Making Sense with Sam Harris - #128 — Transformations of Mind

Episode Date: June 4, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Geoffrey Miller about evolutionary psychology. They discuss sexual selection, virtue signaling, social media, public shaming, monogamy and polyamory, taboo topics in science, genetic engineering, gender differences and the “Google memo,” moral psychology, existential risk, AI, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with Jeffrey Miller. Jeffrey is an evolutionary psychologist, best known for his books The Mating Mind, Mating Intelligence, Spent, and Mate. He got his B.A. in Biology and Psychology from Columbia and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford.

He is a tenured professor at the University of New Mexico, and he has over 100 academic publications addressing sexual selection, mate choice, signaling theory, fitness indicators, consumer behavior, marketing, intelligence, creativity, language, art, music, humor, emotions, personality, psychopathology, and behavioral genetics. Anyway, Jeffrey is a very interesting guy, and we recorded this event in Houston in March. And we covered a wide range of topics, things like sexual selection and virtue signaling and public shaming, social media, spent a fair amount of time on monogamy versus polyamory. We touched other taboo topics in science. Spoke briefly about genetic engineering

and existential risk, in particular AI. Spoke about gender differences, the Google memo, many things here. So I hope you enjoy it. I now bring you Jeffrey Miller. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, guys. I must say, I'm a little thrown by this room. I hope you're not expecting electric guitars and death metal music. But thank you for coming out.

I've never been to Houston before, and it's an honor to be here. So I will jump right into this. We have a very interesting guest tonight. My guest is an evolutionary psychologist and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He's the author of many books and many scientific papers and he is focused on topics as diverse as sexual selection, mate choice, consumer behavior, intelligence, creativity, language, psychopathology, many other topics. His research has been featured in Nature and Science in the New York Times and in many documentaries. Please welcome Jeffrey Miller.

Jeffrey Miller. documentaries. Please welcome Jeffrey Miller. Thank you for coming, Jeffrey. Hey, Texas. So we have a lot to talk about, and I guess, well, let's start with your field, which is evolutionary psychology. Why is this so fraught? The thesis, which is now just undeniable, that we are evolved creatures and therefore not only our bodies have evolved, but our minds have evolved but our minds have evolved, our brains have certainly evolved. Why is this still so difficult to talk about?

Honestly, it's pretty surprising because I've been working in this field for about 30 years and when we first started the field, it was fairly heretical to apply evolutionary theory, natural selection, sexual selection, ideas of social competition and behavioral ecology, to apply all of that biology that had worked so well for thousands of other species, to apply it to humans. It was new, but we had no idea that it would get such a political backlash. And I think in the popular imagination, evolutionary psychology is still kind of associated

stereotypically with, oh, you guys study nothing but sex differences. Or, oh, you guys do intelligence research, which very few of us actually do. And I think it's part of a general defense of a kind of blank slate ideology that says, look, if you bring animal behavior, if you bring genetics, if you bring evolutionary theory into the human sphere, particularly where they affect political controversies, then that's anathema.

That's kind of a taboo. It muddies the waters. It makes people uncomfortable. But for reasons I'm honestly baffled by, I've never really felt uncomfortable viewing humans as animals. I've never really felt uncomfortable with the idea that all of the hard work our ancestors did for millions of years have endowed us with amazing capacities, like emotions, motivations, preferences,

that generally help us do awesome things and get along and invent things and make progress and show altruism. I've never really felt the kind of panic, the moral panic that a lot of people seem to feel about this. Is it an attachment to kind of mind-body dualism? Because obviously no one's disputing that the body has evolved and that we are apes in that respect,

but is it a concern specifically that what we care about in the mind and differences between minds, that that could be beholden to evolution? I think so, but I think honestly, you know, the common folk aren't really approaching this metaphysically. I don't think it's really about mind-body dualism or free will or any of that stuff you get in Philosophy 101. I think it's often more to do with the fact that people worry that you're reducing the rich smorgasbord of human capabilities down to a very small number of basic instincts.

Which is, in fact, the exact opposite of what I try to do. A lot of my work has tried to illustrate, for example, that human capacities to produce art or learn and create music or to have a good sense of humor are genuine adaptations that evolve for specific social and sexual functions, and that those are endowments that we have. So that's not really reducing the human mind to simpler things. It's saying our ancestors cared so much in selecting mates and friends who were interesting and witty and funny that we now are all amazingly witty and funny and interesting

compared to any other primate. Yeah, we are funnier than at least some of the orangutans. Although I think all actors know that you don't want to share a stage with one. You will be upstaged. So you surreptitiously introduced a concept which I think many people are not familiar with. Everyone more or less knows about natural selection,

but there's this other variable, sexual selection. What is that? Sexual selection, I think, was Darwin's most brilliant idea. Natural selection, you know, Wallace also invented it. Other folks would have invented it. I think if we hadn't had Darwin, we might not have had sexual selection for another 50 years in the history of biology Brilliant idea Darwin realized if animals choose their mates selectively for certain traits

those traits will tend to get amplified and become more complex and and conspicuous and colorful and intricate and an Impressive they'll work better and better as signals of the animal's underlying good genes, good health, good coordination ability. And that opens a real Pandora's box of amazing adaptations like birdsong, whalesong, humansong, human language, whale song, human song, human language, that you might not have been able to get if you only had natural selection for survival.

