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David Robson: Placebo Effect, Mortality, and IQ Traps
February 13, 2023
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Today we talk about the placebo effect, mind over matter, and the cognitive traps that correlate with IQ. David Robson is an author of science with a unique focus on human intellect and behavior. He has a degree of mathematics from Oxford. We both bond over our similar degrees in mathematics, except of course he's actually done something productive with his. He's worked for New Scientist, BBC, and he writes for several popular science magazines. Today we discuss the intelligence trap and the expectation effect.
Thank you, and enjoy this interview with David Robson.
David, thanks for coming out. I appreciate it. I've been listening and reading your book for about, it was months ago and then intermittently in the past few weeks. So thank you. It's an honor to speak with you. You too. What got you interested in intelligence? Yeah, I mean, it's something I was interested in since I was, you know, quite a young child. Because in the UK, we have this kind of streamed school system. Now it's only kind of in my area in the southeast of England, but we
take this exam called the 11 plus that decides which type of senior school we go to and essentially it's an IQ test by any other name and if you score in the top 25 percent you go to a grammar school which is meant to be for kind of academically gifted children the rest go to a comprehensive school
So I took the exam, I did quite well, you know, got into my senior school, but I was just kind of a bit baffled by what this test was really measuring, because it wasn't the version that I took, you know, really wasn't looking at what I'd learned at school. Previously, it was all of these, you know, verbal, nonverbal questions that didn't seem to be directly related to kind of education.
Such as? And so I just wondered, you know, it was kind of word association things that were kind of mental rotation exercises, all of these things that I later learned, you know, kind of standard IQ questions. So it seemed quite narrow. And I guess I was always interested in like, what's it mean to be intelligent? Well, you know, what is that measuring? How kind of generalizable can it be?
And then when I became a science journalist, I became super interested in this phenomenon because I was interviewing some of the world's greatest minds, people who changed our understanding of the universe, and you kind of just had to look a little bit more deeply into their private lives to realise that while they were obviously showing high intelligence in their particular field, they could also be surprisingly stupid, and there really is no other word for it in other areas of their life.
There was this guy, Kerry Mullis, who developed the polymerase chain reaction, which we use for all kinds of genetic testing, and it's the PCR test that we use for COVID. But he was a climate change denier. He was an HIV denier. He even believed that he had traveled in the astral plane, had met this kind of glowing raccoon in the forests of California. He had some very strange beliefs that just didn't seem to be scientific, let alone the kind of
kind of thinking that we would expect from a Nobel Prize winner. He won the Nobel Prize for chemistry for the PCR test. So, you know, it was really that that kind of led me back to this kind of old childhood fascination with intelligence. And I just wanted to understand, like, what do we mean by intelligence? What does the IQ test measure? And what does it miss? And what are the other kind of mental traits
What are the other mental traits that we should be kind of cultivating and appreciating that aren't measured in kind of standard academic tests? What do intelligence tests measure and what is intelligence? Yeah, I mean, so the idea had been that, you know, we have this kind of generalized intelligence and this goes right back to the early 20th century, which is like a kind of underlying brain power. It's kind of almost like the kind of processing capability of the brain.
and actually you know we know that IQ tests do measure something meaningful and that they may be reflecting some kind of anatomical difference in the brain that does reflect a kind of general processing ability because we know that even those you know very narrow abstract tasks that I described that I took in my childhood IQ test well you know people's performance on that does seem to predict their academic achievement and then also how well they're doing
They're different professions and especially kind of professions that need kind of greater, you know, classically kind of intellectual input. So things like law, medicine, science, you know, so
If we have a high IQ, we probably are quicker to learn kind of complex stuff, quicker to understand complex stuff. So, you know, it's useful. I don't want to kind of downplay the kind of relevance of IQ. But the fact is that we also know that it's by no means the only thing that's important about someone's intellectual abilities. So, you know, even if you're looking at those kind of classic professions, you know,
kind of can explain the kind of minority of the variance in people's performance you know so there's lots more to IQ even if you're a lawyer or a scientist or a doctor you know it's not going to make you incredibly creative for example so we know that it's missing something important and then what I really wanted to look at in the intelligence trap was just well like what is it missing and how does it relate to things like rationality and wisdom and you know
In the book, something that stood out to me was that there are a variety of cognitive biases and there are some that people who have a high IQ are more prone to. Can you talk about those?
Yeah, I mean, totally. So it's quite complex, I should expect that, you know, a nuanced as well. But essentially, like scientists have been looking at these kind of cognitive biases that have been studied by people like Daniel Kahneman since, you know, the 1970s. And we know, you know, humans act kind of irrationally in lots of different situations. And to just give one example, we suffer from this
thing called the sunk cost fallacy where, you know, if you're pouring resources into a project, like we feel very reluctant to abandon that project, even when we realise that actually any gains we're going to get from continuing are only going to kind of, they're not going to pay off, they're only going to lead us to a further loss. You know, the famous example of that is would be
Is the Vietnam War an example of that as well? Yeah, that kind of thing would absolutely be an example.
It's just really difficult to cut your losses and accept defeat, even when you know that you're never going to win. We've known that exists for decades, but what the new research had shown, research on what's known as the rationality quotient, had actually shown us that people with high IQs compared to low IQs are really no more or less
susceptible to that. Being super intelligent does not make you more rational in that case. So that's one example where surprisingly intelligence doesn't make you kind of more logical. But then there are other phenomena where actually high intelligence can even make you more irrational. And that is when it gets to kind of justifying your bad decisions.
So if you have a really deeply founded belief in something, it might be like Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes novels, that you believe in the paranormal.
Well, what we know there is that then the more intelligent you are, actually the more kind of resilient you are to any contradictory information. So your intelligence actually protects your beliefs and prevents you from looking at the evidence that might actually lead you to a more rational point of view. And we saw that beautifully with Arthur Conan Doyle in all of his writing.
You know, he's actually drawing on all of his creativity and his scientific knowledge to try to justify some really crazy beliefs. So, for example, he believed in fairies. He thought that these young girls in Yorkshire in the UK had taken photographs of fairies kind of around the babbling brook at the end of their garden. And, you know, other skeptics around him, you know, pointed out things like that you could kind of see their cardboard cutouts stuck together with pins.
He took it as evidence that it was a belly button and it was a sign of the umbilical cord. So he actually used that contradictory evidence.
to then make this weird inference that fairies are born in the same way that humans are, with an umbilical cord. And then he drew on these theories of electromagnetism, like Maxwell's new theories, to explain why normally we couldn't see fairies with the naked eye.
so he was actually using his knowledge there to justify this very strange belief that all of the people around him who may have been less intelligent just couldn't actually believe but it's almost like his intelligence was fueling this rational belief because it was so central to him and you look into his biography and you kind of see that he
was mourning the loss of his son and so the belief in this kind of spirit realm actually became really important to him personally because he wanted to believe that you know there was an afterlife that he would be able to see his son again but then he was actually
you know rather than helping him to deal with that grief you know these beliefs were just causing him to pour you know thousands and thousands of pounds into kind of supporting these fraudulent mediums into you know he ruined his reputation amongst his peers by kind of supporting all of these beliefs so it really backfired for him and that was
for me a very clear example of how intelligence can kind of lead us astray. It can actually drive us along the wrong path in life if we don't have kind of checks and balances to make sure that we're applying it correctly. Do you make an equivalence between irrationality and illogicalness, illogicality? Yeah I mean I do think they're very related and essentially you know when to talk about irrationality I'm kind of trying to say when
It's all of those cases where we're, we're not making the optimum decision based on the information in front of us. And you know, anyone can make a mistake if you don't have sufficient information. But, you know, in someone like Arthur Conan Doyle's case, you know, there was enough information available, even if we didn't have all the scientific knowledge we have today, there was enough to suggest that these beliefs in the paranormal were very irrational. But
and you know, plenty of people around him were skeptical, but he wasn't. So that's, you know, that's what I mean by rationality. The rationality could affect things like financial decision making, you know, causing you to pay too much for a property or to make a bad investment. You know, it could be in all kinds of areas, but it's essentially when you're making the less optimum decision, despite evidence that should have helped you to make a better decision. Does rationality incorporate healthiness into it?
So what I mean is that it's rational to make a decision or to have your goal as something that's salutary in the long run, whereas logical is just following a sequence of steps like modus ponens and so on, like axioms. I think that's a great way of looking at it. You know, logic, I think, could be restricted more to, you know, like a very specific kind of question. But like, I do think when we talk about rationality and irrationality,
We are really thinking about, you know, how do we make decisions that align with our long term goals and in making the kind of optimum life for ourselves. The reason I ask that is then could there not be the argument that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was doing what's rational because it provided him comfort?
And so some of these false beliefs, let's just say false in a scientific sense or factual sense, and that's putting a huge asterisk because we don't know the answers to large questions. But let's just put a pin in that for now, that belief in quote unquote, factually false ideas can be rational because they're adaptive. Yeah, I mean, that's not the kind of definition of rationality. I would take because I feel like
So say you know I feel like oh yeah it's true Arthur Conan Doyle kind of wanted to have that emotional comfort but I think if you asked him would you be willing to believe in these things even if they were proven to be untrue he would have valued truth above emotional comfort like I'm certain looking at his writings that he really wanted to believe the truth and felt like he was spreading the truth for other people. So it's all about the kind of alignment of his goals but I really think he did actually
value rationality and we can see that in Sherlock Holmes the character himself is like the epitome of rationality so I think like if yeah like I just think in that case it's like he would have rather had a rational belief than a comforting belief like a true belief than a comforting belief but he was still drawn to this comforting belief because um yeah because I guess he couldn't
somehow couldn't resist it yeah but i agree like i think it you know definitions of rationality depend on what you value in life but you know scientists and psychologists in particular talk about epistemic rationality and that's really where you value truth and you're always looking for truth and then if that is your goal and you're then believing something that is not supported by the evidence then is irrational in an epistemic sense and that's absolutely what Arthur Conan Doyle was suffering from.
Let's get philosophical for a moment. Would valuing the truth, even if it led you to a deleterious outcome, be rational? So let's say I value the truth. I want to know how potent can this virus get. So I'm going to make a virus or make Ebola and cross that with whatever is extremely virulent because I'm interested in the truth.
But yet that has the potential of destroying the entire world. Or let me investigate an even more potent bomb than the hydrogen bomb. That's a truthful endeavor, a scientifically truthful one. My question is, just because something is truthful or factually the case, does pursuing it mean that you're rational? Or can there be something irrational about pursuing the truth? Like, should you value truth above what's nourishing?
Yeah, yeah, it's almost like Icarus, you know, flying too close to the sun, you know, is it always good to push kind of human understanding that far? No, I would say that's kind of whether you pursue that or not, you know, isn't to me a question of rationality. Because say,
So for some of these questions, I think it's perfectly rational for you to say, I don't know and to have that humility, you can just be, you know, like you can say, and it's totally factually correct and epistemically correct to be like, we don't know how dangerous this virus could become.
or we don't know how potent that bomb can become and we don't want to pursue that because the risk is too great for our other goals which is the survival of humanity. So in that sense I think it's more rational really to say we don't know and we don't want to know, we don't want to take that risk. So it's not always just pursuing the truth above all else but it's more also than accepting like
Calibrating your beliefs about that particular phenomenon and saying you don't know is a perfectly reasonable, rational response to something. What would be irrational would be for you to make some claim that the bomb is or isn't this dangerous or that the virus is or isn't this dangerous.
based on a lack of information. So yeah, that's why I stand on that. I certainly don't think we should have a relentless pursuit for truth over all else. But I do think we just have to be honest about where the current level of evidence stands. Okay, while we're on this, I want to get to the growth mindset and then a fixed mindset. But also, as you've steel manned what IQ is earlier,
I want you to steal, man, the dangers of an open mind only because we're constantly talking about that we need more openness. And as someone who has been exploring and unjudiciously exploring theories of everything, let's say, I've been privy to the more heinous aspects of an open mind. And I mean that in a psychological sense, what I'm saying is that
The case for the more ruinous aspects of an open mind are rarely made, at least by intellectuals, because they're constantly saying we need to have more of an open mind, more of an open mind. So I'm curious for you to steal, man, what it's like to have too much of an open mind. How do we know when we're too open?
Interesting. I mean, given the examples that you gave, like that Lovecraft quote, it makes me think of Plato's idea of the people in the cave looking at the shadows, then one of the prisoners escapes. He sees the fire, he sees what's beyond the fire, and he sees the beautiful reality. But it's like, how can he persuade the other prisoners that they want to see reality rather than sticking to what they know?
And you know, so yeah, I think this is a question that we've had for millennia on kind of, how far do we probe? Like, how much can we how can we deal with like a new kind of truth? So I absolutely think that is an open question. You know, I think that a great example, which I'm sure you've covered in this series is, you know, what if we discovered that we didn't have free will?
you know what kinds of consequences would that have for kind of human behaviour and actually there are scientific studies that have tried to manipulate people's beliefs and free will or like a free will and you know it does have important consequences for things like our moral behaviour you know our kind of
so discipline like if we don't believe we have free will we really struggle to kind of motivate ourselves to do anything because you just feel like you know what's the point your fate is already determined um so you know i do think like we could come to a stage where we do come to some conclusion about kind of consciousness or the origins of the universe where we we have to wrestle with these
I don't really have an answer for that. My hunch at the moment is that we're so far away from that, but as a society we should be
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while studying it, you know, it won't leak from a lab, you know, that kind of thing, like we have to have all these kind of measures in place, we even a small possibility of a disaster. I don't think it's worth it because you know, eventually have enough of those kinds of near misses at one time is going to backfire and you could face a real catastrophe. So, you know, I think like that's why we have so many
In general, I don't think we're close to that kind of issue. I think separately there's a question of the individual.
Can it be just too overwhelming for an individual who is so relentlessly curious that they're almost overwhelmed by what they're discovering? And I think that's also something to bear in mind. I think curiosity is something that
bring so many benefits and i write about that in the intelligence trap you know how like curiosity you know literally makes you smarter and that it makes you learn more quickly it makes you more rational because you find it easier to balance kind of information that might be contradictory you know you're kind of looking but the uh you're you're willing to accept like um
evidence that challenges you, which is really important for being rational. So you're not suffering from confirmation bias. So I had always thought that we should like cultivate curiosity. But I think if you get to a point where you're actually just struggling, then maybe, you know, you also have to slow down a bit or take your time, you know, manage like how you're dealing with that curiosity, making sure that you're not kind of pursuing too much too quickly at any one time.
So I guess that's where I stand on that is that even though, you know, open mindedness, curiosity, you know, they're great traits, we always have to kind of rein them in and make sure that like, they're working to our advantage, and that, you know, we're not going too quickly about thinking about the consequences, whether that's personal, whether that's for society.
Can you talk about some of the benefits of curiosity? And then also, I'm going to ask you about how does one temper their curiosity if they're much like myself where I feel like it's not producing positive effects always.
Right. So curiosity, you know, is this kind of hunger for knowledge. And we know that, you know, neurologically speaking, when you feel curiosity, like some amazing things happen in the brain, so actually triggers the release of dopamine, which we think of as being like, you know, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure. And it might be why finding out new things is, you know, is fun. But actually, dopamine also strengthens
the storage of memories it kind of cements the memory for you so it actually improves your long-term memory of what you're learning and then there's this kind of amazing kind of spillover like halo of things so if you're curious about something you know in a kind of physics class or you know when you're reading a book like it actually
helps you to learn not just that one fact but it actually strengthens your memories for all of the other facts that surround it. So you know in education, making sure that someone is curious and that they can pursue their curiosity is really beneficial. It can actually help to kind of
you know, like erase or blur the differences that arise from differences in IQ and learning. If someone's really curious and really dedicated, you know, that's as good as having a higher IQ, essentially, even if the IQ is closer to average. So we know it's important in learning and memory. And then we also know that curiosity can help to offset some of the
of biases that can sometimes come with greater intelligence. So I mentioned earlier that people like Arthur Conan Doyle suffer from this thing called the my side bias and that is and motivated reasoning which is where you you're attached to a particular viewpoint and then you only search for the evidence that supports that viewpoint and you like use your intelligence to dismiss any arguments that might contradict your point of view.
which can lead you down some kind of wormholes where you're believing something that you know most other people consider to be purely irrational and you know so leading you to pursue a goal that isn't actually helping you in the long run. Now what curiosity does is it actually protects you from that and it's because the curiosity overrides that emotional kind of pull of your initial belief. So you know you might have an initial belief in
you know, something like the paranormal or climate change denialism or, you know, any of these beliefs that maybe don't tally with the scientific evidence. But if you're super curious and open minded, it's like then
Your love of new knowledge will mean that you are willing to read that evidence that contradicts that point of view. You're so hungry for knowledge and you're so desperate to actually get to the bottom of this kind of problem that you'll read that report that kind of
disproves your belief and then you'll you'll assimilate it into your knowledge and that's really important then for coming up with a more well-rounded less myopic kind of worldview if you're constantly doing that you're constantly kind of accepting you know information from lots of different sources and then forming a more rational worldview because of that so you know for me curiosity is
in general for most people is like a skill that we really should cherish and cultivate. Now if it's kind of leading you astray or leading you to pursue to feel like a desperation to know so much it's actually like becoming overwhelming. I haven't really come across any research that tells you how to deal with that but I just wonder maybe there it's almost possible to kind of
just focus your curiosity a bit like pick maybe out of all of the things that are fascinating you maybe you know like pick some to focus on in at the present and maybe put some to one side while thinking that you know you could certainly like pursue them in the future but just kind of making sure that you're more yeah more focused more concentrated and
I'll tell you something personal.
I don't think I've said this aloud to anyone outside of here. There's a sentence that drives me. I want to learn every theory that's ever been constructed. So I had that in me for a little while, then I saw that Feynman on his board, Richard Feynman, on his blackboard before he died, it had some equations, but then scrawled in the corner it said,
learn to solve every problem that's ever been solved. And I was like, that's interesting. But that's more practical than for I don't like to solve problems that are useful. I like to know theories. So I'm much more in the air. He was on the ground. That's a great example. Because I think like Feynman was, you know, like one of the most famously curious people that has been written about, you know, you see it in his autobiography, you see it in other scientists descriptions of his behavior. And you know, Feynman had
definitely had like his flaws like um but actually i think in terms of his kind of academic pursuit of knowledge that curiosity really did get him really you know like so far and it was actually just like a kind of curiosity over the way plates were spinning in the cafeteria that eventually came up allowed him to come up with his theory of um uh what was it quantum qed electric yeah exactly but um then won him the noble prize so he
You know, like it does show you what curiosity can achieve. But again, I think he
He was super curious, but I think he was kind of, he kept it in balance and he was like, knew kind of when to focus on one particular project, when to kind of allow his curiosity to kind of go elsewhere temporarily. So, you know, that was, I think he's a good model to follow in that kind of sense. As a writer, how many ideas for books do you have? Interesting. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm working on my third book now. How many ideas do you have? Like on the back writer of, okay, project one, project two,
I've got another couple of ideas. They're very vague notes at the moment, but I just can't say for certain where I would ever pursue them because
Yeah like it's always good to have that kind of stuff on the back burner that's interesting you but I think also like I have to be realistic in what I can achieve in the amount of time that I have and also you know I don't know by the time I've you know between now and when I've finished my next book someone else might have already written something great on one of those topics and then I don't want to just kind of rehash what someone else's
is writing so yeah I have a few I'd say maybe I've got yeah like the one I'm working on that's been commissioned and then another couple maybe three that I'm kind of mulling but I'm mulling over but um you know they may never come off and I might you know in the meantime I might just come up with another idea that just like really grabs my attention that I have to write so yeah that's how I work really you know having lots of ideas kind of
in the background like that I'm mulling over kind of subconsciously and consciously but they're not really making a definite decision until you know something really grabs my attention and kind of helps it all fall into place and makes me think actually this is the one this is what I want to pursue next.
I'm super curious now. How is it that you come up with the ideas for your books? Is it that you're walking around and one idea strikes you? Does it develop over time generally? Or is it like the seed is planted at once? Are you trying to work something out in the book? Like you have an idea, you're not sure if it's true, so are you going to write about it and find out?
Did you read some fact? And you're like, Oh, that's interesting. Let me explore. How does it work? Yeah, I mean, so say with the intelligence trap, you know, I had this fascination with intelligence, you know, but then kind of grew as I became a science journalist and I
kind of seeing these people, you know, where their kind of academic credentials didn't seem to match kind of their behaviour, you know, in other parts of their life, or their expertise in one field didn't seem to translate to others. So, you know, like, I had those examples, you know, as a writer specialised in psychology, I've kind of been keeping on top of the research for that. But you know, it's not like immediately just
As soon as I came across one piece of research like it, suddenly I thought that has to be a book. It was much more of a prolonged process where I kept on coming across new papers, keeping note of them, and then eventually it just kind of coalesced. I guess it is almost like the way clouds form in a way. It's like
I felt like there was just around this nucleus it was like suddenly this idea started to emerge and take shape and then you know it got to the stage where I felt like well I can write a proposal for this book test out for myself whether there's the kind of correct narrative arc
and then you know once that was done I was pretty certain that that was something you know I really wanted to devote like a couple of years to write and it was exactly the same with the expectation effect of my second book which now I've been looking into things like the placebo effect you know since I became a science journalist like more than 10 years ago and then there was a bit of a kind of personal inspiration like an event in my life where I kind of experienced an expectation effect
myself but then again it was just like collecting papers and then suddenly like a few years later it just I noticed that actually there was you know already like a structure had kind of formed it just kind of occurred to me that you know these were how I it was like this was how I could arrange the chapters this was the story that I felt I could tell and then I looked into the research you know to check that it stood up and actually the more I researched the more
It made sense and you know like I was finding all these fascinating things that actually just added to this argument I wanted to make you know pieces of research I hadn't known about previously and like stuff I just found like totally fascinating so yeah that was how that emerged very similar to the first one it's like a kind of it coalesces it takes shape and then suddenly you think yeah this is a story that deserves to be a book rather than like a feature article in a magazine.
And when it's coalescing, are you making notes in Google Docs or Notion? Or is it written on a piece of paper? I know I'm getting in the weeds, but I'm an in the weeds person. I'm a details person. Yeah, no, I mean, it's in a Word document. So, you know, I just have like Word documents that are like, you know, tens of pages long with like all kinds of ideas for like, mostly just for like,
Just noting down pieces of research that interest me and I'll kind of categorize it. You know, and then I might plumb that when I want to come up with like an article to pitch to a magazine or if an editor comes to me and they say like, could you write a piece about, you know, conspiracy theories or whatever and then I'll
have like these notes that I can go back to that just kind of suggest to me kind of what you know what I can say that's new and interesting. See it's very much like that and the books kind of just emerge from that kind of long list of papers. It's you know not very organized like it's kind of split into basic categories but it's not like I'm being really strategic. I think that is a case of me allowing my curiosity just to kind of to flow
How do you deal with this issue of, for myself
When I'm writing, and I'm writing books without a publisher, it's just treatises. It's better to say it like that. Mainly, my impetus is because I don't understand some subjects, so let me write about it. For instance, paradoxes. I'm writing a book on logical paradoxes, or interpretations of quantum mechanics, or theories of every- like a compendium of different theories of everything, actually. Anyway, as soon as I make an opinion or state of fact, quote-unquote, I can find flaws with it.
And there are people who have some alternate opinion, so then I research them, like, that's actually fairly convincing. Okay, let me research what the opponent says. Oh, that's interesting. And it goes back and forth to the point where it's bottomless, at least for myself. And then I get to questions of what is, and who am I? The point is, like, I, at least for myself, when trying to put my stake down as something extremely solid, I find that it's sand.
Yeah, I mean that is really tough.
especially because science is constantly evolving and you know there's always the fear that like you know between having kind of signed off the proofs and the book being published that some big new study will come you know that might kind of prove the thesis but provide that kind of lynching evidence that you wish you could have included or that will contradict some part of the book and like you know I'm always aware of that. I think
And you know, even within the science, sometimes you get research that is contradictory. And that's just a healthy part of science. You know, when I'm writing my books, I really try to kind of acknowledge the those kinds of nuances. But I'm really trying to look at like, whether there's a sort of bully a body of evidence that kind of
From lots of different sources, lots of different types of studies, it could be medicine like longitudinal studies, it could be laboratory studies, it could be like real world kind of interventions. All of that, if you have enough of those that all point in the same direction and are showing the same phenomenon, like with the expectation effect, if you have all of these pieces of evidence showing that our expectations can shape our
behaviour perception and feels physiology in profound ways to create self-fulfilling prophecies then that's what I feel I'm contributing you know I'm summarizing, synthesizing that body of literature and I see it as you know it's a snapshot in time essentially like I have to accept that that book will be as correct as I can possibly make it at the time of publication
But I can never guarantee that there won't be other, you know, cool new studies that might support a contradictor in the future. And I have to kind of make peace with that fact that it's a representation of my thinking and as far as I could represent it, the state of the science at that time that I was writing the book. And I think that's how readers take it as well.
Right, sure. So I mean, I think, you know, like in psychology and medicine, you can have like a, you know, laboratory based study, which is normally in the short term, and you might have someone come in, you know, for psychology, say, where you're, you might test
their mindset so looking this is for the expectation effect like looking at their beliefs on you know a particular element of their health or their fitness or you know what they think about food and then you might either you might then kind of give them some kind of test so you might be measuring you know how that what their hormonal responses to the foods that they're eating
And then you kind of look for a correlation between, you know, their beliefs and those physiological outcomes. So, you know, standard kind of laboratory tests, you might also have a kind of intervention within the laboratory. So in that case, to kind of look at causality, you might rather than just measuring their mindsets, you might actually try to change their mindsets.
So you might try to change the way they view their own kind of health and ability to deal with exercise and then you might measure how they perform on the treadmill, you know, see if if you tell them that they actually have
Good genes for doing exercise that's going to enhance their endurance. Do they then perform better in a test of endurance on the treadmill? And does that change things like their physiology, like the gas exchange within their lungs, you know, that kind of thing. If you do find that those who'd had their mindsets changed, then also show differences in their physiology. Well, that's a suggestion of a hear that sound.
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Of a causal effect, essentially. So quite a good piece of evidence. The latter is an interventional study? Yeah, exactly. And the former was a
Well, I guess a correlational study within the laboratory, but then you could also do these in kind of a real life situation. And I think that would be much more convincing is if you could kind of get people to kind of change their mindsets over a period of a month, for example, and then you measure differences in that physiology. Now, do you see the predicted effects?
You can also look at longitudinal studies which are correlational but they have some advantages because they often track a lot of data from a lot of people over a long period of time. So you might track it over 10 years for 10,000 people and you might have measured their beliefs about their fitness or stress at one point
and then you might look at lots of different outcomes like their behaviour, their BMI, their risk of death at a later time point. And you look for correlations there and you try to kind of control for the conflicting, confounding factors. Again, that doesn't necessarily prove causality and there are issues with that. But I think if you have all these different types of studies and they're all kind of showing the predicted effects,
I think that's what I'm really looking for there. Any one piece of evidence, I think there's going to be some flaws in the way this study was conducted, but I think if you start to find
What is the expectation effect and what was the catalyst you said there is a personal catalyst for the book?
