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Episode 79: Doing good, Overbearing parents, Does birth order matter, facing death
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all right good evening everybody this is Nate G dr. Lyle how are you doing today good good here yeah good to hear you too so last week we had a really fun show about James Moore and the Google memo controversy and we went over kind of an entire memo and a couple of different points here and so we got a little a couple of comments here some some good some similar kind of curious to know a little bit more so dr. well tell us about what you thought about all this stuff that's come out so far from spam oh yes one thing that came up is the course I got a highly intelligent email from from a highly intelligent woman who then presented me with a bunch of data that I was not aware of and the data indicates that apparently there's been large meta analyses which is a scientific technique invented in I think it was 1960s for compiling studies so that you get a much clearer picture than doing it study by study and apparently there's little if any differences between males and females in in mathematical abilities which is was surprising to me because that was new information for me and of course that it would have been different than so what was this guy's name again James d'amour d'amour I can't remember his name the anyway he was looking at I'm sure the same data that I had been looking at and that many people have looked at so he might not have been aware of this the and also I also ever sent for quite a while the the balancing view has been at verbal abilities of females or superior and so it made perfect sense to me that males might have mathematical abilities that would be superior because they have somewhat different problems in their natural history than females and that females might have somewhat better verbal abilities for the problems that they face and so the that all made sense to me and I didn't give it too much thought other than the fact that I wasn't scandalized by the fact that there would be such differences and that it made sense to me that such differences could play out in in a modern environment in a way that could be striking and interesting sociologically like the Stone Age people didn't evolve differences in the Stone Age 500,000 years ago aiming at modern culture and modern society so the fact that there could be individual differences that would play out in the marketplace today would just be historical accident and sort of interesting the pan of course it when there's up on economic implications there could be you know cultural implications etc but this could be all just innocent luck of the draw dramatically now it is it when I went back this week and then looked at this I had to realize you know I'm not really sure what the answer is yet I further looked at further evidence that indicated that some specific types of math problems it may be that the males have fairly substantial superiority and those types of math problems could be three-dimensional geometric kinds of problems that may or may not be true but there's quite a few studies that show that kind of difference now it's also true that as you start to look deeper into where females or superiors start to find some other things like for example facial recognition females are quite a bit superior facial recognition so you start to see evidence that nln insert certain verbal capabilities so you start to see evidence of the following I think this is if I had a crystal ball I would predict that this is what the next 10 or 20 years of research is going to show I could be wrong of course in 10 or 20 years from now I can make this statement now and nobody will remember that I made the statement so I could safely make the statement and appear very sage and making it but this is what I think you know about I've fought back on my own trees from the very first time I was learning about intelligence testing and then early 1980s and and then performed many intelligence tests and read quite a bit of evidence on intelligence the what now I'm suspecting the case is is that probably what you're going to find is that the male and female brains in evolution faced extremely similar problems so that they should be very similar in their abilities and in fact overall if we if we have if we sample enough types of problems we find out that there's no difference in intelligence if we get a wide enough sample now we've got another problem though and that is that if we group the problems in large amounts like we say quote verbal versus math the problem is is that that is likely to be too general and so that instead what we're going to find is that there's going to be clusters of specialised neural circuits where on average there's going to be a great deal of individual variation here that's going to completely overwhelm the the sex differences variation of course the but I believe that you're going to find that the male human across the last two million years as the brain evolved faced slightly different types of problems than the female did and the females obviously faced slightly different problems from the male did and you're going to find that where they where they face the identical problems they have the identical abilities and where they face slightly different problems you're going to find that the sexes differ in those areas slightly probably not dramatically because the problems weren't so sexually stereotyped that there wouldn't be considerable overlap on the cognitive demands now so I'm betting that you're going to find the the three-dimensional rotational differences are the Stata came up two on average across many studies came out to about half a standard deviation that's a lot so that's about the difference of mmm call it the from the fiftieth to the 65th Sentell so we'd have to look it up in a chart and depends upon we're in the bell curve you're talking but it's more or less call it 15 percentile points now that may or may not be genetic but I'll bet you that it's there and I'll bet you that it's there to the tune of at least five percentile points now five percentile points may have people shrugging their shoulders but that that is not trivial and it is showing a evolutionary history of two bell curves that are not lying on top of each other that the male's would be slightly shifted to the right and a little bit higher on that type of problem and females would be slightly shifted to the right and higher on problems of for example facial recognition which may be more important for females