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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2022-01-21
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there you are hey how's it going all right yeah well your place looks fabulous Jen well it's good to finally be here it was quite the epic journey so uh yeah it's good good to be here good to get settled I got internet yesterday so things are moving on up oh that's so good that's great obviously the dogs are all cozy back there oh man they've got they're living the life of Riley they really are yeah they got an ice yard to go in yeah yeah I know they're although it's very snowy right now so it's uh it's you know it's not and it's it's kind of very icy crusty snow so it's not very fun on dog paws but I think they'll enjoy it so being a little bit that way is that a fireplace behind you I like it it is yeah okay it's the fireplace and it's a real it's an actual real wood stove burning fireplace like it's uh it's old school yeah people like Dr Jen is in Virginia yes I'm in Virginia yes I am yeah okay just checking to see and where in the world yeah just Dr John just can't stop moving let's uh so the answer to that question all right so the usual way just for anybody who's new or hasn't done one of these in a while we we are not very uh transparent in our question answering modality we just kind of answer whatever's in the Q a and there is let me um enable there's actually a way for you guys to be able to view the questions and upvote them so um in general all things equal we will we will go in order of the questions that have the most upvotes um but you know sometimes people send questions ahead of time that we want to answer or that we haven't answered in a while so uh we will hit those as well so we just kind of we just kind of do whatever we want basically how this works so um all right and I apologize the laptop is going to move around a little bit when I'm scrolling because I am mouseless at the moment um because my moving pod has not shown up it's all that said I'm snowed in so um I know people will complain about that so all right so we will just see what is here so far the first one uh why do people perform Better or Worse during stress wouldn't it make sense for people to perform Stone Age actions better when much depends on them but but not unnatural novel actions such as an exam what about modern athletic performance which is notoriously hindered by the high stakes yeah interesting question I think that they uh there's all okay let's break this down so let's let's try to see whether or not uh there there's anything here first of all the we're not sure that uh about any anything that's being supposed there so why do you quote people behave better or worse under high stress well that that's a big a statement uh loaded with a lot of assumptions uh that we don't have evidence for so right away I'm not sure we have a question so let's let's ask why there is a stress response okay stress response is because there is a there's an environmental opportunity or threat that is substantive and is going to uh is going to require the investment of time and energy uh and there is there's a there's a the what would stress us would be that the difference between success and failure at a goal would have substantial consequences in other words so we're not stressed over whether or not you know our our restaurant bill is a dollar more than we thought it was going to be that's not stressful so what's stressful that could be true if you're a young guy on his first date uh and it turns out you have 13 in your pocket and you're acting like it's not a problem that you're calculating carefully what she orders at let's make it 23 but this we're sort of doing a time machine back to my first date when it would be 13 for the two of us all right so the point is is that under that those conditions a restaurant build is a dollar more suddenly you have that creepy feeling that you're not going to be able to leave a tip and now that that feels really bad Etc so could that be very stressful yes that could be very stressful so what's driving stress is the possibility of significant difference in survival and reproductive chips uh either gain or loss so you could be very stressed as you're scratching off the last thing of your lotto ticket that has you know six out of or five out of five that's the big lotto number and you're actually feeling stressed about I don't want to scratch too much and scratch the number off and then it wrecks the ticket if this is a 10 million dollar ticket so the point is that it's all about the consequences of the action in when it comes to biological chips so so then the question is do people perform Better or Worse well the answer is going to be the um uh the the answer the answer is actually gets complicated and interesting so I've read a few Malcolm Gladwell books uh mostly they are not very interesting and they're sort of it's sort of like the leftovers from grad school that have been in the back of the refrigerator they're barely he sort of specializes in things that have uh suffered in the replication crisis yeah no I mean so if you go back and read old Gladwell I mean almost all of his sort of like here's a fascinating case to tell us something about how the world works are studies that have been thoroughly debunked and can't be replicated and um so yeah there's a there's a lot of it's way that makes perfect sense because yeah what would be interesting of course it's very interesting and counter-intuitive and it's fascinating finding but that's the pressure in the in the literature is to find these novel findings that um are more likely to be published and more likely to be wrong so yeah Gladwell sniffs those out like no one else right if you find something that's worthwhile that's right and so one of the things he talked about in one of these books was called uh choking and it's about he actually goes through you know he's a fine writer and he goes through telling the tale of some tennis star it uh you know choking in the U.S Open final or whatever it is there's some female tennis star where this happened I could almost remember her name and um and the The Story Goes and he told me about you don't care about female athletes otherwise okay that's really true all right so uh but uh the interesting thing was is that Gladwell tells this story of her in trouble on her serve and like you know her serve starting to go sideways and then watching her essentially try to consciously focus on the fundamentals and actually having it Go worse and so in essence she was trying to quote reteach herself how to do it you know in the middle of the US Open final and the problem with that is that uh as golfers will tell you you can't have too many swing thoughts in other words when when it when if Tiger Wood steps up to the T he's he's probably thinking one thing and he lets all the rest go he tries to get himself to pay attention to don't follow through too far with the with your right hand because he's tends to have been doing that for the last five shots and so the one thing he's going to try to not do is over fall through with the right hand he can't actually pay attention to the other 27 things that are happening in that golf swing those has to trust that to unconscious process so the choking or bad Under Pressure one of the things that can happen is that you can you can actually feel the gravity of the situation and go back and try to retrieve files of instruction about how to not mess it up and it turns out that for highly Coordinated Time motor skills that's not a good thing to do okay