https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0uH_AB2IfFY
So there’s postmodernism, and we already defined that as the hypothesis that reality is constituted by language. Right. Which, by the way, is a close ally to another idea pathogen, social constructivism, or if you want, social constructivism on steroids. And the reason why I add the on steroids, because social constructivism, the idea that we are prone to socialization, no serious behavioral scientists would disagree with that. And no avowed evolutionary behavioral scientists would disagree with the idea that socialization is an important force in shaping who we are. And no serious intellectual would deny that language shapes our conceptions of reality. Exactly. Right. So the issue is degree. Exactly. The problem, and hence the steroid part, is when you argue that everything that we are is due to social constructivism. Right. It’s the collapse of a multivariate scenario into a univariate scenario. The inappropriate collapse. And that’s, by the way, I remember your brilliant chat with the woman from, the British woman, I don’t remember her name, the lobster stuff. Kathy Newman. Kathy Newman. Thank you. Where you made exactly that point about multifactorial, right? Where she was arguing everything related to the gender gap must be due to misogyny. When the reality is that, of course, there might be 17 other factors with greater explanatory power that explains why we’re there. But she can’t see the world in a multifactorial way. She only sees it as due to a single- Well, this might have some bearing on the attractiveness of certain sets of ideas. We might even see if it’s the attractiveness of the so-called parasitic ideas. I think it was Einstein who said that, it probably wasn’t, I probably got the source wrong, but it doesn’t matter, that a scientific explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Right. Right. And so, and that’s an Occam’s razor. Exactly. With a bit of a modification there. And you want to, a good theory buys you a lot, and you want your theory to buy you as much as possible, because it means you only have to learn a limited number of principles, and you can explain a very large number of phenomena. So, but there’s the attraction of the inappropriate collapse of the complex landscape into its simplified counterpart, whereby you rid yourself of complexity that’s actually necessary and inevitable. What that means is that you couldn’t make progress employing your theory in a pragmatic way, but if you don’t ever test it in a way that it could be killed, you’ll never find that out. Right. And so, it’s very easy. In my new book, which is called Beyond Order, I wrote a chapter called Abandoned Ideology, and I’m making the point in there that it’s very tempting to collapse the world into, to collapse the world such that one explanatory mechanism can account for everything, and that it’s a game that intellectuals are particularly good at, because their intellectual function is not just about the And so, you can take something like power or sexuality or relative economic status or economics for that matter, or love or hate or resentment, and you can generate a theory that accounts for virtually everything, relying on only one of those factors. And that’s because virtually everything that human beings do is affected by those factors. And so, that’s the problem. Is it the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these? Is it the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these? So I would say the idea of you or the process of finding a simple explanation for another person’s perspective, is that it’s the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these. So I would say the idea of you or the process of finding a simple explanation for another wise more complex phenomenon, maybe could be linked to, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the word, are you familiar with Gigerenzer? Yes. So if you remember in his work, which by the way, I love the fact that he roots it in an evolutionary framework, I think that’s the most interesting thing about the work, is that it’s a very interesting work. Great. I actually had gone many years ago, his group had invited me to spend some time at the Max Planck Institute. And so he’s got the idea of fast and frugal heuristics, right? Yes. It’s a pragmatic theory, essentially. Exactly, because it basically says, look, economists think that before we choose a given car, we engage in these elaborate, laborious calculations because we’re seeking to maximize our utility, because otherwise we won’t pick the optimal car if we don’t engage in utility maximization. Exactly. Of course, while that’s a beautiful normative theory, it doesn’t describe what consumers actually do because you and I, when we chose our last car, we didn’t look at all available options and we didn’t look at all the options that we could find. We didn’t look at all the options that we could find. We didn’t look at all the options that we could find. We didn’t look at all the options that we could find. We didn’t look at all the options that we could find. We didn’t look at all the options that we could find. Of course, while that’s a beautiful normative theory, it doesn’t describe what consumers actually do because you and I, when we chose our last car, we didn’t look at all available options on all available attributes before we make a choice. Rather, we couldn’t. We couldn’t. There’s too many. Exactly. We use a simplifying strategy. And in the parlance of Giger Enzer, it would be a fast and frugal heuristic because we’ve evolved. I mean, if I sit there and calculate all of the distribution functions of what happens if I hear a wrestling behind me, the tiger will eat me before I finish all of the distributions, right? The calculations, all the distributions. Therefore, in many cases, when I deploy a fast and frugal heuristic, it makes perfect adaptive sense. But the downside of that, so to go back to your point, is that oftentimes I will apply a fast and frugal heuristic when I shouldn’t have done so. Right. So for certain complex phenomena, my innate penchant to want to seek that one causal mechanism is actually, in this case, suboptimal. Knowing when I should deploy the fast and frugal heuristic and when I should rely on more complex multifactorial reasoning is the real challenge here.