Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
13 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 / belief
“I think that individualism is still increasing, certainly, I think in the last 50 years or so.”
06 / belief
“Much of what I think we measure in behavioral economics, experimental economics is actually just a measurement of a culturally local social norm.”
07 / 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.”
08 / 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.”
09 / 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.”
10 / 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.”
11 / 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.”
12 / 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.”
13 / 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.”