so that's a that's a it that's one way that that can happen um uh so that's uh but but generally speaking we're going to find that what stress is going to do is it's actually an orienting feeling that's going to tell the organism hey there's a lot of chips on the line are our adaptive unconscious has calculated that the consequences of success versus failure on this are pretty substantial okay as a result what that's going to do is that's going to Adrenalize the organism and focus its attention in other words so the the brain power and body power are going to be honed in on a very on the variables of Interest with respect to this goal that are the most important parts of the goal uh the goal challenge that are going to require you know highly directed time and energy and intelligence in order to succeed so that's what stress does so now the question is you know what what in what Universe do people perform worse under the stress well I can imagine a number of circumstances where that could be true so for example if you if you're um your psychology keeps as difficulty we keep going back and forth between thinking about what other people are thinking of you you know it means rather than just reacting to the challenge then that that could be a problem in other words so you can watch people and occasionally you'll see people on television that are speaking extemporaneously they're not they're not reading from a script and they'll start to get a little bit lost and tongue-tied about what they're doing and you can you can rapidly see they are now thinking about what they're looking like and they're starting to get anxious about it because they're about to lose a bunch of status if they don't recapture you know some coherence pretty quickly and obviously those people are on television because they're glib as hell you know I mean they don't have that problem very much but you can still see the the essentially an internal audience raging through that thing and saying look out look out look out look out you better you better capture your coherence here pretty quickly because literally in seconds you could lose a bunch of status and that's stress them and you'll occasionally watch their verbal capacities glitch behind the pressure okay you're more likely to find that in someone with two years experience on television as opposed to 30. you know so I don't know that David Brinkley did that in his last 10 years he looked unbelievably relaxed okay see uh but somebody else with more chips on the line uh could potentially wind up with that a lot of brain power going into the analytics uh how much do we have to lose how do we play this how do we get conservative we're in trouble uh oh and then you watch uh you watch the stress response undermine their capabilities so you know interesting question uh as you can see it would have uh there would be different personalities different situations and different types of actions that would be more or less susceptible to the stress response actually increasing capacity versus decreasing capacity one of the uh one of the stories I was always told as a kid completely ludicrous uh but I remember believing it because my I think my mom told me and so you know if your mom tells you something you believe it for a long time and I think I the story was some lady's kid was under the car and getting crushed and in that moment of you know need the lady went over and lifted the car up oh sure yeah I've heard versions of that sorry yeah and it's like wow that great superpowers in us if we really have to have it well let me just tell everybody it doesn't that's not true okay so uh but but it's it's a grand tale but something like that is true which is that under extremely high stress you will find the Apex of your athletic capacity okay if you are literally fighting a cougar for your life you are going to find out what your body is capable of and you may find that out in a way that you wouldn't have found out in the Olympic Games final okay but there's that video of the guy throwing throwing a I don't know if it's a cougar or a mountain lion or what it is a small small you know wild cat like throwing it across the driveway when it's attacking his kid or his wife or something he just picks it up and tosses it so right yeah yeah so these things it's not lifting a car up it's something that he is physically capable of but it's you know summoned in that moment and probably he didn't away he didn't think of when he woke up that morning right there you go yeah all right that's all I know about that yeah the the only thing I would kind of throw into this discussion is the um it kind of bumps up against the uh the what we sometimes will call the stickiness of Stone Age reputational processes which you know a lot of these things your your nervous system is inferring the whole village is watching and how this goes will follow me forever so including you know a moment on TV or something like that and certainly a sporting event um where none of us are really immune from that because that's that's you know what we're adapted to is this one misstep is what they will talk about for the rest of my life this is there's not that many data points on on me um and this is my big moment in the Sun and and I the cost is so high because um you know I I won't I won't be able to live this down I won't be able to people will not forget it when in the modern world most of the time you know people screw up all the time they they uh you know make bad jokes they get caught in some sort of compromising position all sorts of things happen and the people just move on they're too busy they're too distracted there's too much data so um that's kind of just in the in the equation a little bit that a lot of that adrenaline that surges in that moment is that is that is what is driving that CB is that this really is the whole world is watching because the whole world is the village and and you have not actually caught up with real life as far as that goes that's great Jen I uh I don't think I have that Concept in all these notes that are involved I think I do in the big in the master spreadsheet that's fantastic because I just had I just had to write that note that's a that's a yeah what that is that's a a mismatch of modern versus ancient environment and the algorithms built for the ancient environment can lead us to to uh essentially a distorted analysis of what the real CV is that's in front of us that's the high principle and that is an ask effect in other words we aren't being stupid there we're just being we've got limited limited capacities to update that that uh to estimate those parameters accurately yeah I see that a lot you'll see people really sweating some little social process and and way overestimating the long-term impact on them short-term impact or a short-term limited impact they may be fairly accurate in other words they're they're not psychotic and yeah Etc but what they don't understand is that nobody could care less really that is going to impact your future I I uh a great example of this is a is a woman who was very worried about the fact that her daughter and her will would be son-in-law now we're we're pregnant before the marriage by several months and she was trying to hustle the marriage forward so that the child would in fact be born after the marriage because she was worried about the child running that calculus 18 years later and figuring out that the parents were pregnant before they were married are way out of touch you know yeah it's not going to be that big of a deal that was an example of of uh derivative of what does the village think that