Jordan Peterson | Hierarchies, Inequality, BIG 5

[Music] San Francisco barrier welcomes you huge welcome you see the lobster I do yes I said the lobster yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah lobsters everywhere I guess they just made a lobster emoji that seems synchronous right seems like a synchronous event it's quite funny I want the one where you're riding the lobster yeah well you can buy those posters if you're really into that sort of thing new fetishes yeah Oh Jordan where do we even start well you're the interviewer amazing amazing work over the last year you for me someone that you remind me of is Tony Robbins I think he's taller someone that knows how to inspire people to self-actualization and I find that to be deeply needed in our world and that's what you've been doing and it's brilliant beautiful and I think this is why you bring people together like this so so something that you brought to the attention of so many people is the dominance or competence hierarchy Why What let's maybe talk about what's what's the difference dominance or competence hierarchy I kind of like competence hierarchy yeah it's better yeah yeah well I got this colleague his name is Daniel Higgins and I've been working with him for like 25 years he helped me design the self authoring suite which is a series of programs writing programs that are online that help people write about their lives their past and their present there virtues in their faults and to make a plan for the future we've talked a lot he he was a master's degree at MIT in engineering and then he went to Harvard he was a student of mine there and he got a PhD in experimental psychology we've been working on these psychological interventions online ever since and we talk fairly frequently and I'd been using the term dominance hierarchy a lot which it's something that's used by biologists very regularly right because most social animals even animals that aren't social any animals that have to compete for occupation of a specific territorial space tend to organize themselves into fairly predictable hierarchies and it's it's it's a biological Universal that's a good way of thinking about it which is something really important to know right because if you don't know that then you might think that hierarchical organizations are some secondary consequence of a socio-political structure or an economic structure or something like that and it's just that's just not true it isn't even a little bit true it's unbelievably not true and well this is partly why in ruel in twelve rows for life I wrote about the nervous system of crustaceans in rule number one because the neurobiological systems that we have evolved or that have evolved to deal with dominance hierarchy placement I'll get to the competence issue in a minute or at least a third of a billion years old and that's far longer than theirs that's that's there weren't trees a third of a billion years ago so dominance hierarchies hierarchical organizations among animals are older than trees it's like there's no blame in them on capitalism right this is it's just well seriously the hierarchies have problems that they're problematic social structures but you can't blame them on on on on on cultural you can't blame them on culture anyways we're talking about dominance hierarchies dr. Higgins said you can't call them dominance hierarchies I said why not I said he said well unless you're in an organization where you can put a dog leash around someone's neck and lead them around it's not a dominance hierarchy and I thought he's kind of blunt as you might have noticed by that comment kind of shocked me a because because it was so blunt there's lots of that that happens in San Francisco yeah well the thing is well you know that that's actually an operable comment because dominance is just as old as sexuality perhaps perhaps not quite as old it's not quite as old as sexuality but it's old enough so that the two things get tangled together very very inevitably so he said he said two things that I thought were really interesting and the first was that human organizations are sufficiently complex so the dominance is an insufficient means of establishing hierarchical priority that's good and I thought that's right I knew that as soon as he said that I thought yeah I shouldn't be using the term dominance herky because Fran's de Waal who's a Dutch primatologist wrote a series of excellent books on the emergence of morality and chimpanzees I would highly recommend them they're very interesting books one of the things de Waal noted was that in chimpanzee hierarchies the brutal males can rise to the top but they tend to have very short-lived empires and to meet very very violent deaths and so his his conclusion was that in order even for a chimpanzee hierarchy to be stable across time then the top chimp had to be quite pro-social so first of all had to engage in sufficient reciprocal behavior so that he had allies among other males right because otherwise if you're like top chimp and you're cavemen strong man type and and you've established your dominance merely as a matter of intimidation and strength then if you have an off day two of your slightly weaker opponents can tear you to pieces which is exactly what the chimps do because they're quite brutal in there there's no evidence that chimpanzees have any internal regulation of the violence that they'll use to shift dominance hierarchy position and so you end up castrated for example by your opponents which is something that de Waal noted in the Arnhem zoo so he found that the stable chimp troops had males at the helm who were who had friendships because chimps actually have social friendships really that can stretch across many years decades even and that they tracked them very well very reciprocal in their behavior tended to treat the females relatively well by chimp standards and also tended to pay a fair at fair amount of attention to the infants which is an unbelievably important finding right because it indicates at a level that's below the human let's say that there's an ethic associated with leadership that isn't a mere consequence of raw power and then so that was the first thing that Higgins pointed out and the second thing was that he thought and and I haven't I don't know how true this is yet he thought that some of what the ethologist hsihu had used the term dominance hierarchy to apply to animals might have been doing was using an intrinsically Marxist framework to interpret animal behavior and to overestimate the degree to which dominance was actually the core foundation of hierarchical organizations even among animals and the first ones the first objection he had that's definitely the case this is true the second one presenter is competence yeah yeah well did the idea that that it's pure power is an unstable basis for for for stable hierarchy that's well documented and I think that has probably moved into the realm of empirically verifiable fact the second one that the initial idea that it was dominance per se that was at the basis of hierarchical arrangements was in part a quasi Marxist interpretation or projection I think that's disputable because I think what happens is that as you go down the the phylogenetic chain to simpler and simpler animals it looks more and more like power physical prowess essentially is the determining factor it certainly seems to be the case among lobsters for example crustaceans they're of interest because they have seen their third lobster again they have relatively simple nervous systems relatively there's two very complex with large neurons that are easily observable Anna and a neuro chemistry that differs from humans but is the same is similar in very interesting ways it may be an example of using skills that aren't power based or things like creativity to be able to find well ways to food or get wellness what you want you might want to figure out how you would define competence and so there's a psychometric answer to that psychometric psychometrician Zoar psychologists who are particularly interested in measurement and then also in measurement and prediction and so one of the things you want to predict are the various human outcomes like like economic success let's say or subjective well-being which is something that sam Harris is quite excited about and or general quality of life these things are hard to measure but you can measure economic success um what and what you find is that well there are a variety of features that predict economic success in the Western world then the most outstanding of those are IQ so that's straight intelligence and intelligence is something like processing speed and working memory capacity so it's the ability to manipulate variables a number of variables simultaneously at relatively high speeds that's and they're abstract variables and that's uh that you know there's still people who debate about the existence of IQ but they're called fools fundamentally because look I mean there's there's absolutely no doubt that IQ is the most documented phenomena in the social sciences except for one thing there's one only one thing I've ever seen that that has been measured more powerfully and accurately and that was the correlation between inequality across counties in the United States and male homicide rate because that correlation is about 0.9 and you know like that's just you never see that the correlation between IQ and success depending on any measure at academic success learning speed economic success success as a manager and administrator success as an entrepreneur your entrepreneur or creative agent the correlation between that and IQ is about 0.5 which is about three times roughly speaking yeah three times two to three times as powerful as the most typical next powerful order of effects that social scientists measure so IQs a walloping effect so IQs the first one hardly surprising I mean especially as the environment gets more complex because IQ predicts performance in complex jobs better than it predicts performance in simple jobs and a simple job is one where you learn it and then you repeat what you've learned whereas a complex job is a job that changes everyday so I suspect most of you in the audience have complex job and performance in well I suspect so you know me and maybe performance with complex thinking as well as long as the environment that you're that you're operating in changes on a relatively frequent basis then you have to have an i high IQ to manage it effectively that's basically what IQ measures and then the next most relevant predictor is trait conscientiousness which is not a trait we understand at all we have no measures of conscientiousness that work we've got a couple of weak ones but no measures that really work better than self-report and other report could be meticulous be a good way to explain conscientiousness meticulousness is associated with orderliness and orderliness is one of the aspects of conscientiousness but conscientious people the best way to sum up a conscientious person is that they're very good at keeping contracts with themselves and others so what a conscientious person will do is first of all say that they'll do some things so that's the first thing but then they'll actually do it so they seem to be able to and they seem to be it's crucial they yeah it's crucial if it's especially crucial if you're a manager and administrator it's not so crucial if you're an entrepreneur if you want to hold yourself to achieving goals yeah yeah well they tend to be if you want to work your way up the competence hierarchy probably a good way to do that is to say I'm gonna do something and do it yes well well that's the thing that these are these this isn't this isn't rocket science let's say rocket surgery as one of the favorite characters of a show I like in Canada tends to say that that's the Trailer Park Boys rocket surgery which i think is really funny anyways I mean Laura four so four buckets you know science finding it's pretty damn self-evident right smart people who work hard do better and but what that's also what's also really cool about that and this it isn't