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Episode 99: Introvert socializing, happiness triggers, Kid is flunking, Nature fallacy
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evening everybody its mate G with dr. Doug Lyall you just heard because I was having technical difficulties how you doing dr. Lisle it good still doing this out of my garage but yeah running onto the running into the hundredth episode coming up next week and we've gotten what maybe 30% of the audio problems worked out so you know slowly betray we're living a mediocre bill here and closer to lousy great all right we got a lot of interesting questions today so we'll just get right down to it so I changed for people who are subscribed to the BlogTalkRadio newsletter I send out a reminder for the show and once in a while I'll change the titles just as the questions come in so today we are talking about socializing as an introvert concepts called jnana me out to me I've never heard that word before so I learned something too what but not me yes go ahead yeah and then why do women stay with unloving men and then another question after that so let's just get right down to it you ready dr. Lyle all right okay dear dr. Lyle how much socializing does an introvert need I've read that socializing is important to good health but I feel like my friends enjoy being with me much more than I enjoy being with them I'm fifty nine happily married to a fellow introvert and it seems as we get older our friends only have three topics of conversation political rants health complaints and long rambling stories about people I don't know I usually spend my time with others at wishing they would just stop talking and trying to figure out a way to leave early this is just beautiful let's do this person is one of my clan the yeah you don't need any socializing any more than you have a beautiful device buried inside your head to try to help you make ideal cost-benefit decisions and it's it's that's what your emotions are so it's called loneliness in this case so if you're lonely it motivates all human beings to to go out there and connect with other people so if you're one of these really needy extra verse god I just pulled people's chain know the truth of my high over here yeah I am I'm very introverted by nature and so I I relate perfectly to this person's story and the the answer is is that no being socializing is not good for your health that's just utter BS so that that's that's typical things that they publish and you know Good Housekeeping magazine the that whatever whatever quotes science drove that is badly flawed there isn't anything good at all about other people except that they could shoot you committed as far as your health that's that's what effect they could have actually interestingly enough of course we believe that there's a quite a good chance that human beings extroverted nuts may be naturally tempered and the reason why there are even people that are average or introverted is possibly because highly extroverted people probably had more sexual activity and therefore they they may have had essentially too many different partners to be ideal in evolution and they got that gut checked in other words that behavior that would seemingly be advantageous got checked by by the by venereal disease and so it looks like there is a sweet spot in the middle of the bell curve for right in the middle between introversion and extraversion which idealizes your exposure and motivation to meet new people and expose therefore idealizes your exposure to the sexual marketplace but doesn't over expose you nor under expose you now for myself I'm terribly underexpose and so such as such as life but together yes right hold on I want to continue the the you what we do in this life is you feel your way you feel your way to the the people and the circumstances that are are you that are a reflection of of how to optimize your life experience and so if you're getting signals that that specifically in this case these people and their topics are not are not a good cost-benefit analysis then fade them down 30% and see if your life gets better alright what were you going to say well I was I was curious if you could clarify when you said that people don't actually get health benefits from being with each other so you know I don't consider myself an expert on this but I you know very broadly of read a little bit about oxytocin and what happens when human touch and some babies that improve when they're you know their mother touches them if they're if they're prenatally mature yeah so you know I thought well the ideas running around they're not really consistent and when I hear you that it's like you know yes that's Lillian Turkish now that's so fu there there there they've got so many cons and avaria Buhl's there that you can't you can't even you can't even see straight so we need to we need to look at first of all let's look at introverts versus extroverts and let's look at the day of death and we're going to find out whether or not the extroverts live longer than the introverts and the answer is going to be no okay the even even if it were the it could be confounded by a number of variables so yeah this is nonsense and you as an introvert don't need extrovert you don't need people for anything you can your life can be improved and your moods happiness can be improved because there's certain interactions with human beings that are inherently enjoyable because they're banging on circuits that tell you that it's going to increase your likelihood of gene survival so but in terms of eating them for any health issue that answer is is ridiculous now there may be some people that again very anxious and that anxiety can be stressful for them and that stress might be very very slightly deleterious to their health and therefore guess what they're going to be motivated to seek out other people and affiliate but yeah that's a all cool if you're an introvert thumbs up fantastic there we go yeah I didn't realize that they live dissent you know about the same age so now well I haven't checked it out but I'm sure that's true I mean that's just a there's no