Kyle Harper: preference

Transcript context

…When I had Joseph Henrich on, one of the things he discusses is if you look at... cultural evolution has figured out some remarkable things. If you look at the cuisines of different cultures, apparently the spices they use match the antimicrobial and antifungal properties you need in that particular biome. At the same time, you’re reading that part of the book, I'm like, "Okay, I get in some cases, they just genuinely did not have the resources to invest in public health and so forth". But come on, you're just like sleeping in your own vomit and so forth. Why didn't cultural evolution or something like foresight just be like, "Hey, this we can sort of do without"? It's a deep question and what I think we don't think enough about is how, in a really fundamental way, hard are some problems to solve? Some problems are just very, very hard to solve. Even though the incentive is really there, you think, "Ugh, that took a really, really long time to figure out". Even though if you'd only known, it would've made your life so much better. There's tons of trial and error. The example that comes to my mind is the mention of vaccination. Which is one of the great human achievements, like, of all the public health improvements is the most important one. Public health is never perfect. It's this system of six or seven really critical tools that involve clean water, personal hygiene, vaccines, antibiotics, different kinds of therapeutic interventions or rehabilitation therapy. We still can't fend off all the germs. You have to have all of that and you can sort of achieve this equilibrium state where you mostly have it under control. Vaccination's the most important one and it took forever to find the first vaccine. It took this huge period of all kinds of weird trial and error, like inoculation with the actual smallpox, which is very, very dangerous. Not vaccination. Vaccination uses cowpox, the lymph of an infected cow, to intentionally cause the immune reaction of humans. Before that, people would inoculate a person with actual smallpox, which is just giving somebody smallpox. You do it through the skin, but you're giving somebody smallpox. It was absolutely in a utilitarian way, the rational thing to do. It had these horrific death rates. It would never get FDA approval. But in a world where 10, 20% of kids die of smallpox, it's this horrible decision, but you'd be rational to do it. We actually don't know where that comes from. It may come from Africa, it may come from China. It spreads for like a century or more before Jenner discovers vaccination. So it's clearly really hard to figure that out. Even after Jenner, it's like another 60 years, 70 years before Pasteur kind of systematizes it and says, "Hey, we could do this for everything". Some of these discoveries and innovations are really, really hard to discover. But then the beauty of cultural evolution is that we can store that information, and you and I don't have to figure out any of that. We can go on to the next problem because that's now been collectively stored in the library of cultural evolution. It's known, we don't even think about it most of the time until it's controversial. What a blessing to live after people like Jenner and Pasteur who figured that out. There's this great blog post by the author Slime Mold Time Mold where it's discussing....…

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