viewed this way very often is like let's say that you are going to psychometrically validate the integrity of an economic system so you'd say well you take the smart people and and the hard-working people and see if they do better and if the answer is no then this system is rotten right I mean doesn't that make sense because you'd expect you'd hope if a system is functioning that faster harder working people would be better at whatever it does and it turns out that in our culture and in the Western culture the correlation between conscientiousness plus IQ you have to wait the two and long term life success is as high as 0.7 which is walloping walloping correlation given how much chance also contributes to success right because you can be working hard and very smart and then you get cancer and die and that's the end of that like there are lots of random events in life that interfere with your movement forward and so there's an errata Keable degree of chance that that prediction is not going to overcome plus we're not that good at measuring success so there's error on the success end of the measurement as well but IQ and conscientiousness goes a long ways yeah so and that's competence you know and the other thing we might think about with regards to defining a competence hierarchy is imagine that one of the things you want from the operators within a hierarchy is that they maintain the hierarchy and they expand it so that it can include other people right and so competence a good measure of competence would be the ability to work within the hierarchy while you're also expanding maintaining it and expanding it and so you that means that you would want to set up an economic system where smart hardworking people were doing things that made other people who weren't them rich too hmm and I think we're actually pretty good at that you know if you look at the statistics here's a good one and if this is why people shouldn't be as pessimistic as they are likely it's a good feeling to make other people well-off and have their well-being but a lot and lots of people I mean one of the things I've really been struck by with the people that I've known who were hyper competent is that one of the things they really like to do is to find young people who need opportunities and open doors for them I mean it's a it's a it's a pleasure that's not well measured you know but I know that like I've seen that among the professors that I've known that I really admired like they really like to mentor graduate schools and graduate students and develop their careers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley that I know the same thing and good managers and administrators they're not playing a zero-sum game like they're not opening the doors to everyone I wouldn't say but they're definitely always looking around for competent people who are young to provide opportunities to and it's a real unsung virtue of capitalism that that sort of thing occurs and it's not rare so so so well so back to the to the IQ and conscientiousness connection is like like with regards to the say the the broad capitalist that broad capitalist social and economic structure you know I don't know if you guys know this but the UN said is one of its millennial goals in the year 2000 to have the rates of poverty in the world by 50% within 15 years right and we hit that in 2012 three years ahead of schedule it was the fastest decrease in human poverty that has ever occurred in the history of the planet by a massive margin and it hasn't quit now obesity is a bigger problem now than starvation it's like we should have party in the street for that right there's more fat people than there are starving people you know it's a perverse sort of victory but but it's a big one and about three hundred thousand people a day right now are being plugged into the electrical grid and the fastest-growing economies are in sub-sahara Africa sub-saharan Africa it's like there's some real reason to be thinking things are going great in there having Amazon and Holly Baba compete to provide them with those goods that they need every little bit yeah well they have cell phone technology that's really made a big difference and help stabilize the currencies and help them identify where the proper market is for their goods and they're being plugged into YouTube and watching Jordan be Peters and videos now yes well what can I say so Jordan Jordans on competence hierarchies let's look it's better it's better to think yeah it's better to think of a well functioning human hierarchy as one based on competence the other thing like my colleague said to me was that you don't want to overestimate how much power people have let's say in a corporate environment because it's not obvious at all that the managers or the executives for that matter except in the rare cases where they're psychopathic have fewer strictures who have well sometimes you get Psychopaths that rise to the top right I mean otherwise there wouldn't be Psychopaths but it isn't obvious that people higher up in a competence hierarchy have fewer strictures on their moral behavior than people lower in the hierarchy right because my sense is that responsibility increases as you move up the hierarchy and so and your degrees of freedom with regards to moral attitude also tend to decline because you're you know if you're a manager of duffel maybe you have 30 people working for you and they each only have one manager there's a lot of people that you're responsible to and so and you can't miss you can't mistreat your people with any degree of consistency because the good ones leave the bad ones torture you to death and the whole thing collapses across time and so the whole idea that what you have in a confidence hierarchy is power is not a reasonable assumption as far as I can tell that's a big deal right wisely we've got to get that right well so it's a big deal and the word competence is an empowering word I've achieved the status that I have whoever speaking these words by competence and then there's better mates better food less disease etc to it climb higher now since you since you bring this up I think this is an important point and that I really wanted to ask you about which is that what percentage of the competence hierarchy is influenced by potentially an exertion of oppression forgiving let me give you an example for example let's go ahead and take our friendly Lobster yeah let's take the lobster for example let's say the lobster is a sea floor dwelling creature and the lobster has twenty shelters but the lobster only inhabits two of the shelters but it doesn't enable the other lobsters to dwell or reside in the other eighteen shelters that it doesn't even use just as an example Laura I mean it's we could we could think about this one of the things that I've found very interesting about looking at archetypal representations of experiential reality is that they're always balanced and so the fundamental archetypal representation of the hierarchy is the wise King and the tyrant and every hierarchy can be reasonably represented with narratives involving the wise King and the tyrant so the wise king is the part of the hierarchy that sustains itself and expands and includes more people right so that's a functioning polity and the tyrant is the fact that people operating within that hierarchy can play zero-sum games can be willfully blind can be malevolent can play politics can cease to be productive can manipulate the system for their own devices and all of that and it's obviously the case that every human institution especially as they scale falls prey to the tyrannical part of the archetype that's why big things fall apart and so when you say well to what degree is a hierarchy to what degree is a hierarchy emerged because of tyrannical factors the answer is well it depends on the hierarchy but generally a non-trivial amount that scales with size okay but that having said that that doesn't to say that something is partially corrupt is a lot different than saying that it's totally corrupt right there's this great story for those of you that don't know it in The Brothers Karamazov and the Atheist Ivan who's the most compelling character I would say most charismatic character in the book is torturing his younger brother Alyosha who's a monastic novitiate about religion and dogma and God and he's trying to convince a lyosha that if there is a god he's so cruel that he's reprehensible in his fundamental element and anyways he tells this story about the Catholic Church and it's called the the Grand Inquisitor it's a very very famous story and in this story Christ come comes back to earth-2 Seville in Spain at the height of the Spanish Inquisition and he's he reappears and he's doing miraculous things and you know dividing up the loaves and feeding the poor and healing the sick and being miraculous and wonderful and the Grand Inquisitor who runs the Spanish Inquisition promptly has him arrested and throws him in prison and then he come and and and he's decides he's going to be executed and he comes to visit him at night and he says look you know you were here 1500 years ago and you're you were perfect and you put a moral burden on human beings that was way too great for anyone to carry and it's taken us 1500 bloody years to cobble together something out of your insanely positive example that normal human beings could live with and we finally got it a little bit under control and dampened it down and here you are back again like setting up an impossible example for people we just can't have that we're gonna do you in tomorrow and Christ listens and is not particularly upset by all appearances about what's happening and then the Inquisitor who's an old man gets up to leave and when he leaves Christ stands up and kisses him on the lips and the Inquisitor turns white with shock and then leaves and when he leaves he leaves the door open and that's the brilliant part of the story because and that's what made Dostoevsky such an amazing genius I would say is even though he could write a critique of the Catholic Church let's say the Christian Church is powerful and is intelligent as the Grand Inquisitor he also noticed that the dogmatic structure of the church still left the still left the door open for the divine individual it's like you don't get a hierarchy without getting a tyranny along with it you know but but there's a hell of a difference between the 30 or so countries in the world where anyone with any sense would want to live and the other hundred and fifty where that are basically run by barbaric thugs and it's important to keep the distinction between those two things in time it's like yeah we've got some things that we should put together and clean up and you know people are discriminated against for unfair reasons and that's to everyone's detriment obviously but it's a multivariate problem and the the the the the positioning of someone in a hierarchy of competence is in part due to their what would you say to the historical context within which that hierarchy has emerged but to say it's all a consequence of that is part of what I regard as the radical leftist war on the idea of competence itself because I actually think that's the fundamental narrative driving the real radical leftists is that they hate the idea of competence itself it's deeper than Orwell's comment George Orwell's comment in in Road to Wigan Pier where he said well the problem with middle-class british socialists is that they don't like the poor they just hate the rich just like Dada on man vicious vicious diagnosis it's worse than that is that is that the the radical leftist don't like the oppressed they just hate the competent I really believe that I think it's I think it's unbelievably pathological and dangerous it is so the more nuanced conversations like these rather than binary yes-or-no sort of reductionist conversations around complex topics like a competence hierarchy that surface to fruition in the media sphere I think over time we will get to a point where more and more people have deeply complex and nuanced conversation about this Jordan how about the genetic fitness landscape