way there's any substantive effect there now you could find one just because it could be that people that are Hermitage are or bad specimens funny-looking rejected by other people live on their own yeah and have a lot of mutations and a lot of problems so the even then could that could be problematic to do that research we have to control for all those variables and this person happily-married competent etc etc there's no way that adding human beings into their existence and increasing their social interaction is going to help them physically and it's not going to hurt them to decrease it so yeah just follow your gut you'll be fine fantastic all right well we got two callers on the line so let's take one oh my goodness all right all right let's see what happens all right so caller this is the eight five nine area code what's your name where you calling from my name is Pam and I'm calling from Florence Kentucky uh-huh welcome to the show Pam very good thank you that sorry don't worry at all it doesn't drop out this isn't dr. oz in front of eight million people no it's uh it's 11:40 at night here so I am dot disobeying the Goldhammer dictate to go to bed early and get good for Joe so um we spoke just a little over a year ago and you really help me to understand where a lot of my social anxiety comes from and it really helped me so I'm 51 and nearly two years ago I went to true north and I fasted for two weeks and I was trying to relieve a muscular skeletal problem I already the diet stuff was no problem I'd done that on my own and when I was there it was relaxing and amazing and I like never left my room except to go to the bathroom and get water it was awesome but when I came home everything came back and I ended up developing symptoms of fibromyalgia B and my thyroid started not working as well and so I took like I gained back all the way and now I've been off for a long time but I've kept the weight and I've developed digestive issues so I'm not worried about going back to bad old habits because my bowels won't take any thing except for wine of course is a bad habit that comes back and goes away every once in a while but what I'm looking for is what I want to do is how to find satisfaction or happiness in a world where you know I worked really hard and I didn't get what I was going for and I didn't get not only I did not get what I was going for at worse and I'm saying no thank you to the women's breakfast into going disc golfing and doing all those things so did that make sense yeah I'm not quite sure keep keep moving because I do I need to understand what your what your what your dilemma is in terms of your decision making great okay when we talked last time he said that I was probably face blind to some extent so now when I let myself I don't worry about it so much and everybody knows they're supposed to look for me that I can't find my children in a crowded room right and they all do I take care of it for me so what I'm looking for is how to happiness with where I am because where I am is really good I have a great family my kids are you know ones in grad school one's been living on his own for three years my husband's got a good job but this diet thing keeps madness not being able to move things keep smacking me in the face because I'm not going to go to the women's luncheon or the women's breakfast because it's all food I don't eat and I can't go out with a family disc golfing or decorate for the dinner dance or whatever 51 year old women do right yes okay so in other words you don't have we don't have any screaming problem with any of your relationships that are naturally nice right where we have is we've got problems with sort of more peripheral process of interaction with other people on in various things so so it sounds like the things that you would like to do would be interacting with other women and some normal social level doing some little sporting things that you'd like to do but you can't do things of that nature so it sounds like your your light has sort of your options have shrunk to some degree so with yeah telling me okay oh absolutely yeah there's always things that we can do and so we have to look at this let me let me back up and take a little wider view of this because this is a very good question and it it has potential implications for many people across many you know many many people struggle with questions like this here's the here's the way to think about the way your mind is built and what it is that we're up to in this life the what you have inside your way your way your mind is constructed is you have certain you have a phenomenal amount of potential responses and they're different so for example you have a response or an experience of what it would be like to taste an apple versus a grape versus asparagus versus an ice cream cone those are all very different they're similar in many ways but they're different they're distinct and your nervous system can actually make those distinctions in the same way you could watch basketball you could listen to an opera you could get your toes massaged there's all kinds of things there's really for all intents and purposes there's an infinite amount of things that could be done it's going to turn out that those things fall into categories so watching one basketball game is very similar to the next basketball game it's a very similar process so what you could do is we could build a taxonomy of activities that human beings do if we did this this is what I call a taxonomy of happiness so it's going to turn out when I've done this there's a surprisingly limited amount of things that people do I think there's maybe about 40 so there's you know watching other people perform various arts there's doing those yourself there's playing games there's playing sports there's gardening there's cooking there's you know flirting and make it love and there's having conversations with friends etc etc there's looking at aesthetic things in the world so it's going to turn out that there's a if anybody did this for themselves there's also doing productive work and getting feedback from other people there's etcetera so it turns out there's