Yeah, so I mean, the expectation effect is decided that our mindsets, which are these kinds of collective beliefs that we hold, can create self fulfilling prophecies, and that they can do so through changes to perception, changes to behaviour and changes to physiology. So actually altering things like the hormonal response in your body or, you know, your blood pressure, the actions of the gut, your bodily movements when you're
When you're exercising, you know, all of those kinds of things. And, you know, like in the book, I kind of look at the ways that this can, our mindsets can influence everything from, you know, the effects of a particular drug in a hospital to the outcomes of exercise, like
how you experience the exercise, how your body responds to the exercise, whether it's efficient or inefficient in kind of performing in particular activity, how we respond to food, how we respond to a new diet, how we respond to sleep loss, even how long we live. So I really looked at, you know, kind of, I think, all of the kind of key areas of our life that we might be trying to improve with changes in lifestyle. And I'm basically showing that
Changes in mindset are not
alone going to be this kind of secret panacea that's going to kind of create miracles. I'm not claiming that you can change your life just by changing your beliefs, but often the beliefs are an important component and they can kind of take the brakes off of our progress so that when you are making all of those other beneficial changes to your kind of exercise regime or your diet or your sleep, that actually like making sure you're doing so with the right mindsets can actually make it a lot more effective.
Can you give an example before you move on to the personal one? Yeah, exactly.
Now I kind of hinted at this earlier, you know, researchers at Stanford kind of wanted to see how people's beliefs about their own fitness would shape how they responded to endurance exercise. So they gave people a real genetic test. It looked at the CREB1 gene, which is associated with kind of cardiovascular fitness, you know, and endurance. If you have
the kind of good version of the gene like you find a bit easier and more comfortable to do exercise things like your kind of internal body temperature just stays in the kind of comfortable range a bit longer it's a good gene you know like um yeah exactly it's great great to have if you have it i'm a glut and that's like my vice is i just i can go to buffets and just eat meat so that's i hope i have that gene or if i don't i hope crisper is making some progress because i would like to engineer that into me
Well, here's the thing that you should remember then, because so they did the real genetic test, but they gave people false feedback. So they told some people you have the good gene, good version of the gene, some people were told that the bad version of the gene, and then they did that kind of endurance exercise. And what the researchers found was that, yeah, like the gene does have an effect.
But so did people's expectations of whether they had the gene. So this feedback was sham feedback. So some who had the good version were told they had the bad version, vice versa. And actually those expectations independently affected how people did the exercise. And, you know, in some cases, according to some of the physiological measures, the expectations were actually more important than the effects of the gene itself. So
When they were looking at the efficiency of the lungs, well, that depended more on the expectations that you had the good gene than whether you actually had the good gene. That's interesting. To speak to your experience of being like a rapacious fool. Yeah, they did exactly the same experiment looking at people's, a gene that was associated with satiety. So whether people feel they need to eat more to be full. And again, they found that actually those expectations did shape how much people ate.
but also shaped like the response of the gut, the hormonal response. There was one particular hormone that's linked to satiety that was very closely linked to the expectations of whether they would be full or not, thanks to this gene.
So, you know, again, it's like I said, just in the answer to your previous question, like I'm not claiming that like our genes don't matter, because they did have an effect too. But what you can see here is that actually, even if you have the bad gene, you don't have to see it as being deterministic in some way, like you can accept that actually, your expectations are also playing a role. And then you can look for ways to kind of change those expectations. And then that can be beneficial to you.
Now the personal bit. Yeah, so I mean, this was, you know, I think we all know what the placebo effect is. It's where you kind of take a sham drug like a sugar pill. And then you, you're told that it's the real thing. And then, you know, you experience kind of pain relief or, you know, change in blood pressure, due purely to your beliefs. And that's quite well established. But there's this other phenomenon called the nocebo effect.
which is like the placebo effects evil twin. If you expect to become ill, then those beliefs can actually create symptoms of sickness. So they can do things like amplify the transmission of pain signals. So something that would be like a small irritation suddenly becomes agonizing.
they can actually change things like the vasculature of the brain so they can create a migraine and it's actually you know taking form in your brain it's actually changing the way your brain is responding and I experienced that and you know the nocebo effect has been really widely studied in people's side effects to particular drugs so if you're told you might experience a headache after taking a pill
people are much more likely to experience that headache even if they're taking a placebo pill and they're told that it might cause a headache, they get the headache. And I'd been going through a period of depression in my life and I was taking these like very standard antidepressant pills and my doctor you know she was obliged to do she told me that I might experience you know headaches as a result of taking the pills and I did and they were
super painful, like I really found it difficult to focus at work. You know, I say it was like, I needed to feel like such a sharp pain, like, you know, an ice pick was kind of going through the skull or something. So pretty nasty. But at the time, I was also kind of, you know, just by chance looking into the placebo effect, and I came across this research on the nocibo effect.
And actually that knowledge of the nocebo effect and I checked the data for the drug itself and I saw that actually a lot of the side effects that people were reporting were influenced by nocebo effect. That knowledge actually then helped to relieve the pain. It just kind of
I just questioned like, well, is it inevitable that I'm experiencing this pain? It certainly felt like it was, you know, direct kind of physiological response to the drug. But you know, it just made me think, well, maybe it's just my expectations. And actually, yeah, just opening my mind up to that possibility kind of, it led me not to catastrophize the pain and not to feel so anxious about the pain. And that in turn, then stopped me feeling the pain itself. And so
you know after a day or so I actually just didn't have any of the headaches at all and I continued my treatment and it you know it worked remarkably well and if I hadn't known that I would have probably given up that treatment it would have been a waste of like you know perfectly good um line of treatment that actually proved successful so that experience really told me that like expectation effects are real
that you know it's not made up it's not imagined because that pain to me was just as real as when I'd ever had a migraine in the past and we know that it's related to physiological changes in the brain and so I just started thinking well like how else could our expectations shape our experience like what else is it doing to us and how could we use this knowledge to our advantage and so that's when I collected all of those papers you know years later I realized that I had enough
And it took the shape of a book that I really wanted to write. So many questions I have, man. Let me prioritize. Right. How do you know if what you experienced was the placebo effect or you just had the actual effect and what you learned afterwards was a positive placebo effect that neutralized the effect?
I mean, that is a possibility, I suppose. I mean, in this case, I think it's unlikely because I'd actually when I was looking into these, you know, my particular brand of antidepressant pills, you know, like the vast majority of people experiencing headaches,
were experiencing it because of the expectation. The difference between those in the placebo arm of the clinical trials of this drug and the people actually taking the drug was, you know, tiny. I'm not even sure if it was clinically, you know, like I'm not clinically significant, statistically significant. So it really was very likely that I was experiencing a nocebo effect.
This podcast is a part of a series that's extremely practical. So we're going to talk about steps that people can take to utilize the expectation effect in their life. And then also later on, we're going to talk about learning because in particular learning extremely confounding graduate level math and physics because many people on this channel want to know how can I utilize some of the lessons from the intelligence trap and or the expectation effect to accelerate my learning.
In this case, new knowledge nullified the nocebo effect. Now, how does one have new knowledge that gives a placebo effect? Because I can imagine if someone was to tell you, by the way, the positive effects you're feeling, that's just in your head, that may reduce it rather than amplify it. How do you consciously employ some strategy to utilize the placebo effect?
Yeah, and I mean, this has been the big dilemma that had like really put a barrier on kind of placebo research for decades. But actually, there's lots of exciting new research that kind of helps us to get over them. And basically, all of this research shows that you don't need deception to take advantage of expectation effects.
Now one of the kind of studies I like most looks at, they're called open label placebos. They're like non-deceptive placebos. So there was a study from Portugal where the researchers took people with chronic back pain and, you know, they've been struggling, the patients have been struggling with this for a while.
and they actually gave them a jar of placebo pills that clearly said placebo pills take two a day but the pills were kind of bright orange you know quite striking but they knew that they were didn't contain an active ingredient but the researchers also gave the participants a kind of presentation about the
the placebo effect but all of this evidence showing that actually good expectations can help to relieve pain, that sometimes the brain itself can create its own endogenous opioids that kind of has its inner pharmacy that it can tap that will help to produce its own painkillers. They learn all of these things
and then they were told like you don't have to kind of take our word for it like you don't have to you know convince yourself that this is true like artificially kind of lie to yourself or repeat a mantra like just kind of you know listen to the evidence and you know process it as you want but you do have to then take the pills like the ritual of taking the pills is really important so take one in the morning one in the evening like do that for the next um week and what the researchers found was that actually
You know, the ritual of the pills combined with that information that they'd been given, that kind of empowering information about the mind-body connection, that that alone was enough to produce a clinically significant decrease in the pain symptoms that they were feeling. So reduced it by, I think it's 29%, which is the kind of threshold for, you know, if you're trying to approve a new drug for pain relief.
um and you know then they the kind of participants went away the trial was ended it was written up but five years later the researchers kind of visited these same participants and found that even five years later they were still like managing and coping better than the participants who hadn't received the placebo pills those had just continued their um treatment as usual so that really suggested that actually
knowing about the expectation effect, knowing about these benefits can in itself empower you and kind of can create the expectation of pain relief in this case that actually then produces the benefits that you want without any deception. That's now been replicated a few different times for different illnesses and we know that there are other kind of tactics too so actually you can do away with the kind of sham treatment altogether in some cases and just give people
a kind of psychological therapy that just helps them to form optimistic but realistic expectations of their recovery from surgery, for example. So you kind of give them information that allays their worries about the effects of the surgery.
and helps them to plan out this kind of recovery that they would like to see, gets them to feel excited about all of the kind of new activities they'll be able to do when they feel better. And then that psychological therapy alone can produce some of the benefits that you would want to see. They leave hospital more quickly. They return to work more quickly. They also show differences in signs of kind of inflammation within the body. The lower the inflammation, the kind of quicker the biological recovery.
and so that's just two ways that you can kind of apply the principle of the placebo effect but without being deceptive and then you know in other areas of life i kind of explain how you can apply the same kinds of principles to things like um you know managing sleep loss or kind of boosting your experience of exercise you don't have to fool yourself into thinking that you um have those good genes for exercise for example to actually benefit from that kind of
That's what's so exciting to me is that actually, you know, we don't have to be this kind of
self delusional Pollyanna is kind of always kind of falling themselves into thinking things are better than they are. It's all just about kind of having this knowledge of what the brain can do. And then trying to think of like clever ways of applying that and of kind of forming or reappraising your
old assumptions and kind of forming new expectations that can be beneficial and optimum to you. What can one do specifically to up raise their level of sleep? So that's something I need, even sleep quality, let alone the hours. And also, like I mentioned, this is going to be a part of a series on learning extremely difficult mathematics and physics. So what can someone who's watching this do to increase their rate of learning, utilizing this expectation effect?
Yeah, sure. So, to take sleep first, you know, like, a lot of sleep loss comes from a kind of fear of not getting enough sleep.
so you know like we know like it's well accepted amongst um kind of cognitive behavioral therapists who help people with insomnia that we can develop all of these kind of really damaging beliefs about the sleep that we're getting so if you've had sleep loss in the past
then that kind of creates an anxiety about not being able to get to sleep in the future and those anxieties put you in a state of high arousal so that you find it much harder to get to sleep because your brain is on full alert. Now one way around that, intuitively, is that actually if you try to stay awake
is a kind of ironic, interesting therapy. You try to stay awake, your studies suggest that you're more likely to fall asleep. So I don't think that's a case of just staying up, partying and expecting it to come miraculously. But when you're lying in bed and if you feel like you're desperate to fall asleep, actually don't. Try to think of something that's going to keep you awake and you'll probably find then you're kind of drowsing and falling off naturally.
So that's one strategy. Mindfulness is a good way. If you can learn mindfulness and you can apply it well, that can be another good way of just kind of avoiding those kind of fretful thoughts as you fall asleep. And it's almost like having that non-judgmental awareness of what you're thinking. So you stop catastrophizing. Like if you've got all that stuff going around in your head, like you kind of notice it and let it go without judging yourself for it. That can be beneficial.
um but equally important i think is looking at our expectations of what the sleep loss is going to do to the day ahead so if you're struggling to get sleep or maybe you've been asleep and you wake up like always happens to me you wake up at like two o'clock in the morning
You can immediately start thinking, well, if I don't get to sleep now, then tomorrow I'm going to be wrecked. I'm going to be irritable. I'm not going to be able to meet my deadline, you know, all of those things. Actually, just stop thinking about those effects. And the reason that you can do that is that the research shows that actually is those expectations that create the symptoms of sleep loss the next day.
There have been lots of research, longitudinal studies, like I mentioned, also laboratory intervention studies that gave people false feedback about their sleep quality. They all suggest that if you expect to suffer because of your sleepless, you're more likely to suffer the next day from your sleepless. So you tell someone that they've had... Hear that sound?
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Really, you get them in the lab, attach electrodes to them, let them kind of sleep and then tell them the next day that they have actually that they had a terrible night's sleep according to the electrical recordings. That expectation will then cause them the next day to feel more fatigued, to struggle to concentrate, to be more irritable.
That's extremely interesting, because there's obviously the news, which outputs dangerous messages. When I say dangerous, I mean messages of danger. And part of it is they want to inform people, like part of us deleterious, they're trying to get views. But let's say optimistically, they're trying to inform, but by doing so, they may create conditions that make the danger worse. And then Michael Walker of the sleep books. Matt Walker. Matt Walker of what? What's his book called?
Why we sleep? Yeah, okay. So Matt Walker, he talks about the detrimental effects of sleep loss and partly that. I think since I started caring about my sleep, I started to have sleep issues. I had an aura ring. I no longer use the aura ring because I found myself being fanatic about checking my stats and then worrying when they weren't optimal. So that's interesting because you want to inform, but at the same time,
Informing may do more harm than good. How does one navigate around that?
I mean, it's interesting you say that about Matt Walker's book, you know, I'm a big fan, actually. But, you know, I have read like blogs by kind of sleep scientists who've, you know, said that they're actually worried that like, it's created a lot of anxiety about sleep that then is leading more people to come to sleep clinics with sleep problems, and that the anxiety is kind of exacerbating their issues. Now, I think, you know, it's a kind of like we were talking about earlier, it's like,
Should we give information to people? We want to be informed, but should we be giving information that's actually going to harm people's quality of life? And I think we should. I think we need to know the truth about the importance of sleep, because you might be suffering from the kinds of sleep problems that we've spoken about that are fueled by anxiety.
but you know there's also lots of people who just aren't giving themselves enough time to get to sleep and then you know you want those people to be able to make a better informed decision of kind of their lifestyle. But I think the message can be presented in such a way that it doesn't kind of catastrophize the effects of a loss of sleep and I think maybe what's been lost in some of this messaging is that you know
The occasional sleepless that you might get doesn't have to be a catastrophe for you. So, you know, if you wake up in the middle of the night for half an hour, that doesn't mean that you're going to struggle the next day. But look, but we can develop this belief that it will do so any slight disturbance becomes like a serious worry for us. So I think we need to acknowledge that we need to kind of put things in proportion.
Then we can also look at things like that have been proven to work. So, you know, I think like, hopefully, just by understanding a bit about this expectation of age, you know, people who've read that chapter, I've heard that it has kind of immediately helped them with their sleep. And I was like, super pleased about that. But if people are having these kind of continuing problems with their sleep, you know, they're really struggling
to get um to get enough each night and it's becoming something that's really damaging their lifestyle well then they can go to a specialized sleep therapist who won't put them on sleeping pills which you know the efficacy of sleeping pills is
you know, questionable, but instead they will help them to change those beliefs in a more kind of organized program. So through cognitive behavioral therapy or mindfulness-based therapy, they'll help them to deal with those kind of beliefs that are keeping them awake at night and then causing them this distress the next day. And that therapy, working through practical problems, talking about the science and the evidence and, you know, giving them that knowledge,
That can be really beneficial for curing insomnia too. So I would say if you have this kind of prolonged problem, you know, do get help. It doesn't have to be a pharmaceutical solution like there are, but psychological means of dealing with sleep loss that can take advantage of the expectation effect.
Much of this has so far been about ameliorating what is a medical issue. What about if we have no issue and we want to accelerate in a certain area? For instance, learning arcane math, physics, computer science, philosophy. How does one utilize some of these techniques? Does one take a pill in the morning? Can they self assign the pill? Does one inject? Is injecting better?
Yeah, you know, I mean, I wish I really kicked myself that I didn't know about all this science before I did my own degree in mathematics, because, you know, it's a tough degree. I, you know, I did fine, but like, I think I could have done better if I'd known all that I know now about the psychology of learning. And I think one of the lessons that really, really chimes with me and also, you know,
This gets to the heart of how we can use the expectation effect more generally. For example, if you're
exercising, you're working out, you feel aches in your muscles, you feel out of breath, you can assume that those symptoms are kind of a sign of your lack of fitness and you can kind of catastrophize them and that you think like you start telling yourself you have this negative internal monologue that's like I'm a failure, I'm struggling, I'm really unfair, I'm not going to manage to like to get through this workout and you know the research on the expectation of it shows that actually just
changing the way the meaning you assigned to those feelings can change your performance. So if you see rather than like those being those symptoms as being like, you know, detrimental negative signs of failure, if you actually just see it as you pushing your body to its limits of building strength, that's actually really beneficial. And it helps you to enjoy the exercise more, it creates the endorphin rush, you know, it can really build up your stamina, just by changing
that mindset and I think exactly the same thing happens in learning and there are studies that show this. So if you're learning arcane maths, it's really inevitable unless you are some kind of like incredible genius that you're going to feel frustrated sometimes. You're going to not be able to solve that problem, that the concepts aren't going to stick, that there's going to be some kind of gap in your knowledge that you're really struggling to overcome, that kind of gap in understanding.
What the research shows is that you can appraise that frustration as in the same way that someone who's struggling at the gym appraises the muscle aches. You can see it as a sign of failure, as a kind of sign that you're not smart enough, that you're not intelligent enough, that you're not learning, that you're not progressing. You can just see it purely detrimentally.
Or you can accept, and this is also totally rational and actually true, you can accept the fact that frustration is just an inevitable and important part of learning. In the same way that you're pushing the body when you're working out, you're pushing your brain to build new connections, to grapple with really complex, difficult ideas. And if you weren't feeling frustrated, you wouldn't be stretching yourself, you wouldn't be building your knowledge.
and what the research shows is that when you come to accept and even embrace the frustration and you recognize that it's crucial for learning but that actually helps you to learn better. It helps your determination and perseverance but it actually almost like frees up part of your mind because you're no longer feeling all that kind of anxiety, it's not going through your head, taking up your mental resources,
you're just accepting it and then getting on with the problem and that that you know lesson by lesson like kind of class by class you know problem by problem that's going to help you with your progress and that's definitely something that i noticed in my own degree i just didn't know the science behind it it was almost once i relaxed into problems and just could kind of sit with them
without panicking when I didn't get it immediately but that actually just was incredibly important for me to be able to progress a lot more quickly and it's exactly the same when I'm writing
journalism now or writing my books, you know sometimes structuring like a chapter is really frustrating because you just don't see how you can fit the pieces together in the right way and you have to have that kind of structure like you're playing almost like a jigsaw in your mind, like trying to see the most elegant, most comprehensible, most enticing way for a subject.
And the more I just relax into that frustration and accept that it's just, you know, a creative block is kind of part of being creative. If you weren't experiencing that, it would just be a kind of administrative task.
Whereas actually the frustration is the creativity. Recognising that actually helps with my job today too. So I think it's something that can be applied in all kinds of areas. But absolutely with maths, I think the thing that holds so many people back is that they get in this kind of panic. And actually just relaxing into that and accepting it and even embracing it is so powerful.
What else would you do differently as an undergrad? I think going back to curiosity that we've mentioned and the benefits of curiosity for reading. I think sometimes a subject like maths or physics is very abstract and it can be quite difficult for you to kind of
Attach it to something really meaningful in your life. You might automatically have this kind of fascination with, I don't know, like number theory or whatever. But for me, I was always more interested in the applied maths and the pure maths felt like a kind of needless distraction. So I was really dedicated in trying to learn it, but it never felt... Pure maths felt like a distraction.
Yeah, exactly, compared to the applied maths, which is like what I was really interested in, and I had no option like I had to learn it. You know, and I think I put in a lot of effort and I did find like, you know, it's not like I failed that class or anything, but
but knowing what I know about curiosity now I think actually I should have tried really rather than just putting kind of working like a workhorse just kind of putting in the hours I should have thought a bit more creatively about how to cultivate curiosity and what I was learning and something really simple I think like learning about the lives of the mathematicians behind these kind of theories that I was learning
that you know I was never going to be tested on any of that biographical information but I know from the science of curiosity that that could have been enough to kind of spark an interest that would have then had this spillover effect and made the whole process of learning much more meaningful for me because I'm a really like people-centered person
Have you read the biography of Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson?
I have, yeah. I think there's no one in history that could be described as being as curious as he was. Yeah, and in the book, Walter says in the beginning that he has described Steve Jobs as a genius and Einstein as a genius and so and so as a genius, but he said he was careful to not call Da Vinci a genius because he feels like virtually everything Da Vinci had done could be cultivated in other people.
It was just about being immensely curious, like he would paint on the wall a line, and then get him and his friend to guess what is the length of that line. In one of the notes he scrawled, what is the function of the tongue of a hummingbird, or a woodpecker, something like that. And it turns out, then it's like, what the heck, why would anyone think of that firstly? And then does a bird beat its wings down faster than it brings it up?
That's a question you just you don't even think to ask and he would ask them and turns out they had extremely Interesting answers. There was something different about the woodpecker's tongue Yeah, exactly. But I mean, I guess I would disagree with um uh with him and that I think like
that is a that it was that curiosity that was behind Da Vinci's genius you know so and it was exceptional and I agreed that other people could cultivate that curiosity potentially but then I think also people could cultivate the traits that made Steve Jobs I guess that's what I feel about genius is that we especially having written The Expectation of Eight is that we see it as being something that's kind of God-given
but actually you can break it down. There's so many traits that contribute to genius. It's not like there's one secret, but I think they all can be cultivated. And then sometimes just for someone to be recognised as a genius, there's also good luck. You have to be in the right place at the right time to make your amazing discovery. Like Feynman, if you hadn't been watching those,
We can learn a lot from him, but we can learn a lot from all of these other people too.
I agree with all of what you said, minus the luck part. But it's not that I disagree about the luck, it's more about that if we follow the logic of the luck, it's not... So you could say, well, 50% of their success was luck. Well, if you follow the logic that got you to that 50%, you could drag that all the way to 99.999999, because you could just end up with the logic of Dr. Manhattan, I think his name was from the Watchmen, who said, yeah, but for even you to be here, every atom needed to coalesce with this atom and this
organism needed to not die and so on and so the chances of you being here are so astronomically zero so you could follow that line to say essentially every single aspect of you is luck and there's almost zero free will if free will even exists at all and then that has its own downsides that's why I have issues with any arguments about luck like there's obviously positive about luck because you don't want to say every single thing in a person is due to their own merits or that they're flawed in some way like that's horrible
But then logically speaking, any argument for an incorporation of even 10% luck can be pushed to 99.99999999% luck. How do you deal with that?
I guess I kind of do see a point and I kind of agree with it and you know I like to think that say someone like Feynman you know if he hadn't been in that canteen at that time he would have come up with the discovery some other way and because I think it was his combination of you know intelligence and curiosity and open-mindedness and dedication you know grit all of these things the men that he created his own luck in that he took that opportunity and ran with it
But if he hadn't had that opportunity, there might have been another one that you would have had instead that would have also led to some amazing discovery. So, you know, I do think, you know, it still is within, within our control and you can you can maximise your chances you might not be there's no foolproof way to become a genius or to be recognised as a genius, but you can absolutely maximise your chances of that by cultivating those kinds of traits.
So one way that it can be conceptualized is like, yes, there is a lottery, but every time you persevere, it's like you're playing that lottery again and again and again. So is that one way or is that incorrect? Yeah, you have to be in it to win it, essentially. And you can be smart about the kind of way that you play
I'm not discounting the fact that there are structural barriers that we need to remove to give people equal opportunities or more equal opportunities.
David, what is evidence-based wisdom?
So this is kind of trying to apply the same intellectual rigor that we had with the study of intelligence to the study of wisdom. Obviously, wisdom has been spoken about a lot in philosophy, but in science people had really ignored the question, avoided the question of what makes one wise, can we measure it?
and then this researcher called Igor Grossman really attempted to tackle this huge problem and he looked at all of the philosophical definitions of wisdom and he distilled them to six different metacognitive kind of tendencies that we might have and you know to name a few of them as things like intellectual humility, essentially you know people since Socrates had
argued that to be wise, you have to have a very definite knowledge of the limits of your capabilities and to accept when you don't know something. It's the ability to reach a compromise, the ability to look for other people's perspectives. So you're not just kind of myopically focused on your particular viewpoint, but you're looking for other people's too. So he
you know, gathered these together and then he started designing tests that would measure them. Some of these tests were quite involved, but it would involve people looking at a kind of article that might be from a Dear Abby column, I think, like an agony column outlining a problem
or it could be an article about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And he would ask people to talk out loud about what they thought of these issues, how the situations might be resolved potentially.
you know really to kind of talk through their thinking on these complex situations and then psychologists would rate how they performed on all of those different elements of wisdom like intellectual humility. Did these people actually acknowledge that they didn't have all the information they needed to handle? Did they outline what they would like to know before coming to a conclusion? That kind of thing. What he found was that those
those measures actually correlate really well with important outcomes in life. And when it comes to things like people's emotional well-being, their health, you know, all of these really important things that state their relationships, the measures of wisdom actually came out as being more important than independent measures of IQ that had also taken.
So it really proved that wisdom is something that can be measured scientifically and then Igor looked at ways to cultivate wisdom to make people wiser and one example of that which I loved is this phenomenon called self distancing and that is essentially just getting yourself to look at a particular situation from an outside perspective. If you're American and you are
reasoning about the forthcoming elections, for example, rather than just talking about the situation from your own perspective, you might consider how someone from Iceland or Australia might view the situation. If you're talking about a personal problem, you might imagine instead that you were advising a friend with a similar problem. What he found was that this actually improves people's scores and wise reasoning.
It actually helps them to reason in a more sophisticated way about the issues at hand. And the reason is that it stops us from feeling so attached emotionally to the particular problem and to our pre-existing viewpoint. So it helps us to question our assumptions, to look at those different perspectives that we might not consider if we feel totally immersed in the situation at hand. If we are reasoning from the position of an American talking about the US elections,
Did he come up with a number akin to IQ before wisdom, like your WQ?
No, so, you know, he didn't come up with a kind of wisdom quotient. But you know, it was, in a way, like the IQ, the intelligence question is a great way of, you know, you look as a comparison, always a comparison with the average. So maybe that's something he would consider
in the future. But I think more importantly, he's really looking at anyone could measure their baseline kind of wise reasoning score according to his different tests. And then they could try to see an improvement in that score. So you could at least look at your own personal trajectory, even if you're not trying to compare across the population.
The beauty of the IQ test is that it's difficult to fake. You can practice IQ tests and you can score higher, but with a survey, I imagine, with a survey like the wisdom test that says, hey, do you take other people's viewpoints into account? You could imagine, oh, I think it's more socially acceptable and wise, so I'm going to say yes, I do five out of five. You could imagine that you can falsify that information. So is there a way of constructing a wisdom test that takes into account that people may not say what is accurate about themselves?
Yeah, I mean, so I think some of Igor's tests are questionnaires in the way that you described, so self-reported. I mean, surprisingly, people are quite honest in self-reported questionnaires. We know that from personality questionnaires, for example, that people's responses often do correspond to what their friends would say about them. So they're not always lying, although there might be a slight bias
tools a more positive attribute. But actually in a lot of these tests, they were having to prove that they were capable of doing that. So if they were reasoning about the US elections, they would actually have to take someone else's perspective and they would actually have to
They would have to show that kind of integration of what a Democrat would think compared to a Republican and to balance them and to kind of draw connections between the two and to look for the ways that there might be a compromise on a particular political opinion or particular political problem. So they're actually having to show that they did that. It wasn't just them saying, oh yeah, I'm brilliant at this. So yeah, I think he's considered that and it does seem that people's self
What are the rationality coefficients?