But Darwin's theory was kind of neglected for about a century. Nobody really applied sexual selection theory very seriously to human behavior until the 70s and 80s. And I got absolutely fascinated by it in grad school at Stanford in the late 80s when I thought, you know, being a young single man, why is it that women and men have the mate preferences they do? Why do they seem to care about these things? Like verbal fluency or humor or musical aptitude that don't have survival payoffs in any simple way.

And that's what I ended up writing my dissertation about, to argue that the same things that are romantically attractive now in humans may have been romantically attractive in prehistory and may have shaped our minds to be able to do specifically those things. So I think the human mind is not just a survival machine, it's also a courtship machine. So how would you distinguish between something that has been selected for based on mate preference and something that is what Stephen Jay Gould called a spandrel, something that's just there by virtue of other underlying things but was never selected for and never got anyone to further their genetic legacy?

Well, you look for certain patterns. Like if there are abilities where kids don't very much care about them until puberty and then they get really excited about them, right, just in time for mating, that's a hint. If there are skills and aptitudes that people suddenly develop an interest in when they fall in love and they really want to display those, that's a hint that it might have been sexually selected. If people brag about a certain thing on their OkCupid dating profile, right? That's sort of a hint. And crucially, maybe heartbreakingly, things that people did a lot before marriage and then get kind of lazy about afterwards.

Well, you used to do all these things. I think we're going to need a list of these things just to be better people. You know, that's what you expect from the profile and mating effort. And I think with a lot of these kind of aesthetic and entertaining behaviors, that's kind of the pattern that you tend to see with humans.

So let's take some of these categories. How does this relate to consumer behavior? So consumer behavior is a little bit more of a stretch. So what I did in my book Spent, which was about 10 years ago, So, consumer behavior is a little bit more of a stretch. lifestyle branding, where you try to create a link between this product and this brand and this aspirational lifestyle in the consumer's mind. How does that work? I think it's all signaling theory, right? It's all about how do you signal what kind of entity you are to others?

Just like sexual ornaments can be described through signaling theory, you know, what kind of peacock are you as displayed through a peacock's tail? But in the case of consumer behavior, we're not literally growing these ornaments, we're making the money and running around buying them. So whatever you're wearing out there in the audience, you've probably made a conscious choice about this is my look for tonight

this is the kind of person I want to come across as and you might be rethinking those choices now so look to your left and look to your right we'll see you when the Q&A starts

there's no hiding and we're all very good at picking up these sort of subtle cues about, oh, interesting jacket choice, right? And those shoes on a first date, really? So we are very tuned into the signaling, and we don't typically talk about it in these terms. But I think there's a continuity between sexual selection for sexual ornamentation in nature and consumer choice for goods and

services in the modern market economy. The underlying signaling principles, I think, are quite similar. Now, there's this phrase that has seemed to have spread like a mental virus on social media. You could probably guess the phrase I'm going for now, which I would imagine everyone has heard now, but virtually no one had heard even 12 months ago, and that phrase is virtue signaling.

Everyone who castigates me for having virtue signaled about something seems to have a green frog in their Twitter bio. But so what is the – undoubtedly this is being overused, but what is virtue signaling and is it an embarrassing social trait or a necessary one? I think virtue signaling gets a lot of flack, but it's really important, and I think it's largely positive. We all do it all the time. It's not monopolized by any particular part of the political spectrum.

I wrote a paper called Sexual Selection for Moral Virtues about 10 years ago, where I tried to analyze what are the virtues that we tend to show off to potential lovers during courtship, right? They tend to be things like kindness and agreeableness and fidelity and commitment and, you know, romantic love. And these are all signals that say I'm a kind of person who might make a good long-term partner and future parent. So when you're doing virtue signaling in courtship, it's all good unless you're doing it deceptively. And we're actually pretty good at picking out who is being deceptive,

because the technical term is shit testing. We test them. We give them little challenges, and we see how they respond. Now in the political sphere... Do you have any recommended challenges? Some people might be on a first date here and you could just, well, cause chaos. You really want to create a situation where someone's true moral character comes out when they're under severe stress and they're tired and

preferably a little tipsy and and it so make it make it a kind of moral obstacle course but in the in the political sphere virtue signaling can be really toxic if a bunch of people get together and they say, this is an issue where I'm going to demonstrate what a good and kind and concerned person I am about issue X by advocating a new policy or intervention or law that doesn't actually address the problem in any pragmatic way, but is sort of symbolically associated with expressing concern. And I think that's where you get real problems.