in an adaptive setting in a natural setting than they are for males so this is I think that what we're going to find unfortunately is that when you start having a huge cluster of types of problems that you quote call math they are not quote math and it isn't that simple as a math chip versus a verbal chip it could be like 50 different little subproblems and on average across those 50 you may find a subgroup of problems that where the male's definitely have an advantage and other problems where females definitely have an advantage one of the early puzzling facts about the early intelligence test which actually remain in true today is that they have math problems and verbal problems and on the math problems they have arithmetic and they also have memory for numbers and they also have geometric problems etc and it turns out that the arithmetic problems actually people scores on the arithmetic sub test actually correlate better with the verbal scores than they do with the math scores so it's starting to tell us that wait a second what we categorize quote is math is actually a very gross category of problems of which they're they're highly heterogeneous and the same thing is likely to be true what we quote call verbal that a lot of those problems are social and some of those problems are are less social but evolved a heterogeneous set of different kinds of problems this would be why a meta-analysis could wind up obscuring individual differences even though everybody thinks a meta-analysis is the ultimate way to test a hypothesis but it is not an ultimate way to test how about hypothesis it's it's if you have studies that are all studying exactly the same thing over and over again then a meta-analysis is good but if you have 47 different ways or in this case 900 different ways of measuring what you call quote math and what you call verbal then when you average across those domains it could easily be that the male and female brain if you group a wide variety of those you're not going to find the differences but when you go in and circuit by circuit look for specific things you start to find it which is exactly what some of these studies have of course found when you go after just rotation of objects in three-dimensional space now you start to pick up very robust differences but if you then group that with two-dimensional geometry and with arithmetic it all gets wiped out so the one comment here could be that certain kinds of problems in the modern environment are best solved by highly specified circuits that that for example may reside in either the male or female brain particularly for example certain engineering problems so certain engineering problems could easily be the case that the male brain is sitting at the 60th percentile maybe relative to the female brain now that starts to be even a what you would call a fairly modest difference can set up a sociological avalanche or a snowball that essentially people are designed to genetically niche book and figure out where it is that they have advantages over their competitors and where they have disadvantages relative to their competitors they stay away from those areas so even a relatively slight difference could then wind up essentially encouraging certain people to drift a certain direction and other people to drift away from that direction and you could behind a fairly subtle even if fifty-five percentile versus 50th percentile shift in that curve for example on on an engineering related circuit could easily be enough for to wind up that eighty or ninety percent of the people that are that are in that area of life making a living wind up being male so this and this could in other words this is an avalanche of the sociological phenomenon following a fairly subtle biological phenomenon so anyway the questions but it's not as simple as I had sort of previously thought that it was so it does look different than that and I believe and so anyway I wanted to clarify that because the last thing I want anybody thinking is that that I'm a what do you call it some sexist that doesn't stay on top of literature and has a very overly simplistic view of sex differences in cognition all right yeah that makes sense when I was a long time ago I read a book I think her name was Lauren or Louann Brizendine called the female brain and it was describing some of the differences in the female brain versus the male brain some of what you're talking about about the females ability woman's ability to recognize facial cues and she says the result of this is myrin or not so that women are just have more neurons in there but not only that is because they have more mirror neurons as children as infants they respond more when when the adults come to them and you and awe at them and so they respond more so they get better and they wrap the myelin sheath and they wrapped mileage sheep and they wrapped mileage eat more so neat guys so any any any similarity that meant that the boys might have gets good enough they get far behind really quickly because the adults don't really make a lot of facial expressions to the young boys when they're growing up so I wonder if if it's possible to that that whether or not there's differences if there are difference as men as you have we've talked more before in the earlier podcast system this males have a lot more reason to try to display in practice a lot of their abilities because of their status seeking give you then Jared just wrapped way more myelin sheath so they might appear to have much more differences and actually do genetically they just had more practice very possible very possible all good thinking and and we'll watch for us but one thing I wanted to point out here was that to not necessarily be intimidated by quote the last word of a meta-analysis a meta-analysis can can be extremely useful but can also obscure the legitimate findings of a study that narrows down its investigation to a narrow enough level and finds a real effect and if we then group it with a bunch of other studies setting quote what we think is a homogenous phenomena but is really a hetero heterogeneous problem we wind up we wind up losing important data rather than gaining so we so that this is a this is why we should not we should not completely ignore the the some of the findings that have been found just because a big big sloppy meta-analysis educates us that we can't throw everything in the same pot average it out and then wind up wind up with with the truth all right interesting but move on now let's see what else I got nope all right so we got a couple of questions from listeners one of them has to