my daughter's pregnant before she's married I mean yeah it had gone even wider in this hcnc all the way to worried about you know how bad the kid was going to feel that they were in fact a love child as opposed to an honest legitimate child oh man but that's how egocentric bias works you know I mean I talk to people who are still convinced that something that happened 20 30 40 years ago with friends at school that that the because they're sort of perseverating on it and they still it still keeps them up at night that they imagine that that is true for the other people in the incident you know some sort of social gaffe that happened as sophomores in high school and it's like oh no they're not thinking about you right there they're not thinking about you and you know most likely they complete they remember it very differently than you remember it too so we we know how kind of Buzzy and malleable and weird memory can be um and so yeah if we were we know this from Elizabeth Loftus among among others and so if if we were to sit down and interrogate you separately from your friends you know about that thing that happened 20 or much longer years ago um you would almost certainly report really different accounts um and and yeah people just are not they're not hanging on to they're not running the same kind of calculation about how relevant it is so yeah yeah all good all right okay so this one's got a bunch of votes and discussion going on so culture and the limits of behavioral genetics uh in her second book no two alike which I haven't read I don't know if you have but Judith Rich Harris quotes extensive research which shows that children of Japanese CEOs who arrived in the U.S by the age of nine or younger assimilated much easier and quicker compared to older children uh Harris acknowledges the indispensability of behavioral genetics as a research tool in both her books but she claims that it is pretty much useless when assessing the influence of culture on behavior and personality development thoughts yeah Harris doesn't have any data to support this so Harris's uh theory that she uh she she gave to the world in the nurture assumption uh very thoughtful that the she had a theory that that peer processes wound up being the deciding factor of the the malleable process of human personality it turns out she was wrong so she had she had uh done you know done extensive research into the literature and then turned out to you know essentially bat zero flat out wrong so did uh can't remember losing uh losing the guy's name I respect him a lot he was a PhD in American studies from Harvard he wrote a book called Born to rebel I forget yeah forgotten what a standards the uh but the point is is that uh he also had this we talked about that book for like six months and we always used his last name and I can't I can't place it either it's like it looked in relevance to my working memory the uh but the point is is that that his idea was um uh what do you call it uh the notion that birth order was a supermarket issue it turns out Brook order has nothing to do with personality turns out that peers and peer groups have nothing to do with personality so it turns out that whatever Judith Richard yeah yeah yeah the um the uh it's going to turn out that the the that that uh this this notion is uh pretty well gets buried by what it is that you see in Blueprint so uh blueprint is where where somebody needs to go on who knows if I don't know if Harris wrote that book before or after blueprint but I I know that clearly she's chasing social processes and quote personality development and so that's fine you know what I mean it's good that's that's a good thing for scientists to do is to to uh to to have a position that that they are firmly convinced of and look and look and look and look at it from their own bias as hard as they can uh because that's how it is that that you wind up finding things to contradict somebody else that may be useful so that's how we go about it but as uh for for myself and my many and uh my looking at the at the massive statistical evidence I am overwhelmed with the data that basically says sorry it's all genetic and that also this let me let me explain a little bit further of why it is that I think the way that I think uh why not it's our podcast what the hell we can do whatever we want the uh the point here is that there are things that you can learn and things that you can't learn so the the um you can't learn like the the master program uh of of animal biology is obviously to reproduce genes but and you might say well we can stop that master program well no actually you can't the thing is is that there are there are uh what that is is that's a whole integrated set of values that is in fact what the neural circuits are of a given animal and what what there are is there are there's a goal out there called Gene reproduction that's integrated with that is thousands and thousands of sub goals okay and so uh each of those sub goals these are these are all like rooted in the reflexes at what those sub goals are actually what a goal is is something of value and so that the organism's job is to evaluate opportunities and threats in its environment on a Continuum of value that goes that's the worst possible stimulus situation that I could be in for my Gene survival I.E me and all my children are now being eaten by a pack of of uh of orcas that's as bad as it gets okay on the other side the best thing it gets is is uh multiple orgasmic experience with Mr Wright under just the right conditions okay so that is this is this is how Gene survival works and it works by organizing the organism's responses uh which means these are unconscious calculations of the value here what are the values the values are mathematical uh can be described mathematically as as environmental inputs that Aid in a debt Gene reproduction that's what a value is and you might say well what's a condom then that's walking that well that's that's a very interesting question uh this gets into what can be learned and what can't be learned so you're you're uh so what you have is this integration of values and each of those values is you know those are innate the organism naturally knows that one more bite of food when it's not that hungry no matter what it tastes like is not as important as the big hairy spider that just landed on your bare five okay you don't learn that you know automatically this is this is useful for x amount of biological Gene survival units in other words it's exceedingly unlikely that I'm going to starve to death despite the fact that this is very you know very rich food and therefore in the Stone Age We would rate this very highly because it would be rare I.E it's Haagen-Dazs and I'm eating right here so and I'm pretty hungry it just turns out I decided to eat it for lunch as opposed to you know eating it after dinner so I'm actually pretty hungry it has high survival value but when we say high survival value relative to what okay in other words relative to all other opportunities and threats in the environment so if you're if you're watching Shamu and you're at the side of the tank and you're eating your ice cream and then it falls in the water but it's floating you don't reach in or to the piranha tank and dig it out you know intuitively that these values are integrated in the same way that the keys are on a piano keyboard these things are mathematically related to or up and down the scale that's how it works so it's going to turn out that that you can't change that you cannot change that integration you can learn things about the values that in other words you you you