is this is it fair to say that there are a bunch of different competence hierarchies across this plane of fitness competent well there are there are one you know and you know like one of the bubbles could be who's ranked highest in the government or one of them is who's ranked highest in space or who's ranked highs in genetic engineering and or whatever field in whatever but that's why ideas like multiple intelligence are so attractive even though the idea of multiple intelligence is wrong it's clear no it's clearly it's clearly wrong intelligence that factor analysis have been done and we've known this since like 1920 it's not disputable if you if so here's how you make an IQ test it's really easy and everyone should know this because you need you need to know how these things work so imagine that you took a universal library of questions any sort of question that required abstraction to solve could be a general knowledge question it could be a vocabulary question could be a mathematical question it doesn't matter it could be a question about anything as long as it requires abstraction to solve so you have a universe library of those questions then imagine you took a hundred questions at random from that Universal library and you gave them to 500 people and then you just totaled their scores right right wrong total total scores then you rank ordered the scores from highest performer to lowest performer that's IQ that's all there is to it that's it and then what you'd find is if you took another hundred questions from the same library randomly selected and gave them to the same 500 people and you'd have to rank orders right from from the top to the bottom the correlation between the two rank orders would be about point nine unbelievably high it's unbelievably stable and now if you correct that for age you get IQ that's all there is to it that's it and so well now so there's no mutable intelligences and that's a single factor if you do a factor analysis which is a statistical technique that tells you how many different attributes that that rank ordering possesses you get one factor so it's one that's that not multiple now there are multiple talents and there are multiple temperaments and that's where the Big Five model comes in so people differ in extraversion and extroverts are more likely to be good at sales jobs people differ in negative emotionality despite what the California Labor Board ruled yesterday people differ in sensitivity to negative emotion women are more sensitive on average to negative emotion than men and the effect size of that is something like if you took a random woman and a random man out of the population and you had to lay a bet on who had higher levels of anxiety and emotional pain and you bet that it was the woman you'd be right 60 percent of the time so it's an interesting stat because men and women are more the same in emotional in in sensitivity to negative emotion then different but there's there's a there's a said that the mean and what that also means is that if you took the top 100 people top one and a hundred people who are the most sensitive to negative emotion they'd almost all be women now you see the review see the inverse of that in some sense with regards to criminality so males are more aggressive than females and it's about the same difference if you take a random woman and a random man out of the population you had to bet on who was the most aggressive if you bet it was the man and you'd be right 60% of the time which isn't that much of the time right it's it's deviation from 50/50 but it's not ninety ten it's just 60/40 but if you take the one in a hundred persons who's most aggressive and that's the person you throw in prison by the way they're all men nine out of ten of them are men and so one of the things and this this goes to the complexity argument that you were talking about earlier that's hard for people to have a multivariate discussion because we like to collapse things into single causes but it's also hard for people to understand the statistical reality of distributions because you can have two distributions that almost entirely overlap and have walloping differences at the tails yeah and the tails are where all the action is like who cares how aggressive you are as long as you don't shoot or stab someone you get to be aggressive but if you're so aggressive that you shoot or stab someone then you end up in prison and you're the person that we're concerned with and maybe that's 1% of the population it's like yeah well they're all men and you see this happens in less dramatic form too when you look at phenomena like career selection so it's just a data set released the other day and this is the first time I'd seen this showing quite clearly that as this is a walk this is a remarkable finding and it builds on some earlier research which the California labor board also decided with pseudoscience which is absolutely 100% not pseudoscience that is so wrong no serious scientists debate the data that I'm describing that nobody has debated it since like 1990 so it's very well settled science if you look at career choices between men and women what you find is that they're driven in large part by temperamental differences so that would be in the big five extraversion neuroticism agreeableness conscientiousness and openness and also by interest because the biggest difference between men and women that's been measured psychometrically forget about the physical differences but the psychological differences is difference in interest and it's actually pretty big and so men on average are more interested in things and women on average are more interested in people and it's a one standard deviation difference which is a big difference by the standards of these sorts of differences and it's enough to drive the to drive a couple of phenomena phenomena one most nurses are women phenomena two most engineers are men why has nothing to do or very little to do if any with differences in mathematical reasoning ability and I mean that's being tracked too so if you take junior high kids men and women girls and boys and you take only those who are off the charts in terms of their mathematical interest the gender difference isn't that great there's a tiny edge for boys but not much and it's even disputable whether that edge exists so let's assume it doesn't for the sake of argument if you track those kids across time what you find is a disproportionate number of the men go into the STEM fields and hardly any of the women and the reason is they're good at it but they're not interested in it so in the end then you might think well that's socio-cultural why tweak we could change that it's like no sorry research has already been done what there's a so imagine you could rank order countries by how gender-neutral their socio-economic policies were and then you put the Scandinavian countries at the top for obvious reasons because they've been pushing that for like three decades for decades and have made a lot of progress with it um the biggest difference is in temperament and interest in the world between men and women are in the Scandinavian countries and the data now have revealed that there's a correlation between how gender-neutral the country is and how big the differences are between the men and women and the difference is positive not negative and then you think well is that reliable science or are the right-wing conservatives driving this scientific agenda an answer to that is there are no right-wing conservatives in psychology there are none I'm dead serious man I'm dead serious about that so so here's why this here's why this research is reliable it's because the research is reliable because the people who generated the findings hated them they hated the findings they were completely biased in the other direction because everyone everyone was hoping everyone who's a social scientist was hoping that as you flattened out the gender differences in the sociological landscape you would decrease the personality differences the individual differences and that's not what happened you maximize them instead it's like oh oh that that wasn't what we expected and and believe me people just didn't run to the publisher and publish these datasets they were shocked by them and so they replicated them and these have been replicated across samples of tens of thousands of people and and and dozens of countries it's extraordinarily reliable it is as far as I'm concerned apart from the hard biological end of this of psychology where there's some unbelievably solid work done it's the most solid social science that exists as far as I can tell the psychometric data and the reason I think that is when I was starting my career um I was looking for the most solid data because one of the things I wanted to do was learn how to predict how people's lives transformed and changed and across time and and what sort of level of achievement they managed so I was looking for the most reliable and valid measures and it's clearly the psychometric measures are the most reliable and valid period no one disputes that so except like you know people in women's studies and that just doesn't count so you know they they don't have methodology so so the fact that there's a dispute just doesn't matter yeah well so fear look they have hypotheses right and that's fine there's nothing wrong with generating hypotheses don't get me wrong like there's nothing wrong with theory but when you start to confuse theory with fact let's say then there's real trouble and you know your theory has to be constructed at least in part so that you can make a prediction of some sort so that you can measure what your theory says that you can measure and so that you can predict something with it and then to see whether or not your theory holds up otherwise it's just a hypothesis and that's fine but you don't get to impose it on everyone else because you get to state by Fiat that your hypothesis is correct it's it's reprehensible to do that and then and that's being done an awful lot an awful lot so I always found it interesting to think about why there weren't any groups of men that were trying to increase the amount of men that were in nursing or dental hygienists education or an education Social Work I always found that interesting I always and then I their lower pain the disciplines um and then and then I recently started thinking about this in terms of sports with NFL and MBA and I was like hmm there are just less Asian people and Latino people and white people there's just there's more black people that are just better athletes and are we going to decrease the standards for people of different from a better Asian or Latino to give morning's is funny that the the the discussion about gender differences in occupational position let's say is unbelievably narrow you know it tends to focus on the highest corporate positions that's not all of it but it tends to focus on the highest corporate positions or the highest paid positions but certainly it's quite interesting if you're if you're into this sort of thing I suppose to go online and just look up the Labor Statistics from from the American federal government because they they rank order occupations by gender you know proportion and but bricklayers are that's that that's the occupation that's the most gender skewed there's like no female bricklayers and but no one cares about that and it's kind of interesting well no but it is interesting because it's not like bricklayers don't make a good living you know like the skilled trades people make a damn good living but heavy machinery operators very few women there too so but the percentage of work-related deaths 93% well that's a problem yeah I mean that there's a bunch of reasons why men make more money on average than women do and one of them is that they're they're more willing to work outside that's one they're more willing to move that's another they're they work longer hours and if you work 13% more hours you make 40% more money on that that's the stats oh so that the effect of overtime is nonlinear 13% more hours forty percent more income yeah Wow yeah yeah yeah