do with doing good in the world and how much is enough over noon parents some sibling birth order or whether it matters or not and then facing death so with that look so let's take their way so you're dr. Lyle right I've been fortunate enough in my life as a result and as a result I feel that it's important for me to do good in the world for the most part I do okay in this regard work for a nonprofit I'm an ethical vegan I'm very involved in the progressive Church however I struggle with feeling like I should be doing more good in the world like ditching my renew motive job and dedicating my life to something that requires more sacrifice for example so I have trouble just being happy with where I am when I'm doing something I often feel like I should be doing something else that somehow better for the world there's an there's a quote that captures my feeling quite well which is that I'm torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world this makes it hard to plan my day and I'm a real planner always thinking about the next thing I should be doing so what's your take on this this is a very good question is it just great and there's so many there's so many angles that we could talk about so I'm going to start talking and I'll probably miss and forget some things that we might talk about another day and hopefully it spurs additional questions from other listeners the I would say first of all that I had I've had many Epiphany so I'll tell you about one epiphany that I had the I once I was I was flying somewhere like a big shot to give a speech that I was going to be paid much for to Proma from my book which wouldn't sell much and as I'm looking down over to San Francisco berry and there's six million people that live there I realized that that at best you know there was no way that 1% of the San Francisco Bay Area was ever going to read my book not a chance not only that it wasn't going to even be 1/10 of 1% and in fact it was more likely at best to be a hundredth of one percent if that that would be an extremely big success and it was succeeding ly unlikely and so it I realized I just sort of had that that moment where you realize that you are an unbelievably tiny fraction of what's going on in this world and I can remember also sometime after that looking down at some little kid and I'm standing in some line this little three-year-old kid that has doting parents who are well-to-do and the kids got a big ice cream cone he's flicking ah first time I'm having my thoughts about that and and I also got character and I'm looking at this and I'm looking at the general unbelievable dietary indulgence of the United States relative to not only what happens in the third world but also what has happened throughout human history and realizing that a lot of my career has been about speaking to people about how to deal with and manage their own tendencies towards extraordinary dietary indulgence when they're trying not to hey what a bizarre twisted upside down problem that is and how difficult it is to stop it and when you when you when I realized that I if I spent my life looking down at this little kid and toiled as hard as I possibly could and was just brilliant and had unbelievable impact on the world if I did my impact positive impact on my child's existence would likely like there's no way it would be as much as 1/10 of 1% impossible Steve Jobs has not had a 1/10 of 1% impact on anybody's life in the United States other than the people who work for him hey no way so no no single human being is moving the needle not happening the and that when I thought about that I thought why on earth toil into the night trying to make a huge difference in the world when all that would happen is that in a miracle this little guy's life would be 1% better why on earth would I care his life is already indulgent beyond all belief there's nothing that I'm going to do this is going to have a substantive impact on the world that's going to move this needle one bit and so we need to get clear that the purpose of our life is not to make the world better that's an interesting mistake that you can get trapped into the purpose of your life is to enjoy your existence that is the purpose you keep that front and center and now it's going to turn out that inside of you what you have is you have happiness circuits you just as you've got circuits that can smell carrots and you have circuits that can feel ice if you put it on your knee and you have circuits that can see flowers and you have in other words you have all these phenomenal variants of experiences that you can have certainly those experiences will cause emotions as opposed to sensations the but of those experiences what we are attempting to do think of your nervous system is a jukebox and what we're trying to do is we're trying to hit the hits you're trying to hit the music that you really really like and the music you like causes aid a diverse set of experiences that we call happiness and happiness can take place in various and sundry ways the most common and most dominant features of the the the interactions between humans and their world that cause happiness circuits to fire our esteem signals okay so that comes from us earning and then getting esteem signals from other people now the it's going to turn out that the desire then to to earn esteem you're trying to be valuable and so you're trying to be valuable in the stone age in the village and the village is pretty small 30 40 50 people and the genes are designed to compete to try to be valuable in that village and when you compete successfully and demonstrate your value to the village you will get esteem signals throughout your day and throughout your years so will indicate that you are valued ie loved in the village now the problem is the bot moderate environment is 7 billion people not 35 and so what can happen is is that the genes that build people they come in they come with some motivational architecture one of them is going to be what I call hill climbing and another one is going to be what we're going to call conscientiousness so the hill climbing gene means to rise in dominance hierarchies to become as spectacular and valuable as you can be in whatever way that you can until you get stopped by a competitive superiority so don't get as high in the company as you can before you get stopped get as high and the Olympic sprinting as you can before you get stopped so whatever it is that you're doing that tries to garner a steam from the village rise until you get stopped the problem is in the modern environment if you've got a couple of characteristics