So that is research where someone has tried to look at a more direct comparison to the intelligence quotient. That's worked by Keith Stanovic, who's another Canadian researcher.
brilliant mind who's really taken the work of people like Daniel Kahneman, all of these cognitive biases that we know that exist, like the sunkost fallacy that we mentioned earlier, things like temporal discounting, which is whether you
are able to overlook a more immediate reward for something a bigger reward later on that kind of thing you know how how you fall on that kind of spectrum of potential responses for you know when you're willing to kind of have a cut of all of that kind of literature on decision making he's really looked at very carefully and he's shown that there are reliable
individual differences
do tend to suffer from all kinds of biases. Both of us are more resilient against biases. And then he compared that to their IQ scores, their SAT scores in the US education system. In all of these cases, he found that there was a correlation with measures of intelligence, but that intelligence alone didn't describe people's rationality. So what I mean by that is you could still have someone who is highly intelligent, but who scored very low on the rationality quotient.
and vice versa. Did he say what the correlation was? It really depended on what kind of test they were using and also it did depend on what kind of bias they were looking at. The sun cost velocity, I believe, or temporal discounting, I believe the correlation was almost zero. You know how like
Surprisingly, people really weren't more rational in those kinds of situations that they were measuring. If they were more intelligent, it just didn't seem to make a difference. There were other elements of his rationality equation that did depend more on intelligence, and that tended to be the things that I think would be covered in academic education.
how he also looked at things like how you would read statistics like whether people are able to understand like absolute risk, relative risk, all of that kind of statistical reasoning and as you might expect if you have a higher SAT score you probably were paying more attention in your maths classes and so you are better able when asked to actually calculate those different risks. Those are really important elements of rationality and actually they can be taught which is positive so
but yeah it's not like intelligence was completely unrelated to all elements of rationality but certainly for some some areas where you would expect that a smarter person would just automatically make the more rational decision he didn't find that at all so he does he says it supports this idea but you know smart people can make terribly irrational decisions and he calls that phenomenon disrationalia which he compares to dyslexia um so dyslexia is the
You might have a high IQ person who has a particular problem with literacy and with reading in particular, and similarly with disrationalia. You might have someone with a high IQ who's just really irrational. They just really struggle to come up with, to read data rationally and logically and to weigh up evidence and to come up with a conclusion based on that data. So he
So Stanovich's terminology is he calls it the quotient, it's not coefficients.
No, it's the rationale. Well, that's the informal name is the rationality quotient. But yeah, his book was called the rationality quotient. So he's definitely promoting this idea like the intelligence question. Yeah, I see. And there wasn't just one there was several types of rationality quotients or there was just one like right RQ and that's it not RQ underscore one. Yeah, no, exactly. So basically a bit like with IQ tests, actually, you break it into kind of soft tests.
So an IQ you might have like the verbal subtest, the nonverbal reasoning subtest, lots of different types of different problems that it's measuring and there's a correlation between all of them but actually the correlation between one and another might vary. So you know there's a kind of central factor we say which is
Someone's kind of general intelligence, but and if you're better at one, you're more likely to be better at another cognitive task, but it doesn't mean that you're automatically brilliant at all of them. If you are brilliant one, it's the same with rationality that you see a correlation between the different sub tests.
Was his conclusion that high IQ individuals generally have a slightly higher RQ but in particular for certain subtypes of RQ they're lower?
Yeah, that's exactly it. And even amongst high IQ individuals, you'll have enough variation that RQ rationality is something that we should be measuring and then cultivating separately from IQ and the other kind of academic
disciplines that we look at. So he gives the example of if you're recruiting, you know, some recruiters do use IQ test still to kind of work out who's the best person to employ. But they're not really measuring accurately, rationality and you want a rational workforce, really, you don't want someone who's gonna fall for fake news, fall for bullshit from some kind of other company and make a bad investment.
you want a rational workforce, so he suggests that actually we should be using the rationality equation as a means of selecting candidates and also just as a means of identifying who could do with some training, like who needs to learn more about maybe how to read statistics or needs to have their awareness raised about things like the sunk cost fallacy so they don't fall for it in the future. Is there a relationship between
Hi, IQ and arrogance. I wouldn't I don't know if anyone's looked at it like that. But Keith Stanovich had looked at the bias blind spot. And that's essentially you ask someone like, you tell them about these cognitive biases, and then you ask them, do you think you're gonna suffer from those biases yourself?
and what he found was that people with the higher IQs tended to think that they were less susceptible than the other people. They over exaggerated their resilience, their protection against the biases, so they thought they were
much better than they actually were. And that was more likely the more intelligent they were, essentially. So in that, you know, in that sense, I think the bias blind spot is an example of intellectual arrogance. And it's a serious problem. Because if you don't have awareness of the ways that your reasoning might fail, then you're less likely to try to account for that. How can an individual listening slash watching this increase their RQ, the rationality quotient?
Right, so this is still an area of research, but I think there's very strong evidence that we can improve elements of rationality. So, you know, just learning about these biases, there are some studies that showed that once you have that awareness, and as long as you make sure that you apply that awareness as well, that you
look when you're making a new decision that you start to consider the biases that might be influencing your decision and then try to account for them. That's a learnable skill. So that's one thing. We can look at these books, like The Intelligent Strap, like Thinking Fast and Slow, we can learn from those books and then try to apply it, and that will improve our rationality. More generally, I think there's research looking at critical thinking, so identifying logical fallacies.
learning to to avoid just relying on like our gut reaction. So whether we think whether intuitively something feels right to actually override that and to question our assumption and then to look for the evidence that contradicts it.
Another useful strategy when you're trying to appraise different pieces of information is to just try to put yourself in an alternative viewpoint where you question whether you would be as convinced by a piece of evidence.
if its conclusions were the opposite. So it's kind of intricate that, but if you wanted to, if you were a Republican, say, and you saw a report that supported a Democrat's economic policy, now you might instantly dismiss it because it doesn't come to the conclusion that you would want it to take. But what you can do to make sure that you're not just dismissing that evidence unfairly
is to stop and think, well, would I have spotted the same flaws in this piece in this report if it had actually supported a Republican viewpoint instead? That's just one example, but it's very much just trying to check that you're even-handed in the way that you're applying your critical thinking skills.
In the much earlier example of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the paranormal, how does one know that what he was doing was in fact false? So one way is we say, well, the scientific consensus is so-and-so. But then my issue with that is that there's a beautiful study in your book
Which I love, I'm going to start to quote about if you give a test on gun violence to people who are conservative and liberal and subtle reasoning shows that the gun violence in this example, the laws that are for gun control end up causing more gun violence, but you have to be extremely careful with your math in order to come to that conclusion.
that the conservatives were more likely to find that loophole or the not-trivial reasoning in order to get to that conclusion, and the liberals were more likely to say, oh yeah, gun control clearly reduces gun crime, and then vice versa. So then that made me think, okay, well, if we ever appeal to scientific consensus, we have to wait
for political leaning and the majority of scientists are liberal like 90% are liberal there are studies on this so then do we wait consensus by that how do we do that so that's my issue because there are so many aspects of this world of the themes that i try to investigate in theories of everything that i used to just
dismiss and disparage, like near-death experiences or connecting consciousness with quantum mechanics or even UFOs. Also, I was looking into the placebo effect, whereas prior I thought that it was just a measly effect, like a bit of pain relief. I didn't think it had much merit to it. I'm not saying that I've come to any conclusion, nothing like that, but it's not inconsequentially dismissed, at least not for me. I find that there's something there, or there could be something there. There are people like Penrose, a Nobel Prize winner dealing with quantum mechanics and consciousness.
This is all what I would say is woo prior. I got this sense from your book, and it could be incorrect. I got the sense of a bit of condescension when the word paranormal was mentioned or aliens or UFOs. I'm listening to that thinking, okay, how was that made with appeal to scientific consensus? How does that work when there's already political biases, let alone other biases that maybe the majority of scientists
I think it's unproven but I think lots of theories of consciousness are also unproven so it's like it deserves
So say with the paranormal, though, I
That's a tough one because I have to accept that my own biases could be shining through. I would say there have been lots of good studies, carefully controlled studies, trying to detect paranormal phenomena. I think most scientists, even
if they believe in the paranormal would have to accept the setup of the experiments as being scientifically valid and then you look at the outcomes and you look at the outcomes of multiple experiments through mitra analyses and you find that the effect size vanishes to zero which is why
even if I would be so basically to calibrate my confidence I would never want to dismiss out of hand something like a paranormal phenomena being I would never want to say it's absolutely impossible but I would say given the evidence that we've got from all of these
Experiments that I think have been well conducted, you know, maybe not dismissing the possibility. There could always be another experiment that's someone's found like an even better way of testing for potential paranormal phenomena. And then maybe that would show that it does exist and we can always keep our mind open to that. But I think until that experiment comes along, we have to kind of look at the balance of the evidence today. That's my view of that.
I think this is where we need teams of people to collaborate who come from lots of different backgrounds and that's really the best way forward. And so maybe with some of the existing experiments you say well that was done by a sceptic so they'd set it up to not be true.
But what I think you should do is have a pre-registration, which is really fashionable in science now, and across a big collaboration through multiple labs, you all set up in advance the experiments that you agree would show the effect that you want to prove.
you gather all the data, it's all kind of anonymized, it's all analyzed independently, you've already agreed on the statistical analyses and then you look at the, you know, you kind of crunch the numbers, you find the results and then because you've already tried to account for all of your biases in advance, you have to kind of accept
the result that comes out. Now that actually was done with tests of precognition, a paranormal phenomena where you believe that people can kind of sense the future. And when those predetermined studies were conducted, pre-registered studies were conducted, they actually found, you know, they didn't find the effect of the hypothesis, they didn't find that there was a paranormal phenomena. So that's why with that particular case I would be
very skeptical that there is one because you know one of the best studies to date
Have you looked into the studies of Rupert Sheldrake or Dean Radin?
No, I can't say I have in a huge amount of detail. I think I did look into Sheldrakes, but I'm afraid I have forgotten the details of that. Obviously he's a huge name, but I think that's what we have to accept as well, that we can't just rely on someone's previous credentials, that we have to
be very specific about the outcomes, you know, of the quality of the evidence itself, independently of who kind of arranged it. And that's why it's important to have these teams of people who come from lots of different perspectives to kind of cancel out each other's biases potentially.
What else would be... I'm struggling here to find an issue that's not climate change, that is scientific, that has a huge divide between conservatives and liberals. Okay, I can just stick with climate change. I'm not a climate denier nor acceptor, like I mentioned. Anytime I look into any theory, I just find flaws, and I'm just completely befuddled and addled and unassured. But anyway, the point is that when it comes to an issue where we make an appeal to scientific consensus, but it's a politically charged issue,
How do we deal with the political leaning of the scientists going into it need to be taken into account and you need to somehow reweight the results? I don't know how to do that. And I don't know if that's the case in climate change. And I don't want to pick a particularly charged topic like climate change because I can mention I'm just not interested. I'm not trying to cause any controversy here.
So I'm trying to find another one, but you get the idea. So how do we deal with that? You mentioned that we need to have teams of people who are competing against one another from various backgrounds, but in absence of that, what do we do?
I mean I think with climate change you could have meaningful debates on the evidence. So I mean the problem of climate change very much like the problem with proving that cigarette smoke causes cancer is that it's very difficult to actually do
Causal tests of this and I think that ultimately that is where the controversy lies. It's why people who don't believe in climate change could always say, you know, we're only viewing correlations and that maybe there's another factor driving the rise in temperatures, which is very difficult to deny, although some people do.
um similarly with cigarette smoke tobacco companies um had always said well we've never you know we haven't tested done a controlled trial where you have people without uh randomly who you're giving some cigarette smoke from the age of 20 you're and some about
Take a set of planets, put humans on a set. Exactly. You couldn't do that and it was a cause for controversy and it allowed tobacco industries to deny this kind of causal link that I think we now, it would be very strange if you denied the link between smoking and cancer.
It's the same with climate change. We don't have a separate planet where we can set up coal or carbon-fuelled industries for centuries to then check the effects on the climate. That is a big issue. We do have to look at ways around that. My impression from looking into the evidence has been that multiple lines of evidence from lots of different sources
We need to acknowledge there's considerable uncertainty with the
So the models that scientists are using and climate scientists are using are pretty honest about, you know, the best and the worst case scenarios and there's, you know, a difference between them. But yeah, like,
save from doing that kind of absurd experiment. I think, you know, that is going to be an issue to kind of resolve the question. And I don't have an answer for doing that. It does have to be kind of what way you give to the different lines of evidence. I think it can sometimes help to look at people who have changed opinion from one side to the other and to look at the reasons for why they've done that.
I think what I've been interested in psychologically is also how sometimes you can
What happens when you try to overcome the look for psychological ways to overcome that motivated reasoning that comes from people's initial political standpoints? So things like when you try to cultivate their curiosity or you create a kind of safe space for them to talk where they don't have to fear being judged with their political viewpoint. You know, what conclusions do they come to when they look at the evidence when they've been given those opportunities?
I think those are some you know those are the things that we can be doing but yeah it's a huge problem and I think it is one reason that the intelligence trap is such a serious problem to consider is because like you as an enlightened society it's really worrying that you can have such divergent views given the evidence
Given the same evidence that people, even highly intelligent, highly educated people can come to such polarized viewpoints. I don't have the solution. That's why I'm interested in the intelligence trap and how on both sides we can reduce those biases so we can try to get people to be looking at the evidence in the most rational way possible. What is functional stupidity?
That is where companies kind of create stupidity within the workforce due to their corporate culture. So, you know, there's lots of reasons for that. One potential reason is simply that people are simply that you have this kind of culture of relentless positivity, and you don't really
allow people to express doubt or criticism. So a company might say they only want solutions, not problems, that kind of issue. And we saw, you know, in the book, I talk about the deep water horizon, oil spill, the fall of downfall of Nokia, you know, all of these examples where companies hadn't been allowing the
What were some of the solutions in order to combat the functional stupidity?
I mean, one is to cultivate within the workforce a culture of disagreement. So actually allowing people to even at the lowest levels of the corporate hierarchy, allowing them to kind of raise their hand and to say that they think there's a problem that's occurring. If someone had done that with Deepwater Horizon, if the engineers had said that they saw all of these anomalies in the processes that were going on within the rig,
That could have been prevented similarly with Nokia. Just to recap, you know, with Nokia, they were trying to develop a smartphone, but they kept on failing to meet their deadlines until Apple had come up with the amazing iPhone that just like swept them out of the market. You know, a lot of the employees were really worried about what was going on. They had lots of ideas, but they were being listened to.
The concept of functional stupidity as well as the antidotes were developed in the vein of industrial and organizational psychology. So I'm curious, how does one apply this to an individual mind?
So I think with the intelligence trap in general you know we have to first of all look at our intellectual humility as one of those elements that was so important that the measures of evidence-based wisdom that we discussed and on an individual viewpoint we have to feel free to accept when we're wrong about something or when we're uncertain about something
and does not feel so defensive that we deny that possibility. We have to cultivate our curiosity. So allowing ourselves to look into those tangents that fascinate us or that have aroused some kind of question that we want to be answered. And rather than just ignoring that and trying to focus on just meeting like a productivity goal, actually just pursuing that curiosity, answering those questions.
We need to try to have an open mind in other ways too. So like I said with the questions of analysing evidence, you know, not just like only accepting the evidence that supports your point of view, but also trying to look at the evidence that might disregard or disprove your point of view. And then try to treat it as fairly as you would for the evidence that supports your
argument, balancing the two in hand. I think you obviously do that very well when you're looking at something like climate change. From what you've said, it's like you're allowing yourself to be pulled in each direction. I think that's really important. It might not allow you to come up with a solution to climate change because the
I think my openness, my quote unquote openness, is buttressed by my closeness.
So what I mean is that I'm a judgmental person by nature. And if I ever come across non-judgmental, it's because I'm fighting my tendency constantly. I want to say, actually, so I want to be that person that puts on the hat, actually, so and so and so. And when I'm looking at alternate viewpoints, I'm doing so because I want to have the ultimate actually, so and so. I want to say, I don't know, some issue about plastic bottles. So I want to say, okay, well, what's the opponent say?
But that's what I think you need.
open-mindedness in the sense that you're not drawn purely by your preconceptions and that you're willing to look into the broad range of evidence, but you also need to apply critical thinking. You know, you have to be analytical about what you're looking at and then you have to synthesize it. You know, that's, I think that is fundamentally what we mean by kind of being a skeptic. And then I think like what's really important, and this comes back to intellectual humility, is
that like you can come to a conclusion and it's important I think that we don't always sit on the fence on every issue but you can moderate your opinions on something so you can say I believe that this is the case and you can even put a number you know you can say I'm like 60% certain you know that
I think that this is where we stand on climate change to date or whatever you're looking at on, you know, plastic bottles, you know, and you can adapt that. You might then come across a new study that, you know, shifts it one way or the other. But I think it really helps to have that kind of, to realise there's a spectrum of confidence
Whereas I think especially with social media today and identity politics and this kind of tendency to get attention of having very strong views, we always think it's like you have to be 100% one way or 100% the other and that's a trap. You want to accept that you is sliding scale and you can move along that scale and that you don't have to become fixed at one point.
Does the statement, I'm 60% certain about so-and-so fact, the utterance of it make you then 65% and then the next time you say it makes you 70% like do you become entrenched just by saying it even with an acknowledgement of uncertainty? I don't know I'm asking like unless do you have to always say 50% right in the middle so that you don't get pulled in each direction? No because I think actually to sit on the fence in that way is also not
optimum to be honest and so we note this from studies of super forecasters and these are people who have been put through these huge experiments where they're asked to predict the outcomes of different geopolitical events and it could be you know who wins your revision to you know who wins the world cup to who wins an election to whether war will break out in a certain region you know loads of different regions uh loads of different areas of a political you know world activity
What happens with these tournaments is that the people are asked to make their predictions and they cannot update their predictions up to a certain point and they have to give their confidence.
And the way it's scored is that someone who's always just, I don't know, it's 50% one way, it's 50% the other, they don't score very well, because it's the safe option. So you're rewarded actually for, you know, veering one way or the other in your predictions. Like when they come to actually the final outcome, and they're measuring your performance, you know, you're rewarded. But if you were right, and you were more confident, you get more points.
than if you were right, but you showed only a low confidence. So, you know, it's a complicated measure that they used to do that. But, you know, essentially, that's it. The more confident you are in a right outcome, the better you score. And the super forecasters consistently do perform better. They show more confidence in the areas where they're right. They show lower, much lower confidence in the areas where they end up being wrong.
So I think that shows that actually there is value in expressing true confidence rather than always sitting on the fence. And actually it is possible to estimate that. You can actually rationally think, you know, what evidence have I looked at
How strongly do I feel that this is true? What are the potential reasons that I might be wrong? And then you can gauge, you know, whether that is more likely or less likely, and that actually is meaningful. Where I was going with that, there are studies that if you write about some fact that you don't believe in, so let's say I like Kellogg's cereal, you don't. You write about it, then all of a sudden you start to like it more. I believe some people in wartime use this. They say the Japanese would take in Americans and say, write about why you like Japan, and then all of a sudden they would.
When making a statistical claim about confidence, for instance, if I was to say, I think it's 30% likely war will break out in Canada next year, you do so not by a rational analysis. It's extremely unless you've unless you have pages and pages and even those pages will have assumptions.
Unless you've done some specific analysis to come to that number, you're using your intuition. And you could be false about your own intuition, too. So you could have just come up with a number. So that's why I was saying, if you simply state, well, I'm 30% confident about so-and-so, then you'll become more entrenched to thinking you're 30%, even though you didn't rationally come up with a number 30%. You didn't analyze that. It's a bit tricky to even give a confidence level unless it's something you've studied for years.
So, you know, these people aren't studying these different issues for years, but they do look at them in depth when they're doing these super forecasting tournaments, you know, they do some strategies that are kind of well accepted even by people like Daniel Kahn. Like napkin calculations. Yeah. So like look at the base rate. How likely is it that a country of a similar economy to Canada, similar size, similar history of warfare,
How likely is it that that country is going to enter a war very quickly? And then you have a look at the base rate and you might see that it happens once in every 10 years, once in every 20 years, whatever. Just coming up with that base rate actually makes you better than just going solely with your intuitions. But then these people update those predictions by looking more specifically at the different factors
But yeah, you know, there's no algorithm that will always give them the right amount. But what this study showed is that actually they were capable, the super forecasters especially, with rating their confidence much better than chance, much better than just kind of, you know, rolling a dice and picking their confidence based on that. So they were making the decisions better than normal and rating their confidence better than the average. So it is possible.
I think what you're saying is you know there's this phenomenon called this saying is believing effect which is useful in psychology and that is true but I think like when you're aware of that possibility you can kind of protect against it and especially when these people are trying very hard to think very analytically about the situation at hand I think they are protected from that compared to someone who maybe is
suffering you know undergoing propaganda in as a prisoner of war or that kind of situation or someone who's in a more you know relaxed kind of laboratory experiment looking at preferences for cereal who might not actually be trying to think very carefully about what they rationally believe and especially like a preference for corn flakes is going to be a much more emotional response so much easier to sway
David, can you go over this study? I believe it's a study or maybe it's just a result.
about all-star teams not being as a whole efficient as teams that have three stars out of ten. Yeah so I'll use like an example from soccer you know you can kind of rank different players in soccer according to you know how they've performed in matches such as the Premier League and then obviously you know they play for like a team like Manchester United in the UK or whatever you know that's
separate from them when they gather together for their country's teams. So some players will play for England, some will play for France, some will play for the US, Canada, whatever. And what you find there is that, you know, if you have those high ranking players who've had a really good track record within their own sports teams, football teams, you know, within the Premier League, you know,
if you have too many of those kind of star players within a country's team actually you reach a certain threshold about 70% and it's like diminishing returns that actually having more and more star players doesn't help your performance and may actually damage your performance so actually you may if you have a hundred percent of the star players within your team
you might actually perform worse than a country that only has 50% of their team made up of these star players from the top teams of the world. Why is that? Well, it seems like it's all related to the team dynamics and the egos and it seems that the people who had the really top performance, and it's also true for basketball, it's also true for
investment banking when you have teams of like the top investors who've been labeled stars you know then they work less well with their colleagues and their company as a whole performs worse. It's all to do with the kind of rutting egos that they're not collaborating, they're not cooperating in the best way possible because they're much more concerned with their own kind of proving their own performance rather than
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What about with IQ, like having a team dedicated to some intellectual task, a team of let's say 10, is it better to have people who are all in the 99th percentile of IQ or is it better to have five of them, like how does that work? Yeah, I mean when it comes to IQ and we call that collective intelligence where you get the team as a whole to solve an intellectual problem, there wasn't
the evidence of the uh too much talent effect although no one had looked at that specifically so i wouldn't rule it out um but what they did find is that the average iq of the team or the top iq so if one team had an especially an especially clever person who scored you know way up the scale neither of those were great predictors of how the team as a whole would perform there was a correlation but it was pretty weak um
So what proved to be much more important again was the team dynamics. So kind of how equitable the conversation was between the different people in the team, like were they giving each person the chance to talk or did you have one person who thought they were really smart and were just talking over the other people? Did you have some people who just weren't really like picking up on the nonverbal cues as well?
Measures of emotional sensitivity, so how much people are paying attention to the other people's facial expressions. That actually proved to be a better prediction of the collective intelligence than the average IQ of the people.
Steve jobs have the same that what he wants to do or what he does at apple is get people who are extremely intelligent and extremely disagreeable and just put them all in a room and like rock tumblers what comes out after our diamonds that or it was a mistaken about that or was he lucky.
No, I mean, I think, you know, so this is all about what kind of team dynamic do you create? And you could have a case of like, you know, like, Kennedy's government during the Bay of Pigs disaster, where you have highly intelligent people, but they're all agreeing with each other, and they're not expressing dissent. And, you know,
It doesn't have good outcomes or you could have like a group of people who are very willing to disagree but in a very amicable constructive way and I think that's the ideal dynamic really where people are absolutely willing to express discord within the group but they're also then looking for ways to
to balance those points of view, not just to kind of combine them all in this kind of Frankenstein's monster of different viewpoints, which you can see with some creative tasks, you could be like, we're all going to contribute something and it just becomes a mess. But actually, you know, really trying to think very hard about like, and being very honest with each other, like, does this work? Doesn't this work? Is that rational? Is that irrational? You know, and then coming to the group decision in that kind of way with a constructive discussion. And what the research shows is that actually,
When you have this kind of dialogue that allows disagreement and allows constructive disagreement, then actually, you know, you do get great outcomes and you get better outcomes than you could have from any single individual. So they do work then as kind of more than the sum of their components, those things. What did you want to include in the intelligence trap that you had to exclude because of whatever reason, pacing, the editor said, no, it's too bloated.
Uh, not much. So there was a section that had been longer about a school called the Intellectual Virtues Academy. Intellectual Virtues Academy. That's right. It's in Long Beach and they, you know, it's a great school. I visited them. They had tried to look at all of these
elements of what I would say are evidence-based wisdom, although they didn't call that but things like cultivating intellectual humility amongst the kids, curiosity, the growth mindset, getting them to look at different perspectives. They've done all of these things and again with educational outcomes it's really difficult to compare different schools because you know it's so tough like
to account for the different backgrounds of the parents and stuff but those kids were doing really well academically and they also really seem to be embracing these different virtues and so I like to think that later on when they've gone on to university and then into later life that they're going to have they're going to be more sophisticated thinkers as a result of their education that appraised more than just intelligence but also all of these other
traits that I think are so important for thinking in a sophisticated and rational way and wise way, you know, that that will really serve them well. And it was really fascinating. Look for me, kind of insight for me of how this could help to change education without sacrificing the things that we've appreciated previously, like they were still doing well academically, but also just helping to develop like better thinkers, you know, more generally.
No, I mean, there were just some things that I didn't think there was enough evidence for. You know, a study showing that
Weirdly, if you expect to get flu over the winter, you're more likely to get a flu over the winter. And that's really difficult. It's really difficult to explain. It could just be a difference in what I say just I think it's equally fascinating could be a difference in behavior. And if you're so cautious about not
catching any illness that actually maybe you're getting less physical exercise, maybe you're actually exposing yourself less to kind of microbes more generally so your immune system isn't performing so well, who knows, but yeah, definitely that was a result but I wanted to wait to see when there's more evidence to kind of replicate that and then to explore the mechanism.
That's the main one. And then how our expectations can shape personality change. So essentially, I have written a piece for this, this should be on this, this should be coming out in the Guardian that looks at
whether we have a kind of mindset of believing that our personality can develop and grow as we get older. Does that actually help people to change the way they are? And the research shows that it does. So people who have this mindset that they're kind of malleable people, they find it easier to develop greater reserves of conscientiousness.
Can you expand on that? And is that the same as the growth mindset or is that different?
Yeah, I mean, it's very much related to the growth mindset. Actually, I would just say it's also the growth mindset had traditionally been concerned with intelligence, but this is using the similar principle, but just looking at personality, like, do people believe that personality is fixed? Or do they think that it's malleable? Do they believe in the brain's plasticity and ability to change to see things as
emotional regulation as something that you either have or you don't and if you're angry you cannot possibly calm yourself down or do you see emotions as being something that actually are within your control and that you can you can change the way you process emotions over time and all of those you know elements which are all related to the growth mindset yeah they make a huge difference for how people develop whether you get stuck in this rut of behaviors that you don't find
Have you looked into studies on yogis and their expectation effect? Like that is what people claim to be able to do under intense meditation? No, I haven't though. I would be interested in that.
