Code with Jason
Code with Jason
308 - Christian and Jason Fail to Talk About AI
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In this episode I talk with Christian Genco about IQ, the pros and cons of high intelligence, the Big Five personality traits, evolutionary differences between men and women, hypergamy, the origins of money, and whether Yuval Harari's "shared fiction" concept holds up. We never got to the AI topic we planned.
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A Snail Mail Newsletter Pitch
SPEAKER_01Hey, it's Jason, host of the Code with Jason podcast. You're a developer. You like to listen to podcasts. You're listening to one right now. Maybe you like to read blogs and subscribe to email newsletters and stuff like that. Keep in touch. Email newsletters are a really nice way to keep on top of what's going on in the programming world. Except they're actually not. I don't know about you, but the last thing that I want to do after a long day of staring at the screen is sit there and stare at the screen some more. That's why I started a different kind of newsletter. It's a snail mail programming newsletter. That's right. I send an actual envelope in the mail containing a paper newsletter that you can hold in your hands. You can read it on your living room couch, at your kitchen table, in your bed, or in someone else's bed. And when they say, What are you doing in my bed? You can say, I'm reading Jason's newsletter. What does it look like? You might wonder what you might find in this snail mail programming newsletter. You can read about all kinds of programming topics like object-oriented programming, testing, DevOps, AI. Most of it's pretty technology agnostic. You can also read about other non-programming topics like philosophy, evolutionary theory, business, marketing, economics, psychology, music, cooking, history, geology, language, culture, robotics, and farming. The name of the newsletter is Nonsense Monthly. Here's what some of my readers are saying about it. Helmut Kobler from Los Angeles says, thanks much for sending the newsletter. I got it about a week ago and read it on my sofa. It was a totally different experience than reading it on my computer or iPad. It felt more relaxed, more meaningful, something special and out of the ordinary. I'm sure that's what you were going for, so just wanted to let you know that you succeeded. Looking forward to more. Drew Bragg from Philadelphia says, Nonsense Monthly is the only newsletter I deliberately set aside time to read. I read a lot of great newsletters, but there's just something about receiving a piece of mail, physically opening it, and sitting down to read it on paper that is just so awesome. Feels like a lost luxury. Chris Sonnier from Dickinson, Texas says, just finished reading my first nonsense monthly snail mail newsletter and truly enjoyed it. Something about holding a physical piece of paper that just feels good. Thank you for this. Can't wait for the next one. Dear listener, if you would like to get letters in the mail from yours truly every month, you can go sign up at nonsensemonthly.com. That's nonsensemonthly.com. I'll say it one more time nonsense monthly dot com. And now without further ado, here is today's episode. Hey, today I'm here with Christian Jenko for recording number three, episode number three. Welcome back.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. And I I bullied you into changing the uh uh recording setup, so I should sound much better now. And we won't drop key words that I I was listening to the last two episodes, and uh there were some key words that I was saying in it uh my my internet like blipped out at exactly the wrong moment. So uh I could hear in my head like the word that I had said before, and then I was like, oh no, people are gonna get so confused about what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_01So uh yeah, I'm I'm deeply embarrassed, and I apologize for that. Uh because yeah, right at the beginning, it's like, let's talk about it's like I oh please don't be no.
SPEAKER_00I think it's uh I think it's my internet. I've been fantasizing about like, do I get a fancy Starlink backup thing that automatically carries over? And I've been doing a lot of like home network uh uh updates recently. But uh yeah, no, uh Riverside is uh a pretty good platform for this sort of thing. Records natively. I I'm not affiliated with them, but uh yeah, it's a it's a solid platform for this sort of thing.
Framing Today’s Topic: Intelligence
Comparing Strength And IQ In Modern Life
SPEAKER_01Yeah, maybe I'll try to get one of the Riverside guys on this podcast even seems like an appropriate thing for somebody from that organization to do. Um anyway, I think originally we were gonna talk about um AI again, and I I hope we still will. Um, but then pre-recording we got started talking about uh intelligence and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And this is something I think about a lot. Um because you know, I think I've said it on the show before. Uh it it it feels wrong to admit this kind of thing because it's not like socially appropriate, but I am smarter than most people. Um, and I I know that you are too. Um and and I think about this fact a lot, um because it is it it is not an unalloyed advantage in life. Um, you know, if you're physically stronger than other people, you can like overpower them, uh, you can fight them and win. Um but it's not the same with with intelligence because all the dummies agree with each other. Um and they're like in a big group and they're like, two plus two, that's five. And you're like, no, it's it's actually four, because you see you got two things, and these other two things, one, two, three, four. And they're like, uh, Jason, not this again. Uh anyway, it's five, blah, blah, blah. And that's an experience I've had about a million times in my life, and it's deeply frustrating. Anyway, uh, that's that's part of how I view that and what I've been thinking about. Uh, but we were talking about a little bit something different pre-recording, but I don't remember what.
ADHD, Autism Testing, And “Very Superior” IQ
SPEAKER_00I I have so many thoughts about this, and yeah, I'll kind of pick up and uh respond to what you just said. Uh it's interesting comparing it to strength because in caveman times, strength was arguably the most valuable trait. If you're bigger, stronger, you can defend your tribe better, you can take down bigger wildebeasts or whatever. And strength, uh height, physical size, uh stopped being as big of an advantage in uh modernity, for lack of a better word. Once you have civilization, once you have uh tools, once you have mechanical things, certainly, being uh bigger and stronger doesn't matter as much. And yet, oh uh the this whole rabbit hole we could go down of uh like dating and evolutionary biology and that sort of thing of like what what humans are uh hardwired to select for. And height is one of those things. So uh I'm I'm of perfectly average height. I'm uh 5'9, which in the US is that that's like the average height for for men. And I don't see myself as inferior to people who are taller than me, and I could easily see uh I have some friends uh who who do see it that way, who feel like you know, kind of a resentment towards taller people, and they're like, ah, you know, they get all the girls or whatever, uh and the they think they're better than me. Uh it's interesting seeing you know the the sorts of people who are arguably the most successful in uh what I might call the primary game of uh society, which is like the building of wealth, are all of average or less than average height, but do seem to be uh an outsized intelligence. So uh yeah, interesting sort of what society selects for. So so uh yeah, you and I uh took recently, I don't know how recently you're supposed to, but mine was recent, a test for uh ADHD in autism. Because there were a lot of things that I'm like, oh, I'm I'm a little bit weird in these areas. I wonder if that's all it does. My wife was also encouraging me to get it uh uh as we we do couples therapy, and in couples therapy, she was like, I think there's a lot of problems that would be explained if you if you uh were autistic. And I took the test and it was this whole psychometric evaluation. They it was like a I don't know, six or seven hour thing and a whole bunch of different tests and a lot of problem-solving stuff. And I got my IQ formally tested, and she said, Ah, you have I came back and she the the terms they use on the test, which did not help my ego or this framing of like superiority. The terms they use are very superior. So she was like, you know, in these they split it up into a bunch of different dimensions, and she said, you know, uh in in you know, spatial reasoning, you're very superior, and then blah blah blah, you're you're very superior. And I was I was just basking in it because like I can't wait to go tell my wife that actually the problem is just that I'm I'm superior in intelligence to you, and and that's that's like the source of all our problems. Uh but you know, thinking about that, the same sort of thing as height, that doesn't I I've thought I've thought so much about this. That doesn't make me a superior person. It takes all types. Uh certainly there are, you know, uh I can if if I could choose, I I would probably choose IQ, but like you're saying, uh oh that you used a funny word there of uh uh allo unalloid uh something uh that uh uh yeah that there's there's pros and cons to this. Uh one of which is uh harder to relate to people. You know, if you're extreme in any dimension in your personality or or uh your physical stature or any sort of attribute, you know, certainly if you're if you're above average height, the world is not designed for you. Airplane seats are gonna be smaller for you, and cars are gonna be smaller for you, and you're gonna bump your head in the doorways.