I tend to be... I have a lot of respect for human instincts when it comes to managing our affairs in small groups. I don't have a lot of respect for our instincts in terms of scaling up to manage large-scale social policy decisions in nation states. Yeah, yeah. So in that respect, what are your thoughts or misgivings

about what we're doing on social media? What you just said put me in mind of the kind of mob-like moral panic behavior we see spread. And it's a very low-cost virtue signal to forward something on Twitter or to add your voice to this cacophony that is singling somebody out for abuse. Yeah, I think when you get the intersection of virtue signaling and a sort of online witch hunt and mob mentality and, you know, let's have an auto-defeat that destroys someone's career because I'm going to misinterpret this one thing they said, take it out of context, and then feed it to people who reliably express outrage about it. That's a terrible kind of society to live in. And I think pretty much every public figure now

lives in almost constant fear of that happening. And folks who engage regularly with social media, like Sam or like Jordan Peterson or like Christina Hoff Summers or anybody from anywhere across the spectrum is self-censoring quite a bit because we know everything we say is going to be taken out of context by someone and they're going to try to weaponize it into embarrassment or perhaps a career-killing event. So I hope that as a society we can develop

a better kind of conceptual immune system that rejects that sort of dynamic and that's very sceptical of that particular kind of virtue signaling. Is there something that the platforms themselves could change or that we could change as far as our behavior goes? Or is it conceivable that there's another sign to this that it will take it to such an absurd extreme that everyone will have a thicker skin and a more durable reputation as a result? Well, when I talk to my students about this, I point out, look, in five or ten years,

everybody will have augmented reality glasses or contact lenses. We will all be recording audio and video all the time for pretty much every interaction we have with everyone. That means any cocktail conversation, any little interchange as you're walking down the hallway with someone, everything that you do is going to be vulnerable to going up on YouTube. Is that just by definition dystopian, or do you see a silver lining to that? It's going to be hell for about three years.

It's going to be hell. There's going to be mass embarrassment and horror and there will be a very steep learning curve until we all realize we all, dozens of times a day, say things that if taken out of context, are really, really embarrassing. And I think we just have to level up and realize that and get over it and judge people by, you know, the whole mass of what they do and say and not just by these isolated incidents. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, having been on the receiving end of a lot of this,

it seems to me that the most insidious thing is to seize upon something that can be misconstrued out of context for the purpose of misconstruing it out of context and then hold someone accountable for that thing rather than actually care what they care about the totality of what they think on any given issue. And those efforts are always in bad faith,

and I just feel like there's the penalty for doing that should increase. I think that's something that we haven't quite, we haven't found whatever dial can be turned there. But because people do that with impunity and seem to always get away with it. And there's really no recourse but to just keep saying that's not what it meant in context. Yeah, I think we all have to hold each other accountable for that.

And I think we have to do it kind of in private. I think that's the leverage. I mean, I'll sometimes impulsively want to, you know, tweet something and my girlfriend, who's also pretty active on Twitter, will go, eh, I don't know about that. Or, it'll go out and it'll start to get some bad traction and then she'll go...

Well, if you follow Jeffrey on Twitter, you'll know just how diabolical some of those edited tweets must be because he's very edgy on Twitter. Yeah, so what you're getting is the stuff that made it past my girlfriend. Yeah, that says a lot about what it would look like if the dam burst. But yeah, I think calling each other to account. So for example, I had one incident a few months ago where I retweeted something where some graduate student at a particular university had used something called the progressive

stack in her classroom, which is a way of making sure you call on certain people by ethnic groups before you call on other ethnic groups. And that went viral much more than I expected it to. I didn't really want her to get in as much trouble as she did with her university, but conservative media picked up on it. And I ended up kind of writing an email to her dean saying, please don't take this too seriously. I'm like, I was one of the instigators of this. Go easy. This is ridiculous. This is yet another witch hunt.

Don't cave to the social pressure. And I think if you ever find yourself in a situation where you've unwittingly fed one of these online mobs, you have a moral duty to try to correct it to the extent that you can. Yeah, that's interesting because there seems to be an ethic, certainly, that public shaming has an appropriate role to play here. And so it's very tempting when you see something that is clearly wrong or something that has been put out there for which the author should be embarrassed,

you feel that someone's getting away with murder somehow, and you circulate that for the purpose of shining some sunlight on this and shaming this person, at least, I mean, I have done that from time to time, feeling like, okay, this is totally warranted, but I'm never foreseeing some catastrophic reputational cost there. I'm not saying that this person should be fired, and as you say, things can get out of hand.

Is that initial ethical intuition, you think, in error? I mean, should we not be leveraging shame at all in public discourse or on social media? I think shame is a dangerous tool, but like, what are the alternatives? So, you know, I'm a libertarian, so I generally don't want the state to outlaw things that I don't disapprove of. I think it's better to have social norms enforced by shame than laws enforced by state threat of violence. Right. So can you do better than shame?

I think you can use shame carefully or you can use it recklessly. And I think to use it carefully, you have to understand what is the nature of shaming, how do online mobs work, how does human moral psychology work in general. There's some good books out there now. We have a much better understanding of these so-called social emotions like shame and gratitude and anger than we used to 10 years ago. And I think at this point, every citizen kind of owes it to society to understand our instincts about these issues and to have a certain amount of distance from our initial reactions

and to go, oh, I have the urge to express my moral outrage. Is that really constructive? If it gets out of hand, will I regret it? And is my moral outrage informed? Or is it just kind of a culturally programmed reaction to an issue that I don't really know anything about? Well, you have many thoughts on human sexuality and our evolved moral intuitions around monogamy and its alternatives.

Polyamory is something you've written about and actually adopted. This seems like a very complicated way to live for those of us who are not part of it. So let's talk about just innovation in that sphere. Well, first we should define polyamory, but why is this just not way more trouble than it's worth? Well... It's totally worth it.

