TRIGGERnometry - Dr Diana Fleischman on Evolutionary Psychology, Men & Women & Effective Altruism

Episode Date: July 9, 2018

Evolutionary psychologist, Dr Diana Fleischman discusses disgust, men and women, sex differences, the gender pay gap, effective altruism, veganism, the psychology of humour, libertarianism, why socialism fails and the death of nuance with the guys at TRIGGERnometry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin. And this is the show for you. If you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects, they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts. Our amazing expert guest, this week is an evolutionary psychologist

at the University of Portsmouth. Dr. Dana Flashman, welcome to Trigonometry. Hello. Hello. Thank you so much for coming on. For anyone who doesn't know what an evolutionary psychologist is, could you just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do? Sure.

So evolutionary psychology looks at the human mind in a similar way that you would look at any other kind of adaptations in Pryph's physiology, right? So birds have wings and those wings are especially designed to fly at certain speeds and to catch certain kinds of prey. And in the same way, the human mind has certain adaptations that have evolved to help us survive and reproduce. And so, for example, I study disgust a lot and disgust has got evolutionary history that's kind of human-specific. And the idea there is that disgust evolved to distance us away from things that could potentially contaminate us, both toxins and disease. And so there's a reason why things are disgusting, and it's an adaptation to help us survive and reproduce, for example. Isn't it true that women feel disgust more than men? It's very true, yeah. Women are more disgust sensitive than men overall, especially in the sexual domain. So, no, I was saying that's a lot of men. That's what it is.

So, yeah, if you look at, there's one very well-known disgust inventory, and it says that there's three kinds of disgust, pathogen disgust, sexual disgust, and moral disgust. It's a big question as to whether or not moral disgust actually exists for real or if it's just a kind of extension of anger. But, yeah, women are much more disgust-sensitive in the sexual domain. So there's a huge difference. And one of the studies that I did was I looked at whether or not,

so if you make men sexually aroused, So if you have them look at pornography and then you have them think about disgusting possible sexual scenarios, they're much less sexually disgust sensitive when they're sexually aroused than when they're not. Obviously, everybody knows that from being alive. And so I did this from my PhD, I did a study where I looked at women and we showed them pornography and then we showed them disgusting things like corpses, people vomiting, stuff like that. or we showed them disgusting things and then we showed them pornography

and we had also a probe in the women's vaginas this has escalated very quickly and so the probe shoots out light into the vaginal canal and the more aroused the woman is the less light comes back because those blood vessels take up that light so what we found is that women

who saw disgusting stuff first they became less sexually aroused but we don't find that sexes sexually aroused women, I didn't find, that sexually aroused women are less disgust sensitive. So while men become less disgust sensitive when they're aroused, it doesn't really seem that women have that same effect as much. And there's a variety of reasons why women are more disgust sensitive than men. One is just that, you know, women have a certain, like five or six chances on average to have offspring, and they have to be choosier about who they have offspring with.

But another reason is that women are just much more likely to get sexually transmitted infections. and I've tried to come up a way to talk about this delicately. It's very difficult, but women are, we have a pocket, and you don't have a pocket. I mean, you have pockets, too. But women have a pocket. And so basically, if a woman has sex, she's much more likely to get the sexually transmitted infection of her partner than she is to pass something onto her male partner if they have regular, whatever, penis and vagina intercourse.

So we don't know how long sexually transmitted infections have been around, but women are much more likely to get them, and they have a much worse disease burden again, you know, again. So yeah, those are a couple reasons why women are more disgust sensitive than men. And how did you get into studying disgust as a little girl? Were you curious about evolution, psychology? How did you become who you are? So many reasons. So I'm kind of an unusual, I'm just, I'm a strange woman generally, but I was kind of a tomboy growing up. And my mother was like incredibly, incredibly obsessive compulsive disorder would only wash me in mineral water the she had boiled and put alcohol in.

Mineral. Wow. My father had to bring home water from the shop. She wouldn't wash me and tap water. And she was just incredibly disgust-sensitive about everything. Was this in Brazil? Because I know that you have Brazilian heritage. Yeah, no, I was only in Brazil when I was three months old. I left Brazil.

But yeah. And so my mom was really, really obsessed with cleanliness and with contamination. And she got better over time. And then I also spent my weekends. My dad is big into riding horses and my grandpa was too. So I spent all my weekends on this like filthy farm interacting me with mangy animals. And then at home, my, you know, my living room was all white. Everything was completely pristine.

And so I became really interested in individual differences in disgust sensitivity. And you often find that unpalatable sorts of areas of psychology are the last to be, you know, they're the frontiers, basically. And so disgust is pretty new. Nobody really wanted to study disgust until, you know, so disgust is a relatively new area of research compared to other things like, I don't know, happiness or fear or whatever else, you know, fluffier topics. So it was really a niche that I thought I could get into. And it's really important for all kinds of reasons for health psychology, you know, for sexual

psychology and sexual health. And also dietary stuff is really, you know, people, they crystallize about what they eat when they're very young and people often can't change their diets because of disgust, even if, you know, they'll end up dying of a heart attack if they don't change their diets. So that's all super interesting and what I've worked on for some time. I mean, I work on different stuff now, but yeah. Well, we'll get into that, but we started talking about men and women at a level that I was not quite expecting. But let's broaden it out a little bit. We mentioned before we started the show, James the James DeMore memo and things like that. As an evolutionary psychologist, what can you tell us about the psychological differences between

men and women on average that are scientifically verified? Because I think, most people understand the biological differences between men and women. Yeah. Well, increasingly less so. But there are kind of basic things that we all know. But psychologically, it seems like we're kind of always veering between offensive stereotype and useless generalization. So what are the differences between men and women?

Well, so you might expect that, you know, one kind of very conservative claim you could make from an evolutionary perspective is that men and women should only differ in domains in which they've had different selection pressures. And that doesn't sound like a big deal, but it would make a big deal. So some of the big differences between men and women are in the sexual domain. And I studied with an evolutionary psychologist called David Bus, and he did some really interesting stuff where he asked men and women, for example, how long would you have to know somebody before you would reasonably be likely to have sex with them?

