https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ajtnhtEg76k
I talked a little bit last time about what we were going to cover, but I didn’t get quite through it, so I’m going to finish that. For those of you who weren’t here last time, you can watch the lecture because it’s online. We stopped at the depth psychologists, really. Those are the psychoanalysts. Psychoanalysts are people who are concerned with… well, for a psychoanalyst, roughly speaking, you’re a collection of loosely integrated spirits. That’s one way of thinking about it, or subpersonalities. You’re not a unity, and those subpersonalities have their basis in… well, in all sorts of things, they might have their basis in past, especially traumatic experience, or in patterns of socialization that characterize your family, but they might also have their basis in fundamental biological motivational systems. So for example, a psychoanalyst would conceptualize anger, or perhaps sexual attraction, as a subpersonality. And the reason for that is that, well, you know what it’s like when you get angry? You get angry at someone you love, and first of all, at some level, you’re wishing harm. Now that might only be that you want to win the argument, and you want them to be nicely crushed while you do it. So there’s a desire that comes along with the anger, but there’s a lot of other things that happen too. So for example, if someone’s annoying you, even if you love them, the probability that at that moment you’re going to be able to easily access all the memories you have about how annoying they are, and have difficult time accessing the memories about how wonderful they’ve been to you is quite high. You know, and you know that, because sometimes you get angry with someone, you have an argument with them, and you sort of clue in later. You snap out of your more or less possessed state, and you think, yeah, well, you know, I really wasn’t taking the context into mind, and I was kind of harsh. And so then you think, well, who’s in control? And that’s the question the psychoanalysts are really interested in, and their answer is it’s not generally you. And so it’s very terrifying reading in some sense, because people like to think of themselves as masters of their own house, so to speak, and it’s just, it’s only vaguely true. And you know people, you know that too, because you make maybe New Year’s Eve resolutions, how you’re going to be a better person. I think one of the most common ones is, man, you’re going to hit the gym three times a week. It’s like, no, you’re not, actually. And so very few people do, and that’s partly because, well, it’s hard, and so you don’t want to do hard things, and the reason for that is because they’re hard, so it doesn’t take much explanation. But it’s also because you can’t just tell yourself what to do. And that’s annoying too, because life would be a lot easier if you could just say, okay, well, you know, sit down, study for two hours, don’t watch cats on YouTube or whatever it is that you’re watching. And no, no, no, that isn’t what happens. You sit there and you study for a while, and then you know you’re thinking about cats, and the next thing you know you’re watching Haunted Mansions in London or some damn thing. You know, so, and it’s a scary idea in some sense, because if you think, well, if you’re not really master of your own house, you know, if you don’t have yourself under full voluntary control, and you certainly don’t, then what does? And you know, Freud is interesting in that regard, because he really talked about the motive power of fundamental motivational systems. Mostly for Freud it was aggression and sexuality, you know, and those are big motivators. Let’s make no mistake about it. And so he thought of you as the conscious part of your personality, maybe as the, it’s like the captain of a ship with a very unruly crew. It’s a nice metaphor, because of course the ship’s on the ocean, and the ocean can be very stormy, and so you can only sort of plot your course, and you have to work with what’s thrown at you, and then the unruly crew is, well, it’s all your drives. Drives is the wrong way of thinking about it. I like the psychoanalytic notion of subpersonality, because a subpersonality has a viewpoint, there’s things it wants and it plans. So it’s a living entity, it’s not some dead cognitive system, you know. So Freud was interested in some sense more about, I would say, the biological underpinnings of the subpersonalities, you know, because he was quite biologically oriented, and he realized that sexuality and aggression were very fundamental subpersonalities. And then there’s Jung, and Jung is much more terrifying than Freud, which is really saying a lot, because Freud’s quite terrifying. But Jung, he’s just terrifying beyond belief. For Jung, the subpersonalities that make you up are thousands and thousands of years old. They’re cultural constructions that are thousands and thousands of years old, and they have you in their grip. So for Jung, for example, one of the things he said, and I don’t remember where it was, I love this phrase, it’s so true, and you can think about this for like five years, and you can still think about it after that. One of the things Jung said was that people don’t have ideas. Ideas have people. And that’s really something to think about, because you know, just think about your own situation. So no doubt you have political views, and you think, I have political views. It’s like, well, no you don’t, because you share them with a lot of other people. So they’re certainly not yours. And not only that, they’ve had a very lengthy historical development far before you ever showed up, you know, so they’re rooted right at the depths of your culture. But then of course they’ve been elaborated by one philosopher or another extensively over the last two or three hundred years, and there’s this whole system of thought and poof, it inhabits your brain, and then you think, well I’ve got political views. It’s like, no, the political views have you. And that’s a very salutary thought, because it’s one of the ways to stop yourself from being possessed, because people get possessed all the time by ideas. Right? That’s what happened in Nazi Germany. That’s what happened in the Soviet Union. It happens everywhere all the time. And you might think, well possessed is a little strong, but no it’s not actually. It’s a very nice, it’s a metaphor obviously, but