is going to be most attracted to say about a 40 year old male who's in spectacularly good shape so he's because he if he's 40 and not thirty he has more life experience therefore his brain is more valuable all things being equal he may have actually in this in this day and age he may have actually accumulated more resources but in the end which could be useful within the Stone Age and more abilities as well to get more resources in the Stone Age however he would have been more valuable because he all things being equal he had more social resources and he might have actually had more income know how it's been shown in studies of hunter-gatherers that men will reach their athletic peak at 27 or 28 but they will reach their hunting yield peak in their late 30s which is very interesting so they become better at their craft over that instant decade and I think that you're going to find that probably the typical female whether she is 60 or whether she is 20 is probably most attracted to a 38 year old who would be who is an excellent I think all things being equal why because they're at the peak of their abilities they are likely to be very healthy they're going to be imposing they've lived long enough to to weed out the fact that they may have weaknesses either physically or also weaknesses mentally but lead to injuries and ie poor judgment too impulsive take too big a risk we're just stupid we're not conscientious enough okay so a 38 year old late 30s is going to be essentially someone who is optimizing the information that a female can look at and she could look at the cost benefit associated with all these factors if he's 44 he's probably he's past his prime okay and not only that if we're going to get resources out of him over the next two or three years or four or five years in a romantic relationship where there's going to be children involved then he's will be in fact now definitely on the downslope and you know in in anywhere in major league sports this guy has long since retired he's got him he's in front of a microphone he's not taught he's not playing anymore so the so we would expect that the female aesthetic preferences would be probably triangulating somewhere in the same arena and I believe it does so in my experience and I actually don't have any data on this by the way but this is my personal experience that my mother who is 80 yesterday on Valentine's Day my mother buys most attractive men that are around 40 okay good-looking 40 year old athletic men that's what she finds most attractive this is also true for my ex-girlfriend who's now 49 was lamenting to me that dog gonnit the darn thing is is what she finds most attractive is guys about forty days and she says the problem is that's who she's always found most attractive by the time she was 20 25 years old now I think a lot of 20 to 25 years old would find a 40 year old guy kind of gross so they might be more attracted to somebody five or ten years older than them not not all the way to 240 but I think that that's what you're seeing is you're seeing actually that that there's a similar set of value judge buzzers that are taking place and they're triangulating around that late 30s so you know Nate you got a few years to do some serious farming and you know 75% of our listeners are between the ages of 35 to 44 so there's some good news right there there you go there you go all right great question Rob thank you for asking great question Rob okay so you know speaking about flakes and how to deal with them I know and we kind of woven woven around to explaining the purpose of life in the universe yeah so if we run it back around to flakes like what you said about hmm that we don't have a choice someone who's flaky doesn't have a choice in this right so right they they can't help but but make wrong cost-benefit analysis or maybe not wrong maybe wrong from my project if I'm the one getting flaker but certainly not wrong on their side right how do we deal with slick yeah I mean yeah yeah I mean there's a lot of things you know what the truth is we I guess you'd call this how how to deal with flakes but we may have to table this so we'd come back around to it because there's there's a few different things that I would explain to people and we're not going to do it in a couple minutes because because I went on a rant [Laughter] so that we have time to keep going if you want or we can table and go another time no let's just table and go another time and that that's enough for everybody and we'll we'll call it good and we'll circle back ramble will definitely attack this problem because I think it's an interesting one okay fantastic and so we'll call it I'm going to rename episode and called flakes what was that flakes gays and Cougars how's that there yo that's great and then people be like in the middle of that thing they'll be like what is this whole thing we had to deal with today that's steps that's the slick advertising that we do to make him choke down my thinking oh and the bed I was telling you about last week with my friend yeah yeah it looks like I'm not flaky I just had some stuff and I have to do one feminist rally so if any of the listeners have any ideas of something that that's ridiculous send me an email beat your jeans at gmail.com I'm in the Southern California area so if there's something you just want to see me at I have to pretend that I'm actually into it and can't be dangerous or anything like that but dr. Lao if you have any ideas let me know too that would be fun none good luck [Laughter]
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