And how many sex partners would you like over your lifetime and things like that? And some of the biggest sex differences are in that domain. and you also see that, you know, kind of lesbians and homosexual men are kind of interesting in this regard, too, because gay men don't really have a limit in terms of female coyness on how much sex they can possibly have. And so you see gay men have a lot more sex partners than straight men can reasonably have because they're not limited by women's choosiness as much. So I think the idea that women are choosier has even been come into question recently. there was a really famous study by Clark and Hatfield back in the early 90s where they had

a Confederate, attractive Confederate. A Confederate is like somebody who's in cahoots with the experimenters. And they went up to a random undergraduate on the street and they said, hi, I've noticed you around campus, I'm really attracted to you. Would you either, A, go on a date with me, B, come back to my apartment or C, have sex with me? And zero percent of the women said yes to sex. And what percentage of the men said yes to sex?

from a random woman on the street? 100%. 75%. Yeah, I'm not surprised. And the ones who said no. You're surprised? I'll be honest with you, right? And maybe it's my innate Britishness.

But a woman coming up to me who I've never met before, I don't know her name going, do you want to have sex with me? That would be, excuse my language, fucking terrible. I would feel my virginity grow back. I'll be honest with you.

So, and they also included men who said, I would love to, but you know, my mother's in town or my girlfriend at home or whatever the case may be. But something interesting is that 50% of women said yes to the date. Wow. Wow. Yeah, it's interesting, yeah, but very few said yes to the apartment. And there was these people who said, you know, that if you change the rules of the game,

like if you tell women they're definitely never going to be slut shamed, the sex is going to be good, and they will be in no personal danger, then you can get the averages a little bit closer together. But certainly, like, you said that you'd be terrified. If a woman came up randomly to you on the street and said, would you like to have sex with me? You'd think she was some kind of bunny boiler. Yeah. And so I think men and women have similarly, you know, would be afraid in that situation.

The idea that there's a huge difference there. I don't know if that may necessarily make sense. So that's one domain. But you also see differences in another kinds of domain. So women have, on average, taken care of offspring, much more than men have. And in some cultures, you know, in kind of, of modern Western secular cultures, what's called weird, that's Western educated, industrialized, rich democracies, men and women tend to converge and take care of offspring more together.

But in most cultures, men hold their kids like whatever, 15 minutes a day, women hold their kids nine times as long as men do, and they always know that they're the mother of their offspring, for example. And so you should see a lot of differences also in domains that have everything to do with child rearing and there's also this difference in the kinds of roles that men and women have had in terms of hunting, gathering, and seeking out mates warfare. It's never been the case that a band of women have gotten together with spears and hand axes to go and kidnap the men from a neighboring group and have sex with them. Like that's never ever happened.

Oh damn it. And so, you know, this idea, there's kind of a fantasy and I think it's, I, I, I, the more I've learned about kind of leftist ideology, the more I think it comes from a really good place. It would be wonderful if human nature was so malleable that literally women could be socialized to go to war to whatever. I mean, that that wouldn't be a great outcome, but it would be great if human nature was that malleable. So I think it comes from a really nice place, but I don't really think that human nature, especially sex differences, are that malleable. And so you see these kinds of differences. So if you look at the research, what you see is that there's this kind of minimization of personality differences. So, for example, if you look at extroversion, which is one of the big five personality factors, men and women don't really differ much on extroversion.

But if you look at the internal facets of extroversion, you'll see women are more warm than men are, and men are more assertive and sensation-seeking than women are. And so there's a scientist named Marco Del Judice at University of New Mexico. He's my evolutionary psych colleague. And he did a really great paper called The Distance between Mars and Venus. And he said these characteristics that men and women have, they don't occur in a vacuum. These personality characteristics, they converge and they correlate together. And so if you look at a cluster of all the masculine personality characteristics and all the feminine personality characteristics, they actually is a big difference between them.

And that's averaging across gay men and gay women as well. So there's still a big difference. between these two groups. And if you look at the personality factors as they are like extroversion, agreeableness, et cetera, then you'll see smaller differences or if you look at very specific things. Like if you, for example,

what's her name, Cordelia Fine, did testosterone wrecks, and she said, yes, it's true that in these personality factors, they say men are much more risk-taking than women are, but they didn't ask about certain kinds of risk. Like, what about the risk of cooking a souffle that you've never cooked before?

I'm like, that's, that's not, nobody's going to kill you. Oh, because you go to bad soup play, right? So one thing that I've always been fascinated with is the, you know, the premise of, well, women like a bad boy. Is that scientifically true? And if it is, why so? Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you about something that's actually right.

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Yeah, so I think that is true. But, well, so it depends on the kind of environment you live in. So there's some idea that you actually, you're malleable in the, you know, in the beginning years of your life as to how much you like these kind of what are called dark triad characteristics. So dark triad is narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. And those are, you know, how great you think you are. There's an accurate description for most comedians. Exactly.

Narcissists are actually considered more attractive than other people who aren't narcissists. Really? But probably because their narcissism is somewhat informed by their actual self, their actual main value, what we call made value. So I think more attractive people are more likely. I mean, attractiveness and narcissism do correlate, like, objectively. If you think somebody's more attractive, they're more likely to be narcissists. And then whenever I fill out a narcissistic personality inventory, they're like,

would things be better if you ruled the world? I'm like, well, yes, objectively. That's true. So these kinds of personality characteristics. So one idea kind of floating around is that if you are in a volatile environment, so if you're an environment where, let's say you don't have a father, around, then you're getting cues from the environment that either your dad's dead or that this is not the kind of environment where men invest in their kids, for example. Also, if you're an

environment where you see people deceiving each other or cheating each other. So what's the best thing to do in an environment like that is to have babies that are also going to be able to be good liars and good at deceiving and manipulating other people. You don't want to find the most agreeable nice guy in the world to have kids with if you're an environment that is volatile in this way. And you see this kind of dichotomy about what women like in romance novels. So in romance novels, which are the best-selling books on the planet, what happens is the woman falls in love with a man who's this bad boy rogue, what are the top, you know, they're pirates or thieves or whatever, right? And then he becomes so devoted to her that he can express this deep devotion to her,

and he's nice to her and agreeable to her, where he isn't to anybody else. And that is sort of this feminine fantasy is to be with somebody who has the capacity to manipulate and fuck over and deceive other people but doesn't to her as so in love with her that he treats her really well and her family and her kids really really well and that is that's what really optimally I think women want because that's the kind of phenotype that's the kind of man who could succeed in any environment and he would make the kind of kids that could succeed succeed in any environment so he would be nice to her but he would also be able to protect her from external danger and provide or whatever

Is that evolutionary? Yeah, that kind of thing. But if you're in a really volatile environment, you want somebody who can, yeah, like, fuck over other people. So that's, like, what you optimally want. And even women who say, like, oh, I want a man who's generous. Yeah, you want a man who's generous, but you don't want to come home and find a tramp sleeping on your sofa

because he decided to bring one home. You want a man who's generous to you. You want a man who's generous to your family. You want a man who always tells you potentially that you're right. But there's, like, a whole manosphere, red pill thing about how much women need push back. how women actually test to make sure that men that they're with actually still have these kind of bad characteristics that they can still fend for themselves in that kind of way.