it’s the right kind of metaphor, because a body of ideas like political ideas, they’re a living thing, you know. They’re not some dead, dusty words on a bookshelf somewhere. They’re an integral part of a dynamic society, and the motive force those ideas have motivates you. You’re in their grip. And so you can tell when you’re talking to someone who’s completely possessed by an idea system or an ideological system, because they’ll just bore you to death unless you happen to believe exactly the same thing. So they’ll spout out a few of their fundamental belief axioms, and then you can identify which system they’re part of, and then they just speak in cliches from that point onward, and you can predict everything they’re going to say if you know the axioms of the system. So it’s very non-authentic speech, and that would be a way that say someone like Rogers or Abraham Maslow, who were humanists of the 1960s, might talk about it, because the person isn’t speaking from the depths of their own experience or from even their embodied knowledge. You know, they’re just mouthpieces for abstract ideas. And so it’s very frightening to realize the extent to which you can be the mouthpiece for abstract ideas, you know. And it’s actually one of the dangers of becoming educated, especially in a mass system like the university system, because a lot of what happens to you when you come to university is that you’re fed a set of predigested ideas. I suppose that’s one way of thinking about it, you know. And it’s very easy for you to think, well, those are now your ideas. They’re not. They’re not. The loss of ideas you have to earn, and if it’s a great idea, then you really have to earn it, because why should you just be able to come along and like pluck up a great idea? That’s not how things work. You have to earn things that are valuable. So anyways, the depth psychologists, man, they’re so good at that. It’s lovely to read them. And the problem too is with a lot of the people we’re going to talk about, it’s very difficult to summarize their work, you know, because often the devil’s in the details. So you might look at someone like Piaget is a good example, the constructivist that we talked about briefly. Man, the guy wrote dozens of books. You can’t just summarize those suckers. It’s not one coherent theory that you can boil down to ten axioms and then you can read it while you’re flying from Toronto to Montreal and poof, you’re a Piagetian psychologist. It doesn’t work like that. The people who formulated these theories were extremely intelligent and they were often great writers. So a lot of the knowledge is actually in the writing itself and not in what you can extract out from the gist. And most of the theorists, Freud, Jung it’s harder, but Freud, Rogers, people like that, you can extract out the gist of their theories and then you can, what would you say, you can stereotype it or you can caricature it and then you can point out how your caricature is observed and then you can feel like you’re even smarter than Freud. You know, you’re not. So it’s not a good idea and so these people should also be approached with respect because man they have so much to tell you. It’s so useful. Okay, so we talked about the depth psychologists, we talked about the constructivists, we didn’t talk about the humanists and the existentialists and the phenomenologists and a mouthful of words, you know, so let’s put a little bit of foundation under those. So if you’re a humanist, to be a humanist means really to be a creature of the enlightenment and a humanist thought in some sense, at least this is what the humanists think, they think of it as post-religious, you know, and they think of humanistic thought as putting the value of the human being at the centre of the cosmos in some sense, valuing the person as they are and then also valuing the person that they could be and promoting the pathways of development that would allow people to become what they could be as creatures that are valuable in their own right. So a humanist, for example, would be very skeptical of claims, so let’s say standard Christian claims and I use that example because the realm of ideas that these thinkers emerged out of was almost always Judeo-Christian and so, you know, the roots of their thinking are in those systems and you can’t understand their thinking without understanding that and so part of humanism was a rebellion against the idea that life on earth, so to speak, was of limited value because everything of any importance was going to happen in the afterlife after you die. So it’s like, no, it’s here and now, it’s right now that matters and, you know, life in the present is what’s important and you don’t need some kind of afterlife or some kind of belief in a transcendent reality in order to find value right here and now. So, you know, fine, there’s a lot of good things about that idea, you know, and the whole idea that you can improve yourself in some sense is a humanistic idea and most of you, I mean, how many of you believe that you can improve yourself? So is there anybody who doesn’t believe that, that’s willing to admit it? So usually people only don’t believe that if they’re very depressed or hopeless, but it’s not self-evident, you know. I mean, and in many cultures, you could think of medieval culture, for example, in Europe, where you were sort of stuck in your position, there was no real idea of self-improvement. You could try not to sin, but you weren’t going to get radically better in some way. You were just who you were and that was that. But that’s not the case for the humanists. Now, existentialists, they’re kind of a different kettle of fish. So you know, when Freud talks about psychopathology, because a lot of personality is about pathology, right, how person-alienists can go wrong, Freud kind of thinks of the normal person, roughly speaking, as healthy in their normality, but perhaps transformed into a pathological version of themselves by some sort of past trauma. And that might often be an abusive childhood, you know, or maybe a sexually abusive childhood, because you know, Freud talked a lot about that and it happens fairly frequently. So for Freud, all things considered, if you weren’t healthy, there was a reason for it. You know, something terrible had happened to you and you needed to come to terms with that terrible thing, however you might do that, and put yourself back together and then you could