aren't designed to to Value genes survival per se you're designed to Value orgasms that's what you're designed to Value the system didn't say value Gene survival it said value cues that are correlated with chain survival so you could learn oh guess what I don't want to reproduce children but you can't learn oh I don't want to have an orgasm that you can't learn that is a defined mechanism inside the integration of the value system you can't get around that okay so people are often trying to trying to say to me oh but so-and-so says that if you do something over and over again it becomes a mental habit no it doesn't okay there is no such thing as mental habits the every single action that the organism is taking is as a result of a cost-benefit analysis now where people got confused with this and like the idea of culture and importing that on personality all of it okay what you learn is you learn correlates of the value so you learn if you're growing up in Compton you know a pair of red Air Jordans is worth more to your survival reproductive value than that same pair of Air Jordans if you grow up in in you know I don't know in Larry Bird's backyard where everybody wears Converse in other words so but the value of the esteem process of having valuable things that other people find uh important and they're giving you cachet that's innate you can't relearn that you can't you can't change that that's a that's a defined value inside the system so there so all that we learn all culture is is culture is nothing other than the local correlates of the underlying values okay now the way the underlying values are integrated they are essentially they're like they're like for example every car you know they're not different we got electric calls with different engines forget about that go back to 1990 and every single car that's manufactured in the United States they have the same components they're an internal combustion engine they use gasoline they have oil as they use for keeping the thing clean they have antifreeze they have a cooling system in other words they are a set of Integrated Systems to accomplish a problem and they're all fundamentally the same but they're all different so if you have a windsor engine in a Montego that was built in Canada that's a little different than the Cleveland engine that was built somewhere else they're both 351 cubic inches in the report engine but they're slightly different and they have slightly different configurations that's personality so all humans have the same underlying integration value system All Humans when they're eating the ice cream if the tarantula drops on your thigh it would be incredible you would have to be very bizarre and have a very strange process to not flip out and put down the ice cream and there would still be something on that Continuum that would get you to drop the ice cream so maybe it wouldn't be a tarantula but a rattlesnake would do it or a tiger would do it you know there would be it's not the the circuit exists it just is different levels of stimuli and then the the for most people under the bell curve the tarantula is going to be enough it's it's like tarantula versus Ice Cream tarantula wins that's right yeah so the point of all this is that the way that your particular nervous system is constructed are like your particular internal combustion engine that is genetic that is not subject to change the only thing that is subject to change is your interpretation of the information of the environment that is coming in okay so that means that if you're in Compton you learn that the red Air Jordans are really valuable for survival and reproductive success you don't leave learn that if if you you grew up in oh I don't know Nova Scotia okay because you people are interested in hockey and you come down to the game about Air Jordans okay so the point is is that you don't care less about what other people think and your ability to put Badges of cool value that you've accumulated that you care just as much in Nova Scotia it is the particular environmental contingencies of the 20th century post Michael Jordan's career or Etc that's what has changed so it's the correlates it is not the underlying value structure so that is not changing anybody's freaking personality at all okay somebody that is genetically wired to be particularly sensitive to Fashion and statements uh that person is you're not going to increase or decrease that sensitivity uh culturally it's going to be that it's it's going to be the particulars of that particular culture that they're going to learn oh it happens to be x amount of of units in this culture that's going to give x amount of cache for that so therefore somebody that's of a 10 percentile they're saying okay well I'll pay a little bit of attention but not much but more than I might have as a result of that somebody else is like oh now they're really interested uh even more than they would have been so let me let me see see if I can try to get this you're the only things that cause human beings to change their patterns of behavior within an environment they have they have a they have opportunities and threats in an environment they have targeted action that are the goals for their Gene survival processes if the environment changes then their behavior is going to change because new information is going to alter the cost bit of analysis so the the new tires that you know you need for your car you weren't going to buy because you couldn't afford it but your aunt Millie just gave you two thousand dollars and it turns out oh well now now I got two thousand dollars I really should put that into the car that was getting very high priority but I didn't have the resources and so I needed to keep it for my rent to not get evicted but now that I've got that 2000 now I'm gonna go get the tires on the car we didn't change your personality we didn't suddenly make you more responsible we changed your environmental threats and opportunities and therefore we altered your behavioral trajectory that's all so you are not so it's interesting uh modern psychology's belief about what is changeable and what is not changeable I think there's many reasons why they are confused of which Judith Richards if she's commenting on this she's confused okay the the um one of the reasons is the extraordinary changes that can take place in motor efficiency so the fact that people can be bumbling at 12 years old with a hockey stick and they can be Wayne Gretzky 10 years later and they can be unbelievably competent the fact that the myelin sheath will change the structure of the brain and wrap essentially wrap efficiency around neural circuits for repeated motor patterns that causes people to think and they also realize gee if you do enough mathematics and you keep doing mathematical stuff you try them a hell of a lot better at arithmetic than I was before six months ago when I started studying for the SAT and I worked like hell on it so what is that Dr Doug well what that is is that those are specialized neural circuits for particularized environmental information that you have now you've now essentially made it more efficient for those calculations to be done accurately that's all we haven't changed your personality at all okay so Behavior change is secondary to new information that changes the parameter estimates that already that parameter estimating equipment which is the cost benefit in analytic engines that sit under all of what uh what a nervous system is doing a nervous system basically does four things it has perception it has evaluation it has a motion and it has action so the perception processes