Oh, really? Tell us about that. That sounds interesting. I haven't heard about this stuff. So I'm writing, I'm sort of writing a book and I probably won't go into it very much, but I've started reading some of this red pill stuff because I just... So if anyone doesn't know, including me, what is red pill? You don't know what red pill is? I'm familiar with red pill in the sense of people who might have been left, leaning becoming less left leaning.

There's a lot of different red pills that you can possibly take. I'm starting to get the sense that's not the one you're talking about. No, that's not the one I'm talking about. Red pill is a, it's men, so I can think the common wisdom is that women have it worse than men, women are oppressed compared to men, and the red pill, like for example in this like red pill documentary, says that actually women do have some advantages and these are underplayed relative to men's advantage. advantages and not only that but that women also do manipulative things to men in order to get their way that women have kind of secret power

wait is this the Cassie J documentary yeah I have seen it and I've just asked you a question about something I've seen as if I've not even got to know there's extra red pill stuff there's also like red pill stuff about you know what's called shit testing so yeah what when women when and and you're I guess you're blissfully ignorant of the way this is less a podcast you're learning about women that's good i'm happily married for a long time now so he doesn't even realize he's getting praised that's how deep i've repressed all of this information just not to know what's happening and just to be happy with my life so please tell me what's wrong with um so women women whatever do something called shit testing and they do a variety of things to see kind of what the boundaries are like how much they can get away with how generous a man is going to be with them how compliant he is to

her demands, especially if they're unreasonable. So if you make an unreasonable demand of a man, is he just going to say, yes, I'll do that, or will you experience some kind of pushback? So kind of testing a man to see if he has the kind of status, whatever balls, whatever you want to call it, in order to push back against you and not give in to your every whim. and I think, and I find that women's kind of self-help books are very often, like, you go, girl, and you're amazing as you are, and there's nothing you need to do to change in any way, shape, or form, and somebody will love you just as you are. Whereas I find men's self-help books are very much saying, you should work out, you should be

playing chess, you should be trying to sharpen your mind, and you also need to play this game that women are playing. Whereas I really haven't read very, you know, and I've been trying to read some women's self-help books that say, no, you are a woman and you are playing a game, but you're deceiving yourself about these games that you are playing. And I find that I'm very self-aware about the kinds of ways that I am testing things out and seeing where men are at with me. And so coming back to the broader picture of men and women, then, I'm sure you've seen the Kathy Newman and Jordan Peterson interview. Actually, I mean, I started watching it, and then it was very frustrating, so it stopped. It was incredibly,

I mean, he's definitely said some things that I know that the way to get famous and the kind of intellectual landscape is to say things without nuance. If you say things with nuance, it's never going to be a sound bite because nobody cares. So I know that I've seen Jordan Peterson

definitely say things in a less nuanced way, but, I mean, otherwise he wouldn't be famous if he was totally nuanced, right? Probably. I'm not a huge fan of Jordan Peterson, but in that interview, actually, part of the conversation was very much the James DeMore thing. He was trying to explain that the gender pay gap is not simply down to discrimination, that there are factors like the Big Five Personality Trade Differences between men and women.

So what can you tell us about the impact of the differences between men and women on things like the real world stuff like the gender pay gap, for example? So this talk wasn't recorded. I probably should record it at some point, but I gave a talk for the Adam Smith Institute back in December, and I talked a little bit about where this kind of wage gap comes from. and I hope I get all the details of the study right, but they were looking at people who scored very high

on quantitative measures like the SAT, men and women who scored very, very high, and they were looking at this kind of elite intellectual group, and they asked the men and the women in this group, how many hours a week would you work optimally if you had your druthers, which I don't know what druthers are, but they're a thing that you can have. So if you had your druthers, how many hours a week would you work?

And I think far fewer women, it's like 30 or 40% fewer women, said that they would work more than 40 hours a week. And so if you ask women, I think this is the major difference here. If you ask women, how much would you like to work in a week and how much time would you like to spend with your family and how much time would you like to spend with your kids? Women say, on average, I would like to spend more time with my family and my kids and less time working than men say that they would like to.

and so that's kind of a, it's not very well appreciated, but I do think it comes down a lot to personal preferences. And men are also more willing to kind of work on call. You know, there was this study that was done which showed that Uber drivers, like men were making 9% more as Uber drivers than women were, because they were willing to work more when the surge came, they were willing to make more short trips. They were essentially showing that they were more willing to take risks and do jobs that were less appealing. Another really interesting thing about men and women in terms of the pay domain is that lesbians make more than straight women do.

There's something called the lesbian wage premium. Lesbian privilege. And lesbians make 9% more than straight women do. And if you were kind of going with the kind of typical story and you said, okay, well, lesbians obviously don't present as gender typical. they often come across as more butch, obviously. I think everybody knows that. Not on the internet.

Not on the internet. You hear that's the sound of a meltdown happen. So, you know, this is this idea like, oh, you know, women are assertive and they act. And I think that this is true to some extent that women who act assertive, they're called bitches, you know, in whatever American black slang. You say a man who acts dominant, he's bossed up, whereas a woman who acts dominant is called bitch, right? I do think that that happens. But you would think that a woman who didn't act in a gender typical manner, like some lesbians do, would make less money

because they would be oppressed for not fitting in with the larger gender roles. But no, they make more money. And I think it's because lesbians have some of these characteristics, like status-seeking, risk-aking kind of behavior that more feminine straight women are less likely to have. Do you think it's also as well because men are more aware of status? And it's more about... So men, by their nature, we compete with one another for everything, for partners, for whatever it may be, that we're more obsessed with status, therefore we're more obsessed with working more, generating more money, so that we can present ourselves as being more successful.

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, men throughout whatever, our evolutionary history, have gotten sex partners and gotten laid by increasing their status. So it's not about getting like. Yeah. Yeah. their status in order to get sex partners. And, you know, women who are high in status, I think that they're desirable. I think men also like intelligent women who are high in status. But I think that if you have a selection pressure that, and status really differs from

culture to culture. So this is one area that I think is malleable. If you made being a stay-at-home dad a really high-status thing, then you would see more men being stay-at-home dads. I think that women should date stay-at-home dads whenever possible, right? Because I do think that all of the stuff is really driven by female sexual choice. And so that is a malleable thing. In some cultures, there's not really any cultures where being a stay-at-home dad is considered the most high-status thing that you can do. And men chase status, whatever it is, money, power, land, whatever it is in that particular culture. So I think that is a malleable characteristic. But the fact that men are seeking status and chasing status, I think is pretty hard to change.