a fairly limited taxonomy of what I call the texana me of happiness now it's going to turn out that this is the answer to your question is going to be very similar to if I was to answer the question it had a different question from somebody similar let's suppose somebody called me and said you know I'm not real sharp and I don't have much money and I can't do much about my career because you know I'm 55 years old then and I can only earn X amount of money so there's things that I wanted to do in this life but it's I'm not really going to be able to do them so even though I'm not too sharp I am kind of open to experience and I really wish that I could see Paris and I wouldn't want to see Rome and London and Munich and Japan and I want to do all these things but I can't do them okay now we might say well gee that's tragic you know you're not going to be able to do all these things because those things are out there to be done the other thing we could say though is say well it's not a problem because there's more to be done on the taxonomy of happiness to activate happiness circuits then you're going to ever have time to do okay so the we have to look at the taxonomy of happiness and see what kinds of things are appealing so there are things about playing disc golf that's appealing but we could look inside disc golf and find out what things about disc golf or appealing and there is going to be pieces of that that we're going to be able to essentially take out of that and replace with something else that you can do the same thing would be true about the women's breakfast there's nothing about the women's breakfast where those women are having breakfast that we have to have breakfast we could actually maneuver around that potentially right there we can become the freak that brings their own food and we could joke about it talk all about it no problem we could we could actually socially engineer that and get away with it now if we don't want to do that what we can do is we can organize our own little breakfasts okay the we can also if it's not women's breakfast its women's other thing where people do things and things that we can do where we're not going to have food being a main focus of something and we can we can interact with people in a group context that way so what we would do not in Kentucky yeah we could okay so what I'm getting at I hear you but what I'm getting at is this following notion this is this is what I'm going to call with something like this I'm going to call this package deal dissonance and so there's many things in this life that the world sells us that it has to be a package deal that that you and that you have to take the package deal so you got it your spouse is going to be your best friend your business partner co-parent the kids and everything else into the Sun it's like well the maybe that will work and maybe it won't good luck okay now then it's going to be that our kid we're going to be proud of they're going to be athletic they're going to be this they're going to be that they're going to be our best friend cetera et cetera good luck maybe it'll work maybe it won't work I know your job supposed to make you good money give you good steam from the community feeling good like you're doing good things be you know explore the upper limit to your potential blah blah good luck okay probably not probably not going to happen probably the thing that might be the best thing would be to do job that seemed reasonably reasonably rewarding that was actually rewarding financially enabling you to have time to do other things that are artistic and still have the standard of living that's adequate in other words you piece it together you don't try to go for the entire package deal so what we want to do is you want to use your acuity to look inside the things that you like so you can say wow I'd really like to hang out the loons breakfast it's like well why is that the reason why is that is going to be probably a couple of things probably you know people enjoy the noise that comes with a lot of people in a closed space that makes us feel like the whole village is there and people are eating and therefore they're happy that's one of the times when people are happiest and it's a woman's thing so if there aren't men there then it reduces the feeling of sexual competition that without the men there it doesn't force women to be competing with each other they can be a coalition that feels good in other words there's all kinds of aspects to that women's lunch that that actually activate a lot of moods have happiness inside of women that being a case we can pry probably extract some of those conditions and we don't have to have it at those what that limits lunch we could have it in some other place okay we have to figure out what that would be we might even have to create it and then we have to decide whether or not it's worth the trouble to try to pull that off the I have a way of looking at these problems like for with with respect to disco if we look inside a disc golf and we anything with anybody that's listening if there's something that you really like to do but you can't do it the idea is look inside of it and let's find out the elements of what it is that you like that and let's see if we can extract elements out of there that we can do in other words we piece it together the anyway so this is the this is the notion that we can be and I also like to circulate around another problem-solving concept over the top of everything and it's the it's the Nazi Germany concept and that is if you are Nazi Germany and they told you well if you fix the problem of how it is that you can have it get together with women where you don't have to be eating junk food and you can interact and enjoy their company and they can enjoy your company if you can get that organised in the next 30 days and we going to let you escape and walk over to Switzerland but if you can't do it then you're going to stay right here now when we look at that it's a joke it's like well of course we could organize it and so the a lot of challenges are about how much time and energy and creativity are we willing to risk and