are bringing in the information from the outside world through the five senses the evaluation process is easily the most complex because it involves not only the recognition of the percepts in other words the information that's coming in from the environment is being uh analyzed according to the underlying value system that sits in the organism and it's attempting to analyze the what what is in fact the opportunities and threats that I'm perceiving in the environment in addition to that it's going to turn out that it also has memory systems I.E things that it learned dendritic changes that took place in the brain or myelin sheath that it's wrapped around motor programs what it's going to have is to have memory systems that are in fact designed as increasing methods of increasing Precision in either motor action when it comes to motor skill or evaluative processes which comes from dendritic changes in neural circuits I.E I now know that a rule of thumb is that interest rates are obey the law of 72 4 times 18 years 72. how long is it going to take me to double my money well it's a four percent then it's 18 years it's not exactly 18 years but I didn't know the law of 72 at one point and so now if you give me several math problems around that I'm better did you change my personality of course not what you did was the brain gathered information and synthesized information and that information whether it's accurate or inaccurate what that information will do is it will change the underlying cost benefit analytic engine and therefore result in different feelings so if I if I'm stupid and I don't understand the interest rate then I have an incorrect calculation I could be very excited about an investment that is in fact a terrible investment okay so in other words your feelings are derivative of the and the evaluation that takes place in the Adaptive unconscious about the biological value of whatever the situation is okay so culture is just part of the percepts that come in from your external environment that change and then it's going to turn out that your memory systems which is really what culture is is the memory of your experiences in interacting with other people and understanding their patterns what they particularly value in this culture with respect to what the base core underlying values that are part of the species that are not modifiable so the local environments can have the the fact that they value the Air Jordan shoes instead of the converse they you can figure that out but nothing about the underlying you couldn't be selling style and fashion if that wasn't it a core principle of human nature in the first place so if human beings didn't give a [ __ ] about what they that what they each other looked like and what they wore and how that influenced what it is that they look like then you couldn't sell uh what do you call it uh fashion there would no be no such thing as a fashion industry okay so the only reason you have a fashion industry is because people have vision and people that can have have actually been developed preferences and then we can perceive what those preferences are and then we can understand that that's more valuable and then we can then we can be motivated to pursue those things for our survival and reproductive Advantage so this is the yeah I think that you know this whatever the hell the question is or whatever the hell Judith rich is saying Okay the reason why I categorically reject it is because of a systemic belief that I believe I actually understand how this machine is built and and my understanding of how this machine is built is consistent with the overwhelming majority of the evidence that comes from all studies of Personality that are informed by Behavior genetics and if they are not informed by Behavior genetics they are useless okay we already know that behavior genetics is the overwhelming elephant in the room when it comes to anything when it comes to variances in human psychology I know and Jen and I have talked about this that other people I have not come to the party that intelligence is just a all you're talking about is neural circuit uh neural circuit variants so one of the extraordinary things that you've seen is the the observation of experts in the field that say well we know that IQ is at least 80 genetic because that's what the MC twin studies will show personality looks like it's 60 percent well guess what folks they can't be independent of each other right it's all the same neural circuit processes so all that that means is that IQ is less subject to these little learning processes of individual characteristics of an individual environment your personality test has variances uh is is actually asking people questions in some Rock Fashion about their preferences which change depending upon whether they got a hot girlfriend or they don't for God's sakes where your ability to do a calculus problem doesn't change in whether you have a hot girlfriend or not so the personality questions and the tests are simply subject to random background radiation variation of humans life experience but what we find which is incredibly important finding and a damning finding for any theory of culture or influence or teaching Etc personality is we find from the MC twin studies that are done over time that if this person out of a monozygotic twin is more outgoing than this person at time one then five years later when we retest them it should be the case that at least there should be a two out of three chance or a three out of five chance that this person is more outgoing than their monozygotic twin five years later or two years later right if there has been a learning process from their enculturation their life experience they've been two different people and grown up in different environments those two people if one of them is at the 60th percentile for outgoing the other one is the 40th percentile outgoing and we run that and we see it at age 24. then it if that in fact has happened then that should not be reversing two years later but it's very important to know that two years later when we test those two people it is absolutely impossible to tell who is going to be at the 60th versus the 40 talk we're outgoing this person is no more likely to be above this person when it comes to the outgoing measure then this person is likely to be of this person there is no correlation which means that the difference between those two Is Random which means it's not a personality characteristic it's a random variation of that snapshot in history on the day they took that test and that's all it is yeah random is a little confusing of a word um because people will read that in in plummet and not quite understand what it means random in in the sense that life is random that you could you could have had a good day or a bad day you could you could things could be looking up for things could be looking down and so there's all of this natural variability in everyone's life and that's what's reflected in those those measurements in that moment so yeah that's one of the first questions that I have about her methodology here which I I haven't read the book and can't speak to it too but when she says that the the older kids are more assimilated than the than the younger kids like how is she operationalizing that what what does assimilated look like to her and is she measuring it over time or is it just some sort of snapshot in some kind of context um although I would also say it's not totally I I don't think anything that you've said here is at odds with the intuitive conclusion that she came to which is that the the younger kids are