So I was a good little monogamist and I believed in monogamist mating norms until a few years ago when my girlfriend turned to me. Humans have an innate tendency to form long-term pair bonds, no doubt. Pair bonds are extremely important in human evolution. People finding mates, settling down, having a little home, raising kids together, bi-parental care, dads investing,

that has been crucial to human evolution for at least a million years. And then it's kind of gotten ritualized culturally into the expectation of lifelong monogamous marriage. And every large successful civilization in human history has adopted monogamous marriage as the typical mating pattern for most people most of the time. So I'm not going to go dis-monogamy. It has been a wildly successful way to take sort of hominid

pair bonds and update them for agricultural and industrial civilizations in ways that work for most people, you know, most of the time, pretty well. However, they can be oppressive to certain people who have certain values or certain life situations or simply certain personalities. So I taught, I think, the first psychology of polyamory course last term at University of New Mexico, and we reviewed all the empirical... What was enrollment like in that course?

It was... It was... What was the ratio of men to women? It was really cool students. It was 50-50. And it all worked very well. There are no fisticuffs or big arguments. Other professors gave me some flack. Another story. But I think in the modern era, if you go back and you ask, what were the original

cultural and social functions of monogamous marriage? A lot of them had to do with things like reduce the transmission rate of STDs, ensure paternity certainty that your kid is who you think your kid is, manage inheritance of wealth and land. And it was also crucially about spreading reproductive opportunities fairly evenly across young males and young females so that nobody kind of monopolizes the mating market. And that all worked very, very well. You couldn't have had Chinese or Roman or medieval European civilization

work as well as it did without monogamy. But in the modern world, 21st century relationships, the issue is, are your kids or grandkids seriously going to pursue lifelong monogamous marriage as their default or their aspiration? The surveys among millennials and Gen Z say no. A lot of them don't want that. So what are they going to do? We don't know. This is probably the topic of my next book.

But I think we have to basically look at all the different little sexual subcultures that have tried different kinds of mating patterns, right? Monogamy people, polygamists, polyamorists, swingers, asexuals, figure out what are the lessons learned from each of those subcultures. Can you differentiate those? Because between monogamy and asexuals, it all sounded like a big orgy. It all sounds like a big, messy,

messy orgy from the outside, but from the inside, the poly people think the swinger is super conservative and red state, and the swingers think the polyamorous people are really young and naive. So how

does one know whether one is a swinger or polyamorous? You're probably a swinger if you're a married couple and you like to go to events where you meet other married couples and you kind of court them couple to couple and if you get along then you um you get together and you um kind of swap partners temporarily for a few hours or or you hang out together for a weekend

with a sexual swap but typically not a long-term emotional connection expected to be formed although they happen sometimes so swinging is sort of a couple meets couple thing polyamory is more of a there might be this individual or they might be with another individual in an open relationship, and each of them will typically be dating other people with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved. That's the crucial thing, is the honesty and the transparency. So that's kind of the poly ideal. And there are other emerging ways to do this.

I think of it as a kind of Cambrian explosion of different relationship patterns, most of which will end up being dumb and fail. But the ones that don't fail, I think, will be great learning experiences for kind of updating monogamy and figuring out how to do it or something else better. So I guess it's not hard to envision the bumps in the road down that path.

So how do you deal with jealousy? How do you deal with kind of an asymmetry between just how much one partner in the relationship is hooking up with other people. And what would you, can you, is there a sociology around this that's understood? I mean, what is the success rate or failure rate of these relationships? The success and failure rate seems kind of comparable, at least in terms of how happy people are in these relationships. comparable at least in terms of how happy people are in these relationships. Short term we don't yet have good data on how stable are they long term. Like if

if there's a couple who's about to have twins I would not necessarily say you guys should definitely try polyamory right now. Okay because I don't know how the longevity would work out. But in terms of the jealousy issue, here's where I part company with the kind of standard polyamory culture. A lot of polyamorous say jealousy is a kind of cultural construct. It's arbitrary. You can jettison it.

You can unlearn it. It doesn't run very deep. I think, on the contrary, evolution created sexual and emotional jealousy for very, very good reasons. They are deep instincts. They have important adaptive functions. However, that doesn't mean you have to let them rule your life. So, you know, the Steve Pinker book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, is all about we have these aggressive homicidal instincts, right? But we managed to drop the rate of aggressive homicide by orders

of magnitude over the last thousands of years. That was a win for civilization, taking aggressive instincts and harnessing them and managing them and making them not run our lives. and harnessing them and managing them and making them not run our lives. I think the same thing could be done with sexual jealousy. But most people aren't willing to try. They're terrified of jealousy, and they can't imagine being in a relationship where they're comfortable with a partner going out on a date for a night. That terrifies them more than like bankruptcy or real or a bad election, you know.

But it's survivable. It's survivable. And the question is why? And then one wonders whether that murder curve is going to go up if this ever catches on. What's the, there must be some perceived limitation of well-being imposed by monogamy that is corrected for by polyamory and it's worth the jealousy that you say is unavoidable. Yeah, okay, so what are the upsides? It's fun. You get to meet more people. I think humans are actually evolved to use sex to make friends. And I'm not being totally facetious about that. Sex is a great way to get to know somebody better very quickly. That's a tweetable meme, I think.