spend in order to try to get inside of a problem and try to get our psychological needs met that's that's what we're looking to do and a very often the answer is gee I don't think it's worth the trouble and it may not be there maybe lowing lower hanging fruit somewhere else where the moods of happiness can be activated in turn back to my guy who doesn't have the money to visit Rome Paris Munich and lended but so what he can do is you can watch movies he can play in the park he can get on fantasy football he can actually read great classics well he can't because he's not that smart but he could certainly watch movies about those things and there's there's all kinds of he can visit museums in his own City and he can do all kinds of things that are very interesting that activates the moods of happiness and he can actually activate one of the things that's got him going is the his openness to experience and a sense of adventure he can do that partially possibly whitewater rafting and other things backpacking hiking and visiting cities that he can afford to visit this is the notion of that you don't this is a position of power of understanding that your moods of happiness are latent circuits inside the nervous system that don't require any specific input to get it they require a type of input to get it you don't need a specific human beings love or affection you need love and affection per se okay you don't need any specific job you need the processes of productive work per se and this is this is how it is that this thing works and so therefore we have an infinite amount of creativity that we could apply to making your life as good as we could possibly make it alright so can I restate sure I was looking kind of towards the path towards that beautiful feeling of running and you know the wind in your hair and being outside the Sun and what I nearly go is say oh I can be outside in the Sun to feel the wind in my hair in my backyard thank you absolutely alright thanks for all ham thank you thank you very for the call pilly appreciate him all right we're going to take another caller dr. Lyle we have actually a third caller as well so we'll take right now sure let's stay here I'm going to read the last tutor two notes of the phone numbers to the phone number ending with three one three one color what's your name were you calling from Pelican hear me yeah hello welcome to the show thank you uh yeah I'm here um I'm calling from Florida mm-hmm and what and um ah Scott is my god very good glad Scott okay I'm calling in because uh I I'm having a issue that maybe uh you could help me out with um I have a son and my ex and I are not together and my problem was twofold really I have a problem with my son lying and hawai about stupid stuff hawai about awesome has he brushed his teeth and I'll say yes and then I'll smell his breath and it's obviously obvious a has an or you know I'll tell him to go clean up his room and then he'll go do something else a have you cleaned up your room and he'll tell me yes yes I cleaned up my room and you know he hasn't cleaned up his room you know it doesn't you know I'll confront him about it I had a million and one reasons excuses why his rooms not clean you know and he'll just lie to your face and this is a issue because I'm not with my ex so sometimes who lied to her about what's going on or whatever and my other issue is I'm with school he you know he just doesn't want to do the work and you know I've been listening to your podcast so I understand get your your perspective on Donna's hey if you're like there's the Jeanette you know do not at this point or whatever he's not very detail-oriented he's not very driven there's not too much you can do about that yes to make his mind up for himself as far as that goes but I mean I was wondering is there is there any way you can kind of tweet that I come from a background in finance and Applied Economics you know that's my educational background and so when I see something I look at as a problem of incentives like maybe I'm not incentivizing him properly to do his work and if I give the incentive structure right or raising incentive so he thinks it's worth his time he would do this thing so I just wanted to see what you had to say about that that's all very reasonable Scot and so thinking about this in terms of cost-benefit analysis is going to make some sense but we're going to look inside of that and we're going to we're going to see how far we want to take it okay so first thing has how old is he chief time yeah okay so what's going to happen is is kids do a lot of lying they probably they probably don't do too much more than adults well the issue is is that just to just to take the camera back a little bit for everybody so that you understand lying in principle the the what there is is in communication the the only reason why communication systems evolve between animals is because the the benefits of communicating are greater than the costs and so our evolutionary time it was in the best interests of a of as the same species to actually signal to each other there's a few times when there's signals between species but that's rare typically if we're thinking about sophisticated communication systems out of which human language would have evolved we're talking about within systems communication systems and so what we're going to see is that that in general the benefits are greater than the cost and if we look at communication we're going to see the communication has the following structure and that is that there is a sender there's a message and there's a receiver and the purpose of all communication is for the sender to be intending to influence the receiver and the reason why the sender is attempting to influence the receiver is because they want to influence the receiver to the sender's benefit so in the most simple structure a father says to his son hey kid get out of the street so that is he's attempting to influence the son's behavior we could say manipulate which would be have a slightly pejorative tone but that's ultimately what we're trying to do and so we're trying to influence the son's behavior and that is in the