Yeah, it's a good, it would be a great study if someone were to do it. There's some people like Wim Hof who, I don't know if you know who Wim Hof is, I believe he believes that through his breath technique, and I don't think that's entirely mental because he's actually doing a behavior, he believes that he can repel a virus or viruses of a certain sort and he can train people and you can get a study where you impose this intervention on a set and then have a neutral other set. Have you looked into those claims at all?
I haven't. I mean, I'd be super fascinated. I wouldn't so like to talk about calibrating my confidence. I would say I would be kind of 50 50 on that at the moment, not knowing the details. But you know, we do know that the mind is connected to the immune system. And that things like meditation can influence your the activity of your immune system, and especially if you have chronic inflammation, which can be caused by kind of anxiety,
you know, and can be affected by your breathing as well, that that can then throw your immune system out of balance, so you're more susceptible to certain illnesses. So it doesn't sound like implausible to me, but I just I'd be interested to see that in a, you know, reasonably sized study to look at that the difference between the two groups, you know, yeah, it's fascinating.
This is an ill-defined question. I'm sure it's one you've thought about. How far can the placebo effect slash the expectation effect be taken? Because some people, through meditation, which I'm synonymizing with an expectation effect, can boil water, or at least can raise the temperature of their body drastically.
And it's something that you thought was only a part of the autonomic nervous system, like you cannot control that. And then there are other cases, like you mentioned of not as quote unquote, trivial as pain, even though pain is not trivial, it's something that we would think, okay, yeah, you can coerce yourself into pain, you can take yourself out of it mentally, how far can it be taken the placebo and expectation effect?
Okay, I mean, I think we have to be really careful in defining the limits of what the science shows that it can do. And, you know, I do think it is limited in what it can achieve. I don't think that by changing your expectations, you can shrink a tumour, for example, you know, and I think there have been studies that try to look at things like optimism amongst cancer patients. And, you know, I don't think you see a strong effect from that. And
I actually think there's a danger with over claiming that people are only going to be disappointed or that they might even start to blame themselves, you know, if they are not getting better from some illness like, you know, they think it's because they're not being positive enough that only adds to the stress and makes them
Your book is like the scientific version of the secret.
Yeah, that's exactly how I want it to be. Yeah. And it's like, you know, but also I think just because it can't perform what I would say a miracles, you know, like curing cancer doesn't mean that it's not really significant. And that it doesn't have a really profound effect on our life. And actually, we know that say your beliefs about aging do seem to predict your longevity. But that's not through some kind of
unknown mechanism that's actually very well established mechanisms and essentially if you associate aging with decline and disability and all of these things well that makes you less active so there's a behavioral component it's also like increases your stress you know over months and then years because if you think as you're getting older that your life is kind of going to fall to pieces that makes all of the challenges you face more stressful it raises cortisol levels so that they're chronically high
it raises inflammation that causes biological damage and then that predisposes you to illness and then we know that that can change gene expression within the cells so you start to have the biological clock as it's known kind of ticking at a faster rate and with all that's very well documented.
I said, that's incredible. And actually, according to one longitudinal study, the difference between people with the positive and the negative views of aging, the positive view would be that you see aging as a time of kind of greater wisdom, you know, new possibilities, the difference between those two mindsets actually was about seven and a half years in
I don't find any of those mechanisms miraculous actually. I just think it's
is what we know about how the mind can affect behaviour, we know how the mind can affect stress and stress can affect illness. It's just linking them all together and showing that something that you might not think to be that important actually over time, over decades, adds up and really makes a difference.
Yeah, that's remarkable. Do you imagine that if you were to intervene in someone's life, if you were to impart in them a sense of beliefs that that would increase their not only quality of life, but their lifespan? And if so, what are those beliefs like if you were to prescribe it with all the disclaimers that come along with that?
Yeah exactly. I mean no one has performed because ideally you would have like a 40 year study where you'd change people's beliefs and you kept on coming back to them. You know the research hasn't been around long enough to do that but there are short time studies where you kind of give people like an exercise program and then some of these people are also given psychological support alongside the exercise program. So they might be
So you falsify the data to tell them this?
I can't remember to be honest. It might have been falsified in one study. I think in others you're just feeding them this positive information that your health is within your control and as you age that you can actually benefit from exercise.
that there are these opportunities no matter how old you are and what you find is that when you change the mindset in those ways that whether it's through deception or whether it's just through kind of positive encouragement that you seek greater benefits for those people so that's
You know it's only over a couple of months but like you do get this signal that changing the mindset really is being beneficial. There's another study that had looked at giving people subliminal signals through a kind of computer game they were playing. These were old people and I found that actually giving them subliminal signals
What does this say about the relationship of consciousness to reality?
The fact that if we believe so-and-so, it increases the chances of so-and-so. Believe, which is an aspect of consciousness, increases the chances of so-and-so in an external reality, if there is external, because there are some people who are idealists and so on. Right, exactly.
You know, I don't, to be honest, I'm fascinated by all kinds of theories of consciousness and the idea that we're living in a simulation and all of that. I don't think this research tells us anything about that. But I do think on a more superficial kind of level, not as profound as what is the nature of reality. But like, you know, this is essentially what we're showing is that
our thought processes are changing our reality in the future. And again, that's through just very, I wouldn't say mundane, but very well accepted behavioral, perceptual and physiological mechanisms that we know happen day to day, hour to hour. And all this is showing is that actually
sometimes the effects can, you know, add up and be really profound. You know, I always like to say actually, like, we know that our mindset can shape our bodies, like all the time, if you think of your favorite food, your mouth starts producing enzymes to help you to
Okay.
acknowledged or put to use previously that we can harness to improve our wellness and our health and even our longevity and that now we have that knowledge there are very specific techniques you can use to to really make the most of the mind body connection.
Have you looked into the subject of ego depletion?
these studies is the fact that actually mindset plays a role in ego depletion so if you expect to be depleted you become more depleted if you think that your willpower is kind of unlimited and that actually the more you practice your willpower the more you kind of get into that zone when you're doing those difficult problems if you believe that then actually that becomes your reality and you find that your concentration kind of you know actually grows as you focus on the task ahead
Before we start to wrap, I want you to explain what the pilot site test is and then why is it important.
Okay, I mean, this was a study from a few years ago, I'd say when the research on the expectation effect was really starting to expand beyond the placebo effect of medicine. And it was just looking at how people's vision is affected by their expectations. Now I've mentioned throughout the conversation,
that one of the pathways that the expectation effect can influence us is through perception. We know this from all kinds of studies, you know, the taste of food depends on what you expect the food to taste like of you. The same chemical that causes parmesan to smell so delicious is actually also behind the smell of vomit, but our conscious experience is very different depending on which we believe that we're smelling.
It just seems that this also happens with vision and with the clarity of vision. So this study by Ellen Langer at Harvard University seemed to suggest that if you lead people to believe that their vision is going to be more acute than it really is,
Then that can actually help them to see more clearly and just seems to be that we know the brain does a lot of work in tidying up our vision of the stuff that hits our retinas. Those patterns are not what we consciously experience because there's so much processing going on in the brain.
and it seems that actually when she kind of primed people to believe that they were going to have better vision by putting them in a flight simulator and telling them that they were kind of acting as expert pilots or that she gave them exercises that led them to believe that their eyesight was going to improve or she turned the sight test upside down so that the smaller letters were at the top and people have this association that they can read the first line on the
site chart, you know, in all of these cases, multiple experiments, people's vision did seem to improve compared to the control groups who aren't given the same kind of priming to believe that the site was going to be better than it was. Now, you know, I'm really careful in my book to say this isn't an excuse to kind of throw away your glasses. You know, these were kind of short term experiments. But I do think it's still quite profound that like,
what where that something as basic as kind of eyesight can to a certain extent be influenced by our beliefs and actually there's independent research showing that you know like if you if you're a bit short-sighted and you see a road sign but you know what it's going to say well you actually see that sign more clearly than if it was an unfamiliar sign where you don't know what the
I'm wondering now if there's a connection between this and something we talked about from your earlier book. I asked, is there an association between arrogance and intelligence?
They said not exactly, at least that hasn't been studied, but there is an association with people who are intelligent then believing that they're less susceptible to cognitive biases. And I'm wondering now, if priming for visual acuity, if you tell someone, hey, you have great vision, then all of a sudden you can see a bit better. If that's the case, then
Maybe it's not intelligence breeds arrogance, but arrogance breeds intelligence. Because you're like, hey, I believe I'm much more intelligent and then so I become a bit more intelligent. Now, maybe I'm taking it a bit too far. But is there an association there? Is it like an increase of five IQ points? 10 IQ points? Can't say that.
Well, like, so, you know, there have been all of these apps looking at kind of brain training, and there'd been, again, contradictory evidence, but some really seem to show that if people do these kinds of games, then they improve their IQ scores. But what scientists at around 2015 realized was the way that these participants were recruited
kind of primed them to expect that they were going to see those improvements. You know, the adverts were often like, you know, want to help with a test of brain enhancement, you know, come to our lab in like this room. And they looked, they analyzed that data, those historic studies, and they showed that those
with the kind of posters that had primed the expectation of improved intelligence did see greater gains because of the associated with the brain training compared to those who have them. They then did their own independent study which showed exactly what they'd predicted that actually if you tell people that by doing these tasks they're going to get smarter, they improve their performance by about five IQ points.
so it did seem to suggest that there is a benefit to that and actually it's been replicated just earlier this um well uh last year at the end of last year similar study um so i do think like having that self-belief can be really valuable
But in my opinion, we don't want to develop overconfidence because that is also associated with greater susceptibility to numerous biases. It might help your IQ, it might also then damage your reasoning and decision making.
But I think what's important there is still to kind of recognise this, your capacity to grow and improve. And it comes back to what we were talking about with how we can boost our learning. If you see frustration as being inherent in your intellectual growth, that will make your intellectual growth more likely. I think it's very much the same phenomena.
Now, taking this back to how far can we push this? I know that's a dangerous question. It sounds like we have untapped potential. Now, what that is in terms of a percentage may vary from task to task if you can even place a number on it. Now, there is a phenomenon called induced savantism or acquired savantism. You don't induce it. It's just called acquired savant. For people who don't know, there are some people called savants who they seem
to be not up to par intellectually in most tasks except one where they're extremely versed, extremely well so like they could read at a rate five times the ordinary person or they can play music just from hearing a song once or recreate a scene from seeing it in like a second
then there are some people who through some neurological defect that occurs later in life they were ordinary people and they're even ordinary quote unquote afterward but after the trauma they have acquired some ability that ordinarily is associated only with savants and it seems like most of our neurological activity is inhibitory strangely enough we think that hey we have this whole prefrontal cortex is doing all these calculations and producing content it's stymieing most of what's occurring so it's like stopping some reflexes
Well anyway, I was just wondering if you have come across a relationship between the expectation effect and acquired savantism. I haven't. And remarkable abilities in general. So I'd have to say
I'm not 100% familiar with the research on acquired savantism, because I've heard, I'm not sure if it's true, with some of the people who show amazing creativity. Well, they show amazing kind of productivity with their creativity, but whether it's actually independently rated as being original and innovative and fantastic, you know,
in the same way that, say, the innate savants are, you know, that I think I'd heard that was another matter that maybe they, they're not inhibited, and that they really, you know, have a feel compelled to create, but whether it's actually of a high quality, according to people's standards is another question. But I do think there is this kind of
You know, even just creating is something that we hold ourselves back from. Lots of people have creative anxiety where we're so worried about expressing ourselves that we just don't do it. So we find brainstorming really excruciating. We feel we put limits on, you know, our own idea generation. I do think that actually the expectation effect is really relevant in that case.
It might not make you immediately have the creativity of Leonardo da Vinci, but I think if you have this ability, this belief that your creative efforts are valued and that actually it's an incremental process,
You recognize that your first idea might not be your best idea, but that you might iteratively improve your ideas over time. I think that's the kind of belief that will have an impact on your overall quality of your creative output over time. If you see it as something that can be nurtured and you recognize that you don't have to limit yourself, but you can actually give free rein to your creativity and then refine it. I think that's what you really want to aim for.
So David, what's your next book on and what are you looking forward to this year?
Yeah, so I'm looking forward to writing this book, which is all about social connection. I'll save that. So I'm super excited about that. And then just, you know, other elements of my life, like I've been learning Italian for like a few years, and I'm gonna only go to Italy to spend like a month or so there. But I'm really looking forward to kind of getting the chance to kind of immerse myself in that culture.
How did you learn Italian? Was it through an app or?
No, it was very boring and old-fashioned through like evening classes. And then I've got Italian friends that I kind of speak to really regularly now. So it's just constant practice and constant, you know, reading Italian stuff, listening to podcasts, just, you know, very boring, just kind of putting in the work. Yeah. Did you start to learn Italian because you heard the research about
If you know another language, you're more open or you're more rational. I remember this was in the expectation effect. I'm not sure. Yeah, it did influence me a bit, but it's also just I'm super interested in Italian culture and the language and the literature. So yeah, it's a combination really. It's just that feeling you want to be able to communicate with another group of people and to see the world from their perspective. I think that's what's always fascinated me.
Great. Which place in Italy are you looking forward to going? Rome. Great. Great. You've never been? I've been on holiday, but I'm just looking forward to kind of, I think the longer you spend in a place like more, you know, familiar, you become a bit, the kind of deeper you can understand it. So yeah.
Great, great. Well, man, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for spending almost three hours with me, if not three hours. I appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for such interesting questions.
Alright, you just watched the episode with David Robson. Thank you so much. And on the last point about people being afraid to create, I find that to be the case. People just need a push. And so earlier this year or earlier last year, we had this physics and consciousness explication contest where people who were just on the verge of producing content but needed a bit of a nudge, we tried to give them that
At least modicum of an incentive. So the pace one, the physics and consciousness explication contest, the winners are announced either now or they're going to be announced and you can look out for a video on that. There are several wonderful, wonderful videos that came from this contest, this expedition, this exploratory effort that we engaged in together. It's fascinating. It's unbelievable.
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"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
},
{
"end_time": 84.445,
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"text": " What is the nature of reality? This is essentially what we're showing is that our thought processes are changing our reality in the future. That's through just very well accepted behavioral, perceptual and physiological mechanisms. And all this is showing is that sometimes the effects can add up and be really profound."
},
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"text": " Today we talk about the placebo effect, mind over matter, and the cognitive traps that correlate with IQ. David Robson is an author of science with a unique focus on human intellect and behavior. He has a degree of mathematics from Oxford. We both bond over our similar degrees in mathematics, except of course he's actually done something productive with his. He's worked for New Scientist, BBC, and he writes for several popular science magazines. Today we discuss the intelligence trap and the expectation effect."
},
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"text": " Thank you, and enjoy this interview with David Robson."
},
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"text": " David, thanks for coming out. I appreciate it. I've been listening and reading your book for about, it was months ago and then intermittently in the past few weeks. So thank you. It's an honor to speak with you. You too. What got you interested in intelligence? Yeah, I mean, it's something I was interested in since I was, you know, quite a young child. Because in the UK, we have this kind of streamed school system. Now it's only kind of in my area in the southeast of England, but we"
},
{
"end_time": 188.251,
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"text": " take this exam called the 11 plus that decides which type of senior school we go to and essentially it's an IQ test by any other name and if you score in the top 25 percent you go to a grammar school which is meant to be for kind of academically gifted children the rest go to a comprehensive school"
},
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"text": " So I took the exam, I did quite well, you know, got into my senior school, but I was just kind of a bit baffled by what this test was really measuring, because it wasn't the version that I took, you know, really wasn't looking at what I'd learned at school. Previously, it was all of these, you know, verbal, nonverbal questions that didn't seem to be directly related to kind of education."
},
{
"end_time": 231.886,
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"text": " Such as? And so I just wondered, you know, it was kind of word association things that were kind of mental rotation exercises, all of these things that I later learned, you know, kind of standard IQ questions. So it seemed quite narrow. And I guess I was always interested in like, what's it mean to be intelligent? Well, you know, what is that measuring? How kind of generalizable can it be?"
},
{
"end_time": 261.886,
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"start_time": 231.886,
"text": " And then when I became a science journalist, I became super interested in this phenomenon because I was interviewing some of the world's greatest minds, people who changed our understanding of the universe, and you kind of just had to look a little bit more deeply into their private lives to realise that while they were obviously showing high intelligence in their particular field, they could also be surprisingly stupid, and there really is no other word for it in other areas of their life."
},
{
"end_time": 290.776,
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"start_time": 261.886,
"text": " There was this guy, Kerry Mullis, who developed the polymerase chain reaction, which we use for all kinds of genetic testing, and it's the PCR test that we use for COVID. But he was a climate change denier. He was an HIV denier. He even believed that he had traveled in the astral plane, had met this kind of glowing raccoon in the forests of California. He had some very strange beliefs that just didn't seem to be scientific, let alone the kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 314.275,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 290.776,
"text": " kind of thinking that we would expect from a Nobel Prize winner. He won the Nobel Prize for chemistry for the PCR test. So, you know, it was really that that kind of led me back to this kind of old childhood fascination with intelligence. And I just wanted to understand, like, what do we mean by intelligence? What does the IQ test measure? And what does it miss? And what are the other kind of mental traits"
},
{
"end_time": 344.189,
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"text": " What are the other mental traits that we should be kind of cultivating and appreciating that aren't measured in kind of standard academic tests? What do intelligence tests measure and what is intelligence? Yeah, I mean, so the idea had been that, you know, we have this kind of generalized intelligence and this goes right back to the early 20th century, which is like a kind of underlying brain power. It's kind of almost like the kind of processing capability of the brain."
},
{
"end_time": 369.428,
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"text": " and actually you know we know that IQ tests do measure something meaningful and that they may be reflecting some kind of anatomical difference in the brain that does reflect a kind of general processing ability because we know that even those you know very narrow abstract tasks that I described that I took in my childhood IQ test well you know people's performance on that does seem to predict their academic achievement and then also how well they're doing"
},
{
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"text": " They're different professions and especially kind of professions that need kind of greater, you know, classically kind of intellectual input. So things like law, medicine, science, you know, so"
},
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"text": " If we have a high IQ, we probably are quicker to learn kind of complex stuff, quicker to understand complex stuff. So, you know, it's useful. I don't want to kind of downplay the kind of relevance of IQ. But the fact is that we also know that it's by no means the only thing that's important about someone's intellectual abilities. So, you know, even if you're looking at those kind of classic professions, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 437.79,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 410.759,
"text": " kind of can explain the kind of minority of the variance in people's performance you know so there's lots more to IQ even if you're a lawyer or a scientist or a doctor you know it's not going to make you incredibly creative for example so we know that it's missing something important and then what I really wanted to look at in the intelligence trap was just well like what is it missing and how does it relate to things like rationality and wisdom and you know"
},
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"text": " In the book, something that stood out to me was that there are a variety of cognitive biases and there are some that people who have a high IQ are more prone to. Can you talk about those?"
},
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"text": " Yeah, I mean, totally. So it's quite complex, I should expect that, you know, a nuanced as well. But essentially, like scientists have been looking at these kind of cognitive biases that have been studied by people like Daniel Kahneman since, you know, the 1970s. And we know, you know, humans act kind of irrationally in lots of different situations. And to just give one example, we suffer from this"
},
{
"end_time": 506.22,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 481.527,
"text": " thing called the sunk cost fallacy where, you know, if you're pouring resources into a project, like we feel very reluctant to abandon that project, even when we realise that actually any gains we're going to get from continuing are only going to kind of, they're not going to pay off, they're only going to lead us to a further loss. You know, the famous example of that is would be"
},
{
"end_time": 528.729,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 506.22,
"text": " Is the Vietnam War an example of that as well? Yeah, that kind of thing would absolutely be an example."
},
{
"end_time": 554.872,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 528.729,
"text": " It's just really difficult to cut your losses and accept defeat, even when you know that you're never going to win. We've known that exists for decades, but what the new research had shown, research on what's known as the rationality quotient, had actually shown us that people with high IQs compared to low IQs are really no more or less"
},
{
"end_time": 577.824,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 554.872,
"text": " susceptible to that. Being super intelligent does not make you more rational in that case. So that's one example where surprisingly intelligence doesn't make you kind of more logical. But then there are other phenomena where actually high intelligence can even make you more irrational. And that is when it gets to kind of justifying your bad decisions."
},
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"end_time": 588.677,
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"start_time": 577.824,
"text": " So if you have a really deeply founded belief in something, it might be like Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes novels, that you believe in the paranormal."
},
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"start_time": 589.07,
"text": " Well, what we know there is that then the more intelligent you are, actually the more kind of resilient you are to any contradictory information. So your intelligence actually protects your beliefs and prevents you from looking at the evidence that might actually lead you to a more rational point of view. And we saw that beautifully with Arthur Conan Doyle in all of his writing."
},
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"text": " You know, he's actually drawing on all of his creativity and his scientific knowledge to try to justify some really crazy beliefs. So, for example, he believed in fairies. He thought that these young girls in Yorkshire in the UK had taken photographs of fairies kind of around the babbling brook at the end of their garden. And, you know, other skeptics around him, you know, pointed out things like that you could kind of see their cardboard cutouts stuck together with pins."
},
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"end_time": 662.363,
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"text": " He took it as evidence that it was a belly button and it was a sign of the umbilical cord. So he actually used that contradictory evidence."
},
{
"end_time": 677.517,
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"start_time": 662.363,
"text": " to then make this weird inference that fairies are born in the same way that humans are, with an umbilical cord. And then he drew on these theories of electromagnetism, like Maxwell's new theories, to explain why normally we couldn't see fairies with the naked eye."
},
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"text": " so he was actually using his knowledge there to justify this very strange belief that all of the people around him who may have been less intelligent just couldn't actually believe but it's almost like his intelligence was fueling this rational belief because it was so central to him and you look into his biography and you kind of see that he"
},
{
"end_time": 713.217,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 697.892,
"text": " was mourning the loss of his son and so the belief in this kind of spirit realm actually became really important to him personally because he wanted to believe that you know there was an afterlife that he would be able to see his son again but then he was actually"
},
{
"end_time": 732.875,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 713.217,
"text": " you know rather than helping him to deal with that grief you know these beliefs were just causing him to pour you know thousands and thousands of pounds into kind of supporting these fraudulent mediums into you know he ruined his reputation amongst his peers by kind of supporting all of these beliefs so it really backfired for him and that was"
},
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"text": " for me a very clear example of how intelligence can kind of lead us astray. It can actually drive us along the wrong path in life if we don't have kind of checks and balances to make sure that we're applying it correctly. Do you make an equivalence between irrationality and illogicalness, illogicality? Yeah I mean I do think they're very related and essentially you know when to talk about irrationality I'm kind of trying to say when"
},
{
"end_time": 790.35,
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"start_time": 761.084,
"text": " It's all of those cases where we're, we're not making the optimum decision based on the information in front of us. And you know, anyone can make a mistake if you don't have sufficient information. But, you know, in someone like Arthur Conan Doyle's case, you know, there was enough information available, even if we didn't have all the scientific knowledge we have today, there was enough to suggest that these beliefs in the paranormal were very irrational. But"
},
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"end_time": 819.889,
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"start_time": 791.22,
"text": " and you know, plenty of people around him were skeptical, but he wasn't. So that's, you know, that's what I mean by rationality. The rationality could affect things like financial decision making, you know, causing you to pay too much for a property or to make a bad investment. You know, it could be in all kinds of areas, but it's essentially when you're making the less optimum decision, despite evidence that should have helped you to make a better decision. Does rationality incorporate healthiness into it?"
},
{
"end_time": 848.217,
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"text": " So what I mean is that it's rational to make a decision or to have your goal as something that's salutary in the long run, whereas logical is just following a sequence of steps like modus ponens and so on, like axioms. I think that's a great way of looking at it. You know, logic, I think, could be restricted more to, you know, like a very specific kind of question. But like, I do think when we talk about rationality and irrationality,"
},
{
"end_time": 865.998,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 848.217,
"text": " We are really thinking about, you know, how do we make decisions that align with our long term goals and in making the kind of optimum life for ourselves. The reason I ask that is then could there not be the argument that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was doing what's rational because it provided him comfort?"
},
{
"end_time": 888.575,
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"start_time": 865.998,
"text": " And so some of these false beliefs, let's just say false in a scientific sense or factual sense, and that's putting a huge asterisk because we don't know the answers to large questions. But let's just put a pin in that for now, that belief in quote unquote, factually false ideas can be rational because they're adaptive. Yeah, I mean, that's not the kind of definition of rationality. I would take because I feel like"
},
{
"end_time": 919.104,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 890.06,
"text": " So say you know I feel like oh yeah it's true Arthur Conan Doyle kind of wanted to have that emotional comfort but I think if you asked him would you be willing to believe in these things even if they were proven to be untrue he would have valued truth above emotional comfort like I'm certain looking at his writings that he really wanted to believe the truth and felt like he was spreading the truth for other people. So it's all about the kind of alignment of his goals but I really think he did actually"
},
{
"end_time": 948.166,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 919.104,
"text": " value rationality and we can see that in Sherlock Holmes the character himself is like the epitome of rationality so I think like if yeah like I just think in that case it's like he would have rather had a rational belief than a comforting belief like a true belief than a comforting belief but he was still drawn to this comforting belief because um yeah because I guess he couldn't"
},
{
"end_time": 977.739,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 948.166,
"text": " somehow couldn't resist it yeah but i agree like i think it you know definitions of rationality depend on what you value in life but you know scientists and psychologists in particular talk about epistemic rationality and that's really where you value truth and you're always looking for truth and then if that is your goal and you're then believing something that is not supported by the evidence then is irrational in an epistemic sense and that's absolutely what Arthur Conan Doyle was suffering from."
},
{
"end_time": 997.722,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 977.739,
"text": " Let's get philosophical for a moment. Would valuing the truth, even if it led you to a deleterious outcome, be rational? So let's say I value the truth. I want to know how potent can this virus get. So I'm going to make a virus or make Ebola and cross that with whatever is extremely virulent because I'm interested in the truth."
},
{
"end_time": 1017.619,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 997.722,
"text": " But yet that has the potential of destroying the entire world. Or let me investigate an even more potent bomb than the hydrogen bomb. That's a truthful endeavor, a scientifically truthful one. My question is, just because something is truthful or factually the case, does pursuing it mean that you're rational? Or can there be something irrational about pursuing the truth? Like, should you value truth above what's nourishing?"
},
{
"end_time": 1037.841,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1018.012,
"text": " Yeah, yeah, it's almost like Icarus, you know, flying too close to the sun, you know, is it always good to push kind of human understanding that far? No, I would say that's kind of whether you pursue that or not, you know, isn't to me a question of rationality. Because say,"
},
{
"end_time": 1058.37,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1039.753,
"text": " So for some of these questions, I think it's perfectly rational for you to say, I don't know and to have that humility, you can just be, you know, like you can say, and it's totally factually correct and epistemically correct to be like, we don't know how dangerous this virus could become."
},
{
"end_time": 1082.944,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1058.37,
"text": " or we don't know how potent that bomb can become and we don't want to pursue that because the risk is too great for our other goals which is the survival of humanity. So in that sense I think it's more rational really to say we don't know and we don't want to know, we don't want to take that risk. So it's not always just pursuing the truth above all else but it's more also than accepting like"
},
{
"end_time": 1101.544,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1083.404,
"text": " Calibrating your beliefs about that particular phenomenon and saying you don't know is a perfectly reasonable, rational response to something. What would be irrational would be for you to make some claim that the bomb is or isn't this dangerous or that the virus is or isn't this dangerous."