wander along being a healthy person. But the existentialists, that’s not how they think at all. They think the standard human being is pathological. And the reason they think that is because they think that self-conscious existence, also, the life of a creature that knows it’s bounded in time and space, right, knows it’s vulnerable to disease and illness and death and the loss of things that they love, and the disintegration of all things in some sense, is that’s enough of a problem to give you problems without having to have been abused by it. And so the existentialists view life itself as a problem of sufficient magnitude that it can destabilize you mentally merely by being aware of it. And so they also believe that often what people do as a consequence of that is flee from their own awareness. You know, so how do you deal with the fact that life is suffering? Well, you don’t think about it. Well, for an existentialist, that’s not a very good answer. And I would also say, generally speaking, for clinical psychologists, that’s also not a very good answer because the literature suggests pretty damn strongly that the harder you run from something you’re afraid of, the larger it becomes and the faster it chases you. So avoidance is generally a very bad strategy. Now it’s not always the case because sometimes if you can’t do anything about something, really, you can’t. Well, there’s not a lot of sense spending a lot of time planning and struggling against it, you know, and sometimes people are in genuinely hopeless situations, but often not. So I really like the existentialists, man. I think they’re – well, all the people that we’re going to talk about, their thinking is extraordinarily valuable. You know, it helps situate you in your own life. It helps clarify the nature of your relationship to other people in the world. It helps you lay out what your future could be if you were the creature that you could be. It’s really wonderful. Phenomenologists, they’re a tricky bunch. The fundamental phenomenologist was Martin Heidegger, who was also somewhat tangled up with the Nazis, you know, which was clearly not a good thing. And you know, people debate about whether or not you can separate out his philosophy from what tangled him up with the Nazis. I think you can, you know. So anyways, Heidegger wanted to take a fresh look at the nature of reality. So Heidegger’s idea was that we made a fundamental philosophical error way back when we were Greek, ancient Greek, roughly speaking, and that we started concentrating on the wrong elements of – he doesn’t really call it reality, he calls it being. So a phenomenologist is someone who’s concerned with being. And you might think, well, what’s the difference between being and reality? And the answer to that is it depends on how you define being and it depends on how you define reality. So Heidegger’s observation was that for modern people, roughly speaking, reality is sort of a de-animated material objective substrata. It’s dead in its essence, roughly speaking, and the things that are most real are precisely those things. And the thing that’s important about that is objective reality for all intents and purposes. But what Heidegger tried to point out is that it’s a choice in some sense. Because your knowledge is finite, because you’re fundamentally ignorant about all things, you have to decide that certain things are true and then act from that point. And you know, Heidegger’s point was there’s a lot of things that you can decide about at the very fundamental level of axiom. And so one of the things you can decide, for example, is whether or not the objective world is what’s more real or whether or not your lived experience is what’s more real. Now, you might think, well, what’s the distinction there? And I would say the distinction is probably something like watching someone in pain on a video and being in pain yourself. You know, so pain’s a good example of an element of being because it’s obviously you experience it within your own… it’s hard to talk about this because he uses different terminology. Pain is an element of your being. And it’s not something… the pain itself is not something that you can even conceptualize in objective terms. Like, you can measure it, you know, maybe your heart rate goes up when you’re in pain or something like that, or your facial expressions change. You know, so you can index it. But the indexes are not the phenomena. That’s hence phenomenology, right? And so the phenomenologists have built up an entire system of thinking predicated on the initial axiom that the best way to approach life is to assume that being is the fundamental reality rather than the objective as the fundamental level. And then you might think, well, why do people bother with that sort of thing? And part of it is, one of the… this is an existentialist claim. One of the consequences of developing the objective theory of existence was obviously all the amazing technology we have around us. And you know, great, thank God for that. Otherwise we’d be sitting outside freezing. But one of the consequences of that is once people established objective reality and then defined it as ultimately real, terrible questions of the meaning of life arose, you know. Like if the world, the universe is made out of nothing but dead matter, it’s eternally were nothing but a candle flash in the wind, the idea creeps into your mind that perhaps all the damn suffering isn’t worth it. Or to put it another way, you know, does your life really have any real meaning or is that just an illusion? Well Heidegger would say the reason that you have that problem is because you’re approaching the entire problem wrong. Clearly things have meaning. They just don’t if you make the hypothesis that what’s objective is ultimately real and everything else is merely a secondary consequence of that. So anyways, it’s complicated. It takes a while to get your head around it. The humanists and the existentialists and to some degree the phenomenologists, they all came out of, there was a variety of sources for their thought and I would say one of them is the clash between religion and science or between value and objective truth. They’re trying to rectify the division. And Piaget himself was trying to do some of that as well, so was Jung I guess. And the other thing is a lot of the existentialist and humanist work was post-World War II. And so, you know, after World War II happened with