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Joseph Henrich

lines on the record: 124
first: 2025-03-12
most recent: 2025-03-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, the big thing is this book on collective brains, so I'm gradually working through that. One of the ideas that I really am excited about in this book is that we evolve to think in collectives. There's this assumption that psychologists have had that understand human decision-making and how our mind solves problems is that we should put people by themselves in experiments and see how they do. But real human societies, hunter-gatherers, they actually work in groups. And when we want to solve a problem, the first thing we want to do is check with our friends or ask other expert members of the community. So it's the idea that we think collectively and solve problems collectively in a kind of naturally distributed brain. And Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, for example, have argued and shown with various lines of evidence that many of the sort of irrational biases we have mitigate or disappear entirely when we solve problems as groups. So it's almost like we have”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so what we know from other species is that lots of animals use tools, and particularly chimpanzees use tools. So we can assume tools in the common ancestor. Now, what we see in the paleoanthropological record is the increasing use of stone tools. And these are pretty simple stone tools. You can see a cutting edge there, but not very much fancier than that. And then fire is a lot of animals are afraid of fire, and they have to run from wildfires and stuff like that. So whatever your story about humans is you have to overcome the fear of the fire in order to tame it. Probably humans first found wildfire and somebody approached the fire instead of running away, which is the usual thing to do. got some of it and then put it to use i guess yep so”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, one thing to keep in mind is that most human societies over most of human evolutionary history didn't get to the movement. So, this is one particular group of humans. And one of the things we talked about earlier in this conversation was the cultural evolution of epistemology. So it was the improvement in what constitutes evidence, what constitutes a good argument that allows us to get to science and accumulate this kind of knowledge to do these kinds of things. So I see that as part of a continuous trajectory, but it's just that we have new cognitive tools.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But maybe the AI world you're imagining is different than the one I'm imagining, but I still think that people are going to figure out what problems we need to solve unless we're just going to tell the AIs to figure out what the problems are and then solve them. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess one of the things I'm trying to say is that the minds that might lead us into the new world might not be the ones that have the highest IQ because once you're sort of augmented with AI and all these kind of technological aids we have, the specialized thing that leads someone to do something creative, probably not going to be the same abilities that did it in 1910. Yeah.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So the first thing that we need to do, though, is to zoom back. Know in the IQ test, they ask you to remember digits backwards. I'm not sure how useful remembering lists of digits backwards. It was in a previous world where we had to write everything down and remember a lot of stuff. In some sense, we're interfacing with our technology and we've got to figure out how do we, what are the set of cognitive abilities which is going to make people best able to solve problems. And like we talked about, it's even the case that the most creative people aren't the highest IQ people.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's right. Because the assumption, the sort of model that people seem to carry around their heads is that humans have done all these things because of our individual brain power, when really it's been the power of cultural evolution and a network of minds gnawing away of problems over long periods of time and gradually accumulating not just the obvious tools, but also the cognitive tools for addressing these things. Yeah.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, all that any convergence is completely independent because I haven't really spent much time at all. I mean, I've gone back after people said your work is kind of like Hayek. I went back and read some Hayek. I did read the fatal conceit in graduate school, but aside from that, I didn't read very much. And then same thing with Adam Smith. I mean, I've tackled the wealth of nations and I eventually read the theory of moral sentiments, but it was pretty far into the process. I had become, I had picked up on themes, they developed before I knew they had developed them.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in my own work, for example, we've measured cousin marriage across different populations and shown it correlates with runs of homozygosity in the genes. Something like polygyny can be revealed by looking at the ratio, the variance in Y chromosome, stacks chromosomes. Fire probably has some, we probably have some special genetic adaptations for dealing with the toxins in fire. So if you want to know when humans got fire and you see the gene that gives us immunity to toxins in fire, then you can infer the fire is older than that, right?”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's a series of different networks. So David Reich and I, for example, are always talking about how to, I mean, we want to read culture from the genes. So if humans have had a long history of gene culture co-evolution and we want to understand what Paleolithic populations were doing, we might be able to see imprints of it in the genes.