So you're saying that the bulk of the gender pay gap is down to behavior? Choices. Choices. Yeah. Because I'm sure an element is down to discrimination. We've had people, women who've told us a personal story about being discriminated because they're women and we have no reason not to believe them. So I'm sure that's part of it.

But the majority of it you think is down to choices. I think the majority of it is down to choices. And, yeah, I think, I do think that women do have stories about discrimination, but I also think that that is kind of how it's framed. And so, it's nobody wants to hear a story from a woman who said, no, I've never been discriminated against, and I've never had any problems. You know, you also see this in other domains, like one of my colleagues that a study where he asked people who are minorities in America, you know, do you think that you're regularly discriminated against? and East Asians said like 80% of them said rarely or never and something like 68% of black Americans said rarely or never do they feel discriminated against

and it's kind of squeaky wheel thing the stories that people hear are definitely those stories in which discrimination played a very important role and the same way that somebody might really overestimate the murder rate because you hear much more about murders than other kinds of crime you also hear a lot more about discrimination than what is representative I think in the general population.

Well, since you touched on that, I mean, we've done something controversial, men and women. Let's lighten up a bit and talk about racism. That sounds great. I can't remember whether it was Brett Weinstein or another evolution. Or maybe it was Jordan Peterson in conversation with Brett Weinstein. They were talking about disgust being an element of racism in human beings. And the idea was that if a group of people encountered another group of people, they were quite likely to get diseases from them.

And you talk about this a lot, disease being and discussed being very closely interlinked. Is that, like, why is there racism? Why are people racist? Why are people xenophobic? Why did we evolve in this way? Wow, really, the softballs are just keep coming. Wow.

So there is a disease story that people have told. There's an anthropologist. And he talks a lot about how if you were in a group and then there were these out-group people, that they would have carried novel diseases for which you would not have necessarily had any defense against. I don't think that that really makes sense. And it was a really popular explanation for a long time. So xenophobia is related to what's something called pathogen burden. So the more diseases a given country has, the more kind of bad attitudes they have against out-group people.

And these things were related to one another, they thought. And also conservatism, political conservatism is associated with how much disease there is in a given population. I don't really know if one thing causes the other. I just think that if you have more exposure to various different people, then you don't necessarily consider them your out-group. But there certainly has been selection pressure over evolutionary history such that people who look different than you didn't necessarily follow your social norms, and you would not expect them to behave. ethically towards you. So if you encountered somebody from an out-group, which was a group that was different from you, they probably didn't look that different from you, for example. So if you think about the Hutus and the Tutsis, that civil war that happened in Rwanda,

those people, I mean to white people, they don't look that different. And sometimes there's just very, very subtle physiological differences between them that caused people to get discriminated against. So in the current society in which we have people from all corners of the globe and all kinds of mixtures of all different kinds of ethnic groups together, that is really a very novel kind of situation where, you know, previously out-group members, they would have looked almost exactly like you except they would have had slightly curlier hair or slightly lighter eyes or been slightly taller or thinner or whatever. And now you have people who look really wildly different than you. So there is a certain, I think, during your development,

you're exposed to these people and then you have repeated interactions with them and then you're less likely to become prejudiced. But I think that interacting with people who look very different from you is always going to have some kind of fraught evolutionary cognition behind it because throughout evolutionary history

you could not expect those people who looked very different from you to treat you with the same kind of moral accord that they treated their in-group. So, for example, I did a study like a long time ago, probably like nearly 10 years ago, which looked at ovulating women. And so one question is we had ourselves was ovulating women, ovulation is the time in which it's most dangerous to be sexually assaulted because it's the time when you can get pregnant,

right? And so would ovulating women prefer out-grouped men? So would they find them more attractive because there's this thing called hybrid vigor, obviously, mixtures of two different ethnic groups, those children tend to be more vigorous than with single ethnic. group or would they be more afraid of such men? And we found that ovulating women showed, you know, increased aversion to men who were black or Latino or mixed race compared to other white men. And those are the kinds of interactions, I mean, that have a deep evolutionary impact. If I was, you know, throughout most of our evolutionary history, I would have not intercounter to anybody who looked different than me unless it was probably a very aggressive interaction.

although there was some trade and things like that. I don't think women generally were involved in that. And so it's unclear really how much of a footprint that has on our minds, but it is clear that it's very easy, for example, to leverage disgust or fear when talking about out-group people. And people talk about this example all the time about how during World War II East Asians were compared to insects and cockroaches and how Jews were compared to rats and vermin

about how out-group members are considered to, like, smell different or have these various other qualities that are animal-like. And certainly there is a continuum, like a human-animal continuum. I'm just thinking about whether I should go into one we're quite complicated study. I guess I will. So you know what extinction is, right? Extinction is when you have, like, let's say you have a fear reaction.

Like, every time I show you a snake, you have a fear reaction, and then over time you get desensitized to it. So this colleague of mine did a study where he showed white people snakes and spiders, and then he gave them a very mild electric shock. Or he showed them white faces, or he showed them black faces and gave them a very mild electric shock. And it's very easy to pair physiological arousal, that is heart rate increase and skin conductance increase with black faces if you're shocked. And white faces too, so that happened. But then as he extinguished that response, as he started showing them black faces and then no longer shocking them, it took much longer for that response to extinguish than it did for their

fear response to in-group faces. And it was similar to the response to spiders and snakes. And that's where I think this kind of comparison between animals sometimes comes from is that you're trying to leverage that fear response that you have towards non-human animals towards out-group members. Yeah. I mean, that's slightly mind-blowing. You were just saying there, and I was just trying to get my head around it.

But one point that I wanted to make to you is that human beings have always found a way to discriminate against other human beings, even if they're in the same society. For instance, in the 1950s in the UK, like my father grew up in Lancashire, in the north of England. And you were discriminated against if you were a Catholic. And even on the surface, if they didn't know you were Catholic, one way they could discriminate against you is they'd ask for your CV. They'd check what school you went to. oh, St. Mary Magdalene's school and you're not going to get this job, X. Why do we do that? Even when a person looks absolutely identical, has the same accent, there's almost no difference.

