'Cause part of the challenge of science is that, at least as I understand a lot of your work and claims correctly, we have a-

a-S- science is a struggling problem- Yes ... and thus we have- Yes ... a ceiling problem in science.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, yeah.

And so, like, uh, if we're thinking about the best standup and it's pretty different, then, like, at some point that comedian had to think, I think, from first principles ab- about, like, what it is we're doing here.

And I think when you look at interviews with, like, really serious comedians, like, they think really specifically about what they're doing, how it works, the function of it, like, where do you come from in the beginning? And I think this mass middle that's not that good, uh, I think they don't do that.

What is the strangest idea in the world?

Yeah.

And so inside the hotel, people are eating canapes, and they're giving talks about how we might be able to, you know, reduce people's implicit bias by this tiny amount that might be noise.

And outside of the hotel, people are doubled over, um, you know, their veins full of fentanyl, and it just seemed like, I don't know if we are taking these problems seriously.

That like it really seems like what we're doing inside the hotel is burnishing our CVs, and we are pretending that all of this will ultimately lead to the resolutions of the problems outside.

And like I'm just really not sure.

I do think that the, the problems on, in the Tenderloin in SF can be solved through increasing our knowledge.

I don't think we know how to solve the problems quite yet, and even if we do know the right solutions, we don't know how to convince people to take them up.

Yeah.

listeners, readers.

The idea being that AI has obviously gotten a lot better over the past couple of years.

People are like, oh, yeah, it's going to be super intelligent.

It kind of already is.

And this is not at all my experience interacting with it in the sense that some things it's extremely good at and some things it's not good at.

And what is the dividing line between the things that it's good and not good at? I think the things that it's good at are verifiable, well-defined problems where you can tell that it's done a good job.

And so if you've got a bunch of humans in a warehouse giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down to every output, the aggregate of their thumbs up are going to reflect the truth pretty well.

Can you just talk a little bit about that concept and how do you know what the right things are to be bored about?

... we, uh, we will discuss whether economics has a paradigm or not, but first, what is a paradigm?

So this word comes from a philosopher of science, uh, named Thomas Kuhn, who wrote this book in the '60s called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was super influential, surprisingly so.

He didn't think it was gonna go so big.

He, I don't think at the time he would've thought that, uh, we'd still be talking about it in, in twenty twenty-six, um, because it, it kinda came out of some ideas he had while he was teaching a class at Harvard.

It wasn't really all that well polished, and, uh, this is sort of unfortunate in our history because this idea, I think, entered into discourse without being fully formed and then became a kind, kind of mutant version of itself that now isn't as useful.

So when people think of a paradigm now, they think of like, "Oh, it's a, you know, a way of doing things." Um, and, you know, we used to wear baggy jeans.

Now we wear skinny jeans.

But then the second question is, okay, so what, what, what would be the next step?

What do you find, what do you find there?

Yeah.

We similarly thought like, yeah, if you, if you're a real nut job for your party, probably you're gonna do worse at writing because you probably have a more warped perception of what the other side is, or maybe you're just a more warped person in general.

Maybe you're worse at expressing yourself.

Didn't find anything there.

We also didn't find any difference in terms of, okay, if you're a real nut job for either party, then when you read statements, you're probably gonna do worse 'cause you're probably in a more biased media environment.

Like, something made you more extreme in the first place.

I wonder if you have-- Maybe, maybe our listeners would be interested in some of those thoughts, and if you have any, uh, do you think some of those lessons are transferable to political science? I think we'd be particularly interested to hear, hear that.

But Adam wondered, who are the folks driving this effect?

The suspicion that, like, it's a certain kind of person who says that people are less good than they used to be, it's probably a conservative, and it's probably an older person, and we found that neither of those things are fully true.

They're somewhat true.

So it is true that people who report themselves as being more conservative or more on the right side of the political spectrum do say this more, so they see a bigger change.

But even if you go as far left as you can go in our survey population, they too perceive decline over the same periods of time.

So it's not like being on one side of the aisle turns the effect on and off.

When it comes to age, it's actually a little more complicated, so it is the case that older people say there's been more decline in their lifetimes, but they have a longer lifetime in which to witness that decline.

We don't notice the good stuff in life nearly as much as we notice the bad stuff.

When you ask these questions, what do you mean by moral decline?

There's a lot of differing opinions about what's good and what's bad.

However, there's also a lot of agreement on what's good and what's bad, so no one thinks it's fine to walk into your workplace and slap your boss across the face.

So what about things like that? Th- those, that consensual core of morality, have those things changed? And by the way, this is mainly what people mean when they say morality has declined.

It's, it's a pretty small minority of people who say things like, "Oh, look at the way teens dress these days," or, "We've got too much swearing on TV." Their top answers are things like, "People don't treat one another with respect anymore.

Our government and business leaders lie to us." So, uh, so we want to know, okay, is there any evidence that that kind of stuff has changed? Um, so here too, w- we've got a lot of data going back, uh, all the way into the '60s where people are asked questions like, "Well, how would you rate the state of morality right now?" Um, and they're asked this question over time.

Or they're asked questions about things that they do or that others do, like, "Have you given up your seat on a bus to someone who needed it?" Or, "Have you, have you looked after someone's plants, mail, or pets while they were away?" "How often do you encounter incivility at work?" Uh, "Can people in general be trusted, or can you not be too careful in dealing with people?" And over and over again, we find that answers to these questions have not changed.

There's obviously a lot to worry about in the world, but if you feel like people at their core are in moral decline, getting nastier, greedier, more promiscuous, corrupt, decadent, and that Rome is about to fall You might find at least some comfort in the fact that people have always been taken in by that illusion.

How did this happen?

Um, so we can lay out the facts first, that, um, in books, movies, TV, music, and video games, you see a very similar trend that there used to be more players in the game, um, now there are fewer and they control more of the game.

Um, so what happened there? I think here, uh, we could eventually work our way back to the rising, um......

value of a statistical life, and I think we could back this out of it.

But I think there are more proximal explanations that could explain what's going on there.

One is, um, what I call invasion, which is, um, it is much easier for anyone to produce all the kinds of content that I just, uh, laid out.

You can make a video game at home, you can write a book and self-publish it, you can make a, a movie on, on your iPhone.

Uh, what would those be? Or what would some of those trends be?