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the way we silo science is a big problem, and especially in the social science, I think it's even a bigger problem. One of my experiences, so I've been a professor of anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology, and just even the standards of evidence and what constitutes good research and how you tackle a problem really varies. So the academic disciplines are like different cultural worlds, different tribes, and just pulling the best from them has kind of been my approach.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I try to implement the ideas of the collective brain. So in my lab at Harvard, I have postdocs and graduate students with backgrounds in evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, economics. I mean, some of my favorite collaborators are economists. And we're just bringing ideas from very different places. across the social sciences and even the biological sciences, we're often trying to explain the same kind of phenomena, economic decision-making, cooperation, things like ethnicity. Why does it exist, stuff like that.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess the point, I mean, obviously he's a special individual, although there's a He did spend the whole second half of his career trying to show why quantum mechanics was wrong. So his Brownie in motion paper is foundational in quantum mechanics. But then he decides, you know, God doesn't play dice with the universe and he doesn't like this stochastic nature of quantum mechanics, which is, you know, More or less prove true, and it's part of our modern technology and stuff like that. And he spends a whole second half of his career fighting it. So that's a case where his intuitions didn't serve him well. And he turned out to be wrong for decades.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the same equation as Einstein, but he doesn't give it as radical an interpretation as Einstein does. He was thinking of the equations as kind of fudge factors trying to make the math work. So there was an almost simultaneous invention of special relativity, and the ideas were all circulating. And Einstein happened to be in a place which allowed him to put all those things together. As a patent class,”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, I mean, I definitely sometimes I'm interpreted as saying that there are no genetic differences among individuals. Definitely think there are genetic differences among individuals that affect their likelihood. But I think when we take the individual, we often import into our thinking about them the person's life history. So for example, Einstein, when he was a patent clerk, so he wasn't succeeding as an academic, and his friends got together in something called the Olympian Academy, they called themselves, which was just a group of like five people who would get together and they would read the interesting books at the time. And if you look at the books that they read, and historians have done a lot of work on this, all the major ideas that go into special relativity were read and processed by the Olympia Academy before they do it. So the idea that, you know, people think the time is relative. Well, people were kind of talking about that. And they were talking about multiple dimensions and like Unrepoint Corree at the same time comes up.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And part of this is that people have to build trust, probably, before we start sharing ideas. And we're more likely, and the more different someone is from us, the more you need that trust. So some of the research suggests that this effect is even bigger when places are more culturally different. And this is interesting because they're probably more valuable to each other when they're more culturally different, but that's then the FaceTime and being in the same place is even more valuable. So that's the kind of direction I'm going. And I also, I'm not satisfied that I still think that there should be exactly what you said, which is that the internet should have caused more innovation. I'm just not satisfied that we fully determine the best way to figure that out.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's something I'm really interested in figuring out. And one thing that I'm still, I don't have a full answer to this question, but one thing that is clear is that there's something special about face-to-face interactions. So something like whether even in the 21st century, whether two cities have direct long-haul flights between them or direct flights between them increases the flow of ideas between those places. But we know that these places are connected by the internet, whereas that effect doesn't seem as good.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. So polycentricity, there should be lots of different competition amongst these groups, no single funding sources, lots of different priorities. One thing I point out in this book I'm working on is that scientific papers tend to be more impactful when the authors are more from more diverse societies. But interestingly, people are biased to work with people from their own society. So what we actually do is different than what would maximize innovation.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I do think I'm interested in the cultural evolution of epistemologies. So societies have varied over time in what counts as good evidence and what counts as a good argument. So one of the psychological changes that we see emerging in Europe compared to other places is how important is what the ancients say? So in lots of societies, you're really, if someone says something and you can say Aristotle or Confucius didn't believe that, then it's like, oh gosh, I guess I'm sunk. Whereas at some point, Europeans decided, actually, who cares what Aristotle thought? We know a lot more than he did. So this is a big epistemological change. And then the emphasis on empirical evidence in science is not something you find in earlier traditions within Europe. And it's quite variable across different societies. So you should think of it as a very standards by which we count a good argument and good evidence is it's self-culturally evolved.