You can still find a way to say, no, you're not part of my tribe. I guess I was just speculate and say that there is this kind of motivation to make an out-group and an in-group all the time and to think about these kinds of things. I think sport taps into that in a more healthy way. than other kinds of in-group, out-group, kinds of, I don't know, thought. But, I mean, I couldn't explain that. The whole Catholic, I mean, I come from America where that's not really a thing. So I find that really difficult to kind of wrap my head around.

But I think that perhaps there's just an appetite for that. And certainly, if you have a group of people that you're tight with, like a family or a kin group, and then you say there's this out-group and they're actually trying to exploit us, you'll become much more tightly knit with that in-group. And so maybe there's a motivation to do that because it actually helps you get in better with the people that you're close to. That's just pure speculation, though.

That makes absolutely sense. Yeah, that's very interesting. It's all very interesting so far. Well, we talked about altruism before we started. I said, I can try to take care of that and become. There's a great American comedian that Francis and I both like Dehattel, who whenever he comes on stage, she picks out, member of the crowd and it goes, do you like comedy? And the guy's like, yeah, yeah, I can change that.

So, yeah, altruism. We talk about effective altruism. I mentioned I listened to a lecture of yours about morality. Tell us what effect of altruism is. Okay, effective altruism is the idea that you should actually, I mean, so not all effective altruists are utilitarian, but I'm a utilitarian. And the way that I think about it is that you should try to engage in actions, for example, or donate to charities that actually can create the most good. And Peter Singer has got an example that he uses all the time. For example, if you watch television, you'll sometimes see advertisements for seeing eye dogs. And to train a seeing eye dog puppy, it takes about 40,000 pounds. It's very, very expensive to train a seeing eye dog puppy to become a seeing eye dog

for a blind person, a blind person's companion. Whereas for the same amount of money, you could probably save hundreds of people from becoming blind at all in Africa from from river blindness. So he kind of makes this comparison. Is it better to have one blind person's life become better because they have a seeing eye dog or is it better to prevent possibly dozens or hundreds of people for becoming blind in the first place? And effective altruism considers the relative risks and benefits of various kinds of actions on human flourishing but also all sentient life flourishing. So there's kind of three main strands in effective altruism right now. One of them is non-human animals, which is something that I'm very focused on. So something like

a trillion fish and billions and billions of animals are killed in pretty horrible ways. And that's actually a pretty low-hanging fruit. You could reduce a whole lot of suffering if, for example, you could make clean meat, which is now the big push, which is this meat that you make without actually slaughtering any animals or raising animals for food. I'll go into that more in a minute. And then there's decreasing existential risk. So, by all accounts, human civilization has led to many, many happy lives. There are many more happy lives on this planet than there ever have been previously.

And if we could stretch our resources even further, perhaps we could have many, many more billions of happy lives in the future colonize the galaxy and just create many happy, happy, flourishing, human or other sentient lives. But if there was something like a meteor strike or political unrest or a huge pandemic, it could either kill many, many people who would go on to lead happy lives or it could basically take civilization back to the dark ages, where we wouldn't be able to make these strides in technology that are going to enable many, many more happy future lives. And then there's also eradicating global poverty. So that's another big strand of effective altruism,

which is helping people in the developing world because they're much cheaper to help than people in the developed world. So you can, for example, for, I don't know, $3,000, give or take, buy malaria nets and buy a year of healthy life or possibly save a life from malaria. So what they do, there's a bunch of different charity evaluators. There's like Give Well, for example, and they evaluate charities as to how much life does a dollar buy for a human, of flourishing. And so that's kind of the whole effect of altruism. Most of the landscape right now is looking at those three main cause priorities. And I focus a lot on non-human animals. So I've been vegan for a long time. And I am on the board for something called the Sentience Institute. So what they are interested in looking at is things like how are animals being killed in crops

and what are the best ways, for example, to reduce the amount of sentient suffering on the planet. And so one thing that I generally plug for people is that you probably don't want to go vegan. A lot of people don't want to go vegan because it's difficult. And so most of the animals that you eat in terms of deaths per calorie are small animals. So if you were to give up eating fish and chicken and eggs, you would be causing 90% fewer deaths, per year than if you carried on eating those things, because it takes about 200 chickens to make the same amount of meat as is in a cow, for example. And so this is something also, Ezra Klein, who I disagree with politically to a great extent,

but he starts off all his podcasts now saying give up chicken. If you give up chicken, then you're actually doing a huge amount to reduce the amount of suffering you cause yearly because every chicken meal you eat or every two chicken meals kills a chicken, whereas it would take you about two years of eating beef probably to kill the cow. It makes a huge difference. And I don't think that cows are 200 times more sentient or more capable of suffering than chickens are.

Well, they guys are a sponsorship in there. We guys were going to have KFC or whatever. Celebrate at the end. Give up chicken, eat whales. Yeah, give out. Wales also, yeah, I mean, people really have, I don't know why people like whales so much. Like, I don't,

they have, like, hair for teeth. Did they? Eyes are all fucking low. And their singing is terrible. and people like whales so much. I have to say you have a fantastic sense of humor for me. Thank you. So, yeah, you should eat whales. We should eat whales.

Okay. And what else? Prongs aren't sentient, are they? I would put prawns. I'm not sure where prawns are. They're like the cockroaches of the sea. However, however, two things about prawns that are very bad. One thing is that they're fed other fish.

Yeah. So if you eat a prawn, it's like eating fish that have vertebrate fish, and that's not good. And the other thing is that there's a lot of slavery in the supply chain for prawns, about a third of... Offly, you're going to say, towards a slave. Prongs are slaves, also, no. So what happens is, you know, people from Burma or whatever, they go somewhere like Thailand to get work, and they end up on a ship, and they sort out what's called trash fish. So if there's a big trawling net, they take out the fish, and those fish are ground up to go into aquaculture, which is for prawns.

But what they do is they want to get paid. they get on the ship, but then they're out at sea, and they're sometimes just held at gunpoint for years at a time, and never paid and never able to talk to their families. And so it was a few years ago, and I don't actually know what kind of strides have been made in this regard, but the Guardian said about a third of all prawns have slavery in their supply chain. So don't eat prawns.

Okay, so no chicken. All right, just kill cows and whales. No prawns. Mallards. You can eat mallards. Yeah. We've already told us. Because they're rapists.

Yeah. So there was a male chasing a female across the park the other day, and then I tried to sort of fling a bag of groceries at the male to keep them from chasing the female. But yeah, it didn't. There was the chase that carried on. Really? He didn't care. Yeah.