well you can you think that's a good example of how you know let's say you have a bunch of employees and you're trying to differentiate them for promotion like and let's say they're all operating within a relatively narrow band perhaps they aren't but let's say for this example they are it's like well the person who puts out 10% more self-evidently so well this guy's around like 10% more that that would be what about next year 45 minutes a day something like that he goes the extra mile while he's going to get the promotion and so you also get this like it also looks and this is worth thinking about too and this is part of the Pareto distribution problem is that six is disproportionately rewarded it's not linear so as you start to succeed the problem each success nonlinearly increases the probability of the next success right so the doors open yeah yeah yeah that's right and not one door but they open exponentially right exactly and so and as you fail they close exponentially so you might think well sick failure success linear it's like no failure success right so once you start to fail good luck to you right because each failure increases the probability of the next failure in a nonlinear mash fashion and that really if you're on a downhill trend man that's really vicious and it's hard to get out of it you see that happened to big companies when they start to go into a death spiral they can't pull themselves out of it but by the same token when you start to succeed each success increases the probability of the next one you actually even see that with lobsters so back to the crustaceans well are they so interesting that some of these things are so fundamental that they appear so low in the phylogenetic chain so if you if you tally up you watch a lobster engage in sequence sequential dominance disputes so basically physical challenges his probability if he loses the problem if he loses a battle the probability that he'll lose the next battle is higher than you would expect if you just derived a linear function that was a consequence of the tally of his previous victories and losses so because he's lost he's more likely to lose harder the next time but if he wins he's statistically more likely to win so and that also drives well that's a fundamental issue too that drives the disproportionate distribution of productive goods and material resources which is a very big problem it's another thing you need to have an intelligent discussion about in our deficit definitely we're going to get there in this conversation as well so just before we wrap up the point about Big Five and gender I have a thought about this and it involves a company that is very close to us here in the Bay Area Google and the question about Google is could it potentially be the interest of a company to want to bring diverse people from around the world in to increase the creativity of their output depends on how you define diverse but I would say you guys have already done that in Silicon Valley it's like well how many people how many people in Silicon Valley are from the Indian Institute of Technology it's like god they're everywhere you know and and no wonder well so that's it but that's cognitive that's that's cognitive ability like look well some new types of it is someone that's birthed in a different part of the world yeah that has a different upbringing that could potentially bring something unique a unique person has no evidence for that whatsoever there's no there's no there's no evidence for that that is not how you get that's not the right definition of diversity but could it also be potentially that we are not measuring and focusing on that in order to find that data no no it's not it's not because look measuring success is not an easy thing you think it should be meritocracy no matter what period no there's there's always a fly in the ointment oh wow they are there is there so the other thing there's a good book that I would recommend reading called the great leveler by Walter shy del it's a new book relatively new book and he details out the he details out the in erotic ability of inequality so part of the problem with this process that we just described where success breeds success and failure breeds failure is that the people who are succeeding get a disproportionate share of the resource high let's say so and you know everyone knows that about money right because the 12 richest people in the world 85 richest people in the world have as much money as the bottom 2 billion which seems well let's say unfair now it's certainly unequal now whether it I believe is lower than your statistic is that eight richest have equal to the bottom 3.5 billion yeah well it's probably worse than it was when I looked at this about three years ago so but it doesn't it doesn't matter because you get the point but it's um it's not crazy but the thing is is that this is not something that only applies to money it applies to everything that's creatively produced so the same rule applies to number of records sold by recording artists the same rule applies to number of books sold by novelists the same rule applies to number of goals scored by NHL hockey players the same rule applies to the population of cities and the mass of stars and the size of trees in the in the jungle it's like the inequality problem is way more troublesome again than mere capitalism it's a terrible problem and shy Dells work which is really really interesting he's traced back inequality ten fifteen thousand years using you can do it for example let's say you find a Neolithic burial site and there's 200 people in it so these people would be buried with their possessions and obviously some of them decay but some of them don't and like some of them are buried with gold well hardly any of them and the tiny proportion of people who are buried with gold are buried with a lot of gold so you can even derive a Gini coefficient estimate which is an estimate of inequality from burial sites and it looks like as soon as you get a surplus you get inequality and that's a rough thing a because you might think well even in hunter-gatherer societies where there's no surplus there's still inequality because there's inequality of friendship there's inequality of health and there's inequality of sexual access and those things are they are not trivial but when you're thinking about it purely economically you start to get an inequality as soon as you get a surplus you think oh that interesting so there's a natural rule which is surplus generates inequality alright so how do you solve that and shy Dells book says well that's easy you just get rid of the surplus right and that's not good so like he found and so one of the things he did was statistical analysis because one of the things he might ask is well let's say you have your measures of inequality and then you can track them around the world and you can track whether or not the inequality is generated by a right-wing government or a left-wing government and then you might hope well the left-wing governments would ameliorate inequality there's no evidence for that at all it doesn't look like inequality is with it it doesn't look like the amelioration of inequality is within the purview of political organization and you'd like you should not here that with any degree of happiness whatsoever because the social science on inequality is also clear as inequality levels increase societies destabilize and the best indicator of that I already mentioned that that was work that was done by Martin daily and margul Wilson at McMaster University in Canada they're really interested in what drove male homicide because most homicide is male male-on-male it's mostly young males it's mostly within race and it's mostly status competition right so and the status competitions get intense where inequality increases so where everyone's poor so if you rank order American States and Canadian provinces by inequality the poorer provinces where everyone's poor there's no male aggression and the rich provinces and states where everyone's rich there's no male it male homicide but the states and provinces where inequality is high the male homicide rate starts to climb up and it's probably the most aggressive males who get most aggressive most rapidly when inequality increases so there's a psychological component but inequality drives male homicide 0.9 is the correlation which means that you actually don't need any other explanation for male homicide maybe you throw in alcohol just just as it as an extraneous variable you don't need any other explanation for the male homicide rate than inequality it's a staggering work it's absolutely staggering work and so the the thing is is that a meritocracy will drive inequality and then you have a problem because people stack up at zero and they can't get out of zero because that's what happens as inequality increases people think about when you're playing Monopoly you know the game that's a perfect example of how inequality emerges everybody is equal to begin with everybody basically plays a random game because monopoly is basically a random game I mean there's some skill in it but not much so so it's a random game so what happens when everyone starts equal and you play around in game one person ends up with everything everyone else stacks up at zero now shy Dells book basically shows the only way out of that is various forms of war including revolution and epidemics that's it that's the only thing he's been able to track that and and what happens is well you level everyone and then inequality decreases it's like well okay that doesn't seem like a really great solution sordin this seems to be even more and more pressing with the proliferation of artificial intelligence robotics genetic engineering neural prosthetics nanotechnology and the race between China and the United States and Russia colonizing Mars what is going how do we actually end up coming to a global consensus on what to do as eight people equate and wealth to the bottom 12 I don't see why we have to have an intelligent discussion about this because on the one hand it's pretty obvious that modern economies are doing a damn good job of lifting people rapidly out of abject poverty okay but at the same time the inequality of it of economic the economic inequality by some measures at least is increasing and that does have this destabilizing effect and so then the question is what what do you do about it well it's really hard because in a meritocracy part of that's driven by segregation by intelligence and then that's likely exaggerated by of computational power because a really smart person with a computer is way smarter than a really smart person without a computer and is written and is way smarter than a person who isn't so smart either with or without a computer right so the computational technology looks like it's a multiplier like I'm sure many of you already know know because there's a huge difference between someone who can really use a computer and someone who's barely computer literate and lots of way more people are barely computer literate literate than you know so here's a good stat this is like I'm really familiar I've really familiarized myself with the IQ literature and it's a dismal horrible literature but but you really need to know it because it's a solid literature unfortunately and one of the most terrifying statistics I ever came across was one detailing out the rationale of the United States Armed Forces for not allowing the inductor you can't induct anyone into the Armed Forces in the u.s. if they have an IQ of less than 83 okay so let's just take that apart for a minute because it's a horrifying thing so the US Armed Forces has been in the forefront of intelligence research since World War one because they were onboard early with the idea that especially during wartime when you're ramping up quickly that you need to sort people effectively and essentially without prejudice so that you can build up the officer corps so you don't lose the damn war okay so there's real motivation to get it right right because it's life and death issue so they used IQ they did a lot of the early