father's best interests to do that in this case we're going to call that a win-win communication okay most most communications are when when at least the total vector analysis of the cost-benefit of communications in general across the natural history of a species has been that the winning the expense of communication has been greater than the cost now let's look at a second example so that we see that there's a there's a there's a vulnerability here and that is the defender could be a swindler and the receiver could be a little old lady and the swindlers communication is little old lady buy my swampland okay so if his if he is successful it's a win for the for the swindler and it is a lose for the little old lady so in this case it's a win lose and but in order for there to be the possibility of the little old lady getting swindled there had to be the possibility that she would also be a net recipient of communications across her lifetime on average so the word commute most of the time the the benefit outweighs the cost now however we cannot stop the the ugly underbelly that in order to evolve susceptibility to win-win messages so you want to be susceptible to win-win messages you want to be the son but when the dad says hey get out of the street you are manipulated by this you don't want to be inert with respect to that intended communication action because it could have been a win-win so this being the case people are are built to be acceptable to communications and that means that there's going to be deception and that means deception is going to evolve to be very very common in all likelihood and it's going to be a major expense that's sitting under the profits of communication Allah false advertising okay exaggerated advertising so that that's going to be absolutely all over the place in communication and you're going to see it all over human nature now what your son needs to do in this life is he needs to lie and he needs to like like hell all the time he needs to figure out what the limits of it are okay he needs to figure out how it works he needs to find out how smart other people are and whether they can figure it out in other words he's right I figure out the parameters of the cost benefit of line and so that's what he's going through and you can count on it continuing for go out around you're going to find out that he will he will continue to discover that other people are you know smarter and figure it out and that it hurts his reputation and therefore sometimes when he tells the truth people people don't believe them ie the little boy the cry well you start to figure out over time that your reputation actually is going to mean something and you're not going to want to sacrifice it too easily so this is a normal developmental process so number one don't worry about that forget it now okay if he winds up imposing any significant costs on you behind one of these lives then you let them have it okay like listen I stirred you did this and you put me in a really bad spot okay so you do that you pull a stunt like that again there's going to be some prices that's how we handled okay now the second thing is about school work so he's 10 years old so I assume he's what fifth grade now yeah correct okay so what what is his how is he doing just in general is he passing is he above-average what's his it's crazy because he can I mean occasionally he'll get you know all A's and B's but most of the time in that quarter like math and science and stuff sometimes even reading even more math and science he'll just he won't do the work and you know he's been diagnosed with ADHD I don't know you're talking that is but in teachers I'll tell him I ate in Washington yeah don't worry about really yeah you know you need to do these uh you need to do these these math problems he'll be there in a class and you know he's he'll say I don't want to do the math problems and you know he he's not only is does he is he I don't want to say lazy but yeah okay lazy but he's a lot braver than I was when I was a kid right when I was I was in the South in the South now had a paddle hanging out on the principal's door and he knew that you crossed a line he could use that paddle on you right he he's brave enough where he's figured out there's nothing that they can do to him you know my dad might take away my my my electronics so whatever punish me but he knows there's not no you know he's not going to be getting cattle you know and his mom doesn't really doesn't really impose too strict to discipline she's more you know and maybe this is the case with I don't want to be sexist here but the this is I feel like this is more the case with women in general they're more like always okay honey you know so and we're not together and you know she's very uh what's the word for she's she doesn't want to work with anyone she's very hard-headed you know so um let's let me let me ask this again what do you know for example about his you know achievement testing like where he stands with respect to math and verbal scores relative to other kids his age you actually know where he is is really he's reading I I'm the fifth grade level math he's probably I mean yeah he's just not he can learn it I'll teach it to him I don't know what is Rek scores right but it's probably below because he just won't be bothered to learn it you know teach you too and make him sit down and learn it he can he can do the math problems but he doesn't want to put in the effort to learn it okay so let's try to back up for a minute and let's find out sort of what some of your frustration is coming from the the appropriate bar for this kid is to pass okay oh god we really want we don't want to hassle of having to have to do a grade over so that's actually where the bar should be there are no rush on this kid with respect to achieving any kind of academic capabilities because he's going to wander we don't know how much horsepower is but it sounds like he's somewhere in the middle of the bell curve okay we don't know exactly where he is but he's not he's not having something jump out at us is either very low or very high and so as a result what it means is is