its immense catastrophes, of course people who were thinking about human nature were very interested in why such a thing could happen. And existentialism, at least as a psychological school, arose in part as a reaction to the horrors of World War II. It’s a very serious branch of psychology and it mostly characterized thinking in the 1950s before the hippies came along and made everything sweetness and light, which is more Wear Rogers and Maslow fit. So we’re going to talk about them a fair bit, the three different categories. It’s kind of a strange approach in some sense that this class takes because I talked to you about some psychologists in that period, but the people I talked to you mostly about they’re not technically psychologists. It depends on what you mean by psychologist after all. I talk a lot about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and also a lot about a Russian literary figure, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote a book called The Gulag Archipelago, which was one of the – there was a few cataclysmic events that brought the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union to a halt. You can argue about what they were, but one of them for sure was Solzhenitsyn’s publication of The Gulag Archipelago, which is a 2,700-page book that describes what it was like to be there and how many people died. And it’s a searing book. He won a Nobel Prize and he deserved it. I mean Solzhenitsyn, a remarkable person. He’s like the Dostoevsky of the 20th century and that’s really saying something. And Dostoevsky is another person I use a lot in that section. Both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche regarded themselves as psychologists fundamentally. And you know, it’s funny because when you think about scientists, you usually think about people who are conducting experiments, right? But then one of the things – and you’ll notice this if you think about it – a lot of you have taken a fair number of science courses of one form or another. And you know, a lot of what you’re taught when you’re taught how to do science is how to generate, you know, how to lay out an experiment properly, how to get the methodology right, how to do the analysis properly, maybe how to structure the revealing of your findings in proper scientific format, you know, and how to test a hypothesis. But one of the things that you’re never really told about is, well, how the hell do you generate the hypotheses to begin with? Because you know, really, that’s at least half the problem and it’s probably a lot more than half the problem. And so part of being a scientist is the ability to be a hypothesis generator, not just a hypothesis tester. Maybe you need to be both to be a true scientist, but maybe not. Maybe you can just generate extraordinary hypotheses. And it’s certainly the case that people like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were unbelievably good hypothesis generators. And so you know, their thinking in many ways underlies the entire development of thought, the sort of thought that you guys are going to encounter in university. Anyways, their thinking underlies the entire development of the edifice of, I would say, both scientific and non-scientific thought across the entire 20th century. And so it’s quite entertaining to go down there and, you know, wander around the roots of these sorts of things because you find out how things are linked together and why they’re linked together, how they developed, and what that means, and also what it means for you to have those ideas and why you have them and what role they play in your life. So okay, so after that, that’s pretty much, in some sense, you might think that’s where the clinical and philosophical part of the course ends. Now, I’m a clinical psychologist and most of the people who are great personality theorists were clinical psychologists. That explains to some degree why the first part of the course is philosophical because The thing about clinical psychologists and psychiatrists and medical doctors for that matter is that they’re not exactly scientists. They’re more like engineers. So what an engineer wants to do, an engineer might use scientific knowledge and, you know, good for them, they should. But really what they want to do is make something change. They want to build something. They want to transform something. They want to act on the world in a beneficial, generally, in a beneficial way. Well, the same thing is the case with the health domains. It’s like someone comes to you with a psychological problem. What you want to do is you want to make it better, and better is not a scientific category. So to the degree that you’re a practitioner, like you can say, well, it’s scientific because worse means abnormal. It’s like, that’s not right. You can make that case, but it’s shallow because there’s lots of times when you don’t consider normal healthy, you know. You consider exceptional healthy, right, or maybe you consider exceptional desirable, and desirable might even be better than healthy, right. So you can’t get out of the value domain when you’re trying to interact with people and sort out their lives. Because partly what you’re always asking is what’s wrong? What’s the matter? Why are you dissatisfied? Why are you suffering? Why aren’t you productive? Why do you fight with everyone? You know, why can’t you sleep at night? Why do you wake up screaming? You know? Why can’t you pursue anything that’s to your own benefit? Why do you hurt everyone that you know? You know, those are moral questions. And then the next problem is, okay, well, what are we going to do about it? What do you want? How would you like your life to look if it could look the way you wanted it to? And then how are we going to get from where you are to that? And those are all, they’re engineering questions in a sense, but above all, they’re ethical questions because they deal with how to act. So I don’t want to just slide over that because that’s generally what happens because physicians and clinical psychologists and say psychiatrists, even though they’re physicians, they like to think that what they’re doing is science and that’s not right. It’s informed by science, but that’s not the same thing. It’s particularly true with doctors because they’re not even trained to be scientists. So okay, so that’s that. So then the next part of the course, the last half, it’s pretty, it concentrates on