going to assimilate more readily than the older kids um because there's a huge development for God and there's less there's less I mean in the terms that you've been using here there's just less uh informational bias in the younger kids in their CV of of you know our Air Jordans cool or not like they're coming the older kids have more bias the the Air Jordans have not been cool and so there's it's more costly for them to adopt them as cool in their new environment when they get here and so there is that that is a different process for them than it is for the younger kids so I don't disagree with her intuitive finding but I just wonder about the methodologies and and the overall framework that she's bringing to the question um which doesn't include so much of what we've talked about even though she is really sensitive to behavioral genetics and a lot of of her stuff in the nurture assumption is really useful so um but yeah I think we've got some fundamental bias yeah understanding what she's looking at and that's fine and that that's that's why you you take a a scheme the scheme that I'm what I'm describing I I believe if I we were to talk to Robert plummen he would say right okay yeah because I think that this is exactly how Robert Plowman is thinking he doesn't actually spell this out because he does he's uh actually uh I think Charles Murray would maybe say the same in other words Charles Murray said look I don't even want to tell when I talk about the human diversity we're not even going to talk about evolutionary psychology because I'm already at in so deep in so much controversy I can't pile that on top of that that's going to be great really true but the point is that's what we do here we are controversy squared so we're going to say listen you know your value system is not changeable by your environment okay you're all all that happens is is that the environmental cues to those values changes that's all the changes but how can you say that you know the value of a calorie or value of x amount of food under X is amount of circumstances changes for the biology of that human being because it grows up in Poland or it grows up in in you know New Guinea no there isn't any difference okay so the value of a of a possible mate that's 20 fancier than you think you are that doesn't change where the hell it is that you grow up not none of this changes in other words these are these are these are absolutely by necessity they are all the same internal combustion engine with exactly the same the way that these things are organized the variations that you see from person to person you there there are Continental variations in other words Suites of genes work work their their uh there's different styles just like Fords are different than Chevys there are you know people that that are African descent or somewhat different than people are of who are of Asian descent and people that are different of Caucasian descent but when it comes to what we care about most and that's interesting and useful in its own right but the truth is is that right down to the level of what she's talking about which is personality is extremely compelling and very easy to you will not get anybody balking at you when you start talking about how there's learning and acculturation processes with respect to the modification of Personality nobody's going to cry foul okay because it is unbelievably politically correct it is infinitely hopeful and flexible it is and it's also consistent with what people observe with respect to the ability of human beings to learn but this is also at this point the foundation of an entire Blank Slate military industrial complex that that underpins huge amounts of bureaucratic funding and effort whether it's in schools or social programs or anything else so if if people were to totally accept the the sort of the rejection of the if they were to reject the blank slate ideology then so many jobs and all the associated status and Financial Security would go away so it's never going to happen people are very attached to this whole for sort of subjective and you know literal Financial incentive sort of reasons right yeah you're you you're uh we met up Pariah you know what I mean we met we met you yeah he's a lone man out there all by yourself the uh but the the the utility of being right is that you are able to then possibly run cost benefit analyzes more accurately than somebody else okay in other words than you did before that is the entire point of learning people the entire part of learning is to increase your Precision in either motor action I.E learn a skill that's useful which your brain will infer that it's useful if you do it over and over again so it doesn't matter what it is hitting a tennis ball against the wall isn't inherently useful in in Stone Age anything but the truth is in the modern environment if you do it against the wall a bunch of times your genes effectively infer that this must be important for our survival reproductive success or we wouldn't be doing it over and over again so what it does is it Alters the structure of the brain's ability to make those movements and it increases its Act of their accuracy okay in the same way that learning anything learning about water buffalo learning about you know the titration of Xanax everything that you learn that is true reduces the possible error that you might have with respect to a cost benefit analysis about uh about some sub goal that you're attempting to achieve so that's that is why learning feels inherently valuable and it feels extremely valuable to be right about high principle because if you are right about my principle you are able to observe and spot mistakes all over the chessboard okay so the uh I could not prescribe a governmental system not that anybody's ever going to ask me unless I had a deep understanding of Economics free enterprise the Invisible Hand Etc okay now none of our politicians give a rat's ass and so we have what it is that we have but the point is is that when it comes to your interpersonal decisions in life it's useful to know but the important core value that's being traded is esteem it's important to understand that uh you know it's important to understand in group out group processes the value and the utility of deception when necessary it uh you know it all kinds of things about understanding accurate it's super important I have to tell you that I'm vehement about this it's unbelievably important to understand how intractable personality is I have people that have listened to us and listened to me and they're like oh my god I've been spending 25 years trying to change these people okay and the amount of time and energy squabbling over whether in fact endemic personality care conflicts between two individuals it's like what a total waste of time or people with conflicts with their adult children and they are so frustrated those children are intuitively supposed to be Insurance programs for the person as they age they have certainly paid out and given a hell of a lot of time and energy into these children and it turns out that they effectively are not friends they aren't friends because you know that was my disagreeable ex-wife's child it's my child too but hey that kid's a son of a [ __ ] or he's she's a [ __ ] and I I can't get along doesn't matter everything that I believe in or everything that I pursue or every way I try to be helpful or useful it's rejected and I put in an out group and I get nothing other than nasty feedback it's like well that's and to understand that that's not going to change okay so I understand that is enormously useful because now you