},
{
"end_time": 1122.773,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1101.544,
"text": " based on a lack of information. So yeah, that's why I stand on that. I certainly don't think we should have a relentless pursuit for truth over all else. But I do think we just have to be honest about where the current level of evidence stands. Okay, while we're on this, I want to get to the growth mindset and then a fixed mindset. But also, as you've steel manned what IQ is earlier,"
},
{
"end_time": 1143.166,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1122.773,
"text": " I want you to steal, man, the dangers of an open mind only because we're constantly talking about that we need more openness. And as someone who has been exploring and unjudiciously exploring theories of everything, let's say, I've been privy to the more heinous aspects of an open mind. And I mean that in a psychological sense, what I'm saying is that"
},
{
"end_time": 1160.316,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1143.166,
"text": " The case for the more ruinous aspects of an open mind are rarely made, at least by intellectuals, because they're constantly saying we need to have more of an open mind, more of an open mind. So I'm curious for you to steal, man, what it's like to have too much of an open mind. How do we know when we're too open?"
},
{
"end_time": 1189.036,
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"text": " Interesting. I mean, given the examples that you gave, like that Lovecraft quote, it makes me think of Plato's idea of the people in the cave looking at the shadows, then one of the prisoners escapes. He sees the fire, he sees what's beyond the fire, and he sees the beautiful reality. But it's like, how can he persuade the other prisoners that they want to see reality rather than sticking to what they know?"
},
{
"end_time": 1215.026,
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"start_time": 1189.036,
"text": " And you know, so yeah, I think this is a question that we've had for millennia on kind of, how far do we probe? Like, how much can we how can we deal with like a new kind of truth? So I absolutely think that is an open question. You know, I think that a great example, which I'm sure you've covered in this series is, you know, what if we discovered that we didn't have free will?"
},
{
"end_time": 1233.166,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1215.418,
"text": " you know what kinds of consequences would that have for kind of human behaviour and actually there are scientific studies that have tried to manipulate people's beliefs and free will or like a free will and you know it does have important consequences for things like our moral behaviour you know our kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 1255.299,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1233.166,
"text": " so discipline like if we don't believe we have free will we really struggle to kind of motivate ourselves to do anything because you just feel like you know what's the point your fate is already determined um so you know i do think like we could come to a stage where we do come to some conclusion about kind of consciousness or the origins of the universe where we we have to wrestle with these"
},
{
"end_time": 1273.456,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1255.299,
"text": " I don't really have an answer for that. My hunch at the moment is that we're so far away from that, but as a society we should be"
},
{
"end_time": 1291.118,
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"start_time": 1273.456,
"text": " Here that sound."
},
{
"end_time": 1318.08,
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"start_time": 1292.005,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 1344.241,
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"start_time": 1318.08,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
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{
"end_time": 1367.568,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1344.241,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
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{
"end_time": 1377.841,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1367.568,
"text": " Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories."
},
{
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"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
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"end_time": 1427.346,
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"start_time": 1398.865,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
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{
"end_time": 1443.712,
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"start_time": 1427.346,
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"end_time": 1460.367,
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"start_time": 1443.712,
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},
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"end_time": 1490.043,
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"text": " This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan, real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way."
},
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"text": " while studying it, you know, it won't leak from a lab, you know, that kind of thing, like we have to have all these kind of measures in place, we even a small possibility of a disaster. I don't think it's worth it because you know, eventually have enough of those kinds of near misses at one time is going to backfire and you could face a real catastrophe. So, you know, I think like that's why we have so many"
},
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"end_time": 1538.626,
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"text": " In general, I don't think we're close to that kind of issue. I think separately there's a question of the individual."
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"text": " Can it be just too overwhelming for an individual who is so relentlessly curious that they're almost overwhelmed by what they're discovering? And I think that's also something to bear in mind. I think curiosity is something that"
},
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"text": " bring so many benefits and i write about that in the intelligence trap you know how like curiosity you know literally makes you smarter and that it makes you learn more quickly it makes you more rational because you find it easier to balance kind of information that might be contradictory you know you're kind of looking but the uh you're you're willing to accept like um"
},
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"end_time": 1602.142,
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"text": " evidence that challenges you, which is really important for being rational. So you're not suffering from confirmation bias. So I had always thought that we should like cultivate curiosity. But I think if you get to a point where you're actually just struggling, then maybe, you know, you also have to slow down a bit or take your time, you know, manage like how you're dealing with that curiosity, making sure that you're not kind of pursuing too much too quickly at any one time."
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"text": " So I guess that's where I stand on that is that even though, you know, open mindedness, curiosity, you know, they're great traits, we always have to kind of rein them in and make sure that like, they're working to our advantage, and that, you know, we're not going too quickly about thinking about the consequences, whether that's personal, whether that's for society."
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"start_time": 1623.387,
"text": " Can you talk about some of the benefits of curiosity? And then also, I'm going to ask you about how does one temper their curiosity if they're much like myself where I feel like it's not producing positive effects always."
},
{
"end_time": 1661.817,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1634.462,
"text": " Right. So curiosity, you know, is this kind of hunger for knowledge. And we know that, you know, neurologically speaking, when you feel curiosity, like some amazing things happen in the brain, so actually triggers the release of dopamine, which we think of as being like, you know, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure. And it might be why finding out new things is, you know, is fun. But actually, dopamine also strengthens"
},
{
"end_time": 1681.135,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1661.817,
"text": " the storage of memories it kind of cements the memory for you so it actually improves your long-term memory of what you're learning and then there's this kind of amazing kind of spillover like halo of things so if you're curious about something you know in a kind of physics class or you know when you're reading a book like it actually"
},
{
"end_time": 1698.49,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1681.135,
"text": " helps you to learn not just that one fact but it actually strengthens your memories for all of the other facts that surround it. So you know in education, making sure that someone is curious and that they can pursue their curiosity is really beneficial. It can actually help to kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 1720.179,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1698.49,
"text": " you know, like erase or blur the differences that arise from differences in IQ and learning. If someone's really curious and really dedicated, you know, that's as good as having a higher IQ, essentially, even if the IQ is closer to average. So we know it's important in learning and memory. And then we also know that curiosity can help to offset some of the"
},
{
"end_time": 1745.623,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1720.708,
"text": " of biases that can sometimes come with greater intelligence. So I mentioned earlier that people like Arthur Conan Doyle suffer from this thing called the my side bias and that is and motivated reasoning which is where you you're attached to a particular viewpoint and then you only search for the evidence that supports that viewpoint and you like use your intelligence to dismiss any arguments that might contradict your point of view."
},
{
"end_time": 1772.073,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1745.623,
"text": " which can lead you down some kind of wormholes where you're believing something that you know most other people consider to be purely irrational and you know so leading you to pursue a goal that isn't actually helping you in the long run. Now what curiosity does is it actually protects you from that and it's because the curiosity overrides that emotional kind of pull of your initial belief. So you know you might have an initial belief in"
},
{
"end_time": 1790.691,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1772.073,
"text": " you know, something like the paranormal or climate change denialism or, you know, any of these beliefs that maybe don't tally with the scientific evidence. But if you're super curious and open minded, it's like then"
},
{
"end_time": 1806.732,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1790.691,
"text": " Your love of new knowledge will mean that you are willing to read that evidence that contradicts that point of view. You're so hungry for knowledge and you're so desperate to actually get to the bottom of this kind of problem that you'll read that report that kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 1830.009,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1807.005,
"text": " disproves your belief and then you'll you'll assimilate it into your knowledge and that's really important then for coming up with a more well-rounded less myopic kind of worldview if you're constantly doing that you're constantly kind of accepting you know information from lots of different sources and then forming a more rational worldview because of that so you know for me curiosity is"
},
{
"end_time": 1856.698,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1830.009,
"text": " in general for most people is like a skill that we really should cherish and cultivate. Now if it's kind of leading you astray or leading you to pursue to feel like a desperation to know so much it's actually like becoming overwhelming. I haven't really come across any research that tells you how to deal with that but I just wonder maybe there it's almost possible to kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 1882.722,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1857.295,
"text": " just focus your curiosity a bit like pick maybe out of all of the things that are fascinating you maybe you know like pick some to focus on in at the present and maybe put some to one side while thinking that you know you could certainly like pursue them in the future but just kind of making sure that you're more yeah more focused more concentrated and"
},
{
"end_time": 1904.053,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1882.722,
"text": " I'll tell you something personal."
},
{
"end_time": 1920.845,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 1904.377,
"text": " I don't think I've said this aloud to anyone outside of here. There's a sentence that drives me. I want to learn every theory that's ever been constructed. So I had that in me for a little while, then I saw that Feynman on his board, Richard Feynman, on his blackboard before he died, it had some equations, but then scrawled in the corner it said,"
},
{
"end_time": 1948.217,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 1921.425,
"text": " learn to solve every problem that's ever been solved. And I was like, that's interesting. But that's more practical than for I don't like to solve problems that are useful. I like to know theories. So I'm much more in the air. He was on the ground. That's a great example. Because I think like Feynman was, you know, like one of the most famously curious people that has been written about, you know, you see it in his autobiography, you see it in other scientists descriptions of his behavior. And you know, Feynman had"
},
{
"end_time": 1976.152,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 1948.217,
"text": " definitely had like his flaws like um but actually i think in terms of his kind of academic pursuit of knowledge that curiosity really did get him really you know like so far and it was actually just like a kind of curiosity over the way plates were spinning in the cafeteria that eventually came up allowed him to come up with his theory of um uh what was it quantum qed electric yeah exactly but um then won him the noble prize so he"
},
{
"end_time": 1981.323,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 1976.732,
"text": " You know, like it does show you what curiosity can achieve. But again, I think he"
},
{
"end_time": 2011.561,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 1981.903,
"text": " He was super curious, but I think he was kind of, he kept it in balance and he was like, knew kind of when to focus on one particular project, when to kind of allow his curiosity to kind of go elsewhere temporarily. So, you know, that was, I think he's a good model to follow in that kind of sense. As a writer, how many ideas for books do you have? Interesting. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm working on my third book now. How many ideas do you have? Like on the back writer of, okay, project one, project two,"
},
{
"end_time": 2022.466,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2012.073,
"text": " I've got another couple of ideas. They're very vague notes at the moment, but I just can't say for certain where I would ever pursue them because"
},
{
"end_time": 2046.357,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2023.302,
"text": " Yeah like it's always good to have that kind of stuff on the back burner that's interesting you but I think also like I have to be realistic in what I can achieve in the amount of time that I have and also you know I don't know by the time I've you know between now and when I've finished my next book someone else might have already written something great on one of those topics and then I don't want to just kind of rehash what someone else's"
},
{
"end_time": 2072.022,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2046.357,
"text": " is writing so yeah I have a few I'd say maybe I've got yeah like the one I'm working on that's been commissioned and then another couple maybe three that I'm kind of mulling but I'm mulling over but um you know they may never come off and I might you know in the meantime I might just come up with another idea that just like really grabs my attention that I have to write so yeah that's how I work really you know having lots of ideas kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 2088.473,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2072.944,
"text": " in the background like that I'm mulling over kind of subconsciously and consciously but they're not really making a definite decision until you know something really grabs my attention and kind of helps it all fall into place and makes me think actually this is the one this is what I want to pursue next."
},
{
"end_time": 2109.053,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2088.473,
"text": " I'm super curious now. How is it that you come up with the ideas for your books? Is it that you're walking around and one idea strikes you? Does it develop over time generally? Or is it like the seed is planted at once? Are you trying to work something out in the book? Like you have an idea, you're not sure if it's true, so are you going to write about it and find out?"
},
{
"end_time": 2123.37,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2109.053,
"text": " Did you read some fact? And you're like, Oh, that's interesting. Let me explore. How does it work? Yeah, I mean, so say with the intelligence trap, you know, I had this fascination with intelligence, you know, but then kind of grew as I became a science journalist and I"
},
{
"end_time": 2148.353,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2123.78,
"text": " kind of seeing these people, you know, where their kind of academic credentials didn't seem to match kind of their behaviour, you know, in other parts of their life, or their expertise in one field didn't seem to translate to others. So, you know, like, I had those examples, you know, as a writer specialised in psychology, I've kind of been keeping on top of the research for that. But you know, it's not like immediately just"
},
{
"end_time": 2168.012,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2148.353,
"text": " As soon as I came across one piece of research like it, suddenly I thought that has to be a book. It was much more of a prolonged process where I kept on coming across new papers, keeping note of them, and then eventually it just kind of coalesced. I guess it is almost like the way clouds form in a way. It's like"
},
{
"end_time": 2186.51,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2168.012,
"text": " I felt like there was just around this nucleus it was like suddenly this idea started to emerge and take shape and then you know it got to the stage where I felt like well I can write a proposal for this book test out for myself whether there's the kind of correct narrative arc"
},
{
"end_time": 2212.637,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2186.51,
"text": " and then you know once that was done I was pretty certain that that was something you know I really wanted to devote like a couple of years to write and it was exactly the same with the expectation effect of my second book which now I've been looking into things like the placebo effect you know since I became a science journalist like more than 10 years ago and then there was a bit of a kind of personal inspiration like an event in my life where I kind of experienced an expectation effect"
},
{
"end_time": 2242.022,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2212.637,
"text": " myself but then again it was just like collecting papers and then suddenly like a few years later it just I noticed that actually there was you know already like a structure had kind of formed it just kind of occurred to me that you know these were how I it was like this was how I could arrange the chapters this was the story that I felt I could tell and then I looked into the research you know to check that it stood up and actually the more I researched the more"
},
{
"end_time": 2271.032,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2242.551,
"text": " It made sense and you know like I was finding all these fascinating things that actually just added to this argument I wanted to make you know pieces of research I hadn't known about previously and like stuff I just found like totally fascinating so yeah that was how that emerged very similar to the first one it's like a kind of it coalesces it takes shape and then suddenly you think yeah this is a story that deserves to be a book rather than like a feature article in a magazine."
},
{
"end_time": 2292.159,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2271.032,
"text": " And when it's coalescing, are you making notes in Google Docs or Notion? Or is it written on a piece of paper? I know I'm getting in the weeds, but I'm an in the weeds person. I'm a details person. Yeah, no, I mean, it's in a Word document. So, you know, I just have like Word documents that are like, you know, tens of pages long with like all kinds of ideas for like, mostly just for like,"
},
{
"end_time": 2309.548,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2292.773,
"text": " Just noting down pieces of research that interest me and I'll kind of categorize it. You know, and then I might plumb that when I want to come up with like an article to pitch to a magazine or if an editor comes to me and they say like, could you write a piece about, you know, conspiracy theories or whatever and then I'll"
},
{
"end_time": 2335.879,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2309.548,
"text": " have like these notes that I can go back to that just kind of suggest to me kind of what you know what I can say that's new and interesting. See it's very much like that and the books kind of just emerge from that kind of long list of papers. It's you know not very organized like it's kind of split into basic categories but it's not like I'm being really strategic. I think that is a case of me allowing my curiosity just to kind of to flow"
},
{
"end_time": 2345.179,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2335.879,
"text": " How do you deal with this issue of, for myself"
},
{
"end_time": 2369.394,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2345.555,
"text": " When I'm writing, and I'm writing books without a publisher, it's just treatises. It's better to say it like that. Mainly, my impetus is because I don't understand some subjects, so let me write about it. For instance, paradoxes. I'm writing a book on logical paradoxes, or interpretations of quantum mechanics, or theories of every- like a compendium of different theories of everything, actually. Anyway, as soon as I make an opinion or state of fact, quote-unquote, I can find flaws with it."
},
{
"end_time": 2391.92,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2369.394,
"text": " And there are people who have some alternate opinion, so then I research them, like, that's actually fairly convincing. Okay, let me research what the opponent says. Oh, that's interesting. And it goes back and forth to the point where it's bottomless, at least for myself. And then I get to questions of what is, and who am I? The point is, like, I, at least for myself, when trying to put my stake down as something extremely solid, I find that it's sand."
},
{
"end_time": 2408.968,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2392.176,
"text": " Yeah, I mean that is really tough."
},
{
"end_time": 2435.367,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2408.968,
"text": " especially because science is constantly evolving and you know there's always the fear that like you know between having kind of signed off the proofs and the book being published that some big new study will come you know that might kind of prove the thesis but provide that kind of lynching evidence that you wish you could have included or that will contradict some part of the book and like you know I'm always aware of that. I think"
},
{
"end_time": 2455.998,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2435.367,
"text": " And you know, even within the science, sometimes you get research that is contradictory. And that's just a healthy part of science. You know, when I'm writing my books, I really try to kind of acknowledge the those kinds of nuances. But I'm really trying to look at like, whether there's a sort of bully a body of evidence that kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 2483.763,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2455.998,
"text": " From lots of different sources, lots of different types of studies, it could be medicine like longitudinal studies, it could be laboratory studies, it could be like real world kind of interventions. All of that, if you have enough of those that all point in the same direction and are showing the same phenomenon, like with the expectation effect, if you have all of these pieces of evidence showing that our expectations can shape our"
},
{
"end_time": 2506.954,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2483.763,
"text": " behaviour perception and feels physiology in profound ways to create self-fulfilling prophecies then that's what I feel I'm contributing you know I'm summarizing, synthesizing that body of literature and I see it as you know it's a snapshot in time essentially like I have to accept that that book will be as correct as I can possibly make it at the time of publication"
},
{
"end_time": 2537.278,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2507.295,
"text": " But I can never guarantee that there won't be other, you know, cool new studies that might support a contradictor in the future. And I have to kind of make peace with that fact that it's a representation of my thinking and as far as I could represent it, the state of the science at that time that I was writing the book. And I think that's how readers take it as well."
},
{
"end_time": 2552.961,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2537.892,
"text": " Right, sure. So I mean, I think, you know, like in psychology and medicine, you can have like a, you know, laboratory based study, which is normally in the short term, and you might have someone come in, you know, for psychology, say, where you're, you might test"
},
{
"end_time": 2575.93,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2552.961,
"text": " their mindset so looking this is for the expectation effect like looking at their beliefs on you know a particular element of their health or their fitness or you know what they think about food and then you might either you might then kind of give them some kind of test so you might be measuring you know how that what their hormonal responses to the foods that they're eating"
},
{
"end_time": 2597.978,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2575.93,
"text": " And then you kind of look for a correlation between, you know, their beliefs and those physiological outcomes. So, you know, standard kind of laboratory tests, you might also have a kind of intervention within the laboratory. So in that case, to kind of look at causality, you might rather than just measuring their mindsets, you might actually try to change their mindsets."
},
{
"end_time": 2613.183,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2597.978,
"text": " So you might try to change the way they view their own kind of health and ability to deal with exercise and then you might measure how they perform on the treadmill, you know, see if if you tell them that they actually have"
},
{
"end_time": 2640.879,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2613.797,
"text": " Good genes for doing exercise that's going to enhance their endurance. Do they then perform better in a test of endurance on the treadmill? And does that change things like their physiology, like the gas exchange within their lungs, you know, that kind of thing. If you do find that those who'd had their mindsets changed, then also show differences in their physiology. Well, that's a suggestion of a hear that sound."
},
{
"end_time": 2667.978,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2641.903,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2687.858,
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"start_time": 2667.978,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
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"end_time": 2717.449,
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"start_time": 2687.858,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
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{
"end_time": 2740.879,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2717.449,
"text": " Of a causal effect, essentially. So quite a good piece of evidence. The latter is an interventional study? Yeah, exactly. And the former was a"
},
{
"end_time": 2762.21,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2741.391,
"text": " Well, I guess a correlational study within the laboratory, but then you could also do these in kind of a real life situation. And I think that would be much more convincing is if you could kind of get people to kind of change their mindsets over a period of a month, for example, and then you measure differences in that physiology. Now, do you see the predicted effects?"
},
{
"end_time": 2783.507,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2762.5,
"text": " You can also look at longitudinal studies which are correlational but they have some advantages because they often track a lot of data from a lot of people over a long period of time. So you might track it over 10 years for 10,000 people and you might have measured their beliefs about their fitness or stress at one point"
},
{
"end_time": 2809.991,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2783.712,
"text": " and then you might look at lots of different outcomes like their behaviour, their BMI, their risk of death at a later time point. And you look for correlations there and you try to kind of control for the conflicting, confounding factors. Again, that doesn't necessarily prove causality and there are issues with that. But I think if you have all these different types of studies and they're all kind of showing the predicted effects,"
},
{
"end_time": 2825.145,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 2809.991,
"text": " I think that's what I'm really looking for there. Any one piece of evidence, I think there's going to be some flaws in the way this study was conducted, but I think if you start to find"
},
{
"end_time": 2841.852,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 2825.145,
"text": " What is the expectation effect and what was the catalyst you said there is a personal catalyst for the book?"
},
{
"end_time": 2870.776,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 2842.619,
"text": " Yeah, so I mean, the expectation effect is decided that our mindsets, which are these kinds of collective beliefs that we hold, can create self fulfilling prophecies, and that they can do so through changes to perception, changes to behaviour and changes to physiology. So actually altering things like the hormonal response in your body or, you know, your blood pressure, the actions of the gut, your bodily movements when you're"
},
{
"end_time": 2890.247,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 2871.834,
"text": " When you're exercising, you know, all of those kinds of things. And, you know, like in the book, I kind of look at the ways that this can, our mindsets can influence everything from, you know, the effects of a particular drug in a hospital to the outcomes of exercise, like"
},
{
"end_time": 2919.189,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 2890.247,
"text": " how you experience the exercise, how your body responds to the exercise, whether it's efficient or inefficient in kind of performing in particular activity, how we respond to food, how we respond to a new diet, how we respond to sleep loss, even how long we live. So I really looked at, you know, kind of, I think, all of the kind of key areas of our life that we might be trying to improve with changes in lifestyle. And I'm basically showing that"
},
{
"end_time": 2921.032,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 2919.497,
"text": " Changes in mindset are not"
},
{
"end_time": 2950.299,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 2921.323,
"text": " alone going to be this kind of secret panacea that's going to kind of create miracles. I'm not claiming that you can change your life just by changing your beliefs, but often the beliefs are an important component and they can kind of take the brakes off of our progress so that when you are making all of those other beneficial changes to your kind of exercise regime or your diet or your sleep, that actually like making sure you're doing so with the right mindsets can actually make it a lot more effective."
},
{
"end_time": 2961.186,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 2950.299,
"text": " Can you give an example before you move on to the personal one? Yeah, exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 2984.821,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 2961.578,
"text": " Now I kind of hinted at this earlier, you know, researchers at Stanford kind of wanted to see how people's beliefs about their own fitness would shape how they responded to endurance exercise. So they gave people a real genetic test. It looked at the CREB1 gene, which is associated with kind of cardiovascular fitness, you know, and endurance. If you have"
},
{
"end_time": 3013.046,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 2984.821,
"text": " the kind of good version of the gene like you find a bit easier and more comfortable to do exercise things like your kind of internal body temperature just stays in the kind of comfortable range a bit longer it's a good gene you know like um yeah exactly it's great great to have if you have it i'm a glut and that's like my vice is i just i can go to buffets and just eat meat so that's i hope i have that gene or if i don't i hope crisper is making some progress because i would like to engineer that into me"
},
{
"end_time": 3033.524,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3013.473,
"text": " Well, here's the thing that you should remember then, because so they did the real genetic test, but they gave people false feedback. So they told some people you have the good gene, good version of the gene, some people were told that the bad version of the gene, and then they did that kind of endurance exercise. And what the researchers found was that, yeah, like the gene does have an effect."
},
{
"end_time": 3060.538,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3033.524,
"text": " But so did people's expectations of whether they had the gene. So this feedback was sham feedback. So some who had the good version were told they had the bad version, vice versa. And actually those expectations independently affected how people did the exercise. And, you know, in some cases, according to some of the physiological measures, the expectations were actually more important than the effects of the gene itself. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3089.923,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3060.538,
"text": " When they were looking at the efficiency of the lungs, well, that depended more on the expectations that you had the good gene than whether you actually had the good gene. That's interesting. To speak to your experience of being like a rapacious fool. Yeah, they did exactly the same experiment looking at people's, a gene that was associated with satiety. So whether people feel they need to eat more to be full. And again, they found that actually those expectations did shape how much people ate."
},
{
"end_time": 3104.94,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3089.923,
"text": " but also shaped like the response of the gut, the hormonal response. There was one particular hormone that's linked to satiety that was very closely linked to the expectations of whether they would be full or not, thanks to this gene."
},
{
"end_time": 3134.616,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3104.94,
"text": " So, you know, again, it's like I said, just in the answer to your previous question, like I'm not claiming that like our genes don't matter, because they did have an effect too. But what you can see here is that actually, even if you have the bad gene, you don't have to see it as being deterministic in some way, like you can accept that actually, your expectations are also playing a role. And then you can look for ways to kind of change those expectations. And then that can be beneficial to you."
},
{
"end_time": 3164.121,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3136.084,
"text": " Now the personal bit. Yeah, so I mean, this was, you know, I think we all know what the placebo effect is. It's where you kind of take a sham drug like a sugar pill. And then you, you're told that it's the real thing. And then, you know, you experience kind of pain relief or, you know, change in blood pressure, due purely to your beliefs. And that's quite well established. But there's this other phenomenon called the nocebo effect."
},
{
"end_time": 3185.06,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3164.121,
"text": " which is like the placebo effects evil twin. If you expect to become ill, then those beliefs can actually create symptoms of sickness. So they can do things like amplify the transmission of pain signals. So something that would be like a small irritation suddenly becomes agonizing."
},
{
"end_time": 3209.497,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3185.06,
"text": " they can actually change things like the vasculature of the brain so they can create a migraine and it's actually you know taking form in your brain it's actually changing the way your brain is responding and I experienced that and you know the nocebo effect has been really widely studied in people's side effects to particular drugs so if you're told you might experience a headache after taking a pill"
},
{
"end_time": 3233.933,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3209.497,
"text": " people are much more likely to experience that headache even if they're taking a placebo pill and they're told that it might cause a headache, they get the headache. And I'd been going through a period of depression in my life and I was taking these like very standard antidepressant pills and my doctor you know she was obliged to do she told me that I might experience you know headaches as a result of taking the pills and I did and they were"
},
{
"end_time": 3256.288,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3233.933,
"text": " super painful, like I really found it difficult to focus at work. You know, I say it was like, I needed to feel like such a sharp pain, like, you know, an ice pick was kind of going through the skull or something. So pretty nasty. But at the time, I was also kind of, you know, just by chance looking into the placebo effect, and I came across this research on the nocibo effect."
},
{
"end_time": 3273.251,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3256.493,
"text": " And actually that knowledge of the nocebo effect and I checked the data for the drug itself and I saw that actually a lot of the side effects that people were reporting were influenced by nocebo effect. That knowledge actually then helped to relieve the pain. It just kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 3299.804,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3273.899,
"text": " I just questioned like, well, is it inevitable that I'm experiencing this pain? It certainly felt like it was, you know, direct kind of physiological response to the drug. But you know, it just made me think, well, maybe it's just my expectations. And actually, yeah, just opening my mind up to that possibility kind of, it led me not to catastrophize the pain and not to feel so anxious about the pain. And that in turn, then stopped me feeling the pain itself. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 3323.183,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3300.282,
"text": " you know after a day or so I actually just didn't have any of the headaches at all and I continued my treatment and it you know it worked remarkably well and if I hadn't known that I would have probably given up that treatment it would have been a waste of like you know perfectly good um line of treatment that actually proved successful so that experience really told me that like expectation effects are real"
},
{
"end_time": 3351.869,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3323.49,
"text": " that you know it's not made up it's not imagined because that pain to me was just as real as when I'd ever had a migraine in the past and we know that it's related to physiological changes in the brain and so I just started thinking well like how else could our expectations shape our experience like what else is it doing to us and how could we use this knowledge to our advantage and so that's when I collected all of those papers you know years later I realized that I had enough"
},
{
"end_time": 3370.964,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3351.869,
"text": " And it took the shape of a book that I really wanted to write. So many questions I have, man. Let me prioritize. Right. How do you know if what you experienced was the placebo effect or you just had the actual effect and what you learned afterwards was a positive placebo effect that neutralized the effect?"