two elements of personality theory. More modern elements, I would say, although not more valuable necessarily because of that. Partly very neurobiological because we’ve made a lot of strides in the last 50, 100 years, let’s say, in understanding the structure and the function of the brain. The things we don’t know about the brain, man, there are lots of things we don’t understand about the brain. We have no idea, for example, what its relationship is to consciousness except that more or less it seems necessary. So even that you can dispute to some degree because there are great case histories of people who were born with hydrocephalus and so that means that your skull basically fills with water. The famous case of that was a French guy who went for an MRI for God only knows what reason. It had nothing to do with what was eventually discovered but he only had 5% of his cortical tissue. His whole brain, his whole head was full of cerebral spinal fluid and the brain was just a little skin around the side of that. It was like a balloon and as far as they could tell there was nothing wrong with him. It’s like hmm, well isn’t that interesting? What the hell is all the rest of that brain for? You know and then you get the other issue like, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of, I can’t remember her name, I think it’s Peppered. She had a famous parrot, an African Grey, you can look it up, talking African Grey parrot. And that damn parrot, man, that thing could talk like a four year old kid way better than any chimpanzee. Full sentences, it seemed to know what it was doing, it’s like it’s a parrot, right? Its brain is this big. So how is that even possible? Okay, so there’s lots of things we don’t know about the brain, really, and it’s unbelievably complicated. But we have learned a lot of things that are interesting. We kind of understand the existence and the location of the fundamental reward and pain and anxiety circuits. That’s a big deal. Those are like discovering major continents, you know. We understand to some degree how people learn and under what conditions they learn. And we understand, I would say to some degree, what the fundamental motivations and emotions are. Now, those are not scientific categories, motivations and emotions. They’re linguistic categories, but we’re stuck with them. But we know a fair bit about their underlying neurobiological basis, and I want to take you through that in some detail, because, for a bunch of reasons. Partly because it provides a nice scientific underpinning to a lot of the hypotheses and presuppositions of the psychoanalysis. So for example, Freud hypothesized the existence of the id. Now there’s no id in your brain, but it doesn’t really matter because the id, the idea of the id is a functional category. It’s like a tool. But there are lots of id-like structures in your brain. One of them in particular is the hypothalamus and that thing. Human beings like to think that their really impressive cortical cap is the thing that’s in charge of things. Your hypothalamus, which is this little tiny thing that sits at the top of your spinal cord, man, that’s what’s running you. As long as you’re not hungry or not angry or not chasing after sexual excitement and not gambling and not addicted, so as long as you’re completely well fed and warm and comfortable, then you can think and you’re more or less in control. But as soon as any of those things go astray, it’s subcortical all the way. You can see this for example in conditions like anorexia. You can think of anorexia as a war between the cortex and the hypothalamus. And I’ll tell you then, the only time the cortex wins is when the anorexic dies. Because other than that, it’s the hypothalamus that wins all the time, which is why anorexics cannot stop themselves from binging. So they’ll cut their body weight down to say 75% of what it should be. And that’s hard. If you really… it’s not easy to starve yourself like that. But they’ll still binge like mad, you know, and eat a whole gallon of ice cream and two bags of bread. And they can’t stop themselves. And that’s because your hypothalamus would rather you didn’t starve to death. And if you’re not paying attention, if you’re not on top of the game, or maybe if you’ve been hurt recently and so your resources or your… what would you say? The negative emotion has been interfering with your cognitive capacity. hypothalamus will come up and grab you and say, man, you’re hungry and it’s off to the fridge with you. You know, so two in the morning you’re going to be eating everything in there in a kind of a daze and you’ll snap out of that and think, wow, what the hell was that? It was like, well, that’s the end, folks. And it’s no trivial thing and it’s a good thing too because if it didn’t tell you what to do all the time… like, think about how foolish you are. If you had to breathe voluntarily, how many days do you think you’d go through? It’s like, you’d wake up one day and an hour later you’d forget to breathe and then you’d be dead. So like, your brain doesn’t let you do anything important. It takes care of all that in the background, you know, because you’re just not that smart. I mean, you don’t know how to digest things, for example. You actually don’t know how you walk even though you can do it. So there are fundamental subsystems, some of them that aren’t even conscious, weirdly enough, even though they’re neurological. They’re doing all the heavy lifting and like, your cortex is along for the ride in some sense and it sort of thinks it’s in control, but yeah, no, not really. Okay, so we’re going to talk a fair bit about fundamental brain structures and the function of those structures because I like functional neuroanatomy. I don’t want to know just what the brain is made out of but I want to know what all the parts are doing. And so there’s difficult papers in there. Swanson, that’s a hard paper. And the paper by Gray, those are papers that were written by, I think, genius level neuropsychologists and you know, they put their whole life’s work into a paper and so you know, you’re going to pick it up and you’re going to think, wow, this is hard. It’s like, yeah, some genius spent 30 years writing it, it’s going to be hard. But they’re so informative, they’re worth the struggle, if that’s the sort of thing you want to struggle with. So that’s the biological end and then there’s the psychometric end. Psychometrics, very unpopular