SPEAKER_01Uh seat hang off the fucking bed.
If You’re So Smart, Why Not Rich
SPEAKER_00Right, right. Uh my brother-in-law, I think, is is 6'2 or something. And yeah, just seeing the there's advantages for sure. Like, you know, people look up to him just at when he's out literally that they're looking up to him and you know he can see on top of refrigerators, and that's pretty cool. Uh and there and there are downsides. Uh and the same sort of thing with intelligence. Like it's a it's a tool and uh it has pros, and yeah, for certain types of problems that it can be better. And uh something I think about all the time is this phrase, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich? And I feel that like I I I can sense why that is, of just there's all these little traps that I fall into of like, ah, fun, interesting puzzle to think about that's not gonna make me any money, but I just can't resist like you know, taking down to this thing and taking it apart and understanding it. Um yeah, it's it's it's arguable whether uh like what IQ range is is uh optimal. Uh one 132, I think, is what they tested it at. Which I think if I could take it again, uh like any sort of test, uh like I wasn't going in preparing for an IQ test, so like I didn't sleep very well the the night before. Uh it it might be uh it might be different than that if I if I retook it. Also, like any sort of test, I think the second time you take it, you you uh learn more about it. But uh which isn't it's not crazy. Uh I think I think the the distribution is out of a hundred people, uh there's there's one and a half people smarter than me, something like that. In a room of a thousand people, there would be something like 17 people smarter than me. Um uh if if those numbers are accurate. And oh, that's also in the US, because in the US uh uh IQs on average are higher. And so, you know, pulling this all the way back to strength, something interesting that happened in uh the the mechanical revolution, the industrial revolution is like, well, now we have these giant machines and motors and things that uh can amplify strength, and all of a sudden uh oh, guns also I would say is kind of a strength multiplier. You know, one woman with a gun can overpower six huge guys. Uh what are LLMs, if not uh uh Steve Jobs used the phrase bicycle for the mind, I might say like a gun for the mind? Uh a uh uh uh you know a mechanical mover, uh uh digging machine uh for the mind that um you know if if intelligence is now a commodity, you can just toss a few pennies at one of these LLMs and have a genius IQ at your disposal. Yes, certainly there will be people who use that and don't use that. Like, you know, uh there's you you can do a physical job in a stupid way where you're using a shovel when you could you know rent a mechanical mover and do it much faster. So uh yeah, that's a that's a differentiator of like, do you do you know how to use the tools? Do you choose to use the tools or not? What I'm seeing is the sorts of people who were already kind of uh optimizing their life for high intelligence, those are the sorts of people who you know have higher intellect jobs and stuff that they can they can leverage those tools much better in the same sort of way that people who would have had blue-collar jobs, like they're the people who are using the the mechanical mover. So yeah, those those are those are some of my thoughts about IQ.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Wow. Um so many things. So yeah, I I did the same thing a few years ago. I got tested for autism. Turns out I do have it. Um autism spectrum disorder level one. Um and uh they they gave me like I guess it was an IQ test, but I don't think it was like a normal IQ test. Like I didn't even know until after that that's what it was, and they're like, your IQ is 119. I'm like, what the fuck? Um because I was so pissed because I I'd taken like a couple informal online IQ tests before. Um first one I got 130, second one I got 140, and then this other one I got 119. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00There's such high variance, and yeah, it's just very smart, I think. If if it was uh like having a having a precise number on it to the digit, I think is is misleading because it it implies a certain level of specificity that I think isn't there. Yeah, you know, depending on the test, depending on the day, it's probably probably all over the place.
Autism Diagnosis, Variance In IQ Scores
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um so I don't know, and like it, you know, IQ is real, like it measures something real, you know. Um and so I I I don't want to like discount it or anything. At the same time, it's obviously a proxy. Um, and so there are people who are like extremely intelligent, but also like not very effective in life because uh uh it's it's not exactly linear. Um, even though the IQ scale is linear, um intelligence is not completely linear. And I don't want to adopt one of those cop-out views where it's like, oh, there's different kinds of intelligence and like blah blah blah. It's like no, some people are smarter than others, uh, and and that's like a real fact. Um and going back to that bicycle of a mind bicycle of the mind? Bicycle for the mind? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Bicycle for the mind? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um uh yeah, you know, if if you're Lance Armstrong and if you're all like doped up and shit, um you you know, he's he's gonna out bicycle me with my relatively weak legs, you know. And and what I've noticed is that really smart people are getting way more out of AI than people who aren't very smart, to the point where like uh a lot of people like it doesn't even occur to them to use AI or how they would use AI and stuff like that. It's like their legs aren't even long enough to reach the pedals, you know. So that's been very interesting. It's like a uh oh Matthew principle, rich get richer kind of thing, where the there's a greater spread now between the haves and have nots.
G Versus IQ And Can You Get Smarter
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that sounds about right. Like there's a there's a minimum bar to use like you you have to be you have to be strong enough to be able to use the the digging machine and the tractor. Uh yeah, certainly certainly there's benefits you can get at any level from that sort of technology, but yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be outsized benefits from people who were already kind of disproportionate on that on that uh on that spectrum. Yeah, yeah. Um I also I I I made this uh I want to correct myself, saying uh I I I take issue with saying uh and I said this, you you didn't say it, with saying that uh uh uh people with higher IQ are smarter. And I'm not I can't fully defend that, but uh smart smart to me means something different. Like IQ is very specific. Smart can mean uh I think I think smart is dependent on the on the domain. So like if I'm in the Amazon jungle, I'm gonna be the dumbest person there, because they're gonna be like, oh my god, you don't know about the the whatever route is this one's poisonous and this one's not. Um smart to me, I think, implies some something about like smart in what uh uh and like you're saying, IQ is is very highly transferable. If you have a high IQ, that's a very good determinant of uh like it's very highly correlated with uh uh career success. It's very highly correlated with if we just give you any arbitrary problem, how how well are you gonna be able to sell it? Um and yeah, there's still some domain like some someone who's been in a domain for a long time is going to be smarter in that domain than someone with a high IQ. Uh IQ, I think, to me just implies like your speed of understanding it. Uh but but someone could be smarter in a domain if they've just spent more time in it uh uh with a lower IQ.
SPEAKER_01That's somewhat true, I think. Um you know, uh my understanding is that most, if not all, of IQ is um like genetic, biological. Um and there's this there's this concept called G, which is like your raw cognitive horsepower. Um and it's maybe more precise to to say that you're like your G is just as like biological and fixed as your height. You're born with a certain G and it's never gonna change. I don't quite understand the distinction between G and IQ, because like if you just sat around in a dark room your entire life and never ingested any information, you'd probably do pretty bad on an IQ test. Sure. Even if your G is really high. If Albert Einstein never learned anything, he'd do really poorly on an IQ test.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Um and you know, if you grew up in the Amazon jungle, you'd probably do great at identifying plants and stuff like that. So so there's that. Um and it's uh the this is another thing that I've thought about a lot. Like, how can you get smarter? Can you get smarter? And and you can improve something, you know? Like I'm smarter than I was ten years ago. I don't know if my IQ has changed. Certainly I don't think my G has changed, because I I I understand that that can't change. Um but uh yeah, you can uh you can improve your intelligence if that's the right way to uh to say it. Does does that seem possible? I don't know. Any thoughts on all that?