psychometric work on IQ okay so that's the first thing they're they're motivated to find an accurate predictor so they settled on IQ the second thing was the United States Armed Forces also really motivated to get people into the Armed Forces peacetime or wartime wartime well for obvious reasons peacetime because well first of all you got to keep the Armed Forces going and second you can use the Armed Forces during peacetime as a way of taking people out of the underclass and moving them up into the working-class or the middle class right you can use it as a training mechanism and and so there's and left and right can agree on that you know it's it's a reasonable way of promoting social mobility so again the Armed Forces even in peacetime is very motivated to get as many people in as they possibly can and it's difficult as well you it's not that easy to recruit people so you don't throw people out if you don't have to so what's the upshot of all that well after a hundred years essentially of of statistic careful statistical analysis the Armed Forces concluded that if you had an IQ of 83 or less there wasn't anything you could possibly be trained to do in the military at any level of the organization that wasn't positively counterproductive okay you think well so what 83 okay yeah one in ten one in ten ten people and that what that really means that as far as I can tell is if you imagine that the military is approximately as complex as the broader society which i think is a reasonable proposition then there's no place in our cognitively complex society for one in ten people so what are we going to do about that the answer is no one knows say well shovel money down the hierarchy it's like the problem isn't lack of money means sometimes that's the problem but the problem is rarely absolute poverty it's rarely that it is sometimes but rarely it's not that easy to move money down the hierarchy so first of all it's not that easy to manage money so it's a vicious problem man and so it's hard to train people to become creative adaptive problem solvers impossible you can't do it you can't do it you can tear fixes Colliers ability but but you can't you can't do that it's training doesn't work it's working six months but it could work in six years no it doesn't work sorry it doesn't work like the dado and that's crystal clear as well look I can give you an example so I know a bunch of people who run MBA programs and I've had discussions with them because the thing about an MBA program is this is if it's selective it's really hard to get in it's like getting into Harvard it's really hard to get into Harvard you have to have an IQ that places you least at the 99th percentile and then you have to be really good at at least one or two other things so it's really hard to get in okay so you think well why hire a Harvard graduate well it's the quality of the education it's like no it's not it's the fact that it's really hard to get in all of the value of the Ivy League education is in the screening before the before the before the education starts now that doesn't mean that people people go to Harvard they get educated but they'd get just as educated if they went somewhere else first of all it's like every University contains more information than any student can ever possibly process if you're super smart you can be dropped into a State College somewhere a low level State College you spend four years in the library you know like what are you gonna do read the whole library no right so so and the data on this is quite clear it's like and it's the same with private schools the reason that people who go to private schools do better than people who go to public schools is because generally speaking the people who go into private schools are smarter it's not the education that's any better and so we radically overestimate the degree to which training works so now you can train people to be stupid that's but training them to be smarter than they are is really really really hard so it like I said it's a dismal literature and liberals see the Liberals think everyone's roughly equal and there's a job for everyone you just have to train them it's like no wrong and the Conservatives think well there's a job for everyone if they just get off their ass and look and work it's like no no that's wrong too even though if you work that's better and well so that that's on the conservative end but the Liberals won't take into account individual differences well obviously that's part of what the whole politically correct discussion is about it's like everyone's the same it's like yeah they're not you know when I find it it's really it's really annoying I would say like I love love to come to Silicon Valley I've been here many many times and like it's really something to come here and and and meet there's so many people here who off the scales intelligence and they're all you know clustered together which is why this place is so unbelievably rich and so unbelievably productive one of the reasons but it's very it's also very annoying that it's so left-leaning because one of the things that the left-leaning Silicon Valley geniuses should understand that is that they're the beneficiary of a genetic lottery mmm-hmm and they should take that seriously it's like yeah you worked hard yes you're entrepreneur oh yes you're on point you put in your sixty hours a week you know you do everything you could do you have an IQ of 150 and like that's not your doing right that's something that happened to you and so you can't be saying well it's it's all me it's like no it's not it's all you and the genius that you were granted as an infant it's that's it that's what's driving it now that that doesn't mean I think that people of disproportionate intelligence shouldn't be rewarded disproportionately it's possible that they should because it might be in the best interest of everyone else to dump as much money as possible to the top 2% of the cognitive strata because they're going to be most generative with it and so and even if it's not fair because you might say well just because you won the genetic lottery does that mean that you should have more money than anyone else it's like well not on the grounds of fairness but if you have to distribute money well who are you going to distribute it to you know and I think Toth was it Ted who ran CNN Ted Turner he estimated that if you tried as hard as you could in your entire life there was no way that you could spend more than four hundred million dollars and so let's say you have more money than that at your disposal well hopefully you're going to do some halfways intelligent things with it and hopefully you'd expect that the more intelligent people would do more than halfway intelligent things with it so if you have to have unequal distribution then a meritocracy is probably the best way to do it but it still leaves you with this terrible problem which is what do you do with all the people who stack up to zero and the answer isn't have contempt for them because they don't work as hard as you it's like yeah a bunch of them don't you know because conscientiousness also predicts success so among the poor there are people who don't work you know but everyone underestimate the contribution of cognitive ability so it's a rough man and we don't take it seriously and we don't know what to do about it and yeah it's clear that as inequality increases societies destabilize that's clear so it's something that has to be dealt with and but we don't know how to deal with it we don't know how to efficiently move resources to the bottom end of the competence hierarchy so that things don't destabilize so you know and I've worked with people lots of people who are who are at the bottom end of the hierarchy in my clinical practice and you know like cocaine addicts for example low eye low IQ cocaine addicts not not all cocaine addicts have low IQ by the way but you know it's it's just uh it's it's a triple whammy let's say cuz if you're a cocaine addict you probably also an alcoholic and so if you're a cocaine addict and you're an alcoholic and you're sort of on the low end of the cognitive distribution it's like you have pretty damn rough life there's a lot of things going wrong for you and you're really lucky if you're flat broke because as soon as you get money you are so done you cannot believe it so like when your unemployment check comes in and you're a cocaine addict alcoholic who isn't employed the probability that three days later you're going to end up facedown in the ditch is really really high so don't be thinking like it's not so simple that you can just dump money down the competence hierarchy to the to the people who are in the underclass and expect that that's going to have a salutary effect I don't think there's any evidence for that whatsoever like money is not an easy resource to use productively so is a class-based speciation something to be concerned about um elaborate on that a little bit what do you mean exactly well by class-based speciation meaning there's already a tremendous amount of wealth that is accumulated within such a small percentage of people and whether it be through a bifurcation of split of a couple billion people off of the human species or it could be a trifurcation we don't know how many splits there may be whether that I don't know if it's something to worry about or something to hope for I mean this time scales are so large that it's probably not relevant to individuals potentially something to hope for in the evolutionary trajectory of the well you kind of hope that people get smarter might might get smarter across time I guess we would hope that might be a good thing I mean it's not self-evident so if it is a lottery if it was a roll of the dice to be born where we are don't we also feel that it could have been a roll of the dice to be born in a place less fortunate there for sure would you feel that I think that's why the you know even if you're successful people often feel guilty because of inequality and then no wonder your ultimate calling in terms of the width of religion and with with finding self-actualization and meaning within you is to like you say eradicate suffering is something that is give so much meaning to life well the sometimes people in less fortunate circumstances experience lots of suffering with lack of food or water or shelter or basic biological needs and so then therefore doesn't it feel like within this potential class-based speciation with wealth that there should be some sort of assistive course where's okay and now that's all for the basis do that well so there's a couple of things there I mean to the degree like you know I've been a vocal opponent of the radical left and I can't detest them enough really is this a fundamental is to find my fundamental position but but that doesn't mean that I don't think that a functioning polity requires a left in a right-wing absolutely and the reason it requires a left wing is because inequality is real and it has to be addressed it has to be addressed for all the reasons that you described but but that having said that there are ways to go about addressing it that are clearly counterproductive and those were tried to great destructive power in the 20th century and I don't really think we need to do that again the corollary to that is we don't know what the productive means are now I've been thinking a lot about that you know and I'm thinking well how do you solve the problem of inequality and it has to be something like the moral burden on those who are successful has to be increased it's something like that and I think you see that I mean I think I wrote this to you that what's the significance of purchasing a third yacht rather than maybe hiring 50 people to solve a problem well it's it's hard these things aren't so simple you know like let's say that you decided to go out to a restaurant and your meal is five hundred dollars and you might think well that's reprehensible and well perhaps you don't think that's reprehensible but the thing is it's not a bad way of dispersing extra money so it's not that obvious what rich people should do with their