field of psychology, even among psychologists, and the reason for that is that psychometricians, I guess, have actually discovered things and people hate what they’ve discovered. And no wonder. So for example, it was people who do psychometrics, engineers actually, who entered psychology, who discovered intelligence. Technical psychometric intelligence, IQ. And people will tell you, there’s lots of kinds of intelligence. It’s like, no there aren’t. That’s wrong. And it’s wrong in this way. The statistics that psychologists use were invented by the people who discovered IQ. And that means every single thing that a psychologist has ever claimed that’s been verified in some way using some statistical process has been verified the same way that IQ was verified. And so you don’t get to say, well the IQ stuff’s invalid, without saying all of psychology and a lot of other fields is invalid too because it’s the same methods of proof. And it’s even worse than that because the relationship between IQ and life success is way stronger than the relationship between almost any other psychological phenomena and almost anything else. So for example, for you guys, even though you’re all far above average in intelligence because otherwise you wouldn’t be here, like at least 85th percentile. And that’s something to think about because a lot of that is determined by biological factors. So a huge chunk of the reason that you’re here is because you won part of the genetic lottery, so like hooray for you. And no one screwed it up too badly as you were growing up. But even among you guys, the correlation between your intelligence and your grade point average is quite high, even though it’s a truncated sample, right, because you’re all pretty bright. And even though there’s a lot of error in the grade measurement system because it doesn’t only index intelligence, it’s still very powerful. And so if you controlled for conscientiousness and other elements of personality, which you can do statistically, in 20 years 10 percent of the people in this room who have the highest IQs will have the highest income, virtually certainly, unless some terrible thing happens to them. You can overcome it to some degree if you’re really hard working, and that’s conscientiousness, but that’s also a trait which seems to have quite a heavy biological loading. So that’s the sort of thing that people hate about psychometricians, because they come up with these facts, and they’re facts that are really dismal. And I can give you an example. So you guys all have an IQ of over 115, roughly speaking. 100 makes you about as smart as the typical high school graduate. You know, 115, that’s kind of the low end for managing the rigors of a fairly high-end university. You know, 115, you’re still going to have a lot of trouble. You’re going to have to work like mad. So, but, okay, so 150. Now that’s one standard deviation above the mean. One standard deviation below the mean is an IQ of 85. Now there’s just as many people out there in the world who have an IQ of 85 as there are people who are able to go to college. Okay, so then you think, what can you do if you have an IQ of 85? Well here’s one answer. So the US Army has been doing psychometric testing for a hundred and some years. For a whole bunch of reasons, but they’ve done a lot of the basic science, you know. And one thing about the US Army is they like to have recruits. And you can understand why, because do you really want to go off somewhere and get shot? And the answer to that is generally no. So it’s not like there are people lining up to get into the Army. Even in peacetime it’s hard to get people. And also the Americans have used the US Army as a, you know, imagine you have an underclass of people who aren’t doing very well, which is the case in every society, and you want to boost some of them up, you know, into something resembling the middle class. You can do that fairly effectively by inducting the young men in particular into the Army, because they get some training, you know, they get some discipline, and maybe they can kind of clamber up into the middle class. And so there’s a lot of policy reasons, A, why the American Army, armed forces, want people, and B, you know, just to be in the Army, but also for social reasons, positive social reasons. So they’re not likely not to let you in. The consequence of a hundred years of IQ testing was the establishment of a law in the United States. You cannot induct anyone into the Army, you cannot accept them into the Army if they have an IQ of less than 82. That’s 10% of the population. So you think about that, that means one person in 10 cannot do anything that is of positive value in an organization that’s rather complex, but not more complex than other organizations, that’s desperate for people. Nothing they can offer has positive value. It’s worse to have them in the Army than not to have them there at all. Really, now, you know, that’s a terrible way of putting it, but it’s a horrible statistic, because it also means, you know, if you think about the Army as roughly equivalent to the world in some sense in terms of its complexity, it means that there’s 10% of the population who just cannot really exist well in a complex cognitive society. So when you might say, well, you know, something should be done about that, it’s like, good luck. People have been trying to do something about that for a very long time. Like, there’s been billions, if not trillions of dollars poured into attempts to do cognitive remediation in the United States. Well, not to mention that we actually have an education system, and the goal is actually to make people smarter. So we’re going to talk a lot about psychometrics. And the thing about the psychometricians is they’re basically brute force statisticians. In some ways, they’re a-theoretical, you know, and they use computer power, roughly speaking, and advanced statistical techniques to look at large data sets and extract out patterns. You know, I was-I hated the Big Five when I first came on it. I thought, oh god, this is boring. It’s like, there’s no theory behind it. It’s not prescriptive. It’s not interested in any literary manner. Like, it doesn’t have a good story. It came out of-it’s so dry. But you know, it works. And that’s how it is. So we’re going to spend a lot of time on psychometrics. And you know, my lab too has done a fair bit of work over the last ten years elaborating out the