But that, you know, that goes back. This is a horrific story. I'm traumatized. I'm going to go home and cry. So we're joking around. Tell us a little bit about why we do what we do. We're both comedians. Uh-huh. What is the evolution,

it's getting laid, isn't it? Yeah. Is that, is that, is that? What you're hearing is the sound of doctor for the moment about to smash us. I'm really looking forward to having my character emissorated on camera. See, but I feel more even more, well, actually you're in a long-term relationship as well.

I feel extra depressed, because if you're a young male comedian and your rationale for doing comedy is to get laid, you have some, that actually makes sense, whereas you and I probably decreases our chances of getting laid with our partners, because we're not even at home to do it. Yeah, exactly. So what we're... Not even home to do it.

Not even home to do it. We're out in the evenings, begging strangers for love. So why do we need... Why do we have humor? What is the evolutionary basis for humor? Okay. So, I'm sorry, start from the beginning.

There's this thing called sexual selection and sexual selection. So natural selection is the evolutionary force that creates adaptation. that cause you to be able to survive. But sexual selection are the adaptations that you use to have sex. And there's a famous kind of analogy, which is with the peacock's tail. So peacock produces a tail and the females find it attractive.

But producing a tail that's symmetrical, that's colorful and that he can jiggle at her is actually very costly. It makes him more prone to predation. If he has any parasites, he can't grow that tail. And so humor is considered like a costly signal in the same way. It's hard to be funny, as you both know. So it's very difficult to be funny. And so one idea, actually, Jeffrey Miller, who is my partner, came up with, what didn't

come up with, but wrote a book about the mating mind, is that human intelligence is a costly signal. It actually takes a lot of energy. You have to have a development that has, you know, very little disease in it in order to be smart enough to do things like make art or make jokes. And so it's a costly signal. You're saying, look at how brainy I am, look how intelligent I am, I can make you laugh because it's very difficult. And so they've done studies, for example, where they had undergraduates caption various different cartoons and people who are funnier also tended to be smarter, right?

I agree with that. And so the idea is that humor is a way of showing off. how healthy and vigorous you are, because you're actually wasting your intelligence a bit. It's like a costly signal, just like a diamond is a way of wasting your money. Humor is a way of showing, look, I'm so smart that I can afford to show off in this particular way. And in order to make somebody laugh, you have to also have pretty good kind of theory of mind. Your brain has to work really well. So I have to have some idea of the culture that you come from. I have to have some idea of the kind of popular culture that you might know.

I have to be able to not be too obvious. I have to have the kind of correct timing. I have to be quick, but I have to also speak clearly. It's a whole thing. And it's knowing your audience. Yeah, it's also knowing your app. Absolutely. Knowing your audience.

Yeah, staring away from the vegan jokes. It's difficult to be funny. It's difficult to be funny. So men tend to show off in this particular way more than women. I'd like to think I'm a funny woman, but like I don't actually think it really gets me anywhere. I mean, it gets me somewhere with other women. Like, I date women, and women certainly like that I'm, funny, but I don't think men care, I mean, the men that I date tend to care that I'm funny,

but I don't think I would have any problems if I was totally, totally a wet blanket and not funny at all. And, you know, when I, I used to hang around with these people who were in the military and they were on this military base in Germany, and I found that all the men tried to learn German, got conversational in German so they could try and pick up German women, and none of the women who lived on this military base, even those who were unpartnered learned any German because they didn't have to, because German men tried to speak English with them, and then the American men who were on this German military base were learning Germans so they could seek out women.

And so men have to try a lot harder, and I think that's where humor kind of comes in. So you're saying that that's essentially all humor is. It's a tool to try and get laid. I did put a lot of fluke about it. But yes, that is the core of it. That's a core argument. Also as well, do you think,

because there's a stereotype, the better-looking you are, the less funny, the less interesting you have to be. Is that true or is that just a wild steroids? I had this friend who she was, she was really obese, and then she had gastric bypass surgery, and then she was really thin. And it was, she's really funny. And people always said,

oh, now I know why you were funny. You used to be obese. Because you had to show off, right? So I do think that people don't work harder than they have to work in general, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that, I thought I was really, really ugly until I was, you know, well into my late teens. And I think that I would be pretty boring if I had thought I was attracted earlier, right?

And I think that's, yeah, the same way with people just work as hard. And they, people tend to play to their strengths. And if you find out that you're funny, then you'll really work on that because everybody has a niche and you'll try and play up that and become as good at that as you possibly can. And if you're attractive, that's just a way easier way of signaling your quality than being funny, right? And people generally don't tend to cultivate being funny unless they really have to. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them.

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A damning indictment. There you go, man. Yeah. That's your life. That's my life right there. That's all we're doing. I love the moment where you went, basically, you know,

being funny is a way of wasting your intelligence. I'm like, am I talking to my mother? My mother in another form. It's conspicuous consumption of brain energy. I'm not that kind of psychologist. You couldn't have done it without a Freud joke, right. Was there anything else that you particularly wanted to ask about humor? Was there anything else that you particularly wanted to ask about humor?

I feel suddenly under pressure now. Why do you think, so it comes to a point where women find humor particularly attractive? And do you think if a woman, what do you think is more important for a woman evolutionary? Is it being sound of healthy of body or healthy of mind? Which one would be more desirable? I mean, those things tend to correlate. So people have all kinds of stereotypes about, for example, people think, if they think about a scientist or they think about somebody highly intelligent, they don't also tend to think about somebody who's very attractive and very healthy and very athletic, right?

even though good characteristics tend to cluster together. So people who are really good with other people also tend to be smarter. But when we think about people who are highly intelligent, we tend to think about people who are highly intelligent and then have a deficit in other characteristics, like how well they can read other people, for example. Right. And those things, that's a stereotype that we kind of have about scientists and funny people.

So in general, if you're smart enough to make jokes, you're also going to have a pretty healthy other, factors, right? It's pretty hard to be smart enough to make jokes if you're, I don't know, dying of consumption. Right. Not mentally healthy though. We know too many comedians to suggest any correlation. And just to kind of swing back to that kind of dark triad, narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, I think that there's a certain degree of showing how good you are at exploiting other people in humor because you're figuring out something. There's a lot of jokes that are tapping into things that people don't want to admit to themselves that they believe. or taboo ideas that everybody holds,

or weird things that people do that they think nobody else knows about. And so that's another reason why humor is attractive, because it shows that you have this secret knowledge of other people, and that is one of the necessary ingredients for being able to exploit other people. Brilliant, and if you don't mind me asking, where are you politically, because you've hinted at different things.