Embryo Selection, Gattaca, And Enhancement
Theory Of Mind, Empathy, And Team Friction
SPEAKER_00I I asked my psychologist, psychiatrist, who whoever the person was who did the psychometric evaluation, uh I asked her that question of like, you know, is is IQ fixed or are there things you can do to change it? And she effectively said it's fixed. She said there are some things that can impact the variance of it day to day, like if if you you get good sleep, if you're getting exercise, if just kind of the the rest of your body is tuned well. There's some supplements of like omega-3, might have a slight correlation with increasing that, but uh effectively uh my my current framing of it from talking with her and doing other research is you have a genetic ceiling. And depending on uh how uh well nurturing uh your uh uh your environment is, that's that's what percentage of that genetic ceiling you can get to. And I it's the same sort of model with height, I think. Like you have a you have a genetic ceiling of what your height. could be and uh depending on then your your childhood nutrition and uh I don't know if if you damage your growth plates or whatever else as a as a kid uh that that determines how much of that potential you can realize. And it's interesting talking about that with growth because there's uh some posts on X that I've seen where you know rich families are giving their kids human growth hormone or something to make them even taller. And there's probably yeah there's probably an analog uh for intelligence. I don't know if you you're familiar with the movie Gattaca from I think the the late 90s or early 2000s talks about uh it it prophetic in in its prediction of kind of where we're going in in a world where we do have a very deep understanding of DNA and can't select for genes and things. It's depicting this uh world where people are very oh discriminated against based on their genetic predisposition and so parents are really incentivized to do like gene therapy because that you know the the first thing anyone does for a job interview is is uh run a DNA scan and see okay well genetically what's your intelligence and what's your uh uh you know how how often you're gonna get sick and all these other sorts of things. And so I think it's very likely I've I've already seen some rumblings of that of you know being able to to pre-select an embryo based on different traits and uh I I think there are probably some genetic things that can already point to higher intelligence that that we know about. And then yeah are there are there things are are there things like human growth hormone but for intelligence that you can boost it even higher? And uh would you want to and like how far would you take that? Like certainly for height you know if if if someone's seven feet tall, okay that's too tall. Don't don't be seven feet tall. Unless you're like really really trying to get this kid to be the tallest basketball player or something. But like that that would be a curse to be uh to to have an IQ that's that's so high out of the variance. Like uh before the call I think you and I were were talking about struggles that each of us face more more of the downsides of high IQ of like it's alienating uh it it can be harder to relate to people which is a uh you know in making a business that that can be a downsided marketing because good marketing is empathy. Good marketing is like understanding what the motivations of of someone is and one of the consistently rich wellsprings of growth that I founded business is really oh I don't want to use the phrase dumbing down, but like uh uh really questioning my assumptions of what uh normal people would understand about a product product and how they would express their needs. Um one of the early mistakes I made with File Inbox was uh I I think I had this uh this idea that anyone who bought it would be getting tricked or or that they would be dumb or because I was like well why would you buy this when you could just you know sign up for AWS and get an S3 key and like set up rsync between two of your comp or something like you know build your own web form to to uh do this. And that is a shortcoming that I have of like oh normal people don't know what AWS is. Uh like the the that's a that's a downside in my ability to empathetically understand. So like yeah growth for me has looked like uh being able to have a more nuanced theory of mind of like uh but it it's a lot more work for me to do that as opposed to what just comes naturally to me is okay well what would I be doing in this situation. So yeah it's it's uh I uh it'll be interesting to see with more of these performance enhancements so the the original point was you know uh can you can you increase IQ? I think the answer is yes a little bit right now. The biggest vectors are probably in selecting for embryos like at the at the early childhood level and once we have those knobs I don't know that it's obvious how far you would want to tune them if you could jack it all the way up and have a 300 IQ baby. Would you want to raise a 300 IQ baby like some someone with someone with the emotional intelligence of a of a baby but like they're already outsmarting you that that sounds terrifying. I don't know that I can handle that.
Big Five Traits And Why Myers-Briggs Fails
SPEAKER_01Yeah those are those are my thoughts on uh yeah interesting um um I I had a thought and it escaped me oh yeah a theory of mind um um in in case anybody's not familiar with that concept it's basically your model of the human mind it's like your ability to put yourself in the shoes of other people it's like this is how I think minds work and one of the uh symptoms of autism is that you tend to have a weak theory of mind um and I think like the most autistic people uh that like they don't even really see other people as people like they have the they I I don't understand it because I'm not that autistic. And there's something about like I I think I'm fairly self-aware and and so like I have tried very hard to compensate for my autism. I'm not one of these people who's like autism is a superpower uh it's a fucking brain disorder and it comes with weaknesses and symptoms and all this stuff and like it has made my life observably worse. So like no it's not a superpower although maybe there's like you know there's pros and cons to everything so it's it's not a hundred percent negative. But anyway I've like deliberately tried I've deliberately worked on improving my theory of mind um to where maybe I have a stronger more accurate theory of mind than even uh neurotypical people um but um it's it's interesting like I went through life knowing that I'm smarter than most people like I I took this test in school when I was fairly young it's called the MEP test M-E-A-P and I scored in the 99th percentile um and my mom always told me like how much smarter I am than other people and that was actually like really harmful and stuff. But anyway I had this awareness um but I I I didn't really realize how large the gap was until fairly recently actually um I I worked for this guy from 2018 to 2022 who was maybe the smartest guy I've ever known and he kept like impressing upon me how much smarter I am than other people and that made me realize like wait hang on a second like actually yeah I I I am a lot smarter than other people and this is an explanation a partial explanation for why life has been so hard for me because things that I see most other people don't see um and it's you know it's it's such an extreme metaphor that it doesn't really even work that well like the everybody else agrees with each other that two plus two is five but I see that two plus two is four. It's it's really not that kind of thing. It's like I don't know so many times when I've been on programming teams um people are like trying to make plans for what to do and stuff like that. And the plans are really just like not even plans. It's just people are talking about random crap and then at the end we don't really have an idea for what to do and then people just go like work on whatever random stuff and I get deeply frustrated because I'm like guys this is fucking not the way to go and I try to like harness everybody in a productive direction and stuff like that. And I think mostly what I get is just resentment and annoyance and frustration and stuff like that. Whereas if I had been born with a n more normal IQ I would be like blissfully unaware and I just go along and the organization the team wouldn't be very effective but that's maybe not the most important thing. Everybody's just happily chugging along and doing what they think they should do. But because I can see more clearly than most other people I get really frustrated and so I don't fit into this world very well.