can change your behavioral strategy based on an increased Precision of your understanding of how life works and therefore not make a mistake it's basically finding out that potatoes are a hell of a lot healthier for you than fried chicken okay same concept so anyway that's why what Jen and I do what we seek is we seek the the synthesis of high concept and then we go back and we talk about it and we learn and we read in order to see wait a second is that highest concept correct okay is it right are we making a mistake and uh yeah so I haven't I don't know much about whenever I hear anybody say culture I'm rolling my eyeballs yeah the uh yeah the the the the the the MZ twin data the monozygotic adoption twin data is unbelievably damning to any concept that that personality is subject to environmental input right that these are five these are difficult problems to describe and for people take some smarts to follow it is what we're saying we're not saying environmental doesn't make a difference it makes an enormous difference in your life okay it's not changing your personality in other words uh my skinnish cat you know uh would do better and do I mean you would be a better Survivor than my phlegmatic cat if we put him in an alley in Calcutta okay but right now in this house he's a neurotic little nut and he's a pain in the ass because he's squalling and whining and you know throwing up and you know he's just doing all kinds of he's a wacky little dude I love him but he's wacky as hell okay it doesn't matter how benign the environment is he's still wacky whereas the other one is unbelievably relaxed the other one is fully enjoying the process that she is you know in in a in an unbelievably benign place in a cul-de-sac that has you know no traffic and great weather and no predators and that one is like living the best life possible for that organism the other little guys living the best life possible for him but he's constrained by the fact that he's inherently jiggly that is that's it that's how it works okay God knows that's an earful that took us almost all the way through the hour but I think uh I think it's it's good to cover in detail so I'm gonna I'm gonna break the law of the episodes because there's a question in here that I remember from last time um so I want to make sure we get to it this time so she says would you talk about a practice a totally different topic um that is often recommended in weight loss groups that of having an accountability partner is this a helpful practice if so what would be the best way for an accountability best way for an accountability partner to support their partner what kind of qualities would you look for would a spouse be a good choice if a spouse would not be a good choice how could they support their loved one in a different way yeah I think generally a spouse is not a good choice um because you need if you're gonna do this which I think it can be very useful and you can you can chime in on this too but um I think for certain personalities it's totally useful but it needs to be somebody who you don't stand to lose a lot of status with when you invariably we are dealing with some struggles and and not living up to your ideals and essentially failing and if that is your spouse that's going to be it's going to be a whole mixed bag in your motivational stew that is going to probably undermine your efforts over time so um I think somebody who I mean this is kind of the concept of you know I did all my time in 12-step with sponsors you you don't want your sponsor to be somebody who walks into an AAA meeting the same day you do um who you know kind of doesn't know the ropes and may or may not be successful you're not really sure you want your sponsor to be somebody who has been there for a while is a little bit of a proven quantity is is somebody who has demonstrated some success with their recovery still struggling um and and at a point in their own recovery where it's helpful for them to have somebody else who's kind of coming up that they can get out of their own head a little bit and help them so I would mimic that as much as possible with with an accountability partner in this process somebody who is not necessarily a total newbie but not also you know not necessarily totally cynical about it but if it's somebody close to you that can be perilous in my experience yeah yeah my my personal answer that question is I don't know uh you uh you'd have to show me a random assignment condition outcome study yeah honestly I I can see I can see the possibility for such a thing being useful I can understand people's intuition about why it would be useful um I don't necessarily believe that such a thing uh operated wholesale on 100 human brands that are all seeking some goal that requires uh you know some degree of pleasure perhaps self-discipline I'm not sure that is a wholesale useful invention uh intervention it may be true that it is useful for some subset of people okay so uh and then I'm not sure how to identify who those subset are so this this is an interesting question it's one that um uh it's what you're attempting to do is you're attempting to change the environment and alter the cost benefit analysis okay so the cost benefit analysis you without anybody observing your your dilemma with respect to pleasure travel versus not pleasure trap that that is its own particularly recurrent dilemma that that nervous system goes through what we're attempting to do is put our thumb on the scale okay we're attempting to reward you for making better decisions or penalize you a little bit more for making worse okay so it is intuitively reasonable that we might be able to do that if we have just the right personality in the situation okay so uh I can imagine for example a lot of people have gotten in shape if they have a highly attractive uh uh individual who's their quote uh what do you call what do you call those people that coach in the gym like a personal trainer yeah personal trainer yeah yeah sure like they're very incentivized that that would be an example where I have no doubt that you give me a highly attractive personal trainer versus not very personal attractive trainer I'll bet you that the people you know some percentage of those people work out a hell of a lot harder and make more progress out of a highly attractive personal trainer so in other words that's I.E putting our scare our thumb on the scale of the cost benefit analysis that's under that's under uh consideration so that's how that's how I look at that problem and so the answer wholesale is Gee can you just wholesale uh have have someone can we do that is it uh or does it does it all come to nothing do we drop out because it's it's more embarrassing and then we start lying to the person and et cetera et cetera so I've certainly been an accountability person uh for people over time with these things I'm not sure I've done any good in this way certainly tried to uh So my answer to that Quest question is I don't know and it's certainly a worthy experiment for anybody who would like to try to do it that way yeah it's interesting I think I think it comes down to the the literature seems very split I don't think there is a clear answer to whether it is better to share your aspirational goals with other people or not I I have seen strong answers in both directions um and I think partly it might be inconsistent because of Personality differences so so that this really is a different question for different people because absolutely there are people for whom having the pressure of an accountability partner whether it's a professional relationship or a friend