particularly conscientiousness and agreeableness as this is this person is signaling by their life history that they have those two things in spades if you have those two things then you have two thirds of what I call the sucker medallion and if you add if you add intelligence to it then you've got the triple play here and you got anima dalian just about hanging around your neck and that medallion is if you are conscientious and agreeable and you're intelligent the world will find you and it will try to get you to do what it is they want to do and in doing so what can happen is that your own conscientiousness which can drive hill-climbing can be highly associated with us that we can essentially be spending a great deal of our energies climbing and demonstrating superiority how much it is that we can give to the village now you can see how in a Stone Age village you would be you would be keeping track a little more closely on the debits and credits that would be flowing back and forth and seeing whether it was worthwhile you'd see where you were hitting the apex of your ability to rise higher in that domain and then you would back off your energy and you'd have so many other things in your life that we're causing calling demands to you you'd have you'd have a slew of children and relatives and people with problems etc so the point is a lot of this altruistic helpfulness would actually be directed at your own genes as opposed to the amorphous masses that it might directed at today so what's easy to happen is that it's easy to get your life out of balance not hard to do I think an example of a life that got out of balance and I'll probably get some mail behind this a classic example would be Mother Teresa so I have no doubt that Mother Teresa was not only extremely conscientious but probably very agreeable and so you wind up let's suppose that in principle she's at the 99 percent I love both of those which wouldn't surprise me that would mean that statistically you've got a 1 in 10,000 individual which means you've got a rare individual now some people would say that she had enlightenment okay I would say instead that what we had was a very unusual personality with a set of circumstances that led her to - to be essentially trapped by an unusual nervous system that wound up not able to sort of break out of that breakout about pattern now it turns out I'm not saying that she lived a lousy life I hope she would great life I hope she enjoyed it a great deal but that doesn't make her enlightened that makes her a genetically unusual specimen that when you start having that kind of a situation you're very likely to wind up sacrificing your life to other people in other causes and wind up essentially with a life out of balance and so if you are genetically unusual it's easy for you to sort of get your life tipped out of balance so think of that game of life as a is a as a set of circuits happiness circuits that reside inside your head and they are generally quiescent okay they're just sitting there just like the circuits in your head that can taste taste and orange they're they're not going off hardly ever only when you taste an orange your happiness circuits are sitting there quiet able to be activated under certain experiences and just like if you were to optimize your eating experiences you would know that you wouldn't just eat brown rice and broccoli every day you would actually have a diversity of experiences and those experiences would rotate they would they would change and shift in ebb and flow that if you think in principle about the idea of optimizing your gustatory experience in life you can see that wouldn't be behind one thing nor would it be behind two nor would it be probably in a highly regular pattern there would be an ebb and flow and change to how it is that that thing that would actually optimize your experience the same thing is going to be true of the activities of life so the activities of life are going to they're going to ebb and flow between not only earning a steam in the right way from the people that matter and receiving those signals but it's also there's also going to be the quiet work that's done from from from earning your own self-esteem as your self-esteem it watches you quietly work to try to improve your own abilities that's a that's another that's another process that takes place that isn't directly in the face of other people and the steam signaling that they would give you but it's also true that you are not only a producer of things to the village you are also a consumer and so you are also one who gives the seam stables to others for their accomplishments and what they bring to the village so you don't just you're not just a singer you're also somebody that appreciates athletics you're not just an athlete you're someone that appreciates someone that defends the country so in other words we are both all you know producers if we can be and we are also consumers of what it is that other people bring the village so our life you know to optimize the happiness circuits we we want to earn and enjoy credits from our contributions and we also want to observe and express our appreciation for those others who are also bringing things to the village so therefore it would be absurd to think if you if you were to look at this on it some kind of an interesting continuum should I be working in toiling all day to work make the world a better place well only if you happen to have some very very bizarre circuits in your head and even if you did have those bizarre circuits in your head I would argue that they are probably not even would never be as far out of balance in the Stone Age as they could get today so I would say watch out for the save the world heroic circuit remember that in the end all you have on this life is you've got time and experiences and so you want to do good things to earn esteem from those that matter don't try to earn it from the whole world in some amorphous way I believe that's a mistake I myself will do isolated altruistic sorts of acts not generally but very specifically so I will from time to time come across individuals that I happen to like that happen to be in some kind of a bind of some kind and I will invest in those people all best my time or energy or occasionally money and I like that process and I think it's more rewarding to me personally rather than trying to lift the world a hundred thousandth of 1% it's better for me to lift one life you know a hundred percent and so I think that I would give that as advice to anybody who is in this kind of dilemma when you when you do that the what