Gender Differences Through Evolution
Hypergamy, Status, And Modern Dating
SPEAKER_00Yeah yeah the image coming to mind is uh uh uh a small tribe walking out on the tundra with one really tall guy and the tall guy is constantly seeing over the horizon like oh man there's there's some uh there's some lions coming and the way that he goes about doing that might be uh you know depending on the way that he's framing it depending on the way that other people in the tribe are framing it uh they might feel resentful towards him of like ah here here comes Mr. Tall guy thinking he can see way far ahead again like uh uh you know uh perhaps uh there's envy from them coming into play perhaps there's uh you know feelings of alienation from the tall guy who's like you know a the uh a desire to fit in that this is just in indicative of uh uh not being on the same page with other people I think fundamentally what people want is connection and so yeah that that's uh uh is a barrier to to connection um yeah and I I I'm conscious now of like I think I think you could take a lot of clips from this episode and be like look at these pompous assholes talking talking about how much smarter they are than everybody. And what what I really want to stress is like I think the game is just understanding yourself, which it sounds like you've done an incredible job of if you understand where you are on the spectrum like yeah you're smarter than most people and if you can approach the world with that understanding you're gonna feel less frustrated in situations where you know you you can see the right way what what you feel like is the right way which is probably the right way you're smarter than most people to do things and and other people aren't recognizing that. Coming at that situation with the understanding of oh you're smarter than most people you're probably seeing things that they aren't seeing in this domain of problem solving and and puzzles and things like that. Well okay of course that's what's going to happen. That's gonna happen all the time. You're always going to be seeing different things that other people are seeing you're always going to be seeing different and it's it is it's consistently going to be a barrier for you to uh explain that to other people. And from your perspective it's gonna be frustrating and like you're dumbing down uh uh what you're trying to say to to other people um you can kind of shift the analogy of you know a person with a 100 is is uh it's standardized in the US so 100 is the uh average IQ in the US if you imagine someone with a with a normal IQ trying to explain to someone who had an 80 or 70 IQ 70 I think it's 75 actually is the cutoff for the military which uh Jordan Peterson has this great line about that which is if you have I I maybe it's 80 actually if you have an 80 IQ if you have below an 80 IQ not even the US government knows how to put you in a productive position. And they are the most motivated to just like have bodies doing something. And if they can figure it out like what a what a debilitating thing it would be. So you know uh I think you said your IQ was tested somewhere in the range of like one of the high ones as high as 140 and and uh perhaps as low as like uh uh 110 or something 119 yeah one so 120 so you know there's a 20 IQ gap at least at minimum between you and someone with an average IQ. So look at that look at that gap for a normal person that would be 100 to 80 interacting with someone with an 80 IQ is like right borderline of what someone who the US military thinks is functional enough to be useful. And that would feel really frustrating to someone with a hundred IQ they would they'd be like hold on what do you what do you mean you don't understand uh you know they they'd be making such stupid mistakes and you'd be like oh my gosh this is awful um not to say you know I really want a friend this of like that doesn't make you a better or worse person. Like uh uh this this comes from the philosophy stuff we were talking about last time with Michael Singer like everyone has their pros and cons. It takes all types of people to to uh thrive and and uh you know help each other out and there there's all sorts of uh virtues you can have outside of intelligence and uh yeah this this is not uh this is not a eugenics thing this uh there's there's uh uh yeah it it takes all types and there's value in in every human life and every human experience but um specifically in this domain of like you know can you can you build something or can you get some work done or can you can you solve a problem that's uh that requires high intelligence uh or requires some level of of intelligence yeah that would be really frustrating for a person who's interacting that way and so understanding that about yourself knowing where you are on the spectrum um can help you in navigating the world of like okay most of your interactions on average are going to feel like that they're gonna feel like a person of average intelligence at a hundred IQ interacting with someone with an 80 intelligence. That's that's what it's gonna feel like most of the time and uh that's gonna feel frustrating and like okay now you can kind of focus on your own inner work of okay where's that frustration coming from and uh why is it so important to you that things are done the right way and and that you have a plan and uh what's wrong with things taking a little bit more time or or kind of walking uh through stuff and uh yeah uh that's that's been a big focus in my life. Um I I love like personality tests and uh the big five personality test I think is the is the most useful one uh it seems to be the the most evidence based there's a lot I can talk about what is that it is so yeah there's like Myers Briggs which uh when you dig into it is complete bullshit it was based on this theory from Carl Jung that wasn't based on he didn't do any sorts of tests he was just like I've talked to a few people I feel like they have these dimensions of personality you can have extroverted people and you can have introverted people and you can have uh oh it's ENTJ uh uh oh my gosh intuitive versus sensing oh yeah you you have some people who just like go more by their feelings and you have people who are more uh you know more imperialistic and the this mother-daughter team that weren't trained in psychology uh Myers and Briggs were like oh let's take his theory and add one more dimension to it uh the the judging versus perceiving just for fun just because we feel like that's another dimension of things and uh uh let's I I don't know the full story. Uh uh they started marketing it to people or or something. It's based on nothing. Uh the the the model assumes that there's bimodal distributions in all these things. So when you get your Myers Briggs and they've they sort of adjusted it from there but the original model was you are either introverted or extroverted. Well okay that's that's obviously flawed because it's normally distributed introversion and extrovert most people are ambiverts more most people are in the middle. But Myers Briggs tries to kind of separate people into into introverts and extroverts. Same thing with every dimension of it. Also in it's the their dimensions aren't uh independent um so oh how how do I explain that succinctly so like if oh and I I don't have an example of how of how to do this. Oh man I there's a blog post in the works that I'll it's garbage. Myersburg sucks. And the so the the better way to do that would be okay what if we took every adjective that every language has used to describe people and we give out hundreds of thousands of surveys where we ask people for all these different adjectives, how would you uh would you say that this adjective applies to you or doesn't apply to you? So like hardworking would be one of these adjectives. Would you describe yourself as a hardworking person? Would you describe this other person as a hardworking person? And now let's give them a test and also have them ask it about you. And based on all this data, what you're trying to figure out is where are there clusters of things? So like if someone if someone says either about themselves or someone else that they're hardworking, do they also say that they are industrious? Well yes, those have a very high correlation. Most of the time if someone says they're hardworking, they would also say they're industrious. If someone says they are uh uh anxious would they also say that they are uh that they worry all the time well yes those have a very high correlation so we can kind of cluster those together and what comes out of the data when you do this a whole bunch of times over a whole bunch of different numbers is five dimensions of personality. The acronym is Ocean so it's uh uh openness, conscientiousness extroversion agreeableness and neuroticism and those are the dimensions of people and they're talking about adding a sixth one that's uh uh are you more oriented towards uh objects or people um but for the purposes of this conversation we'll say that there's just five uh and so from that like the the uh and there's all sorts of personality there's there's like the Harry Potter which house are you in sort of thing there's there's uh Carol Dwike has her own thing of the the four tendencies but as far as I can tell like the this is the the most scientifically backed uh uh personality test so like oh also independent of IQ this is this is like your your personal proclivity is this is uh uh you know based on your tendencies of of where you might fall in each of these five things it tells you a lot about yourself particularly if you're at the extremes so I'm I'm at the extremes for two of those I'm at the extremes for uh neuroticism I have extremely low neuroticism I'm the I'm in the uh second percentile so out of a room of a hundred people there is one or maybe two people who are less neurotic than me. Neuroticism is it has kind of a weird uh uh negative connotation but it's it's your sensitivity to negative emotion so that can land me in a lot of trouble because I can be in situations where like someone's about to rob me and I'm just like doot doo this is fine. No worries. Extroversion I'm I'm uh a little extroverted but nothing I think it's like 70 or 80th percentile. Conscientiousness I'm I'm pretty high that's your measure of hard working uh like industriousness uh if there's a task to do if you've got to like clean your room uh how easy is it for you to to sit down and do it. The downside of having higher industriousness is you're more uptight. You're you're like you can't sit still you can't relax you stress other people out. Same with extroversion like if you're if you're highly extroverted you just constantly need stimulus from outside and like you you can't you can you can't just be alone in a room by yourself. So that's that's uh open oh openness is uh openness to experience that's a measure of creativity. So like uh uh how how how interested are you in exploring other ideas? That's something my what my wife and I are very high in. Uh very difficult for for couples to get along if one of them is very high in openness and and the other is not because one of them is just always talking about new ways to do things and the other one's like exhausted by the oh my gosh this stop it just just do things the way they're they're supposed to be um O C E A is a oh agreeableness I'm also extremely low in. So that's like uh uh how important is it to you to be truthful versus nice? Uh I'm I will choose to be truthful almost all the time. So uh agreeableness and neuroticism I'm like extremely low in. And interestingly those are the two dimensions that uh males and females are are most different in. So females on average at a population level are much higher in neuroticism they're much more sensitive to negative emotion and they're much higher in agreeableness. And the explanation that I've heard for this is evolutionarily you want the woman to uh like that the woman's personality is optimized for the the mother child dyad uh and so how do you as a as a woman how do you maximize the survival of an infant well you want to be on constant high alert of like oh what's what's going on we've got to protect the infant oh what what was that sound let's go uh you know make sure that that everyone's safe that's that's the uh neuroticism um you don't want to you don't want to be sleeping when the when the tiger attacks and then agreeableness you know kind of keeping the peace kind of like okay we'll we'll do it your way it's okay uh uh well okay if you're in a a small tribe and there's aggressive men uh it it behooves you to kind of protect the safety of the infant to to be keeping the peace to be you know kind of keeping things more calm to be uh uh to be okay with not being right as long as you know it's it's uh uh appeasing everyone else in the group. That was a very long monologue where I talked about a lot of different things. Well I'll I'll stop there.