},
{
"end_time": 3389.462,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3371.834,
"text": " I mean, that is a possibility, I suppose. I mean, in this case, I think it's unlikely because I'd actually when I was looking into these, you know, my particular brand of antidepressant pills, you know, like the vast majority of people experiencing headaches,"
},
{
"end_time": 3413.097,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3389.462,
"text": " were experiencing it because of the expectation. The difference between those in the placebo arm of the clinical trials of this drug and the people actually taking the drug was, you know, tiny. I'm not even sure if it was clinically, you know, like I'm not clinically significant, statistically significant. So it really was very likely that I was experiencing a nocebo effect."
},
{
"end_time": 3441.067,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3414.087,
"text": " This podcast is a part of a series that's extremely practical. So we're going to talk about steps that people can take to utilize the expectation effect in their life. And then also later on, we're going to talk about learning because in particular learning extremely confounding graduate level math and physics because many people on this channel want to know how can I utilize some of the lessons from the intelligence trap and or the expectation effect to accelerate my learning."
},
{
"end_time": 3461.357,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3441.067,
"text": " In this case, new knowledge nullified the nocebo effect. Now, how does one have new knowledge that gives a placebo effect? Because I can imagine if someone was to tell you, by the way, the positive effects you're feeling, that's just in your head, that may reduce it rather than amplify it. How do you consciously employ some strategy to utilize the placebo effect?"
},
{
"end_time": 3481.715,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3461.357,
"text": " Yeah, and I mean, this has been the big dilemma that had like really put a barrier on kind of placebo research for decades. But actually, there's lots of exciting new research that kind of helps us to get over them. And basically, all of this research shows that you don't need deception to take advantage of expectation effects."
},
{
"end_time": 3502.688,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3481.715,
"text": " Now one of the kind of studies I like most looks at, they're called open label placebos. They're like non-deceptive placebos. So there was a study from Portugal where the researchers took people with chronic back pain and, you know, they've been struggling, the patients have been struggling with this for a while."
},
{
"end_time": 3523.319,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3502.688,
"text": " and they actually gave them a jar of placebo pills that clearly said placebo pills take two a day but the pills were kind of bright orange you know quite striking but they knew that they were didn't contain an active ingredient but the researchers also gave the participants a kind of presentation about the"
},
{
"end_time": 3542.21,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3523.319,
"text": " the placebo effect but all of this evidence showing that actually good expectations can help to relieve pain, that sometimes the brain itself can create its own endogenous opioids that kind of has its inner pharmacy that it can tap that will help to produce its own painkillers. They learn all of these things"
},
{
"end_time": 3571.254,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3542.21,
"text": " and then they were told like you don't have to kind of take our word for it like you don't have to you know convince yourself that this is true like artificially kind of lie to yourself or repeat a mantra like just kind of you know listen to the evidence and you know process it as you want but you do have to then take the pills like the ritual of taking the pills is really important so take one in the morning one in the evening like do that for the next um week and what the researchers found was that actually"
},
{
"end_time": 3596.049,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3571.886,
"text": " You know, the ritual of the pills combined with that information that they'd been given, that kind of empowering information about the mind-body connection, that that alone was enough to produce a clinically significant decrease in the pain symptoms that they were feeling. So reduced it by, I think it's 29%, which is the kind of threshold for, you know, if you're trying to approve a new drug for pain relief."
},
{
"end_time": 3621.596,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3596.049,
"text": " um and you know then they the kind of participants went away the trial was ended it was written up but five years later the researchers kind of visited these same participants and found that even five years later they were still like managing and coping better than the participants who hadn't received the placebo pills those had just continued their um treatment as usual so that really suggested that actually"
},
{
"end_time": 3650.691,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3622.278,
"text": " knowing about the expectation effect, knowing about these benefits can in itself empower you and kind of can create the expectation of pain relief in this case that actually then produces the benefits that you want without any deception. That's now been replicated a few different times for different illnesses and we know that there are other kind of tactics too so actually you can do away with the kind of sham treatment altogether in some cases and just give people"
},
{
"end_time": 3666.391,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3650.691,
"text": " a kind of psychological therapy that just helps them to form optimistic but realistic expectations of their recovery from surgery, for example. So you kind of give them information that allays their worries about the effects of the surgery."
},
{
"end_time": 3696.357,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3666.391,
"text": " and helps them to plan out this kind of recovery that they would like to see, gets them to feel excited about all of the kind of new activities they'll be able to do when they feel better. And then that psychological therapy alone can produce some of the benefits that you would want to see. They leave hospital more quickly. They return to work more quickly. They also show differences in signs of kind of inflammation within the body. The lower the inflammation, the kind of quicker the biological recovery."
},
{
"end_time": 3723.507,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3696.357,
"text": " and so that's just two ways that you can kind of apply the principle of the placebo effect but without being deceptive and then you know in other areas of life i kind of explain how you can apply the same kinds of principles to things like um you know managing sleep loss or kind of boosting your experience of exercise you don't have to fool yourself into thinking that you um have those good genes for exercise for example to actually benefit from that kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 3742.688,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 3723.507,
"text": " That's what's so exciting to me is that actually, you know, we don't have to be this kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 3759.394,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 3742.688,
"text": " self delusional Pollyanna is kind of always kind of falling themselves into thinking things are better than they are. It's all just about kind of having this knowledge of what the brain can do. And then trying to think of like clever ways of applying that and of kind of forming or reappraising your"
},
{
"end_time": 3784.138,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 3759.394,
"text": " old assumptions and kind of forming new expectations that can be beneficial and optimum to you. What can one do specifically to up raise their level of sleep? So that's something I need, even sleep quality, let alone the hours. And also, like I mentioned, this is going to be a part of a series on learning extremely difficult mathematics and physics. So what can someone who's watching this do to increase their rate of learning, utilizing this expectation effect?"
},
{
"end_time": 3799.701,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 3784.138,
"text": " Yeah, sure. So, to take sleep first, you know, like, a lot of sleep loss comes from a kind of fear of not getting enough sleep."
},
{
"end_time": 3815.708,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 3799.701,
"text": " so you know like we know like it's well accepted amongst um kind of cognitive behavioral therapists who help people with insomnia that we can develop all of these kind of really damaging beliefs about the sleep that we're getting so if you've had sleep loss in the past"
},
{
"end_time": 3836.032,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 3815.708,
"text": " then that kind of creates an anxiety about not being able to get to sleep in the future and those anxieties put you in a state of high arousal so that you find it much harder to get to sleep because your brain is on full alert. Now one way around that, intuitively, is that actually if you try to stay awake"
},
{
"end_time": 3865.367,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 3836.032,
"text": " is a kind of ironic, interesting therapy. You try to stay awake, your studies suggest that you're more likely to fall asleep. So I don't think that's a case of just staying up, partying and expecting it to come miraculously. But when you're lying in bed and if you feel like you're desperate to fall asleep, actually don't. Try to think of something that's going to keep you awake and you'll probably find then you're kind of drowsing and falling off naturally."
},
{
"end_time": 3893.49,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 3865.367,
"text": " So that's one strategy. Mindfulness is a good way. If you can learn mindfulness and you can apply it well, that can be another good way of just kind of avoiding those kind of fretful thoughts as you fall asleep. And it's almost like having that non-judgmental awareness of what you're thinking. So you stop catastrophizing. Like if you've got all that stuff going around in your head, like you kind of notice it and let it go without judging yourself for it. That can be beneficial."
},
{
"end_time": 3908.575,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 3893.49,
"text": " um but equally important i think is looking at our expectations of what the sleep loss is going to do to the day ahead so if you're struggling to get sleep or maybe you've been asleep and you wake up like always happens to me you wake up at like two o'clock in the morning"
},
{
"end_time": 3931.118,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 3908.575,
"text": " You can immediately start thinking, well, if I don't get to sleep now, then tomorrow I'm going to be wrecked. I'm going to be irritable. I'm not going to be able to meet my deadline, you know, all of those things. Actually, just stop thinking about those effects. And the reason that you can do that is that the research shows that actually is those expectations that create the symptoms of sleep loss the next day."
},
{
"end_time": 3951.203,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 3931.118,
"text": " There have been lots of research, longitudinal studies, like I mentioned, also laboratory intervention studies that gave people false feedback about their sleep quality. They all suggest that if you expect to suffer because of your sleepless, you're more likely to suffer the next day from your sleepless. So you tell someone that they've had... Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 3978.302,
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"start_time": 3952.176,
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"start_time": 3978.302,
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{
"end_time": 4027.722,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4004.36,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
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"text": " A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The holidays were tricky for the Colonel. He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC's 499 Chicken Pot Pie."
},
{
"end_time": 4068.302,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4049.224,
"text": " warm flaky with savory sauce and vegetables it's a tender chicken filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls whatever that means the colonel lived so we could chicken kfc's chicken pot pie the best 499 you'll spend this season prices and participation may vary while supplies last taxes tips and fees extra"
},
{
"end_time": 4092.688,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4070.691,
"text": " Really, you get them in the lab, attach electrodes to them, let them kind of sleep and then tell them the next day that they have actually that they had a terrible night's sleep according to the electrical recordings. That expectation will then cause them the next day to feel more fatigued, to struggle to concentrate, to be more irritable."
},
{
"end_time": 4119.206,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4092.688,
"text": " That's extremely interesting, because there's obviously the news, which outputs dangerous messages. When I say dangerous, I mean messages of danger. And part of it is they want to inform people, like part of us deleterious, they're trying to get views. But let's say optimistically, they're trying to inform, but by doing so, they may create conditions that make the danger worse. And then Michael Walker of the sleep books. Matt Walker. Matt Walker of what? What's his book called?"
},
{
"end_time": 4147.654,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4119.206,
"text": " Why we sleep? Yeah, okay. So Matt Walker, he talks about the detrimental effects of sleep loss and partly that. I think since I started caring about my sleep, I started to have sleep issues. I had an aura ring. I no longer use the aura ring because I found myself being fanatic about checking my stats and then worrying when they weren't optimal. So that's interesting because you want to inform, but at the same time,"
},
{
"end_time": 4151.664,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4147.978,
"text": " Informing may do more harm than good. How does one navigate around that?"
},
{
"end_time": 4180.589,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4152.346,
"text": " I mean, it's interesting you say that about Matt Walker's book, you know, I'm a big fan, actually. But, you know, I have read like blogs by kind of sleep scientists who've, you know, said that they're actually worried that like, it's created a lot of anxiety about sleep that then is leading more people to come to sleep clinics with sleep problems, and that the anxiety is kind of exacerbating their issues. Now, I think, you know, it's a kind of like we were talking about earlier, it's like,"
},
{
"end_time": 4200.503,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4181.152,
"text": " Should we give information to people? We want to be informed, but should we be giving information that's actually going to harm people's quality of life? And I think we should. I think we need to know the truth about the importance of sleep, because you might be suffering from the kinds of sleep problems that we've spoken about that are fueled by anxiety."
},
{
"end_time": 4225.247,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4200.503,
"text": " but you know there's also lots of people who just aren't giving themselves enough time to get to sleep and then you know you want those people to be able to make a better informed decision of kind of their lifestyle. But I think the message can be presented in such a way that it doesn't kind of catastrophize the effects of a loss of sleep and I think maybe what's been lost in some of this messaging is that you know"
},
{
"end_time": 4250.452,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4225.589,
"text": " The occasional sleepless that you might get doesn't have to be a catastrophe for you. So, you know, if you wake up in the middle of the night for half an hour, that doesn't mean that you're going to struggle the next day. But look, but we can develop this belief that it will do so any slight disturbance becomes like a serious worry for us. So I think we need to acknowledge that we need to kind of put things in proportion."
},
{
"end_time": 4271.8,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4250.452,
"text": " Then we can also look at things like that have been proven to work. So, you know, I think like, hopefully, just by understanding a bit about this expectation of age, you know, people who've read that chapter, I've heard that it has kind of immediately helped them with their sleep. And I was like, super pleased about that. But if people are having these kind of continuing problems with their sleep, you know, they're really struggling"
},
{
"end_time": 4288.063,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4271.8,
"text": " to get um to get enough each night and it's becoming something that's really damaging their lifestyle well then they can go to a specialized sleep therapist who won't put them on sleeping pills which you know the efficacy of sleeping pills is"
},
{
"end_time": 4314.189,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4288.063,
"text": " you know, questionable, but instead they will help them to change those beliefs in a more kind of organized program. So through cognitive behavioral therapy or mindfulness-based therapy, they'll help them to deal with those kind of beliefs that are keeping them awake at night and then causing them this distress the next day. And that therapy, working through practical problems, talking about the science and the evidence and, you know, giving them that knowledge,"
},
{
"end_time": 4333.865,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4314.189,
"text": " That can be really beneficial for curing insomnia too. So I would say if you have this kind of prolonged problem, you know, do get help. It doesn't have to be a pharmaceutical solution like there are, but psychological means of dealing with sleep loss that can take advantage of the expectation effect."
},
{
"end_time": 4353.473,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4333.865,
"text": " Much of this has so far been about ameliorating what is a medical issue. What about if we have no issue and we want to accelerate in a certain area? For instance, learning arcane math, physics, computer science, philosophy. How does one utilize some of these techniques? Does one take a pill in the morning? Can they self assign the pill? Does one inject? Is injecting better?"
},
{
"end_time": 4378.985,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4353.473,
"text": " Yeah, you know, I mean, I wish I really kicked myself that I didn't know about all this science before I did my own degree in mathematics, because, you know, it's a tough degree. I, you know, I did fine, but like, I think I could have done better if I'd known all that I know now about the psychology of learning. And I think one of the lessons that really, really chimes with me and also, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4397.022,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4379.531,
"text": " This gets to the heart of how we can use the expectation effect more generally. For example, if you're"
},
{
"end_time": 4425.623,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4397.739,
"text": " exercising, you're working out, you feel aches in your muscles, you feel out of breath, you can assume that those symptoms are kind of a sign of your lack of fitness and you can kind of catastrophize them and that you think like you start telling yourself you have this negative internal monologue that's like I'm a failure, I'm struggling, I'm really unfair, I'm not going to manage to like to get through this workout and you know the research on the expectation of it shows that actually just"
},
{
"end_time": 4454.821,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4425.623,
"text": " changing the way the meaning you assigned to those feelings can change your performance. So if you see rather than like those being those symptoms as being like, you know, detrimental negative signs of failure, if you actually just see it as you pushing your body to its limits of building strength, that's actually really beneficial. And it helps you to enjoy the exercise more, it creates the endorphin rush, you know, it can really build up your stamina, just by changing"
},
{
"end_time": 4484.292,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4455.333,
"text": " that mindset and I think exactly the same thing happens in learning and there are studies that show this. So if you're learning arcane maths, it's really inevitable unless you are some kind of like incredible genius that you're going to feel frustrated sometimes. You're going to not be able to solve that problem, that the concepts aren't going to stick, that there's going to be some kind of gap in your knowledge that you're really struggling to overcome, that kind of gap in understanding."
},
{
"end_time": 4510.094,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4484.957,
"text": " What the research shows is that you can appraise that frustration as in the same way that someone who's struggling at the gym appraises the muscle aches. You can see it as a sign of failure, as a kind of sign that you're not smart enough, that you're not intelligent enough, that you're not learning, that you're not progressing. You can just see it purely detrimentally."
},
{
"end_time": 4537.568,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4510.094,
"text": " Or you can accept, and this is also totally rational and actually true, you can accept the fact that frustration is just an inevitable and important part of learning. In the same way that you're pushing the body when you're working out, you're pushing your brain to build new connections, to grapple with really complex, difficult ideas. And if you weren't feeling frustrated, you wouldn't be stretching yourself, you wouldn't be building your knowledge."
},
{
"end_time": 4562.756,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4537.961,
"text": " and what the research shows is that when you come to accept and even embrace the frustration and you recognize that it's crucial for learning but that actually helps you to learn better. It helps your determination and perseverance but it actually almost like frees up part of your mind because you're no longer feeling all that kind of anxiety, it's not going through your head, taking up your mental resources,"
},
{
"end_time": 4584.667,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4562.756,
"text": " you're just accepting it and then getting on with the problem and that that you know lesson by lesson like kind of class by class you know problem by problem that's going to help you with your progress and that's definitely something that i noticed in my own degree i just didn't know the science behind it it was almost once i relaxed into problems and just could kind of sit with them"
},
{
"end_time": 4597.722,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4585.06,
"text": " without panicking when I didn't get it immediately but that actually just was incredibly important for me to be able to progress a lot more quickly and it's exactly the same when I'm writing"
},
{
"end_time": 4619.275,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4598.046,
"text": " journalism now or writing my books, you know sometimes structuring like a chapter is really frustrating because you just don't see how you can fit the pieces together in the right way and you have to have that kind of structure like you're playing almost like a jigsaw in your mind, like trying to see the most elegant, most comprehensible, most enticing way for a subject."
},
{
"end_time": 4631.681,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4619.599,
"text": " And the more I just relax into that frustration and accept that it's just, you know, a creative block is kind of part of being creative. If you weren't experiencing that, it would just be a kind of administrative task."
},
{
"end_time": 4653.37,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 4632.108,
"text": " Whereas actually the frustration is the creativity. Recognising that actually helps with my job today too. So I think it's something that can be applied in all kinds of areas. But absolutely with maths, I think the thing that holds so many people back is that they get in this kind of panic. And actually just relaxing into that and accepting it and even embracing it is so powerful."
},
{
"end_time": 4675.947,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 4654.377,
"text": " What else would you do differently as an undergrad? I think going back to curiosity that we've mentioned and the benefits of curiosity for reading. I think sometimes a subject like maths or physics is very abstract and it can be quite difficult for you to kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 4700.538,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 4675.947,
"text": " Attach it to something really meaningful in your life. You might automatically have this kind of fascination with, I don't know, like number theory or whatever. But for me, I was always more interested in the applied maths and the pure maths felt like a kind of needless distraction. So I was really dedicated in trying to learn it, but it never felt... Pure maths felt like a distraction."
},
{
"end_time": 4715.555,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 4700.538,
"text": " Yeah, exactly, compared to the applied maths, which is like what I was really interested in, and I had no option like I had to learn it. You know, and I think I put in a lot of effort and I did find like, you know, it's not like I failed that class or anything, but"
},
{
"end_time": 4738.114,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 4715.555,
"text": " but knowing what I know about curiosity now I think actually I should have tried really rather than just putting kind of working like a workhorse just kind of putting in the hours I should have thought a bit more creatively about how to cultivate curiosity and what I was learning and something really simple I think like learning about the lives of the mathematicians behind these kind of theories that I was learning"
},
{
"end_time": 4757.432,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 4738.114,
"text": " that you know I was never going to be tested on any of that biographical information but I know from the science of curiosity that that could have been enough to kind of spark an interest that would have then had this spillover effect and made the whole process of learning much more meaningful for me because I'm a really like people-centered person"
},
{
"end_time": 4776.886,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 4757.432,
"text": " Have you read the biography of Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson?"
},
{
"end_time": 4803.046,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 4776.886,
"text": " I have, yeah. I think there's no one in history that could be described as being as curious as he was. Yeah, and in the book, Walter says in the beginning that he has described Steve Jobs as a genius and Einstein as a genius and so and so as a genius, but he said he was careful to not call Da Vinci a genius because he feels like virtually everything Da Vinci had done could be cultivated in other people."
},
{
"end_time": 4826.647,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 4803.046,
"text": " It was just about being immensely curious, like he would paint on the wall a line, and then get him and his friend to guess what is the length of that line. In one of the notes he scrawled, what is the function of the tongue of a hummingbird, or a woodpecker, something like that. And it turns out, then it's like, what the heck, why would anyone think of that firstly? And then does a bird beat its wings down faster than it brings it up?"
},
{
"end_time": 4844.258,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 4826.647,
"text": " That's a question you just you don't even think to ask and he would ask them and turns out they had extremely Interesting answers. There was something different about the woodpecker's tongue Yeah, exactly. But I mean, I guess I would disagree with um uh with him and that I think like"
},
{
"end_time": 4872.739,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 4844.684,
"text": " that is a that it was that curiosity that was behind Da Vinci's genius you know so and it was exceptional and I agreed that other people could cultivate that curiosity potentially but then I think also people could cultivate the traits that made Steve Jobs I guess that's what I feel about genius is that we especially having written The Expectation of Eight is that we see it as being something that's kind of God-given"
},
{
"end_time": 4896.852,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 4873.217,
"text": " but actually you can break it down. There's so many traits that contribute to genius. It's not like there's one secret, but I think they all can be cultivated. And then sometimes just for someone to be recognised as a genius, there's also good luck. You have to be in the right place at the right time to make your amazing discovery. Like Feynman, if you hadn't been watching those,"
},
{
"end_time": 4914.855,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 4896.852,
"text": " We can learn a lot from him, but we can learn a lot from all of these other people too."
},
{
"end_time": 4943.916,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 4914.855,
"text": " I agree with all of what you said, minus the luck part. But it's not that I disagree about the luck, it's more about that if we follow the logic of the luck, it's not... So you could say, well, 50% of their success was luck. Well, if you follow the logic that got you to that 50%, you could drag that all the way to 99.999999, because you could just end up with the logic of Dr. Manhattan, I think his name was from the Watchmen, who said, yeah, but for even you to be here, every atom needed to coalesce with this atom and this"
},
{
"end_time": 4970.043,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 4943.916,
"text": " organism needed to not die and so on and so the chances of you being here are so astronomically zero so you could follow that line to say essentially every single aspect of you is luck and there's almost zero free will if free will even exists at all and then that has its own downsides that's why I have issues with any arguments about luck like there's obviously positive about luck because you don't want to say every single thing in a person is due to their own merits or that they're flawed in some way like that's horrible"
},
{
"end_time": 4980.52,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 4970.452,
"text": " But then logically speaking, any argument for an incorporation of even 10% luck can be pushed to 99.99999999% luck. How do you deal with that?"
},
{
"end_time": 5008.217,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 4981.049,
"text": " I guess I kind of do see a point and I kind of agree with it and you know I like to think that say someone like Feynman you know if he hadn't been in that canteen at that time he would have come up with the discovery some other way and because I think it was his combination of you know intelligence and curiosity and open-mindedness and dedication you know grit all of these things the men that he created his own luck in that he took that opportunity and ran with it"
},
{
"end_time": 5036.459,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5008.217,
"text": " But if he hadn't had that opportunity, there might have been another one that you would have had instead that would have also led to some amazing discovery. So, you know, I do think, you know, it still is within, within our control and you can you can maximise your chances you might not be there's no foolproof way to become a genius or to be recognised as a genius, but you can absolutely maximise your chances of that by cultivating those kinds of traits."
},
{
"end_time": 5055.708,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5036.459,
"text": " So one way that it can be conceptualized is like, yes, there is a lottery, but every time you persevere, it's like you're playing that lottery again and again and again. So is that one way or is that incorrect? Yeah, you have to be in it to win it, essentially. And you can be smart about the kind of way that you play"
},
{
"end_time": 5078.695,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5056.34,
"text": " I'm not discounting the fact that there are structural barriers that we need to remove to give people equal opportunities or more equal opportunities."
},
{
"end_time": 5091.476,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5078.695,
"text": " David, what is evidence-based wisdom?"
},
{
"end_time": 5115.162,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5092.619,
"text": " So this is kind of trying to apply the same intellectual rigor that we had with the study of intelligence to the study of wisdom. Obviously, wisdom has been spoken about a lot in philosophy, but in science people had really ignored the question, avoided the question of what makes one wise, can we measure it?"
},
{
"end_time": 5143.899,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5115.623,
"text": " and then this researcher called Igor Grossman really attempted to tackle this huge problem and he looked at all of the philosophical definitions of wisdom and he distilled them to six different metacognitive kind of tendencies that we might have and you know to name a few of them as things like intellectual humility, essentially you know people since Socrates had"
},
{
"end_time": 5169.991,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5143.899,
"text": " argued that to be wise, you have to have a very definite knowledge of the limits of your capabilities and to accept when you don't know something. It's the ability to reach a compromise, the ability to look for other people's perspectives. So you're not just kind of myopically focused on your particular viewpoint, but you're looking for other people's too. So he"
},
{
"end_time": 5188.677,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5170.469,
"text": " you know, gathered these together and then he started designing tests that would measure them. Some of these tests were quite involved, but it would involve people looking at a kind of article that might be from a Dear Abby column, I think, like an agony column outlining a problem"
},
{
"end_time": 5204.411,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5188.677,
"text": " or it could be an article about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And he would ask people to talk out loud about what they thought of these issues, how the situations might be resolved potentially."
},
{
"end_time": 5229.94,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5204.411,
"text": " you know really to kind of talk through their thinking on these complex situations and then psychologists would rate how they performed on all of those different elements of wisdom like intellectual humility. Did these people actually acknowledge that they didn't have all the information they needed to handle? Did they outline what they would like to know before coming to a conclusion? That kind of thing. What he found was that those"
},
{
"end_time": 5254.036,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5230.674,
"text": " those measures actually correlate really well with important outcomes in life. And when it comes to things like people's emotional well-being, their health, you know, all of these really important things that state their relationships, the measures of wisdom actually came out as being more important than independent measures of IQ that had also taken."
},
{
"end_time": 5279.94,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5254.036,
"text": " So it really proved that wisdom is something that can be measured scientifically and then Igor looked at ways to cultivate wisdom to make people wiser and one example of that which I loved is this phenomenon called self distancing and that is essentially just getting yourself to look at a particular situation from an outside perspective. If you're American and you are"
},
{
"end_time": 5306.186,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5280.23,
"text": " reasoning about the forthcoming elections, for example, rather than just talking about the situation from your own perspective, you might consider how someone from Iceland or Australia might view the situation. If you're talking about a personal problem, you might imagine instead that you were advising a friend with a similar problem. What he found was that this actually improves people's scores and wise reasoning."
},
{
"end_time": 5335.555,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5306.527,
"text": " It actually helps them to reason in a more sophisticated way about the issues at hand. And the reason is that it stops us from feeling so attached emotionally to the particular problem and to our pre-existing viewpoint. So it helps us to question our assumptions, to look at those different perspectives that we might not consider if we feel totally immersed in the situation at hand. If we are reasoning from the position of an American talking about the US elections,"
},
{
"end_time": 5359.957,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5335.555,
"text": " Did he come up with a number akin to IQ before wisdom, like your WQ?"
},
{
"end_time": 5377.5,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5360.401,
"text": " No, so, you know, he didn't come up with a kind of wisdom quotient. But you know, it was, in a way, like the IQ, the intelligence question is a great way of, you know, you look as a comparison, always a comparison with the average. So maybe that's something he would consider"
},
{
"end_time": 5398.251,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5377.5,
"text": " in the future. But I think more importantly, he's really looking at anyone could measure their baseline kind of wise reasoning score according to his different tests. And then they could try to see an improvement in that score. So you could at least look at your own personal trajectory, even if you're not trying to compare across the population."
},
{
"end_time": 5427.142,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5398.251,
"text": " The beauty of the IQ test is that it's difficult to fake. You can practice IQ tests and you can score higher, but with a survey, I imagine, with a survey like the wisdom test that says, hey, do you take other people's viewpoints into account? You could imagine, oh, I think it's more socially acceptable and wise, so I'm going to say yes, I do five out of five. You could imagine that you can falsify that information. So is there a way of constructing a wisdom test that takes into account that people may not say what is accurate about themselves?"