you do to quote make the world better place forget the world think about your world and trying to help a specific individual make their life better particularly but the great basketball coach said that John Wooden said that when you no longer care about the problems of the young it's probably time for you to leave and so the and then in this way you know there are always people that are struggling and worthy and hitting obstacles and could really use some help and and when you help them when you reach down and reach across and help them and they see what you did and they see that you didn't have to do it the the esteem that you earn from from doing that on occasion that's that's grand and that that's how that's where I would put my put my energies in that department rather than worrying about the whole world but you always say is it's better to make a small decision than a big decision yes there you go all right let it goes on this is let's move on okay well before we go on to the next questions and we have to have a caller on hold here so the ranking them on here and see what they have to say caller how you doing what's your name and where are you calling from hey Nate and Doug this is Rob again Nate I don't want to be a nuisance and can call in every week but um no I mean mrs. Bell no worries I mean people people out there you need it you need to get was a program I mean you need to tell me I can call in and talk to the one and only Doug well for free I mean come on hey boy the only one Google a book you know or the iTunes is going to start charging any minute now yeah all right what's that Rob um dr. Loe I was thinking um what is your response to someone who says well I'm kind of hippy about having kids but maybe I should have kids because who's going to take care of me when I'm old yeah the I think that's a very very bizarre attitude I would say that that's probably not very well considered habited the children are an unbelievable investment in time and energy the had a good friend of mine who contemplated having children wanted children and then had them and she's a psychologist and I asked her I said not having had children myself I said how is it now how does the workload and she said I underestimated by 700 percent well in other words it was a massive myths read over the the huge investment that was involved so having children as a buffer zone against one old once old age may make some kind of convoluted sense but I would say instead if you're if one is concerned about that then you do exactly what I just talked about which is that when you are able and you are competent and you have something to give to the world because you're still a competent human then it might be good to invest some some altruistic effort in the young and you might want to find specific individuals that are worthy human beings but are highly conscientious that might need some help and assistance and you reach out to those people and you reach out to those people and then after you do that you make connections with the next generation then what you do is you make sure that you have got yourself appropriately settled for your future financially so you're not a financial burden on anybody which means you produce more than you consume for an awful long time so that you're in a position that if you have to be in your old age and in trouble that you can consume a lot more than you produce at that time and then you make sure that you've got somebody out there in the world that cares about you and loves you because you earned it and that that individual can then look across your care and make decisions for you in case you get into trouble so children as a as a financial insurance policy are is absurd and that shouldn't be done people should just take it upon themselves to take care of business and children as an emotional insurance policy are likewise absurd your children may hate your guts okay there's no guarantees of this and so so this would not be a wise thing to do you have children either by accident and then by moral moral what do you call it moral stance that you can't terminate them or you have children because you want to have children and and you want to go through that process and do the investment in enjoyment process of the whole thing but children for the process of having an old age buffer is is one of the more ridiculous motivations that I can think of and so I I vote to thumbs down all by myself all right all right thank you thank you very much for the call thanks for calling yeah well thanks all right fantastic question right and Rob we always appreciate rupee colors so okay so moving on to the next question this is about overbearing parents so dear dr. Lyon I've questioned regarding childhood experiences and how much nature versus nurture actually does affect us my father was an overbearing an analytical person nothing was ever good enough get a VP at a BT why not a B+ get a B+ why not an a my mother was unaffected and irritable and always wanted a daughter I became a people pleaser with low self-esteem no matter what my environment reflected but I'm six feet 180 pounds muscles and toned and fairly good-looking yet I never felt attractive even when women would approach me I rebelled to my parents man's self sabotage my own self success in life and feel undeserving when I got any success I would date women they would fall for me but the moment I noticed any emotional response I would be immediately turned off in a business meeting when I speak and I notice everyone is actually paying attention to me I actually feel awkward that I'm actually being heard rather than feel valued that my boards are making an impact my brother on the other hand is a self-serving narcissist who would never do anything against his own self-interest and would need to see personal gain for himself before ever healthy anyone very analytical financially conscious and his time and resources are kept strictly guarded yet he's extremely unhappy on the inside bitter irritable and cold so what happened here how did we end up on two opposite sides of the spectrum and how can I rationalize this to help me to move away from these self sabotaging tendencies hmm well God the seems like we we haven't answered this question huh it seems like we did the I would say first of all the first opening part of this question is sort of nature versus nurture and I would say that my my general take is as follows that that both of them have an enormous impact on your life experience the they do not both impact your personality they both impact your life experience so your own nature genetically