that you know if we were typical if we were a super high conscientious parent or set of parents we'd be fretting and biting our nails and and trying to push him twist him into a pretzel to try to have him do well relative to his age cohort at every little milestone along the way that would be American a total waste of time the truth is is that we're just trying to meander this kid through high school and we don't care how well he's prepared for anything when he gets done with high school we just want him to pass because if we're going to do any if he's going to do anything significant past high school it doesn't have to be when he's 18 and it probably won't be okay so this kid will need to go out there and rub shoulders with the proletariat for a while and get his hands burned by grease on a grill and all kinds of other things okay yeah and so he needs to do that he needs to do that for probably a few years and find out that it now wait a second what dad says about going to college may not be such a bad idea how do you become a sonogram tech again okay then we're going to start talking about now we're going to be heading back to the JC at 22 or 23 years old now with a plan and a purpose okay so now at that point this is an older brain a smarter brain and now it's a brain that's finally motivated and it's going to turn now you have to learn that algebra crap that you didn't want to learn in high school no problem he had no motivation to learn it in high school when he was 14 or 15 but now he's 20 to 23 and he sees money in the future and it turns out that he's under a little monetary deprivation because he wants to have a nice car to go out with the better-looking girls oops we got a motivational situation okay so this is what I'm trying to tell you in general is that it's your high conscientiousness that it's actually seeing this as would be sensible as essentially a gene race and your kid you know is on it on the same gene gene line that all these other kids his age are and he's racing against other kids his age and if he doesn't like good keep up and we don't get an edge and he doesn't push himself and learn that he's going too far behind in the gene race and then he's not going to be as fancy well trusting this is all absurd because the girls aren't saying well when did you graduate oh you you didn't graduate the JC till you were 24 and then then you didn't get your little certificate and airconditioning till you were 25 and a half oh well in that case I'm not interested they couldn't care less okay so we are so what we need to do is flush that idea take pressure off yourself and the only thing I want this kid to do is not be a pan they asked you by flunking out okay okay as long as he's not if you if he starts flunking out he's literally in danger of flunking then I would use some of your incentive issues take well as toys make his life you know deprive misery until he gets off his ass and makes sure that he passes but as long as he's passing there's really no incentive for this kid in the game he's not he's not particularly talented or interested and he just doesn't care it's not his thing so let him go do your thing and the hell with the hell with the schools and their expectations about how interested he should be in their stuff okay so then let me ask you this um yes if you because you know like I said he'll get sometimes they'll get a sometimes they'll get seized and he's gotten these a nest before if he is flunking and I take it like I've taken away his electronics and I feel that he still review no not doing well what can I do other than like physical discipline which I can't do because I hear every minute discipline a kid I would just uh you know I would i if he was ki if I knew that the kid was capable of it makes a difference about whether I know they're capable now there's other things that I it's extremely important that we don't have a kid in the ego trap where the expectations are actually too high so what we want to do is we want to tell them listen everything you want to do in goof-off etc you get as long as you get a D okay okay I don't really are you get what you know I don't care if you get an A or B and I don't I don't think you can you say bye yet if you manage to pull a B I'm going to give you this or that treat okay but I don't think there are ants in hell you can do that and I think that I think that where you're at is I think you could probably probably your best work is probably a C okay and then get a D that's okay with me but if you get a nap that's really shitty and things are going to get tough around here okay okay so that way we keep them out of the ego trap and we have you challenge them w yeah yeah lightly or I can give you this a remake on that word America I'm a little what we that's exactly what you're gonna do what look I know that you know there's there's probably not not much chance you could do as good as a B but if you did if you managed to you get this prize but I don't think you can get it okay okay okay this is how we do it we pound a bamboo shoot under his fingernails and but we we need to but the bar is ultimately very low and so therefore the kid hopefully is not ego trapped and he's got enough he's got enough desire to not be humiliated by failing he does not need to have any high expectations for achievement at all because that's going to drive him to do nothing so that's what that's how we do that and etc I think I have on my website I have a about 5 or 7 minute thing about my kid is flunking out and so I suggest its esteem dynamics calm you go there and listen to that little that little snippet it's 5 7 8 minutes and it will sort of reiterate some of the principles that I'm talking about tonight ok ok all right fit very good Scott thank you for calling pleasure thank you thank you sir that thank you very much for the car Scott really appreciated system dynamics org okay so we got a third caller calm Oh calm now it is fantastic yeah we can see okay go ahead all right what do we got okay we got we got a third caller so color where you calling from what's your name in Dayton dr. Lyle - Rob hey Roz I'll oh hey he said man I have two