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, you mean how or what we're up to is different? Well, I mean, we're trying to apply science, which has been very successful in all these different areas. So, you know, evidence, and we all put out our arguments and we go through the process, and some evidence is better than others. And, you know, that's our epistemology.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So I would say that the lesson from Secret is not to disregard it, but just to be cautious because we could be dismantling things that are really important for the structure of society. And you shouldn't do that. You shouldn't just dismiss valuable cultural practices as the relics of a medieval age or the relics of a pre-enlightened age or something like that. So ritual is a good example because rituals seem to have real psychological benefits and binding people in community and helping develop self-regulation. But it's easy to be an atheist like me and say, our rituals are stupid. We got to stop doing them. It turns out they're doing a bunch of stuff. And if you don't want to lose that stuff, you got to figure out another solution.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't think I have strong feelings on this. I mean, I'm always focused on trying to understand the process of cultural evolution, and it is true that people often resist cultural change that in retrospect we think is good. But of course, when you begin to make cities, you lead to all kinds of epidemic diseases. So if you had anticipated that, you might have worked on some of the public health procedures before you built the cities. So foresight can be good.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you know, the Roman Empire didn't say, you know, we got to redo everything. Why not adapt democracy and we could have a republic? Nobody does that.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that seems to be true of political units, but in principle, you could have at least some renewal processes. So democracy potentially provides a renewal process, although there are things like the institutions that the government builds that are hard to renew. So like one simple political idea is I think when you create a new department, it should have the same thing that cells have, where at a certain time they time out. And you got to make a new one. And that's because just the way human bureaucracies institutions work is they kind of corrode from the interior, from the inside, just the way cancer spreads in a cell. So you just got to kill it and make a new one. So we could institute that. But I guess the idea hasn't quite caught on yet. I mean, there are bits and pieces of it around, so it's not like it's unused.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I think the answer to that is yes. The one way that countries or whatever the political institution is could address that would be doing this thing that I've variously called like domesticating the competition. So sports teams constantly renew themselves by competing. Firms live and die and renew themselves over time. Like you said, companies will start off being super great and then they get too big and then they get kind of inefficient and then eventually they disappear. None of them last forever.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maxes out, then we'll be very, you'll see variation among different groups in terms of the number of babies they produce, right? And this thing unfolds in demographic timescale. So we're not going to see it for a few generations, but there'll be some group somewhere that will be producing more babies than everybody else. The reason why I think religion is the likely one is because, you know, people do things because they think God wants to do it. And if people come to think that God wants them to have more babies because it's a way of worshiping him or getting to heaven or whatever the religious configuration is then. That'll be a group that produces more babies. I mean, Catholics were defying the demographic transition for a while. They just. Seem to have stopped. Right.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, from a cultural evolutionary perspective, this is relatively new, right? So the demographic transition is only really like late 19th century. Lots of the world is just getting hit after 1970. And we also have things like rising female labor force participation, which is going to stifle it, rising female education. And so once that stuff...”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I definitely take the declining fertility pretty seriously because especially if you're like a collective brain guy like me, just having fewer people is going to be a big problem. And I think that there will be spread of ideologies or religions or something which are pronatalist. And those groups will have a big advantage in cultural evolution because a community that is pro-natalist tends to produce more pronatalist babies. And so, I mean, Christianity spread using that. Mormonism spread in the 19th century using that trick. So I just feel like where cultural evolution is going to find the combination and there's going to be some pronatalist groups spreading.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's really creating a new third unique thing. It's got a bunch of weird elements, but Japanese law, despite being the same as the US, operates very differently. So unlike Americans, Japanese don't tend to sue each other, and they tend to use mediation and things like that, even though the superficial law is pretty similar. So I do think there is creation of novelty which could be useful. But yeah, in general, I worry about the loss of novelty I also should say that I think that the sort of impersonal world of impersonal institutions and where it's psychology is quite fragile. So, for example, in the US, in rural areas, you see moral universality declining over the last, since 2008. This is based on John Heitz, YourMorals.org data. And so there's an increasing difference in the morality of urban areas versus rural areas in the U.S.