has a tremendous impact on your life experience if you are born not very bright you could be born emotionally unstable you could be born highly conscientious you could be born a flake in other words these sorts of you could be born very extroverted and very warm and friendly and pretty bright and everybody likes you it's like you who you are genetically has an enormous impact on what your life experience is going to look like it's also true that circumstances have a substantial impact on your life experience at any given time so this person had a pretty rough go on the first 20 years of their life when their parents were front and center and their brother was front and center so these these three individuals had had a lot of input on this individuals life and as a result I'm sure those times about individuals life were you know pretty unhappy so as a result you know now but now the question is he goes on to say well I'm kind of awkward and and uncertain and don't have high self esteem even now okay well and you know is that was this caused by being you know beat up for 20 years inside my family I doubt it I doubt it I you know there would be other psychologists that would say absolutely and we need to go psychodynamic therapy and we're going to unwind all these issues and I would say really I actually don't see any research evidence that even remotely supports this so more likely we've got we've got a family here with genes written all over it of some pretty unhappy people mother you know irritable and problematic and not warm to her son because she always wanted a daughter for some reason and we got a father who is apparently just did panty ass ego trapping you know unhappy guide and the brother is you know very these are all disagreeable unhappy people now our person sounds like he's more agreeable but he's pretty unhappy and so I think what you're seeing here is a lot of a lot of this person suffering is actually due not to his upbringing but to some circuits that he inherited the the reason I say this yeah you can see this all over the monozygotic twin studies that that no matter what their their parents were like or how they behaved these kids thirty five years later when they grew up they're very similar in their personalities so so this is this is why it is that I believe what I believe about nature versus nurture now the what do we do about this well the you know now we're getting a little bit we're asking a little bit too much of a general question and answer so with a person like this I would when they say well I'm self-destructive or etc etc well I would need to know how are they self-destructive and specific what domains what are they thinking I would need to know you know sort of what status are they defending in order to you know where are we getting the the self-destructive behavior self-destructive behaviors as a result of ego trapping situations where it's simply the cost-benefit analysis is such that it's not worth trying your best because you could lose more status than the status that you have to gain the and that you know in some fashion that is taking place when people are doing self-destructive behavior unless the self-destructive behavior is having to do with some bizarre anomaly in the environment like you know drugs and alcohol and pornography and gambling or whatever you know processed food in other words their stimuli in the modern environment the disturbed situation between person and environment and cause self-destructive behavior but that's different than what this guy is talking about so anyway the the my broad answer is this person was born with some sort of shaky circuits that were going to be that was we're going to make life a challenge and then spent 20 years not only with those circuits but with the people that that had those circuits and more that we're actually colder and more disagreeable than this individual sounds like the brother bred true in other words the brother was a very good and representative outcome of those two parents and our guy was not or guys the apple fell a little further from the tree a little warmer a little lesson you know not so self-assured not so entitled but has some other emotional characteristics that that may have made the life a challenge so I would say that you know we would have to get more specific and if they were to to write to us again with something a little more specified then I'll try to answer it then fantastic ok great ok all right all right next question dear dr. Lau wanted to know your thoughts on sibling birth order some of the people closest to me are the baby of their family and then my observation has been that they seemed substantially less resilient to the trials of life that they faced and seem to have a lower tolerance for problems and complain much more than people who were first born or among older siblings whereas the older siblings I've observed seem to be more responsible and caretaker separate family this just my imagination is something to this I'll just have to else that I'll tell you go ahead I have two sisters one older one younger and every time I meet new people usually on dating situations it's a last about my sisters and they say oh so just older younger oh you you're the middle child oh you're you're the medical I always wondered what that meant so I need to clarify because I looked it up everywhere which way and it seems to be that middle Gordon's just have a whole bunch of problems exporting all this black psychology yeah right very nice question very very common question in in people seeking to understand personality the people are are designed with the brain seeking patterns your your a pattern seeking machine in fact that's what brains our brains are literally devices seeking patterns because what a pattern is as opposed to sensory chaos pattern actually indicates that there are correlation coefficients in the stimulus array that that indicate statistical regularities that can be exploited so there's more worms over there there's more birds chirping over there I I feel - behind me I feel vibrations etc in other words literally what intelligence is is the reduction of ambiguity and and so a pattern recognition is literally what a brain is doing it's recognizing patterns so that it can act on those patterns to their advantage be more effective in their movements otherwise they're if there were not patterns in nature there would be no brains so at any rate so people have been looking for patterns of human individual differences forever and this is why you've got totems on a totem pole so they look and say wow you seem like you were