questions the first one should be really easy for dr. well the second one's really good I think dr. Lyle um what's the butcher response to someone who says for example when I say something that you say online that you like to say humans are designed by nature to fill in the blank and someone respond right says that's an appeal to nature fallacy what's a good response to someone who always wants say whenever you bring up the word nature or natural they'll say that's an appeal to nature fallacy yeah well uh the I I would say this the naturalistic fallacy did the notion did there's several several problems in several ways to think about about issues number one the the the notion so one problem is is that to describe the what it is that essentially how we're designed we are never we are never trying to say that it is the way that it should be or that it's the best way so the sometimes people are slightly offended in thinking that that this is what it is that we're this is what we're implying okay so this is a so this is the the notion that that this is a this is a value Laden concept and this is a it's sort of the way things are versus the way they ought to be and the so what we're trying to say is that what I'm trying to say is the following that the way thing is the way nature design things is interesting and it's important for us to understand and it can be extremely useful for us to understand this but it doesn't mean that it is the that is desirable in fact very often it is not so I can let me and let me give an example of when people people get into trouble and but by being people can be very blinded and upset and essentially arguing very argumentative unnecessarily because they don't really understand what it is that we're up to let me give you an example the if we were going to talk about rape so very many folks of various political persuasions are very offended by an evolutionary psychology explanation of rape and rape is rape is of course an inherently very important thing to understand and there are a great many you know left-wing feminists who are just going to say it's an act of violence it's not a backed of sex that's a terrible mistake and it's a it's a it's an insane way of trying to analyze the problem it is a of course it's an act of violence from this from the viewpoint of the victim but if you're trying to understand the behavior it's a sex act of a male that's attempting to steal the reproductive machinery of the female that's what it is okay is it violent well of course it's violent okay but it is apt and women'll system has nothing to do with sex of course it does what do you think it is okay now so people that people can be disturbed by this and well they can be very disturbed because they can believe that when you talk the way we talk here and you essentially explain things down at the level of the engineering of the genetic code as it is built nervous systems to have certain responses and behaviors it can seem very cold it can seem a ruthless and it can seem um it can also be effectively it can look like and absolving or excuses it is not okay so the there's a huge difference between explaining something and and essentially saying that it's fine or it's okay because there was a biological basis for it so rape is a criminal act it is a it's the act that in the stone-age that those criminal acts were defended this is what defended against and they were punished and they were often punished by death and so the so that the stone-age had their own their own way of dealing with problems like this so but understood if you're ever going to understand it we have to understand the evolutionary motives that are guiding it and then that can help us potentially engineer human interaction and human society and cost-benefit analysis to penalties etc etc in order to reduce the problems associated with what is fundamentally a conflict of interest let me let me say a little bit more we're going far afield and I'm going to try to get back to with your other question but there is a if we're going to if you actually want to grasp nature and humans and their place in it and a great many of the problems that people face and deal with and essentially the the problems of life you must understand that there that life is inherently what the philosophers are going to call tragic now tragic doesn't mean it's a tragedy it means that there are inherent conflicts that are problematic and there is an alternative view of for Humanity and it's in its capability in the future that we're going to call a utopian or idealistic view and that idealistic view sounds wonderful and it comes out of the mouths of politicians and it comes out of the mouths of some philosophers and it all seems dandy and it seems like it what it could be should be ought to be it can be but the utopian view is mistaken the truth is that life is inherently tragic and for example show me where on the African savannah we don't have predators and prey the it simply is the truth that that lion has to kill something in order to survive that is just the way it is it's going to turn out that two young men are both very interested in one female and only one of them is going to get her and that's the way it is it's going to turn out that a huge percentage of human beings will never mate with anybody that they want to make with and the people that they do mate with they didn't really want to be with but it's all they could get that is inherently tragic okay great many people are going to do very hard work and they're not going to get much satisfaction from it and they're not going to get a lot of esteem for what it is that they do that is inherently tragic the because they may not be very smart may not be very talented etc so there are there are tragic and difficult problems in life that doesn't mean it's a horrible show it means it's difficult and problematic and so people that that that criticize evolutionary psychology is peering into human nature and more broadly the evolution of our minds so evolutionary psychology doesn't begin and end at humans it's all over the map all the way to the smallest brain on earth the the fact that we can