Big Five model. So one of the things we’ll talk about is the Big Ten model, and what it does, roughly speaking, is break each of the five into two, we call them, aspects. And they’re pretty interesting. Like, they predict political belief, for example, quite nicely. So conservatives tend to be more orderly, which is part of conscientiousness, and less creative, less open. And liberals tend to be more open and less conscientious. Which a cynic would say that’s why they’re so into income redistribution. Because they actually don’t work. So you know, the conservatives work like mad, and the liberals say, hey, hey, how about some of that money? You know, and the system’s unfair. And the conservatives say, well, no, we worked hard, and we’re not giving you any. Well, you know, they both have flaws in their theories. The liberals, by the way, make very good entrepreneurs. Like, no, let me rephrase that. Most entrepreneurs are liberal in their political outlook. And that’s because they’re high in openness. So the way it really seems to work is that liberal-minded people start businesses, and conservatives run them. So they’re necessary for one another. Yeah, well, because the liberals, being open, they’re off to the next idea. And they don’t want to attend to the damn details. They get bored by that. They’re not particularly orderly, you know. But once you’ve established a process and it works, you need someone to watch to make sure the process keeps working. Well, that’s not very interesting if you’re a creative person. Okay, so that’s basically that. That’s the course. So now, what have we got for time here? So I think what I’ll do now is I’m going to tell you a story, and you’re going to think it has absolutely nothing to do with what we’ve been talking about. But that’s okay. So I picked this weird picture. It’s a picture of Jonah, biblical character. It’s a 2500-year-old story. So that’s a pretty old story. And generally, if a story is 2500 years old, it’s a lot older than that. You know, it just happened to be written down 2500 years ago. But that long ago, it wasn’t like there were novels and books and that you could find 50 different stories at your fingertips. There were a few stories and everyone knew them, and God only knows how long they’d been around, but it was a very, very, very, very long time. So this was written down 2500 years ago, but we don’t really have any idea how old it is. In some sense, it’s almost infinitely old, at least on any human scale. Now, you see this picture, and what you see is this thing that, what would you call it? It’s a medieval idea of a whale is what it is. You know, and you might think, well, that isn’t really what a whale looks like. And that’s kind of right, but a medieval whale wasn’t the whale that we have. Like whale in medieval times meant large, terrifying underwater thing. You know, and so maybe that was, maybe a giant squid was a whale, and a whale was a whale, and a shark was a whale. You know, the category’s not the same. So that kind of accounts for the, that in pure ignorance is what accounts for the kind of strange mythologized representation. But it’s still a representation of something, it’s just a little generalized. Now what he’s doing is vomiting Jonah up onto dry land. So, and you think, that’s pretty damn weird. How many of you have seen Pinocchio? That’s a lot, eh? How many of you haven’t? Really, you haven’t seen Pinocchio? What kind of parents did you have, anyways? Okay, well you remember in Pinocchio that Pinocchio’s father’s stuck in a whale, eh? And then Pinocchio has to go down there and rescue him. And one of the things you didn’t notice when you were watching Pinocchio is just how daft that is. There you are, sitting there, you’re watching a puppet go down into the ocean to rescue his father from a whale. And you think, why did that make sense? It’s like, well, so that’s interesting, right? That’s interesting. Why does that make sense? Why does that make sense? Because it doesn’t make any sense. But see, that’s a good example of the grip of an archetypal idea. Because an archetypal idea is a very deep and old idea that makes sense to you, even though if someone points out to you that you believe it, which you more or less do while you’re watching the movie, you think, oh yeah, it’s really weird that I believe that. And that isn’t a puppet going down into the ocean to rescue his father from a whale either, just so you know it. It’s a drawing of a puppet going down into the ocean to rescue his father from a whale. So it’s like divorced from reality in all sorts of ways. But what’s so interesting is you go into the theatre and watch something like that, if someone taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, do you know what you’re doing? You say, why don’t you shut up and let me watch the movie? Right? You don’t notice, oh yes, I’m very peculiar. I’m a very peculiar thing sitting here watching this and not noticing how strange I am. You know, and so, well, that’s partly why I’m going to tell you this story, because it’s true, even though it isn’t. You know, and that’s a funny thing. I had a very, very strange professor at the University of Alberta. He died a few years ago. He got on a bus, I think it was in Winnipeg, and he never got off the bus and no one ever saw him again. So he had been a prison psychologist. He worked in the maximum security prison in the University of Alberta, so who knows, maybe he met one of his old clients. You know, it’s possible, but it’s very strange, very strange ending. Anyways, one time we were talking about fiction, you know, and he said fiction is a lie that can tell you the truth. That’s a very interesting way of thinking about it, you know, because you read fiction and you know, it’s true, but it’s not, obviously, because it’s not really about a thing that actually happened. But it’s more than that in some ways, because if it’s good fiction, it’s about a whole bunch of things that happen sort of like that. Right? It’s a distillation. It’s like someone tells you a long story, and then, you know, you talk to your partner and they ask you, what was that all about? And then you tell them in two sentences what it was about. You boil it down to the gist, right? Well, a really good story is the gist of something. And some of the really old stories, the really weird ones, like Jonah and the Whale, for example, which, as I said, is told to some degree in the story of