money that's beneficial and you think well should you buy a third yacht because do you really need it and well that's a particularly perhaps a particularly egregious example but it's not like you're not employing people when you do that you shouldn't stuff the money in your mattress we could say that right because that's just pure hoarding but most people who have money aren't like Scrooge McDuck they don't have a money bin that they swim in right their money well that's that's the kind of that's the kind of clueless picture of wealth I mean most people who have money their money is out there doing things it's not like they're it's not like it's in their bedroom you know it's in in gold coin form so they're not hoarding it in exactly the same way that perhaps people used to hoard wealth when it wasn't as what was tracted and and and functional in its own terms out there in the economy is usually working for them making them more money yeah but it's also doing a bunch of other things you know and if you're a bad money manager even if you're wealthy your money tends to disappear very rapidly that's another thing that's really worth knowing is that like there is a 1% and that 1% does have a disproportionate amount of the money and 1% of that 1% has an even more disproportionate amount of the money it scales all the way up the of the measurement spectrum let's say but there's actually quite a bit of mobility within that 1% so you have a 10% chance in your lifetime in the United States of being in the top 1% for at least a year now that's not like a hundred percent chance but it's 1 in 10 it's not dismal you know so partly what you hope for is that there's some genuine upward mobility but then I think the other thing that you hope for is that people who are disproportionately successful take it upon themselves to do everything they possibly can to do whatever they can that's the best possible thing to do with their money and you know I'm kind of an admirer of Bill Gates for a variety of reasons but he's doing a really good job of putting the boots to the five world the world's 5 worst transmissible diseases you know and that's going quite nicely you know they're making some real polio is just about defunct they're making some real progress with malaria like there's almost nothing that could possibly be done for Africa that would be more useful than to get rid of malaria sleeping sickness would be another one that would be really useful to allow to eradicate and so I would say that the long-term solution assuming that there is one to the problem of inequality is that people who are disproportionately fortunate let's say or successful or both take it upon take the moral duty of doing the best possible good that they can with the money that they generate great but the other thing I think that's sort of interesting about that is I actually don't think there's anything more interesting to do with your money the direct it's like can you think of anything more interesting to do with your money than to find a really difficult problem that causes a bunch of people suffering and then try to fix it it's like amazing if you have a clue that's got to be a little better than a third yacht yeah so no it's pretty low well it's kind of a low like that conspicuous consumption thing at some point it's just if you have any sense at some point that's just not very impressive could could another way to address the potential class-based speciation be the education of the child and by the principles of let's say that over the last hundred billion people that have lived and died to build this beautiful world we live in today with all the food and water ubiquity and the government's and the economies that there every child that's being stamped out into this world might have a little tiny missing chip on their shoulder and that missing chip might be things like their parents explaining to them what evolution is or what their nah to me what their heart and their brain is their body maybe what morality is things like that if maybe every child is born with a little bit of something like that do you think there's something like that Jordan yeah this you know like that's done right this thing is connecting everyone to everything and so the probability that people are going to be get whatever education they want in the next 30 years is overwhelmingly high so I think in some sense that problem is being solved as rapidly as it can possibly be being solved that is doesn't mean people should stop trying to find more and more effective ways of educating I think that would be our there's some general basic principles that you think of parents should teach a child but obviously within the rules of life but it may be something about evolution or something about their own Anatomy and well I think that I I think that there are all sorts of things that parents who are good parents teach their children I mean part of what twelve rules for life is about is about that's like a universal ethic in some sense there I think that there is a there's dawning realization among members of the biologically oriented community let's say that there is something like an emergent ethic that's evident in biological systems and one of the most outstanding examples of that I would say is apart from the work that de Waal has done with chimpanzees showing the beginnings of an ethic at least in in the behavioral sense the beginnings of an ethic among chimpanzees is work that's been done with rats and so yog panksepp for example who wrote a book called effective neuroscience which I would highly recommend it's a real work of genius you blew my mind with Piaget by the way with the way the rats know that's pay except that that was no Piaget found that out found that out in children so Oh panksepp was the scientist who discovered that rats laughs that's right and you think well that's not a big deal it's like actually it is a really big deal because it shows that it shows commonality of the positive emotion systems across biological strata essentially so it's actually a really big deal and he found that if you tickle routes with an eraser they laugh ultrasonically yeah so you have to slow it down to hear them and the reason he would figure that out was because he was trying to figure out why if you take rat pups away from their mother and feed them and give them enough water they still die so they die unless you massage them with well he is the pencil eraser that's what because it's kind of soft it seems to work without harming the rats little rat pups and if you rub them with pencil eraser then they'll thrive and that was actually translated very rapidly into practical research because it turns out that if you have mature infant it's in our incubator they often lose weight a which is a really bad thing because they're supposed to be gaining weight but if you massage them three times a day for ten minutes then they'll gain weight about as fast as they do in utero and they leave the hospital on average five days earlier and the beneficial cognitive and physiological effects are still detectable six months down the road so walloping it's a walloping effect and so it turns out that one of the things panksepp sorted out was that human that touches a human need it's not a secondary need it's a primary need like like food and water the childhood development yeah yeah well and he was also a big proponent of rough-and-tumble play because he found out that in rats that rough-and-tumble play especially among juvenile males catalyzes pre-frontal development and that rat pups who are male that aren't allowed to engage in rough-and-tumble play show prefrontal hypo development and you can then treat them with Ritalin which is the ADHD drug just in case you're wondering so that's a very dismal line of scientific research but also very promising so what panksepp also found and this is another piece of information that really blew me away when I first first read about it was so hee hee hee banks have discovered the play circuitry in mammals and that's also a big deal right that's like discovering a continent to discover a dedicated circuitry to a set of complex biological functions that's a big deal man and so when he was investigating play behavior among rats he noticed that juvenile males in particular would work to wrestle and they wrestled really a lot like ball human children or like cumin children and dogs wrestle and rat spin each other so what Pink's have found first was that and other scientists as well but I'll use him as a shorthand was that rats would work to enter a play arena where they knew they were going to be allowed to wrestle with a appear and that's kind of how you figure out if a rat wants to do something right you make them button press for it or pull on something and then you can measure how fast you press the button or how hard a poll and you can get some estimate of how motivated he is and routs pretty damned motivated to enter into a play arena and so if one rat enters into a play arena and another rat does and the one rat is 10 percent bigger than the other then in like 9 out of 10 cases the big rat can pin the little rat and in the first bout then pinning establishes dominance this is kind of an interesting commentary on scientific methodology too because let's say that you are investigating rat behavior and you were trying to draw conclusions and you only paired rats together once you'd assume the big rat dominates its physical size that does the domination and that's the purpose of play but that isn't right because playing let it win of relates a long way is something that iterates right you don't play with a person only once you play with them well who knows for how long right if it's a relationship that lasts decades then it's decades of reciprocal interaction so thanks F and his colleagues and the other scientists who are working on this paired the rats repeatedly so these are iterated games and the rules of an integrated game aren't the same as the rules of off-key and that might actually be the basis for a universal ethic is that there are rules for iterated games and what Panks have found was that ok so the big rat is now super ordinate to the little rat now when you repair them the little rat has to ask the big trout to play that's the rule so the big rat gets to sit there like he's cool and the little rat has to hop up like like a dog that's asking you to play and sort of bounce around you all know what that looks like dog kind of puts his rear end up in the air kind of hops a little bit and that means like well come on human not me you know and if you have any sense you know how to do that and and you can even understand when a dog does it and the dog if he socialized can understand when you're doing it right because a well socialized dog is you kind of you kind of go like this and then he does the same thing and you whack him on the side of the head a little bit he growls and puts his you know your hand in his mouth but he doesn't bite it but he sounds like he's going to the dog knows what the hell's going on unless it's completely unless it's raised by a behavioral psychologist which is the worst behaved dog I ever saw was a dog that was raised by a behavioral psychologist so anyway sorry about that but so anyways so you pair these rats together and what you find is that so the little rat has to ask the big rat to play in the big rattle like you know break is cool and then wrestle and then if you pair them repeatedly unless the big rat lets the little rat win 30% of the time the little rat will no longer ask him to play like and I read that it was like little electrical storm went off in my bag is what are the me - well it's so good so I'm so absolutely unbelievable is that well there you have it emergent ethic of reciprocity all you need to do is pair animals together in reciprocal play boats and you have an emergent reciprocity and then you think well okay so that's the basis for social interaction is that reciprocity there's a bit of an advantage to thee to the big rat but not a huge advantage say well that's the beginning of an ethic and you say well human beings that