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I am worried about that because just the destruction of languages. So we're losing languages left and right. English has a particular form that you don't find in lots of languages. So that's just an example of the kind of cultural diversity we're losing. Yeah, so that's definitely a worry. I do think that we're getting new variants. So if you look at, so Japan adopts a lot of weird institutions”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we take a questionnaire. This is a technique developed by my postdoc, Muhammad Atari. We take a psychological questionnaire that's been validated. It's in English. And we want to get an equivalent in ancient Chinese. So we run it through a kind of semantic similarity comparison, and we look for quotes from the ancient Chinese corpora that match each sentence in the English corpora. And then we rebuild the questionnaire in ancient Chinese. So that's our psychological measure for something like individualism or collectivism or moral universalism. And then we take each book or each paragraph in each book, and we do a comparison cosine similarity comparison between the two sets of text there. And that allows us to stamp each paragraph with a measure of individualism, for example. And then we do that for the entire corpora. And this allows us to track psychological change across space and time in China. And then we can correlate...”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we have laid Imperial China something called the Gazetiers, which were produced across prefectures, and they had a stylized content, so this is the same genre, thousands of books, and then we have about seven thousand books going back two thousand years in Chinese history. And the techniques that AI is allowing us to do is to get measurements of psychology from the texts”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this gives me a chance to tell you something we've been working on. So we were talking about the kinship hypothesis, the idea that kinship intensity affects psychology. And when I presented the ideas that are in the weirdest people in the world, I get hard times sometimes from historians who will have some kind of very European specific story about why this happened that has to do with European royalty or coal or something like that. And so my move is to not try to get into the weeds and start reading Latin text, but to go test it somewhere else. So if it's true that kinship intensity should work like this, then we should be able to test it somewhere else. So we have a large corpus, two different corpus from China.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if they had gotten to any scale. But we know from modern societies there are groups, for example, in the Amazon that have root-based agriculture that wouldn't leave any archaeological record.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't have a clear picture of that. It is the case that the Holocene was a particularly long stretch, a particularly long interglacial. There were some long interglacials, but the soonest one before that was 120,000 years ago. Other than that, they were getting broken up. I sometimes wonder if we may someday figure out that there were actually a little bit of agriculture. And it would have all been destroyed by the ice age, right? So it's not clear that there would be any heritage of it left. So we would have to find some remnants of some... Domesticated crops.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Places like the Aleutian Islands, the west coast of California, we have lots of ethnographic evidence, and there was no agriculture there. So, yeah, so just putting together all these different lines of evidence help us develop a picture. I wouldn't want to bank everything on the Hadza. Of course, we can't do experiments with some of those groups, but we can see whether the HADSA look like these other hunter-gatherer groups.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is unique. Well, that's always a concern, and it's especially a concern when you're studying hunter-gatherers, because a lot of the hunter-gatherers that are left in the world today are places where agriculturalists couldn't easily move to. So that's something we're thinking about all the time. The ways around that are to go to places where agriculturalists didn't go or couldn't go. So we have a lot of good ethnographic history on people in Australia. And then we have the Arctic populations, which, you know, big sections of Paleolithic Europe were probably kind of like northern Canada is today. So at least environmentally, it's not crazy because, you know, Ice Age Europe.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, my sense is it replicates quite well. So we published our paper in 2010. And in late 20s, Armin Fock is an economist and a bunch of others, Ken Becker, Ben Anke published a paper where they measured economic preferences in 80,000 people around the world. And that just showed big variation in things like patience.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but so the question is Do social interactional traits operate the same way as these things? If you have ethnic enclaves, then you're going to get low trust in those ethnic enclaves. You get things like the mafia, right? So, you don't want that. But if you had an immigration policy that distributed people, and in a high trust society, you benefit by being higher trust because you can do things like collaborate and start companies and stuff, which you have to be high trust to do that. Otherwise, you don't do it in a very effective way. So there is a pressure for low trust people to become more high trust. But if you're in mostly high trust people, there's not an incentive for you to move down. So in social interactional traits are different than things like food types.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, I think that the spaghetti example, or the pizza spaghetti, both good examples is a great thing, right? Because American food is a fusion of cuisine from lots of societies, and that leads to quite good food. You see the same thing. You can see music. So things like jazz have African rhythms in them. And so rock and roll is along that lineage of.