Money As System, Debt, And Shared Belief
SPEAKER_01No this is this is all good and uh I I gotta pull that thread a little bit. Um and I love it when uh when when we skirt into uh taboo topics on this podcast because that's it and it's a lot more taboo than it should be like the differences between men and women. Um and I was gonna mention, by the way, a a a book that's related to all this stuff uh called The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Um there's this very popular idea, especially on the political left, um, that everybody is is just the same. We're all blank slates. There's no such thing as some people who are smarter or less smart or whatever, um, and men and women are are the same, you know, we have different hardware but the same software. Totally not true. Um and and the everything, like everything, goes back to evolutionary biology. Um and and and an interesting thing about the differences between men and women, but but I learned this relatively recently, a few years ago. Um you know, it it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. Um and it's a single-threaded operation. Uh you you can't be four months into a pregnancy and start a new one. You can only have one baby at a time, you know, twins and all that stuff aside. Um, so you're rate limited to one baby every you know, 10 months, let's call it whatever. Um but a man can sire an indefinite number of children uh per unit of time. Um your only limit is uh I was gonna say willing partners, but not even that. It's you know. Um and and so uh from a reproductive standpoint, uh women are the bottleneck, and women are much more it it a woman's reproductive system is a more scarce resource than a man's reproductive system. Yes. Um and so that makes uh the the woman's reproductive system much more valuable than the man's. Um and and think about it, if there's a small tribe and all the men get annihilated except one, yeah, no problem. You can you can repopulate. But if all the women except one uh get killed, like big problem. Much, much different story. Um so men are more expendable. Um and I hypothesize, this is just me guessing, um, but like these things like uh men being um less neurotic and and stuff like that, um, you know, it's it's not as important for a man to preserve his own life because uh we're expendable. And and I also hypothesize that males, you know, of of most animal species, um are like bigger and stronger, but we're not um uh it okay. Men are bigger and stronger, and we tend to be the ones to fight in battles and wars and stuff like that. But my hypothesis is that we don't fight because we're stronger, we are stronger because we fight because we're expendable. So if you think back to really, really long ago in evolutionary history, um maybe there was a species where the the males and females were um oh, what's the word? There is no sexual dimorphism. They had they had the same kind of bodies. Um, but as a natural consequence of the males being more expendable, uh they would do more fighting, and the the bigger, stronger males would be selected for, and that's just a positive feedback loop, and that's how that happened. Uh anyway, all speculation, just total guesses on my part.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, touching on uh a bunch of interesting things. I've every one of these threads I feel like I could talk about for like six hours. Um But the uh uh one of the things you said was, yeah, there's this this difference in in reproductive strategies that women are uh I like how you phrased it as their serial and men uh can be in parallel. A few interesting things there are you have twice as many female ancestors as you do male ancestors. So think about that for a second. Most men have zero children, and then some men have a lot of children. Some men has have uh, you know, uh uh uh well in so in that example, uh, you know, if you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors, that would have to mean, you know, some men are having uh uh two or or four kids. Um, or in the case of Genghis Khan, uh more than that. I found out recently the founder of Signal, the messaging app, he's this Russian guy, is uh a prolific sperm donor and uh has this setup in his will where anyone who's like his genetic uh uh child inherits some of his uh uh billionaire fortune. And so he has something like hundreds of kids uh that are the most genetics of his kids. I know. Um yeah, wild. And uh yeah, no, that's that's the strategy as a as a male, is like you lower your neuroticism as low as you possibly can so that you can play these high-risk, high reward games, and sometimes you die, but like men are expendable, that's that's okay. Sometimes you hit the jackpot and you have concubines and you know, whatever else. Not not so much in uh in modernity, it's more you know, the the emphasis on the on the nuclear family, which I think is uh uh a fantastic uh conspiracy by the majority of men to like uh uh be able to have more children. Like if you're a middle class man, you're doing great right now. Like you you get your whatever, two and a half kids, and uh that's that's much more than uh uh in other sorts of uh uh sociological structures than than you would have had. Uh could just be that like Elon Musk has all the kids and you you don't get any. Um yeah, and then and then uh you mentioned sexual dimorphism, uh uh a corollary of that, like a conclusion that that has to happen because of that, because you know men are going out and fighting each other and uh becoming bigger and stronger. Um and this this is a whole rabbit hole I could talk a lot about of like dating psychology and and how all of that works. Um is this idea of hypergamy, which is women uh look for partners who are better than them in every dimension. So you women look for partners who are uh wealthier than them and uh more successful than them and taller than them and stronger than them. Um because, like you're saying, you know, uh women's reproductive systems are more valuable than men. Uh merely being a fertile woman is bringing a lot to the table. Uh you you just kind of have to sit back and be yourself and be like, all right, who who can uh who can win me? Um and then men have to prove themselves. Men have to do something extraordinary, they have to build a lot of wealth or uh uh build great social networks or or have have some sort of other attributes. Status, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ledgers, Seashells, And Early Blockchains
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, and all these things are like so worth understanding um in in detail and and understanding very firmly, because we are not nearly as far from the from the caveman days than uh then than people think we are. Right. Um you know the these ideas of uh male and female sameness and stuff like that, like for the record, uh I personally believe in equality. Like I don't think men and women are unequal in their worth as human beings or something like that, but we're absolutely different. Um but when we have this lifestyle, when we're not living in a hunter-gatherer society where people are by necessity uh fulfilling their uh uh biological gender roles and people are working at computers and stuff like that, um it's easy to it's easy to imagine that we're not so different, even though we really, really, really are.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Um and and these things affect everything. Like, why uh why does anybody why does anybody do anything was the question that was coming to my mind. Um and it's all for biological reasons. Like, why do particularly men feel a drive to be really successful and build wealth and status and stuff like that? It's totally biological, and that's one of the reasons for the gender wage gap. Um, you know, there's this discrimination, obviously, but that's not the entire picture. We're biologically different, and men have a um uh biological drive to again accumulate as much wealth and status as they can because that's what gets you the reproductive opportunities, and that's what allows your genes to be more prolifically propagated, and so the males that have those genes to make them want to do that are the genes that become predominant in the gene pool, and it's a positive feedback loop. Um and and it's crazy because uh all this stuff feels like it should be outmoded by this point, but it's it's not, and it's not gonna be for a long time. If ever.
Post-Scarcity, Paperclips, And Abundance
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. We uh yeah, that the I feel like the theme of this conversation is just like the benefits of understanding yourself better. Um a tragic outcome of increasing equality in our society, particularly between men and women, I think is that uh it it becomes much harder for women to play the game of hypergamy. It if you're uh a friend of mine uh is a uh woman in her mid to late 30s and is an emergency physician, very prestigious, high-paying role. She makes, I don't know,$300,000,$400,000 a year, uh uh, helps a bunch of people, like has this very high status position. She's single. She really wants kids. Who is she supposed to marry in this in this hypergamy game? Like she could marry a doctor who makes more than her, but like who you're you're already pretty high up there. That the nitting pool's gonna be uh uh incredibly small. Um and I don't have a great solution for this. Like I see the Oh, there's a there's a book I I haven't gotten around to reading it, but I feel like I understand the central thesis. Um, called Seeing Like a State. We're just talking about how if you are a state, so if you're like a government, you are benefited most at the state level from treating everyone as individuals. So any sort of structure that people come up with by themselves, if it's like a family unit or if it's like religion or if it's a kin group, that kind of gets in your way as a state. Because if there's this really tight-knit group and one of them commits a crime, and you really need, you know, let's say it's a family and someone in the family commits a crime, at the state level, you really need everyone to treat each other like individuals and route each other out and like have their primary allegiance be to you, um, versus if it's this tight-knit group and they're like, Well, I I didn't see nothing, you know, my family's more important to me than the state. Well, okay, now you're weaker as a state. So uh, you know, not to say which one's better or worse. I think you could make the argument both ways. But um at the at the state level, I totally understand how you would want more of an egalitarian society. Because if we have uh, you know, my my friend as an emergency physician, okay, well, that is increasing the GDP, that's now increasing the workforce, uh, we we have more doctors now than we would have otherwise if she was, you know, a 1950s stay-at-home mom at the state level. Like, yeah, I totally get it. But at the individual level, like, I think you could make the argument both ways of of how her life might have been better off uh uh if she had perhaps had a lower status job, but then uh felt deep within her bones that the genetics of like, ah, you know, this this local Chipotle manager has higher status than me and and he's tall and good looking, so yes, this is this is who I want to have children with. Um and I think it's a I think it's a barrier both for her and people who she's dating of like, you know, what what guy who has uh whatever a job at McKinsey or something where he's making uh a quarter million dollars a year, uh, you know, if if if he's on her his first date with her and she's like, oh yeah, I make more than you, and I like have this job where everyone in the hospital is kind of looking up to me where I'm I'm the big boss in charge, and you you know, you're a project manager at McKinsey, like uh, you know, the the the status game for both of them I think is kind of is kind of ruined.