Pinocchio, they’re the gist of a lot of things. And people have been boiling those damn stories down for a very, very, very, very, very, very long period of time. Thousands of people over thousands of years. And they come up with these weird stories that people remember. And then people think, well, they’re real. It’s like, yeah, they are, but they’re not real the way a scientific story is real. It’s a different kind of real. So here’s the story of Jonah. So it’s an old Jewish story. There’s probably a variant of it in the Koran, but I don’t know that variant, and maybe there isn’t. Anyways, Jonah lives in 500 BC, and God has a chat with him one day, and he says, look, Jonah, there’s this city, Nineveh, and the people there, you know, they’re really not on the straight and narrow. And things are going to go to hell in a handbasket very rapidly if someone doesn’t do something about that. So I think that you should go to Nineveh, and you should tell the king and all the people that are there that, you know, really, they’re just not doing the right thing. And Jonah, being a perfectly intelligent person, says, you want me to go to a city, and you want me to tell the king, like this authoritarian guy who has absolute power over everything, that there’s something wrong with what he’s doing, that all of his citizens are corrupt. That’s what you want me to do. And Jonah says, there’s no way I’m doing that, because as I said, he’s a smart guy. So he runs off, and he goes to this town, and as he’s running off, he rents a boat more or less, and it’s a big boat, and there’s fishermen on it, and they’re going to like row him somewhere, God can’t find him, which is not going to be an easy thing. And so God, of course, can’t be fooled by such relatively poor strategic choices, because he’s omniscient and all that, and so he’s out on the water, Jonah, and there’s the fishermen there, and then God calls up this big storm. And the fishermen are shorting out about this, because they’re going to swamp the boat, and then they’re all going to die, and they’re not that happy about that, so what they decide to do is throw everything overboard so that the boat is lightened. That doesn’t help much, because the storm gets worse, and so then all of them start praying. They all have different gods, so you know, it’s like a little god competition. One fisherman talks to one god, another fisherman talks to another god, and nothing’s happening. So Jonah happens to be asleep in the hold of the ship. Now he’s already told them that he’s been running from his god, and so they think, ha, we better go wake up Jonah, because maybe he’s the guy that’s causing all the trouble. So they go down there and they wake him up, and they ask him about his god, and he says, well my god made the heavens and the earth, and their gods, they weren’t doing anything that magnificent, so they’re pretty freaked out about this. And so they tell Jonah, what the hell are you running away from this guy for? It’s not a good idea. And Jonah says, yeah, yeah, I’m sure it’s my fault that this storm has come up, so why don’t you just throw me over? And they say, well we can’t really do that, because you know, you shouldn’t run away like that, but you’re not a murderer or anything, we can’t just toss you over. And so they decide to try to row to shore, but God’s not having any of that, so he raises up a big storm and it’s getting worse and worse, and finally the fishermen say, oh, you know, over you go. And Jonah’s into that because he knows he’s a bad guy. And so a whale swallows him. Now you think, hmm, that’s probably not exactly right, because first if a whale swallowed you, then you’d be dead, and it was probably a shark anyways. It’s not like you’re going to be thriving down there. It’s not a big cavern like, you know, the Pinocchio whale. It’s solid, and there’s no oxygen, and so you’re dead. But that isn’t what happens. Jonah’s in the whale, and he’s kind of freaked out by this, because now he’s in a whale and there’s a storm and God’s angry at him, so the first thing he does is pray and tell God what an idiot he is and that he’d like to be forgiven. So the whale zips up to shore and vomits him onto the beach, which is the very, very undignified mode of arriving anywhere. So that’s the Jonah story. And then of course Jonah picks himself up and he thinks, yeah, yeah, you know, that wasn’t so good. I think maybe I’m going off to Nineveh to tell the Ninevites or whoever they were that they’re just not living properly, because that’s a lot better than making God angry, you know, because what with the storms and the fishermen and the whales and all that. So then he goes off to Nineveh and, you know, he tells them what’s going on and it seems to more or less work. So that’s a very interesting story. And you think, well, how did people believe that? And one question might be, well, do you believe that story? And then you think, well, no. But then you think, well, maybe that’s a more complex question than you might think, because it turns out that I believe the Pinocchio story. And you say, well, no, I didn’t really believe it. And then I would say, well, it kind of depends on what you mean by believe, doesn’t it? Because you watched it and while you were watching it, man, you were into it, you understood it, you didn’t want it to be disrupted, you followed it. So it’s like, did you believe it? No, you were like a four-year-old skeptic sitting there thinking, well, you know, puppet, bail, no, it doesn’t add up. You’re not. You’re acting out your belief in it by being engaged in it. And if someone taps you on the shoulder and wakes you up 30 years later, 20 years later, you say, oh no, I don’t believe that. You know, it’s kind of remarkable what you believe. And how many of you are Star Wars aficionados? No, you won’t admit it, will you? Yeah, but there’s lots of you in here, I know. And so that’s all mythology. It’s all mythology. You know that, of course, the person who, what was his name, the guy who came up with the Star Wars idea, Lucas. Lucas was a student of Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell was a psychologist slash mythologist. And the Star Wars stories are updated mythology, just like Harry Potter and all the other things that capture people’s imagination. So you bloody well do believe this. And there’s a reason for it too. Now what time is it? Well, we’ll stop there. I’ll tell you the reason the next time we meet.