And so the poly culture tends to be very tightly socially networked. And that can bring a lot of benefits socially, emotionally, professionally, in terms of careers, in terms of cost savings, all sorts of ways. You sort of are recreating a tribe in a way that a lot of modern alienated people in society don't have a tribe. So is it functioning that way, that there is a kind of community that is... So it's not that polyamorous people are continually having... You're in an open relationship with people who are, I don't know what the name

is, civilians, who don't know what they're getting into, right? This is a kind of hermetically sealed, or I would imagine people are being inducted into this. It's sounding a little cult-like. Is there any kind of proselytizing of this that is necessary to get this working out in the world? Well, all great ideas, you have to proselytize it. No, the crucial thing, though, is that everybody involved should be kind of, should get fully informed consent for what's happening, and you should be up front.

Like, if you go on a date, and you're polyamorous, and you're in a relationship, you've got to say, I'm in an open relationship, I'm polyamorous. You can't hide that. But would you reveal that even before you go on the date so that there'd be no surprise in that first conversation? Well on certain dating sites like OkCupid you can actually specify right this is my dating orientation non-monogamous whatever I think more seriously a lot of people who are in long-term relationships get stale

their self-image is I don't know whether I'm an interesting person anymore. I don't know how attractive I am anymore. I don't know who I am. I don't know what my interests are. You kind of get locked into this duet with a partner and you're just sort of out there isolated on your own without any genuine romantic or emotional engagement with anybody else. And I think for a lot of married couples, that can be extremely alienating after a while and actually increase your divorce rate. Because a lot of people feel like either I'm stuck in this, bored to tears, or we break up the relationship. There is a third alternative. we break up the relationship. There is a third alternative. You can learn more about consensual non-monogamy, openness, transparency, maybe open the relationship and try it. And it might not work,

but the more you read about it, the more likely it is to work. And a lot of people might end up in a situation, I think, that Dan Savage calls monogamish, where you're kind of 90, 95% monogamous, but maybe, you know, the wife goes out on a date once a month with somebody else, and you can handle it, because maybe you have a date the same time, and then you get the equity, right? There's not a mismatch. So I'm not, like like advocating this for everybody, but I am saying these are trends that are happening socially in America, and they are rapidly increasing. And a lot of people under 30 take these seriously as a possible way of life, and we should pay attention to it, do more research on it, think hard about it. Okay, so I just want to say the fine print here

is that if that part of the conversation winds up deranging any of your lives, send all your email to Jeffrey and not to me. My polyamory syllabus is posted online. You can just read all the papers there. Get busy with that. I'm hoping my wife doesn't hear this part of the podcast. So there are so many taboo topics that we've touched on some,

just at a run, things like intelligence and gender difference. Are there any now that you feel like we just have to learn to speak about more honestly from a biological or psychological point of view? Or are these third rails better left untouched? I think at some point in the next 10 or 20 years, America's going to have to start to make its peace with the fact that a lot of mental traits are heritable,

not necessarily for political reasons, but just because of the practicalities of the genetic technology that are going to make it possible to do preimplantation, embryo selection, and genetic screening, where probably within 10 or 20 years, you know, a couple who are having a baby are going to have the option of deciding, do we want to try to do the selection among all the possible fertilized eggs, selecting for this trait or that trait or this other trait. A lot of people will say, don't care, let the chips fall where they may, let it be random.

But some folks will say, well, look, if I can get a kid who's a little bit smarter than they would otherwise be, they'll do better in school and college and their career and their relationship and everything else, why not? Or they might go, maybe some moral virtues are heritable as they are, all personality traits are heritable, including things like agreeableness and conscientiousness. So if you could select for those in your kids, will you? Well, at a certain point, if we had the technology and there were no safety risks, if we had vetted it fully,

it would seem like a truly unconscionable moral lapse not to give your kid those advantages if you could. It's like not putting a seatbelt on your kid. There's no downside to wearing the seatbelt, and you're increasing their chance of survival. If you can amplify unambiguously good traits without raising the risk of negative consequences, it should be said it's not guaranteed that the genome will work out that way. It could be that if you increase the genes that increase the probability of intelligence you could be increasing the liability of different kinds of of diseases i think there's actually some some data already

on that that various dystonias and uh that are correlated with whatever genes we understand relate to intelligence but if something like conscientiousness can be dissected out genetically such that you get the right alleles and you are just four standard deviations above the norm in that trait, of course people are going to do it. Yeah, I think people will do it.