SPEAKER_01Um well we have a pro provider instinct. Right. Um and like if you're just like if you're contributing less than your wife to the whole picture, it kind of feels like man, I'm like not I'm not meeting the bar, you know, I'm not doing it right. And so that's probably gonna be a deterrent to like uh uh uh coupling up with the very high status, high-earning woman. It's like shit, like this isn't I I'm not in this league, this isn't gonna work out for me. And for somebody like your friend, it's like almost nobody is in her league.
SPEAKER_00Right. I'm reminded of uh Travis Kelsey and oh my gosh, Taylor Swift. I'm curious to see how it works out long term, but uh uh certainly I think she's she's uh stayed with him longer than most other people she stayed with. But I can see that kind of working because they're just in different domains. Like Travis Kelsey has this very you know, he he has a lot of status in this very masculine field. And yeah, you know, uh Taylor Swift is one of the wealthiest performers that's ever existed and uh you know sells out these stadiums of uh you know bigger bigger bigger stadiums and crowd turnouts than Travis Kelsey does when he's like playing on one team of a football game or whatever. Um but uh yeah, but because they're different games, because they're different domains, you know, perhaps perhaps it's a per perhaps that is one solution to this puzzle of uh yeah, maybe maybe we uh uh as long as as long as there are games that you're winning, it can kind of work out. That's the that's sort of what is what I was getting at with intelligence, also is like what I mean to say by uh uh anywhere you are on the any of these spectrums, both in personality and IQ, you have value and worth, and uh it's not to say that you as a as a human holistically are better or worse. Um and one of the ways that that manifests is that there are so many different games to play. It's not like as humans we have this one game of just make as much money as possible. Well, no, there's lots of games. There's there's the game of how many followers can you get on Instagram, how much influence can you have, uh, how many children can you raise? Uh how how much of a community leader can you be? Uh what kind of books can you write? Like that there's all sorts of ways to be uh uh uh a productive, high status member of society because there's there's an infinite as a human, there's infinite number of uh these these games to be earning status in.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's funny. As you were saying those things, uh those are all just kind of uh indirectly, how can I propagate my genes?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it's it's funny because it's not even exactly that. It's more like uh your genes are causing you to propagate them. Um maybe we talked about this before, like the Richard Dawkins survival machine thing.
SPEAKER_00Selfish gene, yeah.
Will Scarcity Ever End
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. It's like the unit of selection is the gene, and it's the gene that's the master and us that are the slaves, not the other way around. Um and and so it's it's kind of like uh you could think of it as like humans have humans have um raised corn and wheat um for our purposes and stuff like that. But you could look at it through a corn eye lens, um, and corn has manipulated humans so that it can proliferate.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Val Harari talks about that in sapiens, that perhaps we were domesticated by corn. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Interesting, yeah. I hate everything he writes, by the way. Um my dad hates him too. I I enjoy him. What do you hate about him? Um that's that's a little bit hyperbolic, you know. But um a lot of the stuff he writes, uh I think is just factually incorrect. Um but then a lot of the stuff he writes is just so lacking in critical thinking that it's it's just frustrating. Like his whole fucking thing about uh what was it, PewJoe or or whatever, car company just being like a figment of our imagination. Yes, it's like fucking shut the fuck up. That's like I call it bong rip philosophy. Okay, it's like, oh, this like car company is just like our imagination, man. It's like money's not even real. It's like, no, these uh that that's not that's such a wrong way to think about it. And that whole section of the book, I was just like, uh, I can't take this guy seriously.
SPEAKER_00That's so interesting. That was one of my favorite ideas from that book, actually. Interesting. Yeah, the the like what how how can you justify that Piaget is real or that money is real and not just a shared fiction that exists in our minds? Like if an if you know if all of our memories were wiped in this instant and we we were looking around and you know we had these bits of plastic on our desk and we had these pieces of paper, like that they would have lost all meaning. The the their meaning comes from uh this this shared fiction that we have. What what else what else could they be?
SPEAKER_01Well it's not a shared fiction, it's just a shared system. Um because like the the US dollar, for example, is worth something because that's the only currency in which the US government will accept taxes. Right. Um can't pay your taxes with gold or bitcoin or anything else. Um so that give that's what gives money it's worth, and everybody knows that you can only pay your taxes in dollars. That's probably not the primary thing that everybody thinks about. Um it's not like you give me 10 bucks and I'm like, oh, I could pay some fucking taxes with this. Um everybody knows that everybody else knows that money is worth something. Right. Um, and and it used to be a bit different, you know, like um gold uh used to be well it's different from society to society, you know, but um something that is sufficiently like rare and you can't make more of it easily and it's portable enough and stuff like that, um, those things tend to be used as as currency. Um and it's not uh a fiction, it's just uh in uh it's a system.
SPEAKER_00To me, a the way that you're using the word system uh to me is synonymous with Yval Harari's uh uh description of uh a shared fiction. Shared fiction, I think, is the is the term he uses. Um that like oh I loved you're using the word system too. This this ties back to like all the software stuff that uh we we eventually need to get back around to. Um like what what is a system if not it's a system running on human brains, I think is is the point of connection between your philosophy and and Yval Harari's Bongwert philosophy of like with if you take out the human brains in the same way that you know if if microprocessors stopped existing, the concept of computer code or bytecode. wouldn't be very useful. Like money is a money is a program that runs primarily on human brains. That that's kind of muddy because human brains are you know, we we've built these thinking machines to kind of be uh uh to work within the system of of what we're of what we're doing. So that's that's not a great analogy. But like uh the the money and and Piuget uh is software fundamentally. It's it's a shared concept. It's a system that's running on human brains. I think is what is Yoval Harari's point that like uh and and he uses the word shared fiction to describe that that that it it's it's this story that we've all told ourselves.
SPEAKER_01Yeah so he's using the word story and I think I would use the word program um that that helps facilitate interactions between humans and then to your point fundamentally just you know allow people to propagate their genes ultimately is the is the point of all this yeah man I'm uh I I'm a little bit stuck on something because okay um money is just like a proxy for wealth um because like I don't know if you have a house or or some kind of shelter then you have wealth and you can have wealth in a society that doesn't have money. And how did money get started? How did how did we make the leap from wealth to money? Was it a binary switch uh or was there a continuum from from wealth to things that represent wealth? I I don't know if I know the story of how that went.