taught as a kid so your totem is love the bear or whatever okay so the so across history pattern pattern recognitions have taken the you know everything from the four humors of the body of nature Greece to astrology to Union archetypes to inia gram you know there's been one you know mistaken bunch of inferences after the next about what is the the root of individual differences or the nature of individual differences one of those whose birth order and so birth order is is one of a long line of doomed hypotheses about individual differences now unlike all of those other things which are all completely have zero validity birth order has a tiny bit of validity the research evidence indicates some very small correlation coefficients on a few personality dimensions these these these correlations are very small they are so small that no human being could ever detect them in other words if you were to meet a hundred second born children and a hundred third board children a hundred first sport children you literally had a hotel and that hotel you add a hundred firstborn women a hundred second born women on 103rd board women in each of three ballrooms and you went and hung out in those ballrooms and shook hands and and listened to people's life stories excluding family interactions and sibling interactions and listen to their careers and you spent two hours in each of those three rooms at the end if we had 50 of the top psychologists in the world in personality spend two hours in each of those rooms and then we asked them which room were the firstborns in which room were the second and the third they could not tell you it's important so the there is no possible way you if you had 50/50 psychologists their answers would be no different than random chance so this individual like like everybody else has seen what five or ten families that they've thought about that's nothing okay and it's it doesn't even begin to to widen out the net large enough to actually look for these statistical regularities the person has been now obviously that firstborn people in the family itself are going to be there often being higher positions of authority and responsibility so while those people are growing up that can be true but as soon as we look at them when they're 25 years old forget it okay that is gone off the chart and everything is changed so you will not find that the older people are quote more responsible than the younger people at that point not going to happen so so yeah this is a like I said just want one of many thoughtful thoughtful and interesting and potentially truthful ideas just as astrology was a potentially truthful idea people looking at the Stars the configuration of the Stars has enormous predictability for the seasons which has enormous predictability on crops which has a very important impact on human life it's reasonable that people looked at the Stars to try to find evidence to try to look for patterns of other things in human life that might be important so of course in trying to solve the problem of personality they looked very very hard at the Stars to see whether there's correlation coefficients with with when people were born and what their personalities would be like and when it didn't work then astrology got more complicated to add more variables to fix it and then when that didn't work that add more variables to fix it and pretty soon well your rising sign is this and the other sign is that so you're a little bit of that a little bit of that it's like it all seems to fit okay but all that's all that's really you're seeing is the struggle of a human mind seeking a pattern okay and people will absolutely struggle to find patterns when they're not there when they're desperate to try to find a pattern to reduce variants to reduce their errors in making decisions so stock market Pickers are notorious looking for you know pattern after pattern after pattern desperately trying to find a pattern and coming up with all kinds of cockamamie ideas that fall apart as soon as you look at the evidence so that's the answer to the story oh yeah just so you know yeah I oh I did say yeah there's a tiny little bit of evidence the effect sizes are unbelievably small far too small for any human being to ever detect mm-hmm the only the well that it's it's yeah it's like detecting the the difference of the temperature between your left your right forefinger and your left forefinger like there can be a tenth of a tenth of a degree difference but you would never know it okay and that's that's what the personality differences are as they're related to per quarter yeah when when we first did the podcast about the personality statements the personality differences and you talked a little bit about astrology and you said that the strategy works as they make Barnum statements where they're so very that anybody can apply them any way anybody right so I you know I think six months ago or so I can went on a date and I got the whole you know you're a middle child and blah blah blah so I decided to go and look up what does this actually mean so I felt I found on parents calm you know they explain all these pop psychology problems and have all these characteristics of the firstborn the middle born and the last now yes you know people only have three children so right the first you know so there was like a bunch of adjectives I just had the first one I thought you know I'm going to use your I'm gonna use the logic that you gave us and I tried to cover up and and put them in an excel sheet so I couldn't tell which one was the firstborn which one is middle child adjectives yeah which was Glassport and turns out they all apply so you know there we go ha ha very good all right I'm proud of you all right what else we have all right last question we want to hear you talk a lot about death why does it happen why does the what does the body go through and how might we most skillfully prepare for it and face it how do we best carry on after losing those moves I've noticed that certain groups focus on health seem to convey a subtle message that death can somehow be vanquished or though we can have pain-free lives up to the last minute when we die in our sleep and this seems to emphasize a certain braggadocio that may not be warranted love to hear your thoughts and musings on all of this oh really fine really fine really thoughtful first of all being since I've died 17 times I'm really knowledgeable back I said the it turns out that the nature of life life is a is a process of integration of chemicals and the the complexity that is involved in keeping that integration is