Yeah, where am I politically? I was really, like, I was kind of a socialist in my early 20s, believe it or not. Everybody is. Yeah, and I, and, I was, And I read Ayn Rand, and then that swung me a bit. And then I thought, Aaron Rand is a terrible person. That swung me a little bit the other way.

And so this has been back and forth. But there's not really any libertarians here in the UK. But I guess I would define myself as somebody who is libertarian leaning, but also thinks that there are some services that the free market can't really provide very well. And I have joked before. I think I made a joke on Twitter that said, if you want to keep your male partner away from women, encourage him to get into libertarian bonds.

Because libertarians are very, very, yes, like 75% male of very, very few women libertarians. Is that right? Yeah. Because I would say this podcast is fairly libertarian. I'm certainly libertarian. I don't know where... I just swim back and forth.

I don't know what I am anymore. But one thing I was actually going to ask is this. Do you think, you touched on it very early on at the beginning of the point, podcast. Do you think, I mean, in a world, we'd all love to live in a socialist paradise where we're all equal, everybody's happy, we all listen to each other. But do you think essentially human nature, those are fundamentally incompatible with the basics of human nature? Listening to each other. Yeah. What? And socialism, but socialism in many ways, you know, this idea, you know, socialism, the far left wing ideas of how we should live. I think it's a quote attributed to E.O. Wilson about

socialism, which is a great idea, but the wrong species. Yeah. You know, because ants do that really well. Yeah. Yeah. And naked mole rats. But ants are all related, aren't they? Yeah, that's right.

And so are naked mole rats, right? I just think it's very difficult, especially if you think about something like Twitter or soundbites when people are trying to talk to one another, the tweets that are most popular are tweets that are saying, like, well, no one else is brave enough to advocate this moral position, but I'm really strongly advocating this moral position and a totally unnew. and direct way. And so if you want to have a tweet go viral or you want to have a lot of people listen to you, then you have to give a fairly unnuanced position. And it's, nuance is really not encouraged in really any culture. And it's a little bit alarming to think that it's probably more encouraged in our current culture than it has been at other points in history.

And what you have to do is you have to play to the whole IQ distribution, right? You have to play to people who would not understand nuance if it bit them in the face. And then you have to play to people who really only speak in very nuanced terms and have very complex ideas about things. And so there's always going to be that problem with populism is that people can have nuanced positions, but they have to present them in this other way. And then I think that something that happens with leftist politics is that they want to throw out people with their ideas. So there's this kind of hygiene, epistemic hygiene, where if I think that you have, like, let's say you and I were talking,

and you expressed some kind of opinion that I thought was bad, you think everybody should eat as many chickens as possible. Like you said something like that. Then I might say, now I think that all of your ideas are bad, and I'm going to completely reject you. And even ideas that you have that I might otherwise agree with, because I can't think about you as a group of ideas. I have to reject you as a person.

And that's something I think is really difficult in the kind of current climate is this desire that people have to reject. So Jordan Peterson, I disagree with him about a lot of stuff. I think he's actually very traditionalist in a lot of ways that I don't think are very helpful. And there's some things I disagree with, I don't know, like Sam Harris about, there are some things I disagree with Jeffrey Miller about. There's a lot of people that I admire and I have fundamental disagreements with them. But what happens now is that the more and more different attitudes are moralized, for example, If I said, I don't think there should be any welfare state.

I don't know if I could totally advocate that position. But that's the kind of thing that I could say that would make somebody say, well, now I'm also going to reject veganism. I'm also going to reject evolutionary psychology. I'm also going to reject all these other ideas that I think are clustered together with that. And I have this philosopher friend named Amanda Askell, and she said that one really good way of getting around that is to communicate to people that you're talking to, that you share values.

And so if you're talking to somebody about, I don't know, welfare or socialized medicine or whatever, you'll say, I don't want to see people die in the street. I also care that people live and have happy lives. And then you start on that kind of same page. Whereas I think what happens a lot of times people will think, well, you're not advocating the same position that I am. So you are a moral monster who also doesn't care if people die in the street and who doesn't care about human flourishing. And if you kind of start off saying, no, we have similar values, then you can then talk about how. how you're going to arrive at those values in different ways. But unfortunately, the ways that we arrive at those things,

like, for example, if I said I believe in sex differences and I believe they're pervasive, and I believe that there's a lot of things that we can't really do much about in terms of sex differences, then people might also ascribe to me the belief that I think that women should be kept at home or they should be told what to do when I don't have that value at all. I just have a different idea about how we might arrive at gender equality

then, and I have a different view of what that means than other people would, for example. But isn't it also intellectual laziness? So, for instance, if you say one thing, then instead of me actually taking the time to find out everything about you, your points of view, how on certain instances you're on the right, certain instances you're on the left,

and certain instances you're censorist, it's far easier to go, or you're this, this, and this, therefore I want nothing to do with you. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the same way that you were saying, like, people exclude Catholics and, you know, that there's been these ideas

about making in groups and making out groups. It is some degree intellectual laziness, but also it's much easier to kind of push somebody away who has a bunch of nuanced positions and then say, now we stand strong, me and the other people who are in my ideological in-group, and if there's this threat from people with these other kinds of positions, then you can become much tighter-knit. And you see that in all kinds of different groups and on Facebook. I've been on Facebook in a year and a half, actually partly because I had a really hard argument with one of my best friends on Facebook publicly. And yeah, and so it's, I actually prefer Twitter because even though people are, actually

I've cultivated a really reasonable following. Even if I say this person said something stupid, very rarely do my followers go after them in a way that I'm embarrassed about. So I, maybe I'll undo that. But I think I think I'm a bad as your threshold is too. Yeah, but I don't really care. People say crazy things to people on Twitter. But on the other hand, you know, those response.

responses are, there have to be short. Somebody responds to you 20 times, then they and everybody else who's watching them knows that they're probably going on too much. Whereas Facebook, I just didn't want to read novel length responses from people anymore about stuff that I had posted about, so I haven't really been on there. Also, my mom didn't want her.

I don't want to have political discussions with my mother, if at all possible, yeah. That's never a good idea. Well, listen, we'll wrap up now. Tell me about this current climate that you refer to, Do you think, you know, we talk about free speech a hell of a lot, you know, comedians. Yeah. We're naturally drawn to that issue anyway.

Is, we hear from America that people like Brett Weinstein, Heather Herring, et cetera, that there are issues apparently at American universities where certain things are becoming impossible to research or to do. Do you find that that's the case? Do you think that's a true? Do you think it's the case here in the UK? Is it affecting science, this climate that we have now? I mean, where I teach, I can say pretty much whatever I want. And I've even, I was on some podcast, was it, oh no, I was on some late night, now it's on late night reruns. I told an incredibly dirty joke on television.