},
{
"end_time": 5451.015,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5427.722,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, so I think some of Igor's tests are questionnaires in the way that you described, so self-reported. I mean, surprisingly, people are quite honest in self-reported questionnaires. We know that from personality questionnaires, for example, that people's responses often do correspond to what their friends would say about them. So they're not always lying, although there might be a slight bias"
},
{
"end_time": 5467.79,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5451.493,
"text": " tools a more positive attribute. But actually in a lot of these tests, they were having to prove that they were capable of doing that. So if they were reasoning about the US elections, they would actually have to take someone else's perspective and they would actually have to"
},
{
"end_time": 5497.244,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 5467.79,
"text": " They would have to show that kind of integration of what a Democrat would think compared to a Republican and to balance them and to kind of draw connections between the two and to look for the ways that there might be a compromise on a particular political opinion or particular political problem. So they're actually having to show that they did that. It wasn't just them saying, oh yeah, I'm brilliant at this. So yeah, I think he's considered that and it does seem that people's self"
},
{
"end_time": 5514.65,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 5497.244,
"text": " What are the rationality coefficients?"
},
{
"end_time": 5530.657,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 5515.657,
"text": " So that is research where someone has tried to look at a more direct comparison to the intelligence quotient. That's worked by Keith Stanovic, who's another Canadian researcher."
},
{
"end_time": 5546.067,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 5530.657,
"text": " brilliant mind who's really taken the work of people like Daniel Kahneman, all of these cognitive biases that we know that exist, like the sunkost fallacy that we mentioned earlier, things like temporal discounting, which is whether you"
},
{
"end_time": 5570.538,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 5546.067,
"text": " are able to overlook a more immediate reward for something a bigger reward later on that kind of thing you know how how you fall on that kind of spectrum of potential responses for you know when you're willing to kind of have a cut of all of that kind of literature on decision making he's really looked at very carefully and he's shown that there are reliable"
},
{
"end_time": 5592.329,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 5571.169,
"text": " individual differences"
},
{
"end_time": 5622.329,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 5592.329,
"text": " do tend to suffer from all kinds of biases. Both of us are more resilient against biases. And then he compared that to their IQ scores, their SAT scores in the US education system. In all of these cases, he found that there was a correlation with measures of intelligence, but that intelligence alone didn't describe people's rationality. So what I mean by that is you could still have someone who is highly intelligent, but who scored very low on the rationality quotient."
},
{
"end_time": 5642.807,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 5622.329,
"text": " and vice versa. Did he say what the correlation was? It really depended on what kind of test they were using and also it did depend on what kind of bias they were looking at. The sun cost velocity, I believe, or temporal discounting, I believe the correlation was almost zero. You know how like"
},
{
"end_time": 5663.387,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 5642.807,
"text": " Surprisingly, people really weren't more rational in those kinds of situations that they were measuring. If they were more intelligent, it just didn't seem to make a difference. There were other elements of his rationality equation that did depend more on intelligence, and that tended to be the things that I think would be covered in academic education."
},
{
"end_time": 5693.166,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 5663.387,
"text": " how he also looked at things like how you would read statistics like whether people are able to understand like absolute risk, relative risk, all of that kind of statistical reasoning and as you might expect if you have a higher SAT score you probably were paying more attention in your maths classes and so you are better able when asked to actually calculate those different risks. Those are really important elements of rationality and actually they can be taught which is positive so"
},
{
"end_time": 5722.295,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 5693.166,
"text": " but yeah it's not like intelligence was completely unrelated to all elements of rationality but certainly for some some areas where you would expect that a smarter person would just automatically make the more rational decision he didn't find that at all so he does he says it supports this idea but you know smart people can make terribly irrational decisions and he calls that phenomenon disrationalia which he compares to dyslexia um so dyslexia is the"
},
{
"end_time": 5749.019,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 5722.295,
"text": " You might have a high IQ person who has a particular problem with literacy and with reading in particular, and similarly with disrationalia. You might have someone with a high IQ who's just really irrational. They just really struggle to come up with, to read data rationally and logically and to weigh up evidence and to come up with a conclusion based on that data. So he"
},
{
"end_time": 5762.756,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 5749.019,
"text": " So Stanovich's terminology is he calls it the quotient, it's not coefficients."
},
{
"end_time": 5788.166,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 5763.166,
"text": " No, it's the rationale. Well, that's the informal name is the rationality quotient. But yeah, his book was called the rationality quotient. So he's definitely promoting this idea like the intelligence question. Yeah, I see. And there wasn't just one there was several types of rationality quotients or there was just one like right RQ and that's it not RQ underscore one. Yeah, no, exactly. So basically a bit like with IQ tests, actually, you break it into kind of soft tests."
},
{
"end_time": 5810.23,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 5788.166,
"text": " So an IQ you might have like the verbal subtest, the nonverbal reasoning subtest, lots of different types of different problems that it's measuring and there's a correlation between all of them but actually the correlation between one and another might vary. So you know there's a kind of central factor we say which is"
},
{
"end_time": 5828.541,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 5811.323,
"text": " Someone's kind of general intelligence, but and if you're better at one, you're more likely to be better at another cognitive task, but it doesn't mean that you're automatically brilliant at all of them. If you are brilliant one, it's the same with rationality that you see a correlation between the different sub tests."
},
{
"end_time": 5848.131,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 5829.002,
"text": " Was his conclusion that high IQ individuals generally have a slightly higher RQ but in particular for certain subtypes of RQ they're lower?"
},
{
"end_time": 5868.558,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 5848.78,
"text": " Yeah, that's exactly it. And even amongst high IQ individuals, you'll have enough variation that RQ rationality is something that we should be measuring and then cultivating separately from IQ and the other kind of academic"
},
{
"end_time": 5893.217,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 5868.558,
"text": " disciplines that we look at. So he gives the example of if you're recruiting, you know, some recruiters do use IQ test still to kind of work out who's the best person to employ. But they're not really measuring accurately, rationality and you want a rational workforce, really, you don't want someone who's gonna fall for fake news, fall for bullshit from some kind of other company and make a bad investment."
},
{
"end_time": 5918.746,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 5893.217,
"text": " you want a rational workforce, so he suggests that actually we should be using the rationality equation as a means of selecting candidates and also just as a means of identifying who could do with some training, like who needs to learn more about maybe how to read statistics or needs to have their awareness raised about things like the sunk cost fallacy so they don't fall for it in the future. Is there a relationship between"
},
{
"end_time": 5941.186,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 5919.224,
"text": " Hi, IQ and arrogance. I wouldn't I don't know if anyone's looked at it like that. But Keith Stanovich had looked at the bias blind spot. And that's essentially you ask someone like, you tell them about these cognitive biases, and then you ask them, do you think you're gonna suffer from those biases yourself?"
},
{
"end_time": 5960.384,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 5941.647,
"text": " and what he found was that people with the higher IQs tended to think that they were less susceptible than the other people. They over exaggerated their resilience, their protection against the biases, so they thought they were"
},
{
"end_time": 5985.077,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 5960.64,
"text": " much better than they actually were. And that was more likely the more intelligent they were, essentially. So in that, you know, in that sense, I think the bias blind spot is an example of intellectual arrogance. And it's a serious problem. Because if you don't have awareness of the ways that your reasoning might fail, then you're less likely to try to account for that. How can an individual listening slash watching this increase their RQ, the rationality quotient?"
},
{
"end_time": 6008.336,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 5985.52,
"text": " Right, so this is still an area of research, but I think there's very strong evidence that we can improve elements of rationality. So, you know, just learning about these biases, there are some studies that showed that once you have that awareness, and as long as you make sure that you apply that awareness as well, that you"
},
{
"end_time": 6037.142,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6008.336,
"text": " look when you're making a new decision that you start to consider the biases that might be influencing your decision and then try to account for them. That's a learnable skill. So that's one thing. We can look at these books, like The Intelligent Strap, like Thinking Fast and Slow, we can learn from those books and then try to apply it, and that will improve our rationality. More generally, I think there's research looking at critical thinking, so identifying logical fallacies."
},
{
"end_time": 6055.009,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6037.142,
"text": " learning to to avoid just relying on like our gut reaction. So whether we think whether intuitively something feels right to actually override that and to question our assumption and then to look for the evidence that contradicts it."
},
{
"end_time": 6076.63,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6055.009,
"text": " Another useful strategy when you're trying to appraise different pieces of information is to just try to put yourself in an alternative viewpoint where you question whether you would be as convinced by a piece of evidence."
},
{
"end_time": 6106.015,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6076.63,
"text": " if its conclusions were the opposite. So it's kind of intricate that, but if you wanted to, if you were a Republican, say, and you saw a report that supported a Democrat's economic policy, now you might instantly dismiss it because it doesn't come to the conclusion that you would want it to take. But what you can do to make sure that you're not just dismissing that evidence unfairly"
},
{
"end_time": 6124.411,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6106.015,
"text": " is to stop and think, well, would I have spotted the same flaws in this piece in this report if it had actually supported a Republican viewpoint instead? That's just one example, but it's very much just trying to check that you're even-handed in the way that you're applying your critical thinking skills."
},
{
"end_time": 6141.135,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6124.411,
"text": " In the much earlier example of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the paranormal, how does one know that what he was doing was in fact false? So one way is we say, well, the scientific consensus is so-and-so. But then my issue with that is that there's a beautiful study in your book"
},
{
"end_time": 6160.435,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6141.135,
"text": " Which I love, I'm going to start to quote about if you give a test on gun violence to people who are conservative and liberal and subtle reasoning shows that the gun violence in this example, the laws that are for gun control end up causing more gun violence, but you have to be extremely careful with your math in order to come to that conclusion."
},
{
"end_time": 6177.892,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6160.435,
"text": " that the conservatives were more likely to find that loophole or the not-trivial reasoning in order to get to that conclusion, and the liberals were more likely to say, oh yeah, gun control clearly reduces gun crime, and then vice versa. So then that made me think, okay, well, if we ever appeal to scientific consensus, we have to wait"
},
{
"end_time": 6195.623,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6177.892,
"text": " for political leaning and the majority of scientists are liberal like 90% are liberal there are studies on this so then do we wait consensus by that how do we do that so that's my issue because there are so many aspects of this world of the themes that i try to investigate in theories of everything that i used to just"
},
{
"end_time": 6224.753,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6195.623,
"text": " dismiss and disparage, like near-death experiences or connecting consciousness with quantum mechanics or even UFOs. Also, I was looking into the placebo effect, whereas prior I thought that it was just a measly effect, like a bit of pain relief. I didn't think it had much merit to it. I'm not saying that I've come to any conclusion, nothing like that, but it's not inconsequentially dismissed, at least not for me. I find that there's something there, or there could be something there. There are people like Penrose, a Nobel Prize winner dealing with quantum mechanics and consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 6244.906,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6224.753,
"text": " This is all what I would say is woo prior. I got this sense from your book, and it could be incorrect. I got the sense of a bit of condescension when the word paranormal was mentioned or aliens or UFOs. I'm listening to that thinking, okay, how was that made with appeal to scientific consensus? How does that work when there's already political biases, let alone other biases that maybe the majority of scientists"
},
{
"end_time": 6266.493,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6244.906,
"text": " I think it's unproven but I think lots of theories of consciousness are also unproven so it's like it deserves"
},
{
"end_time": 6279.582,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6266.937,
"text": " So say with the paranormal, though, I"
},
{
"end_time": 6301.954,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6281.954,
"text": " That's a tough one because I have to accept that my own biases could be shining through. I would say there have been lots of good studies, carefully controlled studies, trying to detect paranormal phenomena. I think most scientists, even"
},
{
"end_time": 6326.527,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6302.5,
"text": " if they believe in the paranormal would have to accept the setup of the experiments as being scientifically valid and then you look at the outcomes and you look at the outcomes of multiple experiments through mitra analyses and you find that the effect size vanishes to zero which is why"
},
{
"end_time": 6343.114,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6327.176,
"text": " even if I would be so basically to calibrate my confidence I would never want to dismiss out of hand something like a paranormal phenomena being I would never want to say it's absolutely impossible but I would say given the evidence that we've got from all of these"
},
{
"end_time": 6370.964,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 6344.36,
"text": " Experiments that I think have been well conducted, you know, maybe not dismissing the possibility. There could always be another experiment that's someone's found like an even better way of testing for potential paranormal phenomena. And then maybe that would show that it does exist and we can always keep our mind open to that. But I think until that experiment comes along, we have to kind of look at the balance of the evidence today. That's my view of that."
},
{
"end_time": 6391.766,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 6372.756,
"text": " I think this is where we need teams of people to collaborate who come from lots of different backgrounds and that's really the best way forward. And so maybe with some of the existing experiments you say well that was done by a sceptic so they'd set it up to not be true."
},
{
"end_time": 6409.957,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 6391.766,
"text": " But what I think you should do is have a pre-registration, which is really fashionable in science now, and across a big collaboration through multiple labs, you all set up in advance the experiments that you agree would show the effect that you want to prove."
},
{
"end_time": 6432.483,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 6409.957,
"text": " you gather all the data, it's all kind of anonymized, it's all analyzed independently, you've already agreed on the statistical analyses and then you look at the, you know, you kind of crunch the numbers, you find the results and then because you've already tried to account for all of your biases in advance, you have to kind of accept"
},
{
"end_time": 6461.067,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 6432.824,
"text": " the result that comes out. Now that actually was done with tests of precognition, a paranormal phenomena where you believe that people can kind of sense the future. And when those predetermined studies were conducted, pre-registered studies were conducted, they actually found, you know, they didn't find the effect of the hypothesis, they didn't find that there was a paranormal phenomena. So that's why with that particular case I would be"
},
{
"end_time": 6465.947,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 6461.067,
"text": " very skeptical that there is one because you know one of the best studies to date"
},
{
"end_time": 6494.275,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 6466.203,
"text": " Have you looked into the studies of Rupert Sheldrake or Dean Radin?"
},
{
"end_time": 6517.637,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 6495.947,
"text": " No, I can't say I have in a huge amount of detail. I think I did look into Sheldrakes, but I'm afraid I have forgotten the details of that. Obviously he's a huge name, but I think that's what we have to accept as well, that we can't just rely on someone's previous credentials, that we have to"
},
{
"end_time": 6534.974,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 6517.637,
"text": " be very specific about the outcomes, you know, of the quality of the evidence itself, independently of who kind of arranged it. And that's why it's important to have these teams of people who come from lots of different perspectives to kind of cancel out each other's biases potentially."
},
{
"end_time": 6561.971,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 6534.974,
"text": " What else would be... I'm struggling here to find an issue that's not climate change, that is scientific, that has a huge divide between conservatives and liberals. Okay, I can just stick with climate change. I'm not a climate denier nor acceptor, like I mentioned. Anytime I look into any theory, I just find flaws, and I'm just completely befuddled and addled and unassured. But anyway, the point is that when it comes to an issue where we make an appeal to scientific consensus, but it's a politically charged issue,"
},
{
"end_time": 6582.363,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 6561.971,
"text": " How do we deal with the political leaning of the scientists going into it need to be taken into account and you need to somehow reweight the results? I don't know how to do that. And I don't know if that's the case in climate change. And I don't want to pick a particularly charged topic like climate change because I can mention I'm just not interested. I'm not trying to cause any controversy here."
},
{
"end_time": 6593.336,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 6582.363,
"text": " So I'm trying to find another one, but you get the idea. So how do we deal with that? You mentioned that we need to have teams of people who are competing against one another from various backgrounds, but in absence of that, what do we do?"
},
{
"end_time": 6614.701,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 6594.121,
"text": " I mean I think with climate change you could have meaningful debates on the evidence. So I mean the problem of climate change very much like the problem with proving that cigarette smoke causes cancer is that it's very difficult to actually do"
},
{
"end_time": 6632.705,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 6614.701,
"text": " Causal tests of this and I think that ultimately that is where the controversy lies. It's why people who don't believe in climate change could always say, you know, we're only viewing correlations and that maybe there's another factor driving the rise in temperatures, which is very difficult to deny, although some people do."
},
{
"end_time": 6651.8,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 6632.705,
"text": " um similarly with cigarette smoke tobacco companies um had always said well we've never you know we haven't tested done a controlled trial where you have people without uh randomly who you're giving some cigarette smoke from the age of 20 you're and some about"
},
{
"end_time": 6671.852,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 6651.8,
"text": " Take a set of planets, put humans on a set. Exactly. You couldn't do that and it was a cause for controversy and it allowed tobacco industries to deny this kind of causal link that I think we now, it would be very strange if you denied the link between smoking and cancer."
},
{
"end_time": 6698.643,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 6671.852,
"text": " It's the same with climate change. We don't have a separate planet where we can set up coal or carbon-fuelled industries for centuries to then check the effects on the climate. That is a big issue. We do have to look at ways around that. My impression from looking into the evidence has been that multiple lines of evidence from lots of different sources"
},
{
"end_time": 6717.432,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 6699.275,
"text": " We need to acknowledge there's considerable uncertainty with the"
},
{
"end_time": 6732.875,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 6717.432,
"text": " So the models that scientists are using and climate scientists are using are pretty honest about, you know, the best and the worst case scenarios and there's, you know, a difference between them. But yeah, like,"
},
{
"end_time": 6762.568,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 6732.875,
"text": " save from doing that kind of absurd experiment. I think, you know, that is going to be an issue to kind of resolve the question. And I don't have an answer for doing that. It does have to be kind of what way you give to the different lines of evidence. I think it can sometimes help to look at people who have changed opinion from one side to the other and to look at the reasons for why they've done that."
},
{
"end_time": 6767.21,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 6762.568,
"text": " I think what I've been interested in psychologically is also how sometimes you can"
},
{
"end_time": 6798.695,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 6768.712,
"text": " What happens when you try to overcome the look for psychological ways to overcome that motivated reasoning that comes from people's initial political standpoints? So things like when you try to cultivate their curiosity or you create a kind of safe space for them to talk where they don't have to fear being judged with their political viewpoint. You know, what conclusions do they come to when they look at the evidence when they've been given those opportunities?"
},
{
"end_time": 6820.265,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 6798.695,
"text": " I think those are some you know those are the things that we can be doing but yeah it's a huge problem and I think it is one reason that the intelligence trap is such a serious problem to consider is because like you as an enlightened society it's really worrying that you can have such divergent views given the evidence"
},
{
"end_time": 6843.985,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 6820.811,
"text": " Given the same evidence that people, even highly intelligent, highly educated people can come to such polarized viewpoints. I don't have the solution. That's why I'm interested in the intelligence trap and how on both sides we can reduce those biases so we can try to get people to be looking at the evidence in the most rational way possible. What is functional stupidity?"
},
{
"end_time": 6867.602,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 6845.299,
"text": " That is where companies kind of create stupidity within the workforce due to their corporate culture. So, you know, there's lots of reasons for that. One potential reason is simply that people are simply that you have this kind of culture of relentless positivity, and you don't really"
},
{
"end_time": 6893.097,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 6867.602,
"text": " allow people to express doubt or criticism. So a company might say they only want solutions, not problems, that kind of issue. And we saw, you know, in the book, I talk about the deep water horizon, oil spill, the fall of downfall of Nokia, you know, all of these examples where companies hadn't been allowing the"
},
{
"end_time": 6922.875,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 6893.097,
"text": " What were some of the solutions in order to combat the functional stupidity?"
},
{
"end_time": 6952.756,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 6924.326,
"text": " I mean, one is to cultivate within the workforce a culture of disagreement. So actually allowing people to even at the lowest levels of the corporate hierarchy, allowing them to kind of raise their hand and to say that they think there's a problem that's occurring. If someone had done that with Deepwater Horizon, if the engineers had said that they saw all of these anomalies in the processes that were going on within the rig,"
},
{
"end_time": 6973.575,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 6953.046,
"text": " That could have been prevented similarly with Nokia. Just to recap, you know, with Nokia, they were trying to develop a smartphone, but they kept on failing to meet their deadlines until Apple had come up with the amazing iPhone that just like swept them out of the market. You know, a lot of the employees were really worried about what was going on. They had lots of ideas, but they were being listened to."
},
{
"end_time": 7001.8,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 6973.575,
"text": " The concept of functional stupidity as well as the antidotes were developed in the vein of industrial and organizational psychology. So I'm curious, how does one apply this to an individual mind?"
},
{
"end_time": 7030.435,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7002.807,
"text": " So I think with the intelligence trap in general you know we have to first of all look at our intellectual humility as one of those elements that was so important that the measures of evidence-based wisdom that we discussed and on an individual viewpoint we have to feel free to accept when we're wrong about something or when we're uncertain about something"
},
{
"end_time": 7057.978,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7030.435,
"text": " and does not feel so defensive that we deny that possibility. We have to cultivate our curiosity. So allowing ourselves to look into those tangents that fascinate us or that have aroused some kind of question that we want to be answered. And rather than just ignoring that and trying to focus on just meeting like a productivity goal, actually just pursuing that curiosity, answering those questions."
},
{
"end_time": 7085.367,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7057.978,
"text": " We need to try to have an open mind in other ways too. So like I said with the questions of analysing evidence, you know, not just like only accepting the evidence that supports your point of view, but also trying to look at the evidence that might disregard or disprove your point of view. And then try to treat it as fairly as you would for the evidence that supports your"
},
{
"end_time": 7105.64,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7085.367,
"text": " argument, balancing the two in hand. I think you obviously do that very well when you're looking at something like climate change. From what you've said, it's like you're allowing yourself to be pulled in each direction. I think that's really important. It might not allow you to come up with a solution to climate change because the"
},
{
"end_time": 7134.428,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7105.64,
"text": " I think my openness, my quote unquote openness, is buttressed by my closeness."
},
{
"end_time": 7156.561,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7134.718,
"text": " So what I mean is that I'm a judgmental person by nature. And if I ever come across non-judgmental, it's because I'm fighting my tendency constantly. I want to say, actually, so I want to be that person that puts on the hat, actually, so and so and so. And when I'm looking at alternate viewpoints, I'm doing so because I want to have the ultimate actually, so and so. I want to say, I don't know, some issue about plastic bottles. So I want to say, okay, well, what's the opponent say?"
},
{
"end_time": 7167.961,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 7156.561,
"text": " But that's what I think you need."
},
{
"end_time": 7195.23,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 7168.422,
"text": " open-mindedness in the sense that you're not drawn purely by your preconceptions and that you're willing to look into the broad range of evidence, but you also need to apply critical thinking. You know, you have to be analytical about what you're looking at and then you have to synthesize it. You know, that's, I think that is fundamentally what we mean by kind of being a skeptic. And then I think like what's really important, and this comes back to intellectual humility, is"
},
{
"end_time": 7214.804,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 7195.23,
"text": " that like you can come to a conclusion and it's important I think that we don't always sit on the fence on every issue but you can moderate your opinions on something so you can say I believe that this is the case and you can even put a number you know you can say I'm like 60% certain you know that"
},
{
"end_time": 7235.299,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 7214.804,
"text": " I think that this is where we stand on climate change to date or whatever you're looking at on, you know, plastic bottles, you know, and you can adapt that. You might then come across a new study that, you know, shifts it one way or the other. But I think it really helps to have that kind of, to realise there's a spectrum of confidence"
},
{
"end_time": 7257.551,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 7235.299,
"text": " Whereas I think especially with social media today and identity politics and this kind of tendency to get attention of having very strong views, we always think it's like you have to be 100% one way or 100% the other and that's a trap. You want to accept that you is sliding scale and you can move along that scale and that you don't have to become fixed at one point."
},
{
"end_time": 7282.278,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 7258.677,
"text": " Does the statement, I'm 60% certain about so-and-so fact, the utterance of it make you then 65% and then the next time you say it makes you 70% like do you become entrenched just by saying it even with an acknowledgement of uncertainty? I don't know I'm asking like unless do you have to always say 50% right in the middle so that you don't get pulled in each direction? No because I think actually to sit on the fence in that way is also not"
},
{
"end_time": 7310.23,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 7283.319,
"text": " optimum to be honest and so we note this from studies of super forecasters and these are people who have been put through these huge experiments where they're asked to predict the outcomes of different geopolitical events and it could be you know who wins your revision to you know who wins the world cup to who wins an election to whether war will break out in a certain region you know loads of different regions uh loads of different areas of a political you know world activity"
},
{
"end_time": 7325.486,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 7310.23,
"text": " What happens with these tournaments is that the people are asked to make their predictions and they cannot update their predictions up to a certain point and they have to give their confidence."
},
{
"end_time": 7350.196,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 7325.486,
"text": " And the way it's scored is that someone who's always just, I don't know, it's 50% one way, it's 50% the other, they don't score very well, because it's the safe option. So you're rewarded actually for, you know, veering one way or the other in your predictions. Like when they come to actually the final outcome, and they're measuring your performance, you know, you're rewarded. But if you were right, and you were more confident, you get more points."
},
{
"end_time": 7373.319,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 7350.196,
"text": " than if you were right, but you showed only a low confidence. So, you know, it's a complicated measure that they used to do that. But, you know, essentially, that's it. The more confident you are in a right outcome, the better you score. And the super forecasters consistently do perform better. They show more confidence in the areas where they're right. They show lower, much lower confidence in the areas where they end up being wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 7391.578,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 7373.319,
"text": " So I think that shows that actually there is value in expressing true confidence rather than always sitting on the fence. And actually it is possible to estimate that. You can actually rationally think, you know, what evidence have I looked at"
},
{
"end_time": 7419.94,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 7391.578,
"text": " How strongly do I feel that this is true? What are the potential reasons that I might be wrong? And then you can gauge, you know, whether that is more likely or less likely, and that actually is meaningful. Where I was going with that, there are studies that if you write about some fact that you don't believe in, so let's say I like Kellogg's cereal, you don't. You write about it, then all of a sudden you start to like it more. I believe some people in wartime use this. They say the Japanese would take in Americans and say, write about why you like Japan, and then all of a sudden they would."
},
{
"end_time": 7438.302,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 7419.94,
"text": " When making a statistical claim about confidence, for instance, if I was to say, I think it's 30% likely war will break out in Canada next year, you do so not by a rational analysis. It's extremely unless you've unless you have pages and pages and even those pages will have assumptions."
},
{
"end_time": 7464.565,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 7438.882,
"text": " Unless you've done some specific analysis to come to that number, you're using your intuition. And you could be false about your own intuition, too. So you could have just come up with a number. So that's why I was saying, if you simply state, well, I'm 30% confident about so-and-so, then you'll become more entrenched to thinking you're 30%, even though you didn't rationally come up with a number 30%. You didn't analyze that. It's a bit tricky to even give a confidence level unless it's something you've studied for years."
},
{
"end_time": 7492.159,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 7465.213,
"text": " So, you know, these people aren't studying these different issues for years, but they do look at them in depth when they're doing these super forecasting tournaments, you know, they do some strategies that are kind of well accepted even by people like Daniel Kahn. Like napkin calculations. Yeah. So like look at the base rate. How likely is it that a country of a similar economy to Canada, similar size, similar history of warfare,"
},
{
"end_time": 7518.541,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 7492.159,
"text": " How likely is it that that country is going to enter a war very quickly? And then you have a look at the base rate and you might see that it happens once in every 10 years, once in every 20 years, whatever. Just coming up with that base rate actually makes you better than just going solely with your intuitions. But then these people update those predictions by looking more specifically at the different factors"
},
{
"end_time": 7544.821,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 7518.541,
"text": " But yeah, you know, there's no algorithm that will always give them the right amount. But what this study showed is that actually they were capable, the super forecasters especially, with rating their confidence much better than chance, much better than just kind of, you know, rolling a dice and picking their confidence based on that. So they were making the decisions better than normal and rating their confidence better than the average. So it is possible."