SPEAKER_00I have a great book recommendation and I don't remember the title I think it might be the richest man in Babylon but this idea might come from a different book that uh it it money is debt money is a is a record of you're not thinking of debt the first 5,000 years are you? Oh I think I am thinking of debt the first five thousand years. I I think that's the book. Uh yeah that that money is just a scorecard of being able to like barter with the future and there's this story that's told uh you know if you buy like a kid's book of what is money it it frames this uh picture of like can you imagine being in a in a small tribe and one person makes hammers and the other person has cows that he sells and the person with the hammer says oh I'd really like a cow to have some meat but he has to give the person 5,000 hammers for one cow and why does that why does the cow farmer need 5,000 okay well no that's not how any of this works is is the point of uh debt the first 5,000 years because in these smaller societies you would just work in favors. So they they frame a picture of like you know that this guy uh his daughter's getting married and he goes around the town and he's like uh you know oh you know my daughter's getting married oh that that sure is a nice cow I bet you know it we're gonna need some milk for the to make the cake or whatever just kind of like hinting and and uh the guy's like oh I'd I'd be happy to give you some milk and uh everyone's kind of just in their head keeping track of oh man that you know he lent me some milk for his wedding and oh and then I helped him build his barn and who who owes who what? And that's that's how things work at the individual level right like when when you're transacting with your friends well I'll get lunch this time and you can get lunch next time you're not you're not like tabulating oh it was 5736 but but I had the drink and he had the steak some some friends do this actually on like Venmo or something but that's fucked up. Yeah usually uh you know in uh without money that's that's how humans would be transacting they would be they'd be keeping track of debt in their mind who do I owe what to and who owes me a favor that that I can cash in. Money is a way to do that in a society where you have much less trust. So if it's not my neighbor who I've known for 20 years and you know he was at my daughter's wedding and and we're living in a small society how can I make that work where I can just fly to a random city and have that same sort of interaction happen where I can go out and and transact with debt that you know I I have I have provided value to someone somewhere and they owe me a favor and I'd like to cash that favor in for a Chipotle burrito. The way to keep track of that at a society level uh uh referencing seeing like a state again is with money money is a money is a uh uh it's not quite decentralized that's that's not quite the right word but it's a it's a way to uh oh no it's centralized it's it's a central ledger of debt so that you can keep track of of who has earned the most favors in society.
SPEAKER_01Well I don't think it has to be centralized and and here's a little speculation um um so like okay I I remember that thing about like an economy of of favors I think they called it equitable exchange where like I give you some shoes one day and then like a few weeks later you're like hey I have this gift for you and we like give each other gifts back and forth and there's kind of this unspoken kind of transactional aspect to it but we try not to make it overtly transactional because that would be poor form and stuff like that. But I can imagine if if there's a less familiar relationship then maybe it's like hey I'm gonna give you these shoes and let's do it the other way around. You give me some shoes and I'm gonna say hey I want to like kind of keep track of what we've done for each other whatever I'll give you these like tokens uh I'll give you this like these five seashells and that way we can like remember where we stand with each other and stuff like that. And I I that seems plausible as to like how we could have made a gradual shift from no currency to currency because obviously it's not like one day everybody all together just made a decision and took a vote that hey we're gonna have currency starting tomorrow forever. Surely it started in or in an organic gradual way.
SPEAKER_00Yeah that sounds about right um and so pulling this back to Yval Harari's thing hit his claim his his bong rip philosophy is that uh money is a shared fiction and I think uh so to to rephrase that specifically talking about money that game that gradually evolved that humans are playing of of keeping track of uh uh the the tokens of who owes who what sorry brilliant insight incoming yes um it's not a fiction it's a record define record how how is a record not a fiction um because I think you'll Harari would say you know if if it's if it's an idea that Yval Harari I think would say like a rock is real. You can you can pick up the rock you can throw it at people like there's testable things you can point to it there's the rock. And I think he would use the word fiction to mean an idea. I think for him perhaps idea is synonymous with fiction that it's it's a thing that it's a concept that that exists in our mind. That if we say well this rock represents uh uh a favor that I did for you or this rock represents your place in society and we we put it up here and that means now you're in charge of the tribe or whatever else like that that extra layer to it that extra dimension is an idea so it it's not real in the sense that the rock is real it's it's it it only exists uh within the human minds.
SPEAKER_01Yeah I see I think that might be a confusion between the idea of concreteness and realness. You know things can be concrete or abstract um but just because it's abstract doesn't mean it's not real. So like imagine you give me some shoes and we decide together that a pair of shoes is worth five units of wealth I could give you five seashells for that or we could just make five tally marks somewhere and and make a record of that. Because that's all we're trying to do is keep a record. It's just that if we keep that record using a substance that is um you know okay if we just kept that record in tally marks and I owe you or I have paid you five units of wealth you could make five tallies uh on on a tablet or whatever and then I leave your house and you put a sixth one on there and it's like you could just mess with it um uh completely freely however you want um so it has to be we have to protect against that somehow um so if you use something that's really hard to make more of then I give you five seashells uh and by the way it's like tribes who live like really far inland would use seashells as currency because you can't just go grab more um you can't mess with the record uh the record is very um the record is like very I don't know the word for it very fixed or whatever incorruptible yeah exactly exactly so it's it's not a fiction in fact it's very much rooted in reality because a fiction is something that you can like uh mess with arbitrarily you know and you can't mess with that record arbitrarily like by de by definition it can't be messed with arbitrarily so it's just an abstraction but it's still real I love that we're pulling in the word abstraction again yeah that that that seems to be the theme of of all these conversations um I see what you're saying that like the you don't like Yaval Harari's term shared fiction because uh you know you you have a a$20 bill in your wallet and that's a tangible thing that uh is incorruptible you can't duplicate the$20 bill I tried to as a kid on on my uh we got a scanner I was like oh infinite money glitch right here we have a scanner on a screen here here we go uh and uh uh so yeah you can't you can't just like it it's a tangible thing in the same way that that seashells were a tangible thing.
SPEAKER_00It's not fictional that that seashell exists that seashell actually exists. You can't you can't just make another tally mark and and have another seashell appear out of nothing. It is rooted in uh in reality. And I don't think youval Harari would disagree with any of that and I'm defending him I think because I I'm I I can see I can see the points both of you are making but uh uh I'm I'm I'm uh holding on to this idea from your valari because I don't know I I I like the idea of shared fiction I feel like it uh it it helps me frame things.
SPEAKER_01Uh well here's sorry one quick thing uh it's a can of worms we could get into at some point if we want to uh fiat currency in a sense is a fair shared fiction because the government can just print more money but that's a whole different thing. Sorry what were you going to say?
SPEAKER_00I think Yvonne Harari would say that of course the seashell is real and of course the$20 bill is real but they are valuable only insofar as other people believe them to be valuable and that's what he means by shared fiction. There's a belief that you and the the Chick-fil-A drive through cashier have that because both of you believe that that$20 bill is worth something that that that that is some sort of incorruptible record of value. No?
SPEAKER_01No, no we don't believe the seashells are worth anything um we just believe that the seashells are a record of the value the the fact that the value is rooted in your belief I think is what Yaval Harari is the point that he's trying to make that like if if a uh what what's a good analogy?
SPEAKER_00Like if an alien came down and like was trying to figure out how to how to get Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets uh we would have to explain to them and teach them that that this$20 bill is valuable that this is what we use for currency. It's not it's not inherent in the thing itself that it has any value. We would have to explain to them our story our our system of like okay you know that this this is how we keep track of things this is our record of what's useful. If you do useful work for us we'll give you these tokens that we call dollars and then you can use those to to buy them somewhere else. It would be very different so something that's like not a shared fiction that we don't need any sort of shared fiction like we could be speaking completely different languages and if the alien has a laser gun and he points it at us and says give me my Chipotle burrito right now we don't need any sort of you know he could be yelling at us in his alien language and like okay we we get it. Like you you want the burrito you want me to do what you want like here you go. Force is a is a universal language that like animals speak and aliens would speak and everything else. But we would have to teach him this language and this this uh what Yval Harari would call a shared fiction what you and I might call a system uh uh of how money works and and what the value is in there.