And the people who perhaps even five years earlier were saying, oh, IQ is totally discredited, it's not heritable at all, nobody believes in it, we read Stephen Jay Gould, mismeasure a man, IQ is bunk, right? Those will be the first people to use the genetic screening, I bet. They will turn on a dime as soon as there's actual pragmatic benefits from it. I think the real issue then is going to be, are we going to have a society-wide push that tries to make

access to that technology as widespread as possible so that whoever wants to use it can use it, rather than it just being the preserve of the rich or the well-connected. I think that's going to be the crucial inequality issue in about 20 years. Yeah, that would be a massive amplifier of inequality. So I guess another issue here is gender difference and not differences in aptitude, but even just differences in interest across genders. There's this blank slate dogma that men and women aren't actually different despite the existence of things like a uterus. And so I guess this got focused very recently in the last year with the James Damore memo and the Google firing. I actually haven't spent as much time focused on Damore

and his travails subsequently, but how did all that shake down for you as an evolutionary psychologist? That was an interesting summer last summer because right before the whole Timor Google memo thing blew up, I'd written an article for Quillette.com magazine called The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech, in which I argued that people who have a range of neurodivergent conditions, like Asperger's or PTSD or whatever, it can be difficult to obey campus speech codes that say never be offensive to anybody else. Like, I'm pretty aspy, and that means I can't always anticipate who I'll offend if I say something,

because I don't have a good theory of mind. I don't understand other people's beliefs and desires the way some folks do. So if you have a speech code that says, if you offend someone, you must have meant it, and you must be evil, and you should be punished, I was pointing out that's not really fair to people who are neurodivergent and who have Asperger's or lots of other syndromes. Then about a week later, James Amore, who is probably also on the Asperger's spectrum, right, Google engineer, comes out with this memo saying, look, maybe some of the differences in men and women in terms of where they end up occupationally might be due to different preferences that they have about, you know, are they interested in things or people

and how risk-seeking are they and so forth. And I read the memo and I thought, A, this is all pretty much scientifically correct. I would give this an A if this is a paper in a graduate seminar, but B, this is going to be a world of hurt for DeMoore, because I'm sure Google doesn't want this news. And indeed, that's what happened. Let's just pause there for a second, because it is a shock, or at least it should come as a shock to us, that he was fired for writing something which you, an expert in the field,

said is scientifically correct. And there was no malicious framing of it. It was just this summary of what he believed to be the current science and his fairly tame pushback against this diversity indoctrination that he was having to weather as an employee. There's still people out there who think that he did something incredibly ugly that merited his firing, but we seem to be quite

far from that. Yeah, I mean, when I read it, I thought it's actually surprising that someone who's not a psychology professor would get the empirical research pretty much that accurate. And it's kind of surprising and alarming that Google didn't care that it was accurate, that it transgressed their diversity agenda so awkwardly,

precisely because his claims were empirically pretty well supported. So they didn't really have any defense apart from firing him and saying he perpetuated harmful gender stereotypes. That's all they could really do. And that, I think, was a really bad moment in American culture because it means, well, it sends a message to everybody in every corporation that you can have views that are empirically well-grounded and perfectly reasonable and expressed as carefully and constructively as possible and still be subject to these witch hunts.

And I think that exerts a massive chilling effect on public discourse, and even discourse within companies. Yeah, yeah. Well, what has the aftermath been like? I know there's a lawsuit, right? Have you followed any of that? I haven't really followed it in detail because I know Google's a lawsuit, right? Have you followed any of that? I haven't really followed it in detail

because I know Google can afford better lawyers than the war. Yeah, yeah. And this is America, so more expensive lawyers win. So we have these evolved moral capacities. We have evolved moral intuitions. We're highly moralizing creatures. Being social primates, this extends to pretty much everything we do. There's a descriptive story to tell about how we got here in terms of evolution, but there's a

very different project, and this is something that I attempted to put forward my own views about in the moral landscape, which is a normative one. You can start from where we're at and just take an inventory of our moral hardware, such as it is, and then ask a very different set of questions. Just how good can human life become? How good can the life of any conscious creature become, given everything that we can change about ourselves and about our institutions and about our social arrangements? So it's different to take an inventory of our moral psychology descriptively.

Someone like Jonathan Haidt will talk about human morality in terms of just what the facts on the ground. People have very strong intuitions about jealousy, say, or humiliation, or concern for authority if you're conservative, but not so much if you're liberal. But what I tend to want to do is ask a further question about just what is possible for conscious minds like our own in terms of flourishing. Do you think that's a valid differentiation, or do you still want to continue to see everything in evolutionary terms? Well, I think the evolved moral psychology that we have

is a set of little tools that are largely about managing relationships like kinship and how nice should I be to my offspring and my blood relatives and managing reciprocity relationships and trade and managing in-group dynamics and making sure the clan and the tribe work. And then doing the little virtue signaling that we use to attract social and sexual partners. And that's sort of the toolbox that we have, but we can repurpose a lot of that stuff to achieve levels of moral excellence and progress that go far beyond what any prehistoric human

could have imagined. I mean, I really like, for example, the Deidre McCloskey idea that there is a set of bourgeois virtues that get cultivated under capitalist society, where to succeed as a storekeeper in 18th century Europe, you have to pay attention to what kind of things am I offering to my customers? How can I add value to their lives so they will voluntarily exchange things with me?