And nobody really gives me any flack about anything at all at my university. I also teach psychology of human sexuality and I teach about some quite edgy things. And I've never had any pushback about anything whatsoever. Some of my students have said, Diana teaches us things from a certain perspective. And I don't always agree with that perspective. But of course, I'm going to teach things from a certain ideological perspective. And if somebody writes in their exam paper, something different than my perspective, if they back it up with evidence, I would still really appreciate that, right?

I don't get that impression over here. And in the United States, I know a lot of people, you know, Jonathan Haidt, Jeffrey Miller, Sam Harris, Christine Hoff Summers, people like that who had some kind of pushback. But I also think they wouldn't be nearly as famous as they are now if they hadn't had protests and pushback. And one thing that I really like that Jordan Peterson said is that if you scheduled a talk for him at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m., there would be no protests. Because it's very hard for these people to, I mean, I'm not going to disparage them too much, but it's pretty hard for them to aggregate very early in the morning. They're not that well organized, really. That's a lovely way of saying later.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's, I mean, I'm still pretty agnostic about that. I haven't lived in the States in some time. and I also am in a sort of privileged position. I'm a woman, I can say kind of what I want. Sorry. So I think that, yeah, I just feel like I can kind of say what I like and very few people have ever given me pushback about those things. Did you think if you're a man, you wouldn't be able to say some of the things that you say?

Yeah. I don't think so. I don't think I could talk about sex differences in the kind of fast and loose way that I have today, you know, on this podcast if I was a man because people would feel like I was ideological biased, you know, in favor of my own sex. Whereas as a woman, it would really behoove me to say women are very oppressed and I should be given kind of more advantages or concessions because of that. That would actually be the best position for me to take in terms of my own self-interest. And so if I'm arguing kind of against my self-interest, people are more likely to

trust that. And then also, you know, it's, yeah, I think that sort of petering out here. Yeah, I'm sort of, I'm Latina as well, so I think I also have a bit of leeway about things in that respect. But, you know, I think that what happened to Brett Weinstein is terrible, but I also think that he was at a very weird university. Yeah. And I went to a really super lefty liberal arts university. I was not politically involved in anything at that time, really. And so I didn't really see much of that. But I'm pretty sure that if I had started inviting libertarians or Christine Hoff Summers or anybody like that to come and speak, I would have also experienced that kind of pushback.

But at the current climate, and this is something that people who like libertarians and people who like the free speech people are not going to appreciate me saying, I think that they're actually getting a whole lot more benefit out of being protested than they are. experiencing drawbacks or detriments. I would agree with that, but I think the point that they would probably make is that they're not after fame. They're actually trying to achieve something in terms of

making sure that people can speak freely. Do you know what I'm saying? So they personally benefit absolutely, but I think a lot of them do so almost without intending to. Well, if they're trying to get to a bigger audience, certainly they're getting to a bigger audience that way.

And I think that it obviously, it behooves them to say, oh, I'm really just trying to speak truth, and these people are trying to prevent me from speaking. I think what happened to Christine Huff Summers, I watched some of that, or people unplugging the microphones and things. Unfortunately, if I was involved in leftist politics, or I was involved in Antifa, I would be embarrassed about how childish people in my in group were coming across in those kinds of interactions. And so it's really making people who have sometimes very edgy political positions look really good by comparison. And I wouldn't really pull too much.

much on that thread because it's working out very well, I think, that's far, right? But there are certain things I think that are very difficult to research. And I think that that's going to kind of unwind at some point. We're going to have to, you know, behavioral genetics is really making leaps and bounds. Previously, you know, just looking at somebody's genes, you really wouldn't know that much about their personality. And now we're going, you know, I think in 10 or 15 years, be able to give a pretty tight confidence interval about how agreeable, how intelligent, how promiscuous, like all kinds of things about people based on their genes. And we're going to know how much things are genetically determined

and how much things are influenced by environment much more so than we do now. And there just won't be any way around that. So I think people who are ideologically motivated against that position now, because there's not a whole lot of evidence that, you know, genetics is, so deterministic in all these different respects. But I think as that kind of the evidence mounts, you're going to see that. So I think a lot of these problems will kind of sort themselves out. Very good.

Thank you so much for coming on. Listen, the last question we always ask our guest is, is that one thing that you think no one's talking about that we ought to be talking about? Or if you can't think of some of that, is that one thing we haven't talked about today that we should have talked about. Okay. Yeah, I think that kind of the last point that I was making about the kinds of strides that behavioral genetics are making. And then also, you know, in China, they're trying

to figure out ways of giving people sort of a social reputation score. Social credit, yeah. Social credit, things like that. And they're trying to run their society in a sort of tighter way to see, I mean, they're basically trying to promote social order in a way that's totalitarian. And I think that one thing that people aren't really talking about enough is that when all nations have access to that kind of technology when you can with a DNA sample or a picture of somebody's face figure out kind of the likelihood

that they're going to have certain kinds of characteristics, how are people going to use that kind of information and how can we promote a free society when that kind of technology is really available to everybody? And I'm not sure how soon that's all going to happen and I don't know a ton about it right now, but I do think that it's super important and people aren't talking about it enough.

Yeah, it's already happening. Pipa Malgram, who I mentioned that we had on the show a few weeks ago, she's an expert in technology and she was talking about the fact that it's already happening. Yeah. It's already, they're already doing it. Yeah.

It's scary stuff. Yeah. Scary stuff. Well, that's a nice positive note, I guess. All right, Diana Flechman, thank you so much for coming in. It's been nice of pleasure. Tell us what is your Twitter handle? It's sentientist.

Sentientist? Yeah, so somebody who prioritizes sentience as a basis for morality. And, yeah, I'm Diana Fleischman.com is where you can see my publications and other and you're writing a book? I am writing a book, proposal. Ah, book proposal. Yeah, I'll be blogging and stuff probably over the summer.

We'll come back and talk to us when the book is getting ready. I'd love to, yeah. We'll talk about genetics more. That would be fascinating, I think. All right. Just before we go, if you've enjoyed it, could you please rate the podcast? I'm enjoying how Francis is looking at the wrong camera. I know, I'm nailing this, yeah.

Could you please write the podcast, five stars, leave a review, or even better tell a friend that you really enjoyed it. And if someone wants to follow you? At Failing Human. and I'm at Constance and Kisten. Follow us at Triggerpot on Twitter. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. We're building up our audience. And we'll be back next week with another episode.

Thanks very much.