SPEAKER_01I I that to me is the is the point that Yval Harari's trying to make hmm interesting yeah money is not that um arbitrary of a concept um like yes we have to explain to the aliens like these green pieces of paper um but I think they would instantly recognize depending on the level of advancement of their civilization stuff presumably if they flew here they'd have a pretty advanced civilization um they'd be like oh yeah that's money okay that's this$20 bill is is worth 20 blah blah blah um because surely they would have money because like different um uh isolated peoples on earth have independently come up with money because I I think it's a very natural thing because again um wealth is uh like a natural concept like um non-human species have wealth um um and so we we've had wealth for a really long time since before we were human uh and to have a record of wealth is not a very big leap at all in fact think about it more I wonder if we had I'm sure this is how it went we probably had records of wealth before we had money we probably and yeah yeah like we probably kept track of it in our heads um and then maybe we started keeping track or track on uh on tablets and stuff like that. Yeah we had some kind of primitive blockchain or something like that where everybody knew everybody knew that uh you know maybe a a transaction would be like publicly uh publicly um acknowledged uh so that we know like okay Christian gave me some shoes and I gave him in exchange five wealth points and we keep track of that somewhere um and then after a while you know some devious guy like makes an extra mark and he's like hey you actually you owe me six or whatever yeah yeah I'm like hang on we got to figure out something better we need we need something that's not susceptible to corruptibility like these marks are I think that is if I'm remembering correctly also an idea expressed in Death the First 5,000 years that yeah it was a ledger first before it was money that I think their system one one of the early systems I think were uh clay tablets.
SPEAKER_00Uh ingenious uh uh system you you take a little clay square and you write on both sides you know uh this person has uh deposited this many bushels of grain in the in the uh central repository or whatever and then you break it in half and by breaking it in half you now have two pieces that you can verify like yep these two pieces go together this this is central and then you know in your central bank you keep a copy of it uh you know that the left side and then the person who who gave the grain keeps the right side and now you can you can verify that you uh have actually uh put that much grain in the silo. That is ingenious. You said uh something interesting of money being obvious and I agree with you you know a a a species that's able to come to earth certainly would have an IQ to be able to understand the concept of money but uh I think uh as you were talking the idea that came into my head was like I think money is dependent on scarcity and of course there is always scarcity we we live in a uh universe where you know that there's only a certain number of uh atoms of iron or or whatever else um but thinking about an advanced alien civilization and I I the the future that I kind of see us barreling towards is this idea of at least post-human desire uh scarcity that any sort of thing people might want like we're getting real close to robots are making everything for nothing and electricity is free and the robots are replicating by themselves and uh yeah we need more resources but now we can start like harvesting stuff from the moon and uh harvesting asteroids and and whatever else um in that sort of society is it important anymore to have money I don't know one of the uh one of my favorite games is uh uh Universal Paperclips have you have you played this do you are you familiar with this game? So it's my wife came in watching me play she's like what are you working? Like what is this? And it's because it's entirely text based and it's it's a genre of a game called an idle clicker which is just like there's stuff happening and and you can kind of make these high level decisions of uh it starts off there's just a button that says make paperclip and it shows you an inventory of how many wires of uh how many how many inches of wire you have and you click make paperclip and there's this little counter just text that says okay you went from zero to one paperclip and then you click it a whole bunch more and once you get to 20 or 30 paperclips it says oh you can purchase with 30 paper clips you can purchase an auto paperclip making machine which makes one paperclip every second and so you buy one of those and oh your paperclips goes down but now oh they're they're automatically going up. Oh but now you're running out of wire so we gotta buy more wire and it bootstraps from this simple thing to like we have machines that make the machines that make the paperclips and we're gonna buy advertising so that more people buy our paper clips and you can set the price of the paperclips all the way all the way up to I won't spoil the ending but one of the things that happens in the middle of the book is you have this AI that's taken over the world. It has seized all of the assets in the world and uh humans kind of become irrelevant. It it has access to like all the resources it needs to make paperclips. And at that point the concept of money disappears. There's no longer any money from that point in the game forward. And I think the idea to me is like yet you don't you don't for your own stuff that you own you're not assigning a dollar value to any of it. And you know within your family I I wouldn't charge my kids for like okay you had the mac and cheese that's two dollars to well no it's it's it's in the house now it's a resource. We don't need money that to keep track of it. We've kind of reverted to this system of favors and and uh just kind of keeping track of stuff. And if we had a robot making infinite mac and cheese, well I wouldn't even need to keep track of how much mac and cheese you've got have as much mac and cheese as you want. There's an unlimited supply of it. Unlimited in the sense that like more than you could ever possibly eat in a lifetime. And I think once you get to that threshold in society, so in an advanced aliens alien uh civilization where perhaps they have achieved this level of abundance, I don't I don't know that they would need money. If everyone has as much stuff as they could ever possibly want and the the metal to make the spaceship that they're using to go explore the galaxy for fun is pretty easy to attain because you just send out some drones to asteroids and they mine the metal and bring it back to you and assemble it for free.
SPEAKER_01Oh man uh I think we have to wrap it up soon because this is just Opening up more and more cans of i it's like a a fractal can of worms. Every time we open a can of worms we find more worm cans inside.
SPEAKER_00Um it's kind of cycling around topics though. Like I feel like we're we're we're we're discovering the shape of some thing of uh Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well there's there's certain like deep fundamental truths that that that uh what's the word? Uh I don't know that that shoot through everything. Um and abstraction, I think, is is one of those. Um but yeah, uh there's this idea of a post-scarcity society where everything is free. I don't think that's ever gonna happen, and I think if it did, it would be the biggest disaster ever to befall humanity.
SPEAKER_00Oh, we gotta talk about that then. I I completely disagree. Good.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Um But it's it's never gonna happen anyway, because uh again, money is only a record or a representation of wealth, and people will never stop wanting more than they have. And there's there's always gonna be there's always gonna be wealth, even if everything material is free. Um and you know what matters, there's there's absolute wealth and then there's relative wealth. And um your reproductive fortunes uh aren't dependent on your wealth, they're dependent on your relative wealth.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
Closing And How To Reach Us
SPEAKER_01Um anyway, uh we're an hour and a half in. I don't know what we talked about.
SPEAKER_00Um we were talking about eugenics at one point. That's uh it was a it was a whole ride.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. Um we should we should keep a counter of of how many taboo topics we broach. Um but anyway, um I look forward to the next one where maybe we can finally get around to talking about the topic we we intended to talk about. But I love all these tangents that we go on. Um I would ask you for links and stuff like that, but after you come on the show so many times, it's kind of pointless to ask for the same links again. But any any last words to share with us or no? Uh I'm delighted by these conversations.
SPEAKER_00I I I hope I hope we didn't sound completely obnoxious talking about IQ and stuff. Uh yeah, and uh uh something that that I would love to emphasize to me when I listen to podcasts is like we're real people. Uh for me especially, Jason. I don't know if if you're sick of this, but I love uh if anything we talked about today, like if you have a different take on it, uh I love exploring new ideas, reach out to me. I'm a real person, I'd love to talk about it. Uh uh X is probably the best place to do that. X.com slash C G E N C O. Uh Yeah, uh that's that's one of the reasons I think I love doing these as podcasts, as opposed to uh uh just yeah, talking on the phone with someone.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I really enjoy it too. Um please don't email me. Uh deal with No, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I mean anybody can email me anytime. My email is publicly out there. Uh just no promises that I'll respond. Um it seems like I get uh more and more correspondence every year, and uh I'm just unable to keep on top of it, and there's a lot of guilt associated with that. So yeah, reach out to me. I'll I'll never reply.
SPEAKER_00Reach out to me with what you were gonna tell Jason, and then I'll I'll bring it up on one of these shows.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Um, all right, Christian, uh, thanks again for coming on the show.
SPEAKER_00Likewise. See you next time.