ethic emerged at the biological level and then human beings watched it develop and told stories about it that's where the stories came from and then out of the stories we coded an explicit ethic and that's where the philosophy of ethics came from but it emerged from the bottom up something she predicted like 150 years ago he said well you know we'll find that there was an emergent ethic that emerged biologically and then was later mapped and so that was just well let's just absolutely beyond belief very likely true and points the way to something like well an archetypal ethics certainly one of reciprocity which which I think the fundamental are archetypal ethic it's like well here's another example Jordan maybe just because we own we would not touch on a bunch of other okay appoints as well I believe we're we're amazingly in depth in this is so cool well universalistic is important as it turns out exactly let me tell just a brief story okay alright cuz this is also this is also extremely important because it shows where the classical economist real story brief brief Jordan Peterson yeah I know it's not likely so let's play a trading game okay so you two can play this trading game so here's the deal it's very simple I'm gonna give you a hundred dollars I'm not actually but yeah I'm gonna give you a hundred dollars and you can offer some of it to your partner in the game but the rule is if she says no you don't get anything and neither does she and you only get to make one offer so okay here's your hundred dollars how much he can offer her 40 okay would you take 40 okay then now that's interesting very good that's perfect okay so first of all the classic economist would say you should offer her a dollar why well because she might as well take a dollar because she gets a dollar yeah and you want to maximize your own return so you get 99 dollars it's like what happens when you do that what happens is that is never what people do they usually offer approximately 50% yeah what's and and if they don't then the other person refuses yeah now then you might think well let's say you matched a rich person and a poor person and you said okay give the rich person 100 and they offer the poor person a dollar what does the poor person say you think well yeah yeah I need the dollar state they say no go to hell I'm not doing it because and they're more likely the poor person is more likely to refuse the lower offer than a rich person is completely running completely contrary to the predictions of classical economist you play that game across the world it's pretty much 50/50 and that's so interesting because it's another example of that emergent ethic it's like well part of the reason you'd say no and why know is correct is because you don't play one trading game you play a lifetime of trading games and the right answer to the question of how to play a lifetime of trading games is to not settle for less than 50% but you could also make a case that if you're the giver rather than receiver if you're playing an iterated game you might want to offer $60 $60 because especially if your reputation is being broadcast because let's say your goal isn't to get forty dollars which is what you'd be left if you offered 60 your goal is to let everybody know that if they play with you you give them 60 and you get 40 and then what happens is like well let's take a vote on who wants to play with who it's like you want to play with the person who offers you ten or do you want to play with the person who offers you 60 and then the person who's a little more generous than reciprocal you know 50 50 would be reciprocal maybe you should err on the side of generosity why well easily easy people will line up to play with you so then the question is do you want to win the game or do you want to win the set of games right and I think I think there's rules that govern the set of all possible games and it's the rules that govern the set of all possible games that constitute something like an emergent ethic so anyway so that's a very useful thing to know it's a very useful thing to know it is can you give a couple quick ones of those potential universal ethics that govern the set of games well I think I think that's the big one I think I think the big one is you approximate reciprocity but it would be better it'd be better if you can figure out how to I think you its receptor esse prosody with erring on the side of generosity because there's just no downside to that in an iterated game it's like I'm gonna borrow what I do when I grade papers with students for example as I grade them and then I had 5% it's like well maybe I made a mistake so I'll err on the side of generosity right and why not do that in your reciprocal interactions that doesn't mean you're letting people take advantage of you right it's not a matter of a weakness in your negotiating strategy because there's no excuse for that that's just that's a losing game that but if you could take 50 percent or 70 percent and you decide to be generous it's like well you still have to be awake so that you're not being messed about with by people who are a little bit on the psychopathic and you know you don't want to be foolish about it but reciprocal plus generous that's a hell of a good start so can we do quick dive into science and God because I want I want to know one quick good let's let's try so let's try 10 science sufficiently consistently self-actualize humans well okay let because with with your with God with religion people find some sort of self-actualization science be a source of self-actualization or no doubt allow it the way that we normally construe science like if you look at let's make that concrete for for a minute when I teach my students my personality Klaus and we concentrate a fair bit on clinical theories because I'm a clinician one of the things I make clear to them is that neither medicine nor clinical psychology are sciences there there there variants of engineering attempting to build something there's an end in mind there's an ethical end in mind right I mean what you do when you're a clinical psychologist is try to help people make their lives better now you might say well you're trying to make them more mentally healthy but actually that's a weaker description than that you're trying to make their lives better because sometimes as a clinical psychologist you see people who are you know they're normal in their health but they would like their lives to be better there's a knop obviously there but and that introduces the ethical realm and you might be able to use scientific techniques in order to determine which of the strategies you use to try to make your life better are working but it's not obvious that you can use scientific principles to decide what constitutes better to begin with problem you know I don't see any evidence that you can well how about the science right let's take morality from its purview at the methodological level well okay let's take an example of cancer and science solving suffering by providing solutions to cancer yeah well should you devote money to cancer education that's see that's where the problems start to come is that you can't you can't make an a priori decision you can't make an informed decision about where the ethical where the the scientific attention should focus itself it's not an easy thing to do at some point the decisions have to be there either arbitrary they're made by they're made by techniques that seem to be outside of the scientific purview let me give you an example so I read this book by an ex KGB agent who had detailed out some of the extent of the Soviet biological warfare program back in the 1980s and one of the things the Soviet scientists were trying to do according to this guy was to weaponize biological infectious biological agents it actually turns out to be harder than we suspected thank God and what they were trying to do was cross smallpox with Ebola and it's because Ebola is like seriously fatal and smallpox is seriously contagious and so they thought well seriously fatal plus seriously contagious it's like what could be better than happy for disaster right right and so then you might say well is crossing Ebola with smallpox if is seeing whether you can cross Ebola with smallpox a reasonable scientific question an appropriate scientific question and purely from the perspective of science yes science is a generic problem-solving mechanism now you might say well no it's like it's not something any reasonable human being should ever engage in but that's not the same thing as asking whether or not it's a question within the reasonable purview of science I mean the thing about science is that science was designed to be as value-free of methodology as possible it's designed for that and so then people say well why is there a gap between science and values it's like well cuz it's built into the methodology so it looks to me like you need something that's outside of science to direct the ethic and it seems to me that something like the stories can't come from within science I don't see how I mean partly because it diluted the value isn't the story of the cosmos already enough to get someone excited enough to find some sort of value system from the being born from the Stars and that being inspiration no not necessarily because you can just as easily say well you know here we are in this little dirt ball in the middle you know on the outer edge of this galaxy that's rotating going to rotate pointlessly for the next 250 million years you know a couple of dozen billion years before the heat death of the universe it's like that's pretty dismal accounting of the utility of life I mean you know what I mean you can take you sure we're taking you have that entire you have that entire range of interpretive possibilities from like isn't life remarkable and wonderful and to isn't it bloody pointless if you if you look at it from the wrong temper I think I can find that from science well yeah but you can also find the reverse so that's the problem I'm not anti scientific yeah yeah but worse I don't I don't see a simple way of solving the problem of of of the ethical direction of the scientific inquiry I mean um you know what what comes to mind maybe as a waiter get to that area well one of the things that I talked about in detail with Sam Harrison we're gonna talk about this some more because it's by no means solved is the relationship between facts and values and the old idea Humes ideas you can't derive values from a set of facts and I think that's sort of right but I do I kind of think it's more complicated than Hume that it was but I'm not exactly sure why because like I made a case earlier about this emergent ethic arising out of out of out of iterated games that kind of looks like a scientific observation about the origin of morality at something like that so it's not like science can't inform your moral decisions but exactly how that might come about is by no means a straightforward issue and a fascinating well it's also not the case it is also not self-evident that science has served a beneficial function for human beings like it might be the case it could be the case I mean look we're pretty comfortable here and thank God and that's definitely a consequence of the Scientific Revolution but but you know highlighted your phone as a major yeah yeah but one good hydrogen bomb blowing up over North America would set us back about 50 thousand years and that could easily happen if I was a paranoid dictator that's certainly what I would do and I don't know you yeah yeah most of you guys probably know what would happen if you blow up a hydrogen bomb I think it's about 150 miles up something like that one you get an electromagnetic pulse it takes all the electronics out like all of them right one bomb and so like maybe we'll manage that but it wouldn't and you know maybe we'll manage that transition to whatever we're going to do next but I wouldn't count on it and so it isn't even necessarily the case that scientific endeavor is a pro human life process and what we do with it is bone that's why you said earlier that it's important now more than ever to