astronomical it's it's vastly beyond anything that a human being could you know any any group of human beings could ever imagine doing so literally the workings of a single cell are beyond the complexity of the entire world economy probably by a factor of you know 10 million so the so when you when you realize that you're made of trillions of cells for god sakes you you can and that they're interrelated in a way to integrate into being you you start to get a feel for just how outrageously complex a life-form is it's going to turn out that those those complex integrations are are living in contrast to the laws of entropy which are pulling things apart into disorder so life is order and non life is essentially disorder is how this is going to work and so the you can only organize Mendte t to be so chemically stable to fight against the forces of entropy for so long and it's going to die and it turns out that the nature of this process is that life different life forms and their and their ability to do this or effectively equal so the the light processes of a frog and the life processes of a camel and of a human are all about the same so they all have however this works there's like these I don't know logarithmic mathematical formulas that can say well it's this day in there and it has this many heartbeats and therefore it's going to live this long and it's like unbelievably good so you can you can tell that a human is going to live about 80 years and the chimps going to live about 50 and a horse is going to live about such-and-such cetera it's like it's really clear how this all works this is all basically cell biology it's the nature of life so that's that there's no way to beat it I have a good friend of mine dr. Alan Goldhamer who's you know that one of the three or four healthiest livers I've ever seen on on in my time and on in other words this guy you know him Nate and you know that this guy is true iron self-discipline and just an extraordinary he's a health machine and in the back of my mind I always thought that my good friend Alan would figure out how to cheat death and in fact I thought he was so smart and so such an amazing human being that I actually have believed most of my life that somehow he was going to do it every five years I really expect you to pull this off and I'm really kind of counting on you and you know it's starting to get late here you know we're getting older and I'm more or less you know I'm tapping my foot like when you get a figure so yeah there is no figuring it out and the there's no stopping it in terms of preparing for it and facing it I think it's useful there's useful techniques that I will use in therapy to try to hold the mirror up to people psychologically and different different ways that I do this has different shock value to different persons so when you say well you know you probably got 30 years left that doesn't do much but some people I'll say you got 360 months and they're like oh my god I only have three I've got about a thousand words lemmers yeah you got about yes exactly you've only got so many more summers and so to try to use numbers to hold up the fact that you know what we're going to die and probably the last couple of years are going to be lousy and the notion that this person says you know if you are super healthy do you get to live to the last breath etc it ups your odds of living without pain and being in pretty good shape towards the very end it doesn't guarantee anything human beings they take care of themselves they're less likely to die of a disease process and more likely to simply die of old age which is a different thing and the but that but there's no guarantees so I'm sort of expecting that and I'm trying to do a good job in this life so probably I only have maybe three or six months of lousy at the end and I'm going to try to as my friend Alan said Doug there is no solution to this problem other than you get to try to live till you die try to do a good enough job with your health that you maintain high function into the majority of your life expectancy and I have to say that is probably truly the best motivation for trying to do a good job on your diet eating a lot of fruits and vegetables and Whole Foods getting regular exercise getting to sleep on time staying away from from drugs and alcohol etc I mean all these things are know one of them is going to be a disaster and no want to know one thing is going to save you but what you want to do is you want to minimize the chemical stresses on the body so that we don't wind up pounding the daylights out of something in the winds up being the organ that fails on us and then we wind up going out ten years early and going out hard so that's why I'm a believer in healthy living and to do a good job as far as that goes but as far as the rest of it I'm also a big believer and and being a consumer in this life not just to producer this this question ties in neatly to the the question that we began the night with is about sort of how to spend your life and the answer is spend your the best defense against this problem is to realize the best way to prepare for the end of your life is to make sure you didn't waste the time that you had be you know be real about trying to stop yourself from needless hill-climbing and to try to focus on on how to your personal happiness circuits work and if you're not getting a lot of happiness circuits activated then then you've got some homework to do which is vital and you've got some experiments to run about how to change some of the parameters and how it is that you invest your time and energy in this life and find out if there are people or activities that you need to shrink down and other people and activities that you need to invest more in and you want to find your way to the moods have happiness as consistently as possible and that's what you want to do and that's the best you want to you know as we age and as we lose our function you know you you want to be able to look back and feel and remember that you didn't you know spend all this time in an office you know to do what to to rise in hierarchy to be make more money to be in a corner office to to do something so that we could look fancier and get pseudo esteem from people that don't even know what the hell we did okay know that that would be falling into the trap we want to enjoy the process of interacting with people that we really like and enjoy doing things that feel that feel valuable and interesting and to try to enjoy the very much as you can out of the limited time that we've got
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