Dan Sperber

And typically there's a kind of power issue here, right? You know, it's a sort of, um, uh, the narratives, the stories, the framing is set by those with voice, with influence, with power, um, and, um, uh, and, and, uh, to, to others who have less of that.

There's, um, someone called Dan Sperber has sort of done work in this area and he calls it sort of epistemic vigilance.

So it's, you know, our, our capability, it's a nice term, isn't it? You know, sort of detecting deception, detecting when something's irrelevant, detecting sort of, um, uh, perhaps even incompetence in, in, in what other people say.

So, and to me, that's a, um, something which is, um, really important and one of these things about sort of very human attributes and skills and capabilities which is under-recognized you know it's just like it's not it's not sort of we we don't always see the capabilities that people bring to the fore in clocking to use your term, other people's bullshit.

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Thank you for all.

Thank you.

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A special thanks to my producers.

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Along the way, Jacob and I touch on metaphors for culture as dark matter, as amphibian, as a set of companion species, as living vines on a human trellis.

We touch on foxes and hedgehogs, personal culture and public culture, how to be a wizard, ecological carrying capacity and cultural carrying capacity, schismogenesis, the ideas of Sperber, Heidegger, Jung, and Koulianou, ideal objects and morphodynamics, and how viewing culture as alive gives us a different stance toward the dead.

This is not my first chat with Jacob.

As you'll hear, we overlapped in our undergraduate years, also in our postdoc years, and since 2018 have worked together at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, or DC, which of course is the sponsor and incubator of this very podcast.

So, I mean, partially like all definitions, some of these weird little extra bits are to cut off certain counter examples that people might come up with.

But that's sort of my distillation of really a view that...

I was pushed to start thinking in through encountering the work of, well, on the one hand, people who are interested in non-human animals, and on the other, folks like Dan Sperber, a French cognitive anthropologist who's had a huge influence on my thinking about culture.

Yeah, and we'll definitely say more about Sperber's thinking in a minute.

Thank you very much.

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A special thanks to my producers, Isar Webb, Jim Frank, Lucas Tafiniak, Tom Vanagden, Bernard Igneker, Curtis Dixon, Benedict Muller, Thomas Trumbull, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, Giancarlo Montenegro, Alnico Ortiz and Nick Golden, and to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Sergio Quadriano, Bogdan Kanivets and Rosie.

Thank you for all.

We're not the only ones, but We do have one, so it's been called cultural attraction, cultural attraction theory, cultural epidemiology, epidemiology of representation.

The leader of that approach is Dan Sperber, and many proponents of this approach are his former students, that includes me, but not just them.

The general idea of cultural attraction is...

Well, you could describe it definitely as a kind of mix between an evolved perspective on the mind and a view of human behavior that takes evolved psychology seriously and an interest in culture.

What's that? OK, great.

I'm really glad you knew who said that.

Yes, it was Dan Sperber.

So this idea that we should have Dan on too.

Thank you very much.

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Thank you for all.

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A special thanks to my producers, Cesar Webb, Jim Frank, Lucas Tafiniak, Tom Van Egdom, Bernard Igni, Cur-Curtis Dixon, Benedict Mueller, Thomas Trumbull, Katherine and Patrick Tobin, Giancarlo Montenegro, Alni Cortez and Nick Golden.

And to my executive producers Matthew Lavender, Sérgio Quadriano, Bogdan Canivets and Rosie.