Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedJoseph Henrich: belief
14 Dec 2016 Conversations with Tyler Joseph Henrich on WEIRD Societies and Life Among Two Strange Tribes (Live at Mason)
“One thing that’s interesting about the maverick question is we tend to think of the maverick as the individual learner, the person who comes up with their own idea, their own new idea. But my take on the history, at least of invention (that’s something I’ve spent a little bit of time on; it could be different in other domains), is great ideas actually come from a recombination.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Joseph Henrich
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 14 Dec 2016
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…I’m really curious about your thoughts on the maverick versus the cultural learner and what you think today the role of the maverick is. It appears that cultural evolution shrunk the size of the number of mavericks needed to get us here. In other words, we didn’t need a lot of cultural pessimists and individual learners; we needed a lot of people thinking alike and following the norms. The reason I’m so interested in that ratio is as a career coach, all my clients are the maestros. They’re all Mr. Cowens, and they’re all in careers that their tribe picked for them. They copied what worked for the tribe, you see. My question is, What’s the role of the maverick today? Do we still need some? Does cultural evolution need us? Where do we fit? One thing that’s interesting about the maverick question is we tend to think of the maverick as the individual learner, the person who comes up with their own idea, their own new idea. But my take on the history, at least of invention (that’s something I’ve spent a little bit of time on; it could be different in other domains), is great ideas actually come from a recombination. If you’re a cultural learner and you learn a little bit from this guy and a little bit from this guy and a little bit from that guy and recombine them, you get a brand-new thing. But you actually didn’t. You actually were just cultural-learning from three different people. Knowing people in very different domains of knowledge that normally don’t meet is a great way to be an innovator. To follow up on that, in the 19th century, Tocqueville wrote that Americans were among the most conformist of people. It was precisely because they were free, and that they could be organized in mass numbers in a larger market setting and you had a lot of economies of scale. He thought that made us, on average, quite conformist. Do you agree with that portrait?…
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