at the gym or whatever it is actually makes the the the the potential status loss of of screwing up so high that they just tend to ghost the relationship and use it as a as a excuse or a pretext to totally relapse whether it's alcohol or food or whatever else so in those cases yeah it's a total ego trap and so in those cases you could make an argument that the accountability partner made it worse that it's you know sort of that person has enough of a a sort of high stakes um uh super conscientious personality that that they're so afraid of disappointing this person um and that could be dynamic even within that relationship like you could build this theme with that person to a point where the stakes are so high that then you're super ego trapped and then it's then it's a disaster so would that person have been better off just you know never having that relationship to begin with and kind of just dealing with it on their own and and going through the slings and arrows like maybe um but again we don't yeah no no uh actual randomized study has been done on this as far as I'm aware yeah I think it's so you really have to know thyself yeah I think it's a mess we're exactly the reasons that you're talking about uh the individual on the other side your particular moment in your history with respect to the problem your particular personality all of those things are swirl and cauldron variables which I think are going to make it so that that the answer is that that nobody on Earth is in any position to say oh that's the way to go there's been a way in hell so it's it's much messier than that and even in principle like you might be a person for whom an accountability partner is a really good idea and I think I think I am generally that person but it depends who you're talking about like who's the person yeah who is the accountability partner so um that's going to make a huge difference their personality not just who are they kind of relative to who you are they you know is it a trainer is it a counselor whatever but what's their personality like what does their encouragement look like what does their discouragement look like like how you know how do they respond to your successes and failures like all of those things are really subjective just so everybody knows I'm feeling I I just love talking to Jen but at the same time I have these periodic little waves of of guilt that I haven't sent her uh the the current version of the book it was supposed to get to me before I left Seattle people people harass me all the time like where's the book where's the book and I've just been totally throwing you under the bus I'm like ah you need to ask Doug like bro it's true like I I need the most current draft so I can do my next part in no actually I I actually the my problem is I'm I'm trying to get done on a chapter that I want to leave it off with you at that you know so for your section that section you're going to do so but I I'm feeling guilty enough and and buried enough I think I may just send what I have don't send what you have get out of the ego trap I won't stand what I have in fact I've got it right there it's right on that shelf and I'm gonna that's a very convincing prop yeah what I'm going to do is I'm going to all go this afternoon to to FedEx I will Xerox this thing get it bound and I'm just yeah in hell with it I'm just gonna get that off my chest and I can sit down and I can send you this uh chapter I'm working on after hell with it okay sounds good well definitely when you send it send me the tracking info because um now that I live out here in the sticks the the practice of FedEx in UPS is they they literally just throw your stuff in the ditch I don't even come down the driveway they sort of UPS uses bags they put it in a bag and they throw it in the ditch and then they say they delivered to other s so let me know when it's coming so I can watch for it so it doesn't you know get eaten by raccoons or something yeah yeah all right is that good yeah yeah we can wrap up we have lots more questions that we can uh we can try to hold them over to next time if somebody is a zoom Wizard and knows I can try to just like answer one more just for the heck of it well the one at the top is a big one um and I would like to give it time that it deserves um and actually there let me see if there's just kind of a is there any quick one this one this one was this one was at the top for a while and it's a fairly technical quick one so you Dr Lyle has mentioned that eating soft food early in life can cause us to develop weaker jaw lines uh he seemed to imply that this damage is done by adulthood I have since come across techniques such as mewing I've never heard of this but I'm amused that that's what it's called that claim to improve the jawline and related issues are you aware of this or any other techniques being effective in adulthood I have heard from uh a hot shot that is now headed to dental school who is headed to down School partly because of her fascination with this whole topic supposedly there is some process by which uh this is they've got some concept or some method by which they try to improve things that's all I know so somebody playing and somewhere that they have something that they can do you now have the sum total of my knowledge yeah I think a lot of people claim that there are things things that can be done whether it's some technique like this or face yoga or you know mouth guards or what all sorts of things so right um but yeah I have no idea if yeah there's a there there's some kind of case to be made and I don't know anything about it other than but from looking at some you know uh photography and argument that that uh that there's non-trivial impact on things like probably later sleep apnea and all you know there's a there's a whole bunch of Downstream uh problems that might result from exactly this process and so uh I I I quite frankly it's a great question uh and it's it's one that that I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment further on other than that I know that there are smart people who are looking at these Downstream issues and are are saying hey this is significant how significant it is I actually don't know Ellen's saying that um Brett Weinstein interviewed Mike Mew um who I suppose is the founder of Ewing I thought it was like a cat reference um uh on evolutionary Dentistry so I'm I missed that episode but that would be a great resource I I definitely would uh trust that conversation they may talk about it in the book too I don't know um but uh but yeah yeah there's lots of lots of discussion uh along these lines with lots of people in the space so um I would seek out resources like that all good yeah okay I was gonna ask for the zoom wizard if anybody knows how to download the Q a section after the the whole recording is done I can never source that in any of the extra files but I just copied and pasted it at this time so I've got it this time but if you happen to know a clever way to uh to grab it along with the other files um somewhere that it's hiding just shoot me a quick email so all right all right all right well it's good to see you I feel smelly like I used to feel my advisor you know I would never do what he wanted and then I'd come in with half of it and it'd be like I'd be sort of in the clear for another week uh and that's what I feel like when I send you this thing it's like I'm kind of in the clear you're not in the clear until there's a tracking number my friend foreign we'll see how this goes all right I'll talk to you soon okay bye everyone bye
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