And that selects for conscientiousness and empathy and reliability and good reputation in ways that simply didn't happen before in prehistory. And then I think virtue signaling, you know, it gets a bad rap, but it's been at the heart of almost every major ethical development. Like, of course, the early anti-slavery abolitionists were partly virtue signaling my, here's my empathy because I'm concerned about these other people I don't care about. The animal rights movement, like, I care about cute, cuddly mammals. Let's save them.

rights movement, like I care about cute, cuddly mammals, let's save them. It's easy to mock that, but virtue signaling lets you get a beachhead on moral issues that nobody would care about otherwise, right? And I've seen this happen in the vegan movement that my girlfriend's involved with, that, you know, the way to reach out to certain kinds of people is not necessarily to say, well, look, if you're a strict, you know, utilitarian, then, and here's the evidence for this animal having this level of sentience, therefore you shouldn't eat it. No. The way to popularize that movement is to make veganism a virtue, a social virtue, and then to convert your lovers and your friends and your family through that route. And I think it can be a great source for moral progress. What keeps you awake at night as far as the

risks that we face as a species? What worries you going forward? I'm terrified about this set of risks called existential risks. And my friends in the effective altruism community focus on those quite a bit. These are risks that are not just global catastrophic risks where millions could die or billions, but the risks where everybody could die so existential

meaning does the human species go extinct entirely like within this century or do at least a few of us survive and the big existential risks that people not worry the most about are nuclear war bioweapons like engineered pandemics, artificial intelligence, things that aren't really existential risks, like, okay, meteor impacts, they would be X risks, but the probability it'll happen is extremely low, and those things are already being monitored. I think AI is the wild card.

AI is what keeps me awake at night. I've started to think and work a little bit on AI safety research. The issue there is nobody really knows how far we are away from developing an artificial general intelligence that will be smarter than us in at least some ways. It's very hard to predict what kind of agenda or behavior such a thing would have. It's very hard to apply our intuitive psychology of, like, how do you talk to such a thing or convince it or propagandize it if it might operate on completely different principles

with different preferences and priorities than we do. So there's a lot of uncertainty. What we do know, though, is America and China are investing hugely in an AI arms race. And some of the top talent in both countries is going into this, and both countries are quickly realizing that if we fall behind,

we'll be at a very serious military and economic and even cultural disadvantage. So that kind of makes me want to barf. And it's something also where people have been misprogrammed by Hollywood to worry about the wrong kinds of things happening. Well, what do you make of the fact that there's some very smart people who are arguably as close to the data as we are, who are not worried about this? This is something we were talking about backstage. What are they not seeing, and what's the likelihood that they're right and we're wrong to be concerned about AI? So, for example, Steven Pinker in the Enlightenment Now book, which I love and which is awesome,

but there's a chapter in it on existential risk where he's fairly dismissive of AI as an X risk. I think it's notable that a lot of people who used to be skeptical about AI as an X risk are now worried about it. A lot of people change their minds in that direction. There are very few people who say, oh, I used to worry about it last year, but now I've been convinced, you know, it's fine. I don't know what I was thinking, chicken little, don't worry. Well, just to take that structure, how many people are going that direction with monogamy versus polyamory? Yeah.

There's just a stampede out of monogamy. It's really cute. There's just a stampede out of monogamy. It's really cute. There's no stampede back? Just these wrecked people who... There's a little stampede out of monogamy in high school, and then there is a little bit of a stampede back when people get pregnant. That's true.

Yeah. But I think with the AI thing, my view is even something that causes a 1% chance of extinction is worth really worrying about very, very seriously and devoting billions of dollars to. Yeah. Yeah, a 1% probability of destroying absolutely everything is still a major thing to hedge against.

Listen, I want to now open it to all of you, because for me, the real motivation to have these live events is to make it a proper dialogue. So there should be microphones in the aisles. There should be two. And we would love your questions. And we have a full hour where we can take them. So I guess we'll start over here, our left. All right, I think it's on. Is it on?

I should say, just as a preamble, if your question can end in a question, that would be good. If you can even just accomplish a high-rising tone at the end of whatever you say, the audience will appreciate it. And if you can be brief, otherwise you're surrounded by a thousand very impatient people. All right. So, no, thanks so much for that. So just two things that I thought about. So I lived in South Africa, was there for the SACO incident. so much for that. So just two things that I thought about. So I lived in South Africa,

was there for the SACO incident. I definitely remember that. But what I want to mention is that in so many places in Africa, polygamy was the norm for the longest time. And even within that, like there were so many folks are still going and having relationships with other women. And the wives in that relationship are aware of that. It's actually almost a norm sometimes. But despite that fact, they still get jealous. And all of my younger African friends, when I asked them about this, they have no interest in polygamy, no interest in polyamory or whatever. They want a monogamous relationship.

So whenever you say this kind of stuff, for me, I'm thinking kind of like, I feel like some of this stuff has been tried before and it really didn't work. And even the people who were in situations like this are actually moving closer towards monogamy. And the second part of that is that we talked about from the people in the relationship standpoint, but what about the children? Because I know for me, myself, if I knew that my dad was going and having, even going on dates, even if he was announcing it, that's going to really affect me. And even my African friends who knew that their dads were going on this, it really affected them as well. So what I want to know is why do you think that places that already have kind of relationships like this are actually moving towards monogamy rather than maintaining that? And two, what do

you think the effect on children in such relationships is going to be? Yeah, good question. So polyamory is very different from traditional polygamy, right? Polygamy is there's one man with multiple women and he's typically the high status dominant guy and he sort of monopolizes a few local women and then other guys don't have women and they're frustrated. So it's a very socially destabilizing situation with a lot of variation in reproductive success across men

and a lot of violence actually. And this is exactly why cultural monogamy was instituted to cut down on that violence and jealousy and sort of distribute mates more evenly. What they don't do in those cultures is any of the basic ethical precepts of polyamory, which is open, consensual, transparent communication with everyone about everything that's happening. So polyamory is as new relative to human mating as the smartphone. With all the strengths and benefits of that, it might be awesome, it might crash and burn terribly, we don't know yet.