have these conversations about the future of humanity and where are we going how are we going to do this together so let's let's talk about just ending it off with mutual exploration I really thought this was interesting and the intellectual dark web is a really good example of this which you are a main pillar of in my opinion so let's say that two people are having a conversation and they're reducing their points they're maybe keeping it to a straight binary we see a lot of political polarization that's occurring today in the United States politics finding a lot of the beauty and the nuance of conversation when you take complex position and you maybe stay it quantum estate 'add all these things tend to drive better conversations and it seems as though you're leading that forefront what what what do you see in that sort of path that we're walking of figuring out how to have better conversations there's a I write about this a fair bit in 12 rules for life there's a chapter I think it's chapter 9 I think that's right assume that the persons that you're listening to know something you don't it's kind of a derivation of some of some things that I learned from Carl Rogers who was a great clinician great 20th century clinician his star sort of rose during the 1960's he was a humanist um he was a Christian missionary when he was a kid but he dropped that and he became a leading light humanistic psychology and he was really interested in the preconditions for therapeutic conversation um and he thought that well if you were going to engage in the process of therapy with a client that the client had to bring to the session before he or she arrived the willingness to make things better that would be the first thing yeah right so that and I've done therapy that was court-mandated like I wouldn't recommend that that just doesn't work very well you know because you can't force someone to be better they have to kind of come already thinking that there's a bunch of things they don't know and that their life could be better than it already is that's a good position to take when you're engaging in a conversation with someone it's like look if you already know enough more power to you man you know but if you're suffering more than you think is necessary which is like highly probable or more than you think is desirable which basically means if you're suffering more than you think is desirable that means that you're way more ignorant than you need to be right that's what it means because maybe you have an illness you don't know how to cure it yeah maybe you're having a fight with someone you don't know how get out of it maybe you're failing at work and you don't know what to do about it's like you're ignorant and no wonder because people are ignorant and so you might think well unless everything is just the way you want it to be then you have something to learn and then you think well maybe the person you're talking to no matter how comfortable you are with their opinions and how bent out of shape you think they are maybe even how bent out of shape they actually are there's always the possibility that if you actually engaged in a conversation you asked them questions and you tried to figure out what they thought that you'd come away with one crumb of knowledge more than you had when you went into the conversation and like conversations like that are a lot more interesting I found in my you know I've probably done twenty thousand hours of clinical work something like that and so that's twenty thousand hours of really really really really serious conversations and they're almost always interesting beyond belief and like I've had clients that's I told you already that sort of spanned the entire spectrum from people who were so impaired cognitively and behaviorally that while they were utterly unemployable by any any reasonable standards to people who were unbelievably high-functioning and I found working with all of them if I if I'm in the zone properly it's ridiculously fascinating yeah because people are ridiculously interesting and so and and everyone has their own characteristic experience that's actually unique and so if you have a real conversation with someone and they tell you what's unique about their experience the probability that you can learn something from that is but it's certain that you can my my low IQ clients god they taught me so much it's just they taught me how difficult things were first you know because to see someone struggle with a task that the typical person can do without even thinking sheds light on exactly how amazing it is that that normal people can do that and how hard it is when when you were impaired to the point where those sorts of normal behaviors become become impossible it's so enlightening it teaches you a lot about the world and so I think part of the reason that YouTube is killing television is partly because it's technologically advantageous I mean make no mistake about it there's nothing that TV can do that YouTube can't do and there's a whole bunch of things that YouTube can do that TV can't so it's obvious which one's going to win but what's also interesting about it is that there seems to be a massive and relatively untapped market for actual conversation and it's because conversation is between people of goodwill we're trying to tell the truth we're trying to aim it making things better is unbelievably valuable I mean at least in principle that's what we're all doing here right I mean yeah even though you know you guys aren't talking um that doesn't mean this isn't a conversation you know it's first of all we're trying to pay attention to you at least enough to see if everyone's is engaged in the conversation if you're not engaged in it then it would be completely pointless right and you would involve them in your experiment that was amazing well one of the things I learned in my clinical practice is that if the conversation wasn't interesting then I was doing it wrong yeah straights just be good then and that's a really cool thing too I think that also speaks to this idea of a universal ethic I've really become interested I talked about this with Ian McGilchrist recently I just released that video today though it was a week ago on a different site I've barely become interested in the idea that the sense of engagement of meaningful engagement is the deepest of cognitive instincts I actually think you can make a very strong neurobiological case for that and that that if you're engaged in something what it means is that you're safe and secure on the one hand sufficiently safe and secure you're in your domain of competence which is a good place to be you know it's like explored territory so you're with within the walls where you're safe but you're also peering over the fence at the same time right so if you're engaged what it means is that you're in your domain of competence but you're operating within that domain of competence so that you're expanding your competence at the same time and so you feel that as meaningfully engaged meaningfully engaging and it is and so and I do also think that that sense of meaningful engagement is the right antidote to the suffering that's that's that's part and parcel of our limited existence it's like you need an antidote to the fact that life is suffering and the the experience of meaningful engagement I think is that antidote and I also think that the experience of meaningful engagement is a marker that you're where you should be doing what you should be at the right time yeah I think it's the deepest of cognitive incidence and so that's really cool man if that was true I think it's actually true so for me something if that was true man but I think it is so when we see if it works in that state of flow you lose a sense of time yeah well you lose yourself consciousness too as well so and that's something that's worth thinking but I would also consider that a primary religious experience it's something like that yeah you know you're talking about science and religion earlier and like there's a bunch of questions that we need to address pretty seriously about that too because the the scientific the kind of atheist types you know they're very down on the idea of religion but that's a very bad idea because religion is a human universal right and the religious experience people have religious experiences it's like minimum we need an explanation for that plus you can induce them which is also you know you care you can't just write that off like you can induce religious experiences I can come up with that virtual as well right yeah with religious spiritual so but it's not it's not just conceptual like you know you can say horses realm it's deeply experiential it has to be yeah Jordan are we in a computer simulation if we are it's within a computer that we don't understand I look I think questions like that are strange because welcome to simulation well it's like it's it's like asking whether you can reduce consciousness to material to to its material substrate and the answer that is yes but by the time we reduce consciousness to its material substrate our understanding of what that material substrate is will have transformed so dramatically that it won't look very much like the material substrate that we presume now and so if we're in a simulation then it's within the confines of a mechanism that we can't easily assimilate to our own computational devices so it's it's it and then of course the other problem with question like that is well we've already defined this as reality and so is reality a simulation it's well know by definition it's not it's you might say well the simulation can get so real that you can't distinguish it from reality but you start almost all questions of the forum is a be devolve down to it depends on how you define a and B because the problem with questions like that is a decontextualize as the terms right it's like well what do you mean by reality what do you mean by simulation well if you mean the same thing by both of them then they're the same thing if you mean different things by both of them then they're different things and so well but I'm serious if you have serious about that you know well most of the time you can't pull single terms out of a conversational stream and assume that the term has a bounded definition that's self-evident using only that term because when we converse it's like well you utter a stream of words it's like well what are the words mean well it depends on where they are in the phrase it depends on where they are in the sentence it depends on where the sentence is located in the paragraph it depends on the context within which the paragraph is uttered and you you triangulate all of that simultaneously to extract out the meaning of the word and then if you take a word out like it's a thing and another word out like it's a thing and you say are these two things the same you're acting as if those words can be decontextualized and they have absolute meaning and in their decontextualize state and they don't so so so usually those questions I would say in some sense are philosophically are philosophically untenable so so well that's the answer that's [Applause] for those of you that haven't done a self authoring or understand myself they're incredible programs there's a 20% off code it's San Fran so give that a go thanks Jordan appreciate you I appreciate you coming out here and San Francisco Bay Area really enjoyed having you we hope to have you again soon thank you Jordan thank you everyone that was very much fun yep [Music] it's good feet you

Channel: Simulation

Views: 303,749

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, Dr. Jordan Peterson, neuroscience, evolution, competence, competence hierarchy, dominance hierarchy, big 5, big 5 personality traits, wealth inequality, conversation, outstanding conversation, 12 Rules for Life, Maps of Meaning, Understand Myself, Self Authoring, dr. jordan peterson 12 rules for life, dr. jordan peterson interview, jordan b peterson interview, jordan b peterson 12 rules for life

Id: 8sSe6FSrylc

Length: 99min 50sec (5990 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018