},
{
"end_time": 7571.357,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 7544.821,
"text": " I think what you're saying is you know there's this phenomenon called this saying is believing effect which is useful in psychology and that is true but I think like when you're aware of that possibility you can kind of protect against it and especially when these people are trying very hard to think very analytically about the situation at hand I think they are protected from that compared to someone who maybe is"
},
{
"end_time": 7595.418,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 7571.357,
"text": " suffering you know undergoing propaganda in as a prisoner of war or that kind of situation or someone who's in a more you know relaxed kind of laboratory experiment looking at preferences for cereal who might not actually be trying to think very carefully about what they rationally believe and especially like a preference for corn flakes is going to be a much more emotional response so much easier to sway"
},
{
"end_time": 7611.647,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 7595.418,
"text": " David, can you go over this study? I believe it's a study or maybe it's just a result."
},
{
"end_time": 7637.705,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 7612.022,
"text": " about all-star teams not being as a whole efficient as teams that have three stars out of ten. Yeah so I'll use like an example from soccer you know you can kind of rank different players in soccer according to you know how they've performed in matches such as the Premier League and then obviously you know they play for like a team like Manchester United in the UK or whatever you know that's"
},
{
"end_time": 7661.323,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 7637.705,
"text": " separate from them when they gather together for their country's teams. So some players will play for England, some will play for France, some will play for the US, Canada, whatever. And what you find there is that, you know, if you have those high ranking players who've had a really good track record within their own sports teams, football teams, you know, within the Premier League, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 7682.551,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 7661.323,
"text": " if you have too many of those kind of star players within a country's team actually you reach a certain threshold about 70% and it's like diminishing returns that actually having more and more star players doesn't help your performance and may actually damage your performance so actually you may if you have a hundred percent of the star players within your team"
},
{
"end_time": 7706.954,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 7682.551,
"text": " you might actually perform worse than a country that only has 50% of their team made up of these star players from the top teams of the world. Why is that? Well, it seems like it's all related to the team dynamics and the egos and it seems that the people who had the really top performance, and it's also true for basketball, it's also true for"
},
{
"end_time": 7729.104,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 7706.954,
"text": " investment banking when you have teams of like the top investors who've been labeled stars you know then they work less well with their colleagues and their company as a whole performs worse. It's all to do with the kind of rutting egos that they're not collaborating, they're not cooperating in the best way possible because they're much more concerned with their own kind of proving their own performance rather than"
},
{
"end_time": 7750.094,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 7729.104,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 7768.251,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 7750.606,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
},
{
"end_time": 7792.056,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 7769.582,
"text": " What about with IQ, like having a team dedicated to some intellectual task, a team of let's say 10, is it better to have people who are all in the 99th percentile of IQ or is it better to have five of them, like how does that work? Yeah, I mean when it comes to IQ and we call that collective intelligence where you get the team as a whole to solve an intellectual problem, there wasn't"
},
{
"end_time": 7818.063,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 7792.056,
"text": " the evidence of the uh too much talent effect although no one had looked at that specifically so i wouldn't rule it out um but what they did find is that the average iq of the team or the top iq so if one team had an especially an especially clever person who scored you know way up the scale neither of those were great predictors of how the team as a whole would perform there was a correlation but it was pretty weak um"
},
{
"end_time": 7845.64,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 7818.063,
"text": " So what proved to be much more important again was the team dynamics. So kind of how equitable the conversation was between the different people in the team, like were they giving each person the chance to talk or did you have one person who thought they were really smart and were just talking over the other people? Did you have some people who just weren't really like picking up on the nonverbal cues as well?"
},
{
"end_time": 7860.657,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 7845.64,
"text": " Measures of emotional sensitivity, so how much people are paying attention to the other people's facial expressions. That actually proved to be a better prediction of the collective intelligence than the average IQ of the people."
},
{
"end_time": 7876.254,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 7860.657,
"text": " Steve jobs have the same that what he wants to do or what he does at apple is get people who are extremely intelligent and extremely disagreeable and just put them all in a room and like rock tumblers what comes out after our diamonds that or it was a mistaken about that or was he lucky."
},
{
"end_time": 7902.671,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 7877.637,
"text": " No, I mean, I think, you know, so this is all about what kind of team dynamic do you create? And you could have a case of like, you know, like, Kennedy's government during the Bay of Pigs disaster, where you have highly intelligent people, but they're all agreeing with each other, and they're not expressing dissent. And, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 7924.838,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 7902.671,
"text": " It doesn't have good outcomes or you could have like a group of people who are very willing to disagree but in a very amicable constructive way and I think that's the ideal dynamic really where people are absolutely willing to express discord within the group but they're also then looking for ways to"
},
{
"end_time": 7954.77,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 7925.845,
"text": " to balance those points of view, not just to kind of combine them all in this kind of Frankenstein's monster of different viewpoints, which you can see with some creative tasks, you could be like, we're all going to contribute something and it just becomes a mess. But actually, you know, really trying to think very hard about like, and being very honest with each other, like, does this work? Doesn't this work? Is that rational? Is that irrational? You know, and then coming to the group decision in that kind of way with a constructive discussion. And what the research shows is that actually,"
},
{
"end_time": 7984.77,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 7954.77,
"text": " When you have this kind of dialogue that allows disagreement and allows constructive disagreement, then actually, you know, you do get great outcomes and you get better outcomes than you could have from any single individual. So they do work then as kind of more than the sum of their components, those things. What did you want to include in the intelligence trap that you had to exclude because of whatever reason, pacing, the editor said, no, it's too bloated."
},
{
"end_time": 8005.572,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 7985.708,
"text": " Uh, not much. So there was a section that had been longer about a school called the Intellectual Virtues Academy. Intellectual Virtues Academy. That's right. It's in Long Beach and they, you know, it's a great school. I visited them. They had tried to look at all of these"
},
{
"end_time": 8029.275,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 8006.015,
"text": " elements of what I would say are evidence-based wisdom, although they didn't call that but things like cultivating intellectual humility amongst the kids, curiosity, the growth mindset, getting them to look at different perspectives. They've done all of these things and again with educational outcomes it's really difficult to compare different schools because you know it's so tough like"
},
{
"end_time": 8055.879,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 8029.275,
"text": " to account for the different backgrounds of the parents and stuff but those kids were doing really well academically and they also really seem to be embracing these different virtues and so I like to think that later on when they've gone on to university and then into later life that they're going to have they're going to be more sophisticated thinkers as a result of their education that appraised more than just intelligence but also all of these other"
},
{
"end_time": 8084.633,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 8055.879,
"text": " traits that I think are so important for thinking in a sophisticated and rational way and wise way, you know, that that will really serve them well. And it was really fascinating. Look for me, kind of insight for me of how this could help to change education without sacrificing the things that we've appreciated previously, like they were still doing well academically, but also just helping to develop like better thinkers, you know, more generally."
},
{
"end_time": 8101.084,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 8084.633,
"text": " No, I mean, there were just some things that I didn't think there was enough evidence for. You know, a study showing that"
},
{
"end_time": 8119.701,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 8102.108,
"text": " Weirdly, if you expect to get flu over the winter, you're more likely to get a flu over the winter. And that's really difficult. It's really difficult to explain. It could just be a difference in what I say just I think it's equally fascinating could be a difference in behavior. And if you're so cautious about not"
},
{
"end_time": 8140.572,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 8119.701,
"text": " catching any illness that actually maybe you're getting less physical exercise, maybe you're actually exposing yourself less to kind of microbes more generally so your immune system isn't performing so well, who knows, but yeah, definitely that was a result but I wanted to wait to see when there's more evidence to kind of replicate that and then to explore the mechanism."
},
{
"end_time": 8153.677,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 8140.572,
"text": " That's the main one. And then how our expectations can shape personality change. So essentially, I have written a piece for this, this should be on this, this should be coming out in the Guardian that looks at"
},
{
"end_time": 8175.674,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 8154.155,
"text": " whether we have a kind of mindset of believing that our personality can develop and grow as we get older. Does that actually help people to change the way they are? And the research shows that it does. So people who have this mindset that they're kind of malleable people, they find it easier to develop greater reserves of conscientiousness."
},
{
"end_time": 8189.019,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 8175.674,
"text": " Can you expand on that? And is that the same as the growth mindset or is that different?"
},
{
"end_time": 8213.609,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 8189.411,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, it's very much related to the growth mindset. Actually, I would just say it's also the growth mindset had traditionally been concerned with intelligence, but this is using the similar principle, but just looking at personality, like, do people believe that personality is fixed? Or do they think that it's malleable? Do they believe in the brain's plasticity and ability to change to see things as"
},
{
"end_time": 8241.203,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 8213.609,
"text": " emotional regulation as something that you either have or you don't and if you're angry you cannot possibly calm yourself down or do you see emotions as being something that actually are within your control and that you can you can change the way you process emotions over time and all of those you know elements which are all related to the growth mindset yeah they make a huge difference for how people develop whether you get stuck in this rut of behaviors that you don't find"
},
{
"end_time": 8258.046,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 8241.203,
"text": " Have you looked into studies on yogis and their expectation effect? Like that is what people claim to be able to do under intense meditation? No, I haven't though. I would be interested in that."
},
{
"end_time": 8285.998,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 8258.046,
"text": " Yeah, it's a good, it would be a great study if someone were to do it. There's some people like Wim Hof who, I don't know if you know who Wim Hof is, I believe he believes that through his breath technique, and I don't think that's entirely mental because he's actually doing a behavior, he believes that he can repel a virus or viruses of a certain sort and he can train people and you can get a study where you impose this intervention on a set and then have a neutral other set. Have you looked into those claims at all?"
},
{
"end_time": 8316.032,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 8286.715,
"text": " I haven't. I mean, I'd be super fascinated. I wouldn't so like to talk about calibrating my confidence. I would say I would be kind of 50 50 on that at the moment, not knowing the details. But you know, we do know that the mind is connected to the immune system. And that things like meditation can influence your the activity of your immune system, and especially if you have chronic inflammation, which can be caused by kind of anxiety,"
},
{
"end_time": 8337.602,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 8316.032,
"text": " you know, and can be affected by your breathing as well, that that can then throw your immune system out of balance, so you're more susceptible to certain illnesses. So it doesn't sound like implausible to me, but I just I'd be interested to see that in a, you know, reasonably sized study to look at that the difference between the two groups, you know, yeah, it's fascinating."
},
{
"end_time": 8356.067,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 8337.756,
"text": " This is an ill-defined question. I'm sure it's one you've thought about. How far can the placebo effect slash the expectation effect be taken? Because some people, through meditation, which I'm synonymizing with an expectation effect, can boil water, or at least can raise the temperature of their body drastically."
},
{
"end_time": 8375.828,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 8356.067,
"text": " And it's something that you thought was only a part of the autonomic nervous system, like you cannot control that. And then there are other cases, like you mentioned of not as quote unquote, trivial as pain, even though pain is not trivial, it's something that we would think, okay, yeah, you can coerce yourself into pain, you can take yourself out of it mentally, how far can it be taken the placebo and expectation effect?"
},
{
"end_time": 8404.991,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 8376.442,
"text": " Okay, I mean, I think we have to be really careful in defining the limits of what the science shows that it can do. And, you know, I do think it is limited in what it can achieve. I don't think that by changing your expectations, you can shrink a tumour, for example, you know, and I think there have been studies that try to look at things like optimism amongst cancer patients. And, you know, I don't think you see a strong effect from that. And"
},
{
"end_time": 8423.763,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 8404.991,
"text": " I actually think there's a danger with over claiming that people are only going to be disappointed or that they might even start to blame themselves, you know, if they are not getting better from some illness like, you know, they think it's because they're not being positive enough that only adds to the stress and makes them"
},
{
"end_time": 8440.725,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 8423.763,
"text": " Your book is like the scientific version of the secret."
},
{
"end_time": 8466.664,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 8441.067,
"text": " Yeah, that's exactly how I want it to be. Yeah. And it's like, you know, but also I think just because it can't perform what I would say a miracles, you know, like curing cancer doesn't mean that it's not really significant. And that it doesn't have a really profound effect on our life. And actually, we know that say your beliefs about aging do seem to predict your longevity. But that's not through some kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 8495.35,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 8466.664,
"text": " unknown mechanism that's actually very well established mechanisms and essentially if you associate aging with decline and disability and all of these things well that makes you less active so there's a behavioral component it's also like increases your stress you know over months and then years because if you think as you're getting older that your life is kind of going to fall to pieces that makes all of the challenges you face more stressful it raises cortisol levels so that they're chronically high"
},
{
"end_time": 8513.933,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 8495.35,
"text": " it raises inflammation that causes biological damage and then that predisposes you to illness and then we know that that can change gene expression within the cells so you start to have the biological clock as it's known kind of ticking at a faster rate and with all that's very well documented."
},
{
"end_time": 8534.616,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 8513.933,
"text": " I said, that's incredible. And actually, according to one longitudinal study, the difference between people with the positive and the negative views of aging, the positive view would be that you see aging as a time of kind of greater wisdom, you know, new possibilities, the difference between those two mindsets actually was about seven and a half years in"
},
{
"end_time": 8554.445,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 8534.616,
"text": " I don't find any of those mechanisms miraculous actually. I just think it's"
},
{
"end_time": 8574.923,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 8554.804,
"text": " is what we know about how the mind can affect behaviour, we know how the mind can affect stress and stress can affect illness. It's just linking them all together and showing that something that you might not think to be that important actually over time, over decades, adds up and really makes a difference."
},
{
"end_time": 8594.804,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 8576.613,
"text": " Yeah, that's remarkable. Do you imagine that if you were to intervene in someone's life, if you were to impart in them a sense of beliefs that that would increase their not only quality of life, but their lifespan? And if so, what are those beliefs like if you were to prescribe it with all the disclaimers that come along with that?"
},
{
"end_time": 8619.053,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 8595.299,
"text": " Yeah exactly. I mean no one has performed because ideally you would have like a 40 year study where you'd change people's beliefs and you kept on coming back to them. You know the research hasn't been around long enough to do that but there are short time studies where you kind of give people like an exercise program and then some of these people are also given psychological support alongside the exercise program. So they might be"
},
{
"end_time": 8633.029,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 8619.053,
"text": " So you falsify the data to tell them this?"
},
{
"end_time": 8651.067,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 8633.848,
"text": " I can't remember to be honest. It might have been falsified in one study. I think in others you're just feeding them this positive information that your health is within your control and as you age that you can actually benefit from exercise."
},
{
"end_time": 8667.654,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 8651.067,
"text": " that there are these opportunities no matter how old you are and what you find is that when you change the mindset in those ways that whether it's through deception or whether it's just through kind of positive encouragement that you seek greater benefits for those people so that's"
},
{
"end_time": 8686.442,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 8667.654,
"text": " You know it's only over a couple of months but like you do get this signal that changing the mindset really is being beneficial. There's another study that had looked at giving people subliminal signals through a kind of computer game they were playing. These were old people and I found that actually giving them subliminal signals"
},
{
"end_time": 8704.923,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 8686.442,
"text": " What does this say about the relationship of consciousness to reality?"
},
{
"end_time": 8719.974,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 8704.923,
"text": " The fact that if we believe so-and-so, it increases the chances of so-and-so. Believe, which is an aspect of consciousness, increases the chances of so-and-so in an external reality, if there is external, because there are some people who are idealists and so on. Right, exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 8742.722,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 8720.435,
"text": " You know, I don't, to be honest, I'm fascinated by all kinds of theories of consciousness and the idea that we're living in a simulation and all of that. I don't think this research tells us anything about that. But I do think on a more superficial kind of level, not as profound as what is the nature of reality. But like, you know, this is essentially what we're showing is that"
},
{
"end_time": 8765.503,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 8742.722,
"text": " our thought processes are changing our reality in the future. And again, that's through just very, I wouldn't say mundane, but very well accepted behavioral, perceptual and physiological mechanisms that we know happen day to day, hour to hour. And all this is showing is that actually"
},
{
"end_time": 8781.92,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 8765.503,
"text": " sometimes the effects can, you know, add up and be really profound. You know, I always like to say actually, like, we know that our mindset can shape our bodies, like all the time, if you think of your favorite food, your mouth starts producing enzymes to help you to"
},
{
"end_time": 8803.131,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 8781.92,
"text": " Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 8819.48,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 8803.131,
"text": " acknowledged or put to use previously that we can harness to improve our wellness and our health and even our longevity and that now we have that knowledge there are very specific techniques you can use to to really make the most of the mind body connection."
},
{
"end_time": 8840.998,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 8819.906,
"text": " Have you looked into the subject of ego depletion?"
},
{
"end_time": 8870.981,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 8840.998,
"text": " these studies is the fact that actually mindset plays a role in ego depletion so if you expect to be depleted you become more depleted if you think that your willpower is kind of unlimited and that actually the more you practice your willpower the more you kind of get into that zone when you're doing those difficult problems if you believe that then actually that becomes your reality and you find that your concentration kind of you know actually grows as you focus on the task ahead"
},
{
"end_time": 8888.114,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 8870.981,
"text": " Before we start to wrap, I want you to explain what the pilot site test is and then why is it important."
},
{
"end_time": 8908.251,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 8889.292,
"text": " Okay, I mean, this was a study from a few years ago, I'd say when the research on the expectation effect was really starting to expand beyond the placebo effect of medicine. And it was just looking at how people's vision is affected by their expectations. Now I've mentioned throughout the conversation,"
},
{
"end_time": 8938.183,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 8908.251,
"text": " that one of the pathways that the expectation effect can influence us is through perception. We know this from all kinds of studies, you know, the taste of food depends on what you expect the food to taste like of you. The same chemical that causes parmesan to smell so delicious is actually also behind the smell of vomit, but our conscious experience is very different depending on which we believe that we're smelling."
},
{
"end_time": 8955.964,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 8938.183,
"text": " It just seems that this also happens with vision and with the clarity of vision. So this study by Ellen Langer at Harvard University seemed to suggest that if you lead people to believe that their vision is going to be more acute than it really is,"
},
{
"end_time": 8974.377,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 8956.63,
"text": " Then that can actually help them to see more clearly and just seems to be that we know the brain does a lot of work in tidying up our vision of the stuff that hits our retinas. Those patterns are not what we consciously experience because there's so much processing going on in the brain."
},
{
"end_time": 9003.217,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 8974.616,
"text": " and it seems that actually when she kind of primed people to believe that they were going to have better vision by putting them in a flight simulator and telling them that they were kind of acting as expert pilots or that she gave them exercises that led them to believe that their eyesight was going to improve or she turned the sight test upside down so that the smaller letters were at the top and people have this association that they can read the first line on the"
},
{
"end_time": 9032.824,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 9003.217,
"text": " site chart, you know, in all of these cases, multiple experiments, people's vision did seem to improve compared to the control groups who aren't given the same kind of priming to believe that the site was going to be better than it was. Now, you know, I'm really careful in my book to say this isn't an excuse to kind of throw away your glasses. You know, these were kind of short term experiments. But I do think it's still quite profound that like,"
},
{
"end_time": 9055.964,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 9032.824,
"text": " what where that something as basic as kind of eyesight can to a certain extent be influenced by our beliefs and actually there's independent research showing that you know like if you if you're a bit short-sighted and you see a road sign but you know what it's going to say well you actually see that sign more clearly than if it was an unfamiliar sign where you don't know what the"
},
{
"end_time": 9077.807,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 9055.964,
"text": " I'm wondering now if there's a connection between this and something we talked about from your earlier book. I asked, is there an association between arrogance and intelligence?"
},
{
"end_time": 9094.872,
"index": 406,
"start_time": 9077.807,
"text": " They said not exactly, at least that hasn't been studied, but there is an association with people who are intelligent then believing that they're less susceptible to cognitive biases. And I'm wondering now, if priming for visual acuity, if you tell someone, hey, you have great vision, then all of a sudden you can see a bit better. If that's the case, then"
},
{
"end_time": 9112.432,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 9094.872,
"text": " Maybe it's not intelligence breeds arrogance, but arrogance breeds intelligence. Because you're like, hey, I believe I'm much more intelligent and then so I become a bit more intelligent. Now, maybe I'm taking it a bit too far. But is there an association there? Is it like an increase of five IQ points? 10 IQ points? Can't say that."
},
{
"end_time": 9135.179,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 9113.268,
"text": " Well, like, so, you know, there have been all of these apps looking at kind of brain training, and there'd been, again, contradictory evidence, but some really seem to show that if people do these kinds of games, then they improve their IQ scores. But what scientists at around 2015 realized was the way that these participants were recruited"
},
{
"end_time": 9155.776,
"index": 409,
"start_time": 9135.555,
"text": " kind of primed them to expect that they were going to see those improvements. You know, the adverts were often like, you know, want to help with a test of brain enhancement, you know, come to our lab in like this room. And they looked, they analyzed that data, those historic studies, and they showed that those"
},
{
"end_time": 9180.367,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 9155.776,
"text": " with the kind of posters that had primed the expectation of improved intelligence did see greater gains because of the associated with the brain training compared to those who have them. They then did their own independent study which showed exactly what they'd predicted that actually if you tell people that by doing these tasks they're going to get smarter, they improve their performance by about five IQ points."
},
{
"end_time": 9196.408,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 9180.367,
"text": " so it did seem to suggest that there is a benefit to that and actually it's been replicated just earlier this um well uh last year at the end of last year similar study um so i do think like having that self-belief can be really valuable"
},
{
"end_time": 9212.619,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 9196.408,
"text": " But in my opinion, we don't want to develop overconfidence because that is also associated with greater susceptibility to numerous biases. It might help your IQ, it might also then damage your reasoning and decision making."
},
{
"end_time": 9235.35,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 9212.619,
"text": " But I think what's important there is still to kind of recognise this, your capacity to grow and improve. And it comes back to what we were talking about with how we can boost our learning. If you see frustration as being inherent in your intellectual growth, that will make your intellectual growth more likely. I think it's very much the same phenomena."
},
{
"end_time": 9260.691,
"index": 414,
"start_time": 9235.35,
"text": " Now, taking this back to how far can we push this? I know that's a dangerous question. It sounds like we have untapped potential. Now, what that is in terms of a percentage may vary from task to task if you can even place a number on it. Now, there is a phenomenon called induced savantism or acquired savantism. You don't induce it. It's just called acquired savant. For people who don't know, there are some people called savants who they seem"
},
{
"end_time": 9277.517,
"index": 415,
"start_time": 9260.691,
"text": " to be not up to par intellectually in most tasks except one where they're extremely versed, extremely well so like they could read at a rate five times the ordinary person or they can play music just from hearing a song once or recreate a scene from seeing it in like a second"
},
{
"end_time": 9305.026,
"index": 416,
"start_time": 9277.517,
"text": " then there are some people who through some neurological defect that occurs later in life they were ordinary people and they're even ordinary quote unquote afterward but after the trauma they have acquired some ability that ordinarily is associated only with savants and it seems like most of our neurological activity is inhibitory strangely enough we think that hey we have this whole prefrontal cortex is doing all these calculations and producing content it's stymieing most of what's occurring so it's like stopping some reflexes"
},
{
"end_time": 9319.002,
"index": 417,
"start_time": 9305.35,
"text": " Well anyway, I was just wondering if you have come across a relationship between the expectation effect and acquired savantism. I haven't. And remarkable abilities in general. So I'd have to say"
},
{
"end_time": 9339.275,
"index": 418,
"start_time": 9319.633,
"text": " I'm not 100% familiar with the research on acquired savantism, because I've heard, I'm not sure if it's true, with some of the people who show amazing creativity. Well, they show amazing kind of productivity with their creativity, but whether it's actually independently rated as being original and innovative and fantastic, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 9361.425,
"index": 419,
"start_time": 9339.275,
"text": " in the same way that, say, the innate savants are, you know, that I think I'd heard that was another matter that maybe they, they're not inhibited, and that they really, you know, have a feel compelled to create, but whether it's actually of a high quality, according to people's standards is another question. But I do think there is this kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 9387.244,
"index": 420,
"start_time": 9361.425,
"text": " You know, even just creating is something that we hold ourselves back from. Lots of people have creative anxiety where we're so worried about expressing ourselves that we just don't do it. So we find brainstorming really excruciating. We feel we put limits on, you know, our own idea generation. I do think that actually the expectation effect is really relevant in that case."
},
{
"end_time": 9403.183,
"index": 421,
"start_time": 9387.244,
"text": " It might not make you immediately have the creativity of Leonardo da Vinci, but I think if you have this ability, this belief that your creative efforts are valued and that actually it's an incremental process,"
},
{
"end_time": 9430.998,
"index": 422,
"start_time": 9403.183,
"text": " You recognize that your first idea might not be your best idea, but that you might iteratively improve your ideas over time. I think that's the kind of belief that will have an impact on your overall quality of your creative output over time. If you see it as something that can be nurtured and you recognize that you don't have to limit yourself, but you can actually give free rein to your creativity and then refine it. I think that's what you really want to aim for."
},
{
"end_time": 9435.196,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 9430.998,
"text": " So David, what's your next book on and what are you looking forward to this year?"
},
{
"end_time": 9461.544,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 9435.572,
"text": " Yeah, so I'm looking forward to writing this book, which is all about social connection. I'll save that. So I'm super excited about that. And then just, you know, other elements of my life, like I've been learning Italian for like a few years, and I'm gonna only go to Italy to spend like a month or so there. But I'm really looking forward to kind of getting the chance to kind of immerse myself in that culture."
},
{
"end_time": 9479.155,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 9461.544,
"text": " How did you learn Italian? Was it through an app or?"
},
{
"end_time": 9504.514,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 9479.155,
"text": " No, it was very boring and old-fashioned through like evening classes. And then I've got Italian friends that I kind of speak to really regularly now. So it's just constant practice and constant, you know, reading Italian stuff, listening to podcasts, just, you know, very boring, just kind of putting in the work. Yeah. Did you start to learn Italian because you heard the research about"
},
{
"end_time": 9529.172,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 9504.514,
"text": " If you know another language, you're more open or you're more rational. I remember this was in the expectation effect. I'm not sure. Yeah, it did influence me a bit, but it's also just I'm super interested in Italian culture and the language and the literature. So yeah, it's a combination really. It's just that feeling you want to be able to communicate with another group of people and to see the world from their perspective. I think that's what's always fascinated me."
},
{
"end_time": 9546.476,
"index": 428,
"start_time": 9529.172,
"text": " Great. Which place in Italy are you looking forward to going? Rome. Great. Great. You've never been? I've been on holiday, but I'm just looking forward to kind of, I think the longer you spend in a place like more, you know, familiar, you become a bit, the kind of deeper you can understand it. So yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 9560.828,
"index": 429,
"start_time": 9546.476,
"text": " Great, great. Well, man, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for spending almost three hours with me, if not three hours. I appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for such interesting questions."
},
{
"end_time": 9585.179,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 9561.425,
"text": " Alright, you just watched the episode with David Robson. Thank you so much. And on the last point about people being afraid to create, I find that to be the case. People just need a push. And so earlier this year or earlier last year, we had this physics and consciousness explication contest where people who were just on the verge of producing content but needed a bit of a nudge, we tried to give them that"
},
{
"end_time": 9606.92,
"index": 431,
"start_time": 9585.179,
"text": " At least modicum of an incentive. So the pace one, the physics and consciousness explication contest, the winners are announced either now or they're going to be announced and you can look out for a video on that. There are several wonderful, wonderful videos that came from this contest, this expedition, this exploratory effort that we engaged in together. It's fascinating. It's unbelievable."
},
{
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"start_time": 9606.92,
"text": " If you'd like to contribute to theories of everything, then visit patreon.com slash curtjimungle. Each dollar helps. Your support is what allows there to be a full-time editor who's editing this right now, allows there to be an operations manager who manages my, well, who does virtually everything around here and constantly manages my disquietude and my fretfulness and my stress and the fact that I'm unnerved because there's so much to do."
},
{
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"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm."
},
{
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"text": " which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theoriesofeverything.org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on TOEFL time."
},
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"text": " You get early access to ad free audio episodes there as well. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you."
}
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}No transcript available.