Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
24 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“We got to talking over lunch and we realized in each of the areas for which we were experts on, that Westerners were unusual compared to all the other populations that had been studied.”
02 / belief
“Some of my best ideas come when I’m in that situation. I think there’s great value to doing this rich, deep ethnography.”
03 / belief
“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.”
04 / belief
“I think that’s the Google problem, is that we have less stuff in our heads, but our ability to do things can still expand.”
05 / uncertainty
“Americans had — at least some of them — had relatively similar cultural backgrounds. I guess I don’t know enough about the data at the time to say.”
06 / belief
“I think that individualism is still increasing, certainly, I think in the last 50 years or so.”
07 / belief
“Much of what I think we measure in behavioral economics, experimental economics is actually just a measurement of a culturally local social norm.”
08 / observation
“There’s lots of pieces to this puzzle. The key is to create interconnectedness. To explain the difference between Denmark and India: of course, Denmark is interconnected with many other populations, but the flow of information is much less constricted.”
09 / belief
“I think the data is there. The question is why. One of the things I don’t think he takes into account sufficiently is that there could be long-run cultural differences between populations.”
10 / belief
“In my latest project I’m really looking at the kind of spread of the Western church into Europe and how it transformed the social structure in ways that I think led to individualism, it led to a different kind of cultural psychology that would eventually pave the way for secular institutions and economic growth.”
11 / belief
“I think the standard way from looking at religions all around the world is that most people accepted that their tribe or their clan or their group had a god and naturally that meant that other people’s tribes or groups had a god, so there were lots of gods and you dealt with your god and they had their god.”
12 / belief
“I think I always had that kind of engineer in me, which might’ve led me to think ways different from your usual anthropologist.”
13 / belief
“I think for explaining most of these things, you want to recognize that we have an evolved psychology that allows us to acquire social norms.”
14 / belief
“The importance of, say, our taste for sugar, our taste for fat seems to be a misfiring from our ancestral environments. But I think in the case of human cooperation that doesn’t fit the story.”
15 / belief
“I think when people use different languages, they can think about things in different ways and it’ll highlight different features of the problem.”
16 / uncertainty
“The main thing would be negative growth, and yeah, conflict with various groups. We don’t know yet, but those are my suspicions.”
17 / preference
“I do think sport is potentially a great cultural technology for bringing people together because they all get together to watch the event.”
18 / prediction
“When you get really low-status males, you might get a lot more risk-taking, steep temporal discounting, a psychological shift that gives you a chance to possibly climb the status hierarchy because you could determine, “I’m not going anywhere unless I do something big in order to get into that higher status.”
19 / evaluation
“1. That’s because there’s a lot of variation in the environments that people in lower classes face compared to the relatively homogeneous environments that they face in upper classes.”
20 / prediction
“I think the simplest and clearest one is this idea that I call the collective brain. This is simply the idea because we’re so dependent on learning from each other in order to do innovations and to construct increasingly fancy technologies, larger and more interconnected populations tend to have fancier tools and technologies.”
21 / evaluation
“When there’s not very much interesting things, interesting tools, techniques, ideas in the minds and behaviors of other members in your social group, individual learning is better because learning from others doesn’t get you anything because nobody else in the group has anything.”
22 / evaluation
“People would hide when they had a good crop and they brought in a big yield; they would underplay it and try to hide how much they did. They might have had a particularly good fertilizer, they might have figured out a new cropping technique — but that would be concealed from dissemination because of this concern that if people knew they were doing well they would envy them, and then bad stuff would happen to them.”
23 / prediction
“Just because things are going good for a little while — external forces can cause economies to grow and people could still have fundamentally zero-sum thinking or at least be able to drop back into it pretty quickly.”
24 / evaluation
“If it was genetic, it wouldn’t go away in a few generations. It seems like they’re bringing heritage from the place, and it’s getting retransmitted because they’re in ethnic communities or they’re parents.”