So far, for some people, it seems to work. And we can predict it won't work for everybody. Some people will not have the personality traits that make it work. I suspect successful poly requires, in today's culture, a very high degree of intelligence, organization, conscientiousness, emotional self-control, self-insight, anger management, all of that. The second question, briefly, I think kids are incredibly adaptable about whatever their parents are doing, as long as they get good input and support and care from one or more adult caregivers, I think they can adapt pretty quickly to anything going on as long as there's not a whole lot of violence

and abuse. And we see that in every culture that has different mating norms. The kids don't care if they think it's normal as long as they're being taken care of. Thank you. Hi. Thank both of you for this conversation. I've really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed the podcast. Cool, thank you. This question's for Sam primarily,

but it seems to have relevance to many of the issues that you've touched on in this conversation. So, Sam, in your post-Charlottesville podcast with Douglas Murray, you articulated a hesitance to engage with Stefan Molyneux because he had talked with Jared Taylor and was therefore, in some sense, tainted. Yeah. Obviously, you should only have conversations you think are likely to be fruitful. parameterizing your willingness to engage with people around this six degrees of Richard Spencer principle encourages the kind of dishonest smearing that you and so many of your friends

have been subject to. Is the tarnished reputation of an interlocutor the right predictor of the value of a discussion? Yeah, well, again, this is, I have to confess some uncertainty as to have to confess some uncertainty as to who anyone is. I mean, so I only know what I know about somebody like Stefan. I know enough, or at least I think I know enough about him to worry that he's not someone I should be speaking with. And one data point was the conversation I saw him have with Jared Taylor. So like, you know, presumably he knows who Jared is and he found no daylight between him and Jared when he was speaking to him on the podcast. I mean, they were, they were just like two peas in a pod. And Jared Taylor, you can see talking to just a straight up neo-Nazi, again, without any daylight between them, right? So this is not,

again, this may seem like a transitive property that shouldn't be operating, but I think there's some, there's something fishy there. Again, the ethics of this are not totally worked out in my head. I don't know where the line is between it being a bad thing to give someone a platform by just agreeing to talk to them or it being a good thing to invite someone on who holds morally reprehensible views and just debate them and just air those views and i don't know where the line is and strangely it gets much easier and i think i think i said this when i was speaking to douglas on that podcast it gets much easier when the person is obviously evil, right? Like, you know, I could talk to the Unabomber and not

have to waste any fuel virtue signaling to my audience saying, you know, it's a really terrible thing you did sending those bombs in the mail. I mean, that would just, that would go without saying. And so it's kind of an uncanny valley problem with respect to moral culpability i don't know if you have any thoughts about this and you know who who one should talk to and where one draws the line but i'm just i'm still working it out and i don't i mean stefan is kind of a corner case and i admit to not having spent many hours trying to figure out who he is so thank you very much yeah Hi Sam, I just first want to say that I really appreciate your style of communication.

It's really changed the way that I've dealt with people on a daily basis. And my question is how do we reconcile the difference between our biological need to reproduce and growing concerns that overpopulation might be a problem in the future? It's not clear to me what the consensus is now with respect to population concerns. I mean, it's like you can find people who are just as concerned about underpopulation. You know, it's like the difference between there being too many of us and too few of us might come down to like 20 people. It's like there's this weird factoid that in Japan right now

they sell more adult diapers than kids' diapers. That's fairly alarming to picture. If we could get fully obedient AI to service our needs. And I guess in the context of this conversation, those needs could extend to polyamorous robots, something like Westworld. But in the absent that, I mean, it does seem, and maybe you have some insight into this,

but it seems like we are in some vast Ponzi scheme. You need a new generation to stack under this looming pyramid of aging people. What are your thoughts on world population and what it's going to be like to have 9 or 12 billion of us? I mean, I'm pretty pronatalist, and I think there's a lot of alarmism about overpopulation. It has been since the 70s. Most of that alarmism hasn't come true. That was Paul Ehrlich, right? Right, yeah.

The population bomb. I think as the utilitarian, the more people the better, all else being equal. And one of the things that gets me excited about managing the AIX risk is if we do it, if we survive, if we colonize the solar system, the galaxy, the supercluster, and then we could have 10 to the 30th sentient beings that are post-human, I think that would be amazing. I'm willing to add up utilities and go the more the better. I'm willing to add up utilities and go the more the better. So we should have that long view that as long as we don't wreck the planet in a really predictably dramatic, horrible way, we should have some faith

that our little kids and grandkids will be smart and will be able to help solve problems we can't even solve yet. That's a relief. Thank you. So it seems to me that money in politics is the largest problem in American society today because it's the problem that stops other problems from being solved. So, for example, Sam, if you think a lack of an AI safety net is a huge problem,

then if technology companies lobby against that solution because it increases their revenue, then that problem won't be solved. So my question for you, or for either of you, is what are your thoughts on money and politics? I think it is a huge problem. It's hard to solve because the line between... including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support.

And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.