Hugo Mercier

We should publish that paper someday.

With Hugo Mercier, we had a counter-argument to a very famous