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The strength of these cultural traits seems to go down by an order of magnitude each generation. So the second generation, you can still see that where they came from, but they're a lot more like the majority culture than their parents. And then it goes down another order of magnitude. Yeah, so you just have to do more work essentially to assimilate people and culturate them. But the potential value of having diverse ways of thinking, Different ideas can be really valuable, I think.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So we have a paper under review right now in which we show that from the 1850 roughly to 1940, a big driver of US innovation, both equality and quantity of patents, is the cultural diversity of counties. And we actually use immigration as a kind of way of showing the causal effect of this. So what you want is a lot of cultural variation. Now, if you get people from societies that are more distant from whatever the current U.S. culture is at the time, it's going to take more time until they're able to fully integrate. So if they're coming from a very distrusting society, they're not going to be able to latch into the collective brain immediately. So you see this in early around 1900. There's data from people mostly coming from southern Italy and coming from Germany and Britain. And the Southern Italians are coming from a society that is a high distrust of strangers. So their immediate effect on the patenting system is low.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he doesn't actually fit any cultural evolutionary models. And if you include the people who are learning from parents and learning from their social milieu, your parents determine where you are in the social milieu. So you're surrounded by people who are being more patient and behaving in certain economic ways, then that's going to have a huge effect. I just told you about how if you grow up in Silicon Valley, you're going to patent in computers. It's not because you have genes for computers.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we know that populations, migrants into the US and Europe shift their psychology over a few generations of being there. And we know there's been natural experiments done by economists like Chris Blatman where you actively try to Teach people, train them essentially to discount the future less. And that seems to be culturally transmittable. So this suggests that I can't rule out that there's been any genetic evolution, but I can show that culture can operate on this quickly and powerfully.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, patience. So, one of the things he argues is patience. So in weird, I use the exact same data to actually get the data from him to show that you have this increase in patients. But we know that people can culturally learn patients, and this can all be culturally transmitted. And in this world, it leads to more success. So if you're the kind of person who doesn't waste a lot of his money and we begin to value thrift and stuff, which Protestantism does, then we should expect there to be an increase in fewer murders and lower interest rates.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so he's, I mean, I guess one of the things that I think is a mistake is to focus too narrowly on England. Because, I mean, England was benefiting from ideas that were flowing in from France. There's a lot of great science being done in France. And I mean, I don't think Gregory Clark's right. I can explain almost everything he explains with cultural evolution. And he doesn't even really take that seriously.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then what we do is we look at what happens when a bishopric arrives. And I mentioned before you get a flow of people. But another fact is if you look at the production of famous people, these places where the bishopric has arrived start producing more creative individuals relative to non-creatives. So there's an uptick, and it keeps going up for centuries. So the relative increase. And so that suggests you're producing more authors and inventors and writers and whatnot. And then if you take each of those and you look at you correlate it with modern patents, places that spent more time under the church produce more patents between 1980 and 2014 based on European patent data. And this holds if you just compare regions within the same country. So you can see long-term effects of this and you can see immediate effects in the historical record on the production of creatives.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, the first thing to think about is those other authors, I mean, possibly Greg Clark is an exception, but they don't think about the psychological variation that exists. So there's good reason to think there's all these psychological differences, and you have to believe they don't cash out. And if you think they exist, then you have to explain them. And so you need a theory that explains them. So Bob Allen has, I mean, he's a blank on the psychological variation. So let me give you some evidence that I think is some pretty good evidence. So we have a database of the diffusion of Roman bishoprics through Europe.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, good question. I don't know the answer to that question. So that would be a nice piece of evidence. So, you know, there's a couple of groups working on medieval ancient DNA, so hopefully we'll have more answers on that question. I mean, there is enough now of pre-Roman burial, so Bronze Age type stuff showing that early Europeans definitely had complex intensive kin groups, patrilineal residents, kinds of stuff, polygyny.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So Europeans are quite well mixed compared to other populations. And so we were talking about India. You know, if you do a principal component analysis, so this two-dimensional plot of the genetic similarity, you can actually see the class, and people are pretty spread out. If you do the put the Europeans on the same plot, they're well mixed.”
2025-03-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source