we can explain and understand a great many things is that we are not in any way saying that it should be this way we're saying that it has been this way and it very can significantly still be this way and that is not a naturalistic fallacy because we're not prescribing we are explaining okay Wow all right I do have time for one more let's get your question and we'll wrap up go ahead Oh dr. Lao what is the evolutionary psychology behind Beatlemania and let me explain real quick because when I say Beatlemania I don't just mean I don't just mean you've done I don't just mean that videos I mean you look at footage and there's absolutely you know someone I could picture people looking at footage and say oh isn't that cute the girls are you know they're happy and having fun and it's like no no no take a closer look they're there right there they look like they just saw like their mother died or something yeah they look many of them are fainting and to those who would think oh that's just you know British and American male performers no no there's 195 countries in the world this happens all over the world with biological heterosexual females who respond to my certainly there's a picture of Kim jong-un with with he's sitting there smiling and he has five females clinging to him crying right this is and you know and then on the other end you have a performer like Taylor Swift who's female and yes her audience is mostly female but they're not screaming and will they scream but they're not reacting in the same way they did to Elvis and the Beatles and Justin Bieber and Kim jong-il and the rest so and they be the only time I've seen a male do this is if he happens to be a gay male I don't straight heterosexual males don't react this way to you know if you if you brought me in the room to super really attractive supermodel I'm not going to cry and faint yes so we ready ever listen to psychology behind that great question what you're seeing is you're seeing a a projection or a super normal process of what is in fact what we're going to call the he-man strategy so females are designed by nature to to play mating strategies along a continuum that would be the from he-man strategy all the way to chuckled Lee and in the middle is going to be what we're going to call pair-bond so we're going to just quickly think about that females are designed by nature to guard the eggs and try to actually human females given that we are pair-bond ish species what they're they are a two factor mating decision making decision maker they're trying to get the optimal genes that they can get well at the same time getting the optimal amount of resources so the females essentially thread the needle between two mating priorities get the best genes and the best resources and you can see that inside the female head she's in dissonance over those two things think of a little squatty guy with terrible looks but he's got a billion dollars okay and you could just see a little bit of dissonance females over this but not a lot okay because it doesn't really matter how many resources he has the genes she doesn't want her children to look anything like that that doesn't seem to be the optimal evolutionary problem yeah our solution look on the other side handsome as hell no resources now what's the solution well the solution there is perfectly reasonable in other words it's perfectly reasonable that we would that the female might meet with a guy who's really handsome even though she's not going to get any resources so that you can see and but what would be even better than then using your own brain to figure out whether or not some male it's got really fancy genes it's also look at other females and to check computer's make sure the other computers are coming up with the same answer because if they are coming up with the same answer we can be a hell of a lot more confident of our decision okay so this is think about two females in a bar they're both a pair of eights and a nine and a half male locks in now because there's some variants or actually we're going to call it a nine and because there's you know 10% variance or so on what people might think that one girl is immediately thinking boy I would sleep with that guy he's a 10 but what she's going to do is she's going to turn to a friend and say hey look at that and she's going to be very the reason she's doing that or one of the reasons is she's getting a computer check on her own brain because her brain is only one sample of whether or not those genes are really that good and she should really make that decision so what she's going to do is her friend goes oh my god would a dreamboat then herb then the first girl's brain says aha he's a 10 just like I thought he was so if I mate with him he's a 10 I am an 8 the offspring is likely to be a 9 and in fact if we're lucky it's a nine and a half and if it's a son he's going to rule the world just like this guy's going to rule in my room in about half an hour ok so this is the he-man strategy and this is of course common throughout the animal kingdom so whatever you saw on the beetles you see it all over the place there are birds where one bird will mate with a hundred females in the morning and there's a hundred other male birds mate with zero that's the beetles okay and it's going to turn out that other experiments have shown that the females don't use what we call independent method they don't all independently decide that one bird is the fanciest bird they have a lot of cues that they are highly reactive to that they're very excited about it but it turns out what's also exciting is to find out that all the other females agree ie we reduce we reduce her risk by checking so this is what's happening in beetle media you're seeing women actually falling at their knees almost sobbing that they're not going to be able to get to that DNA because they could see they a phenomenal competition but they would dearly love to get there and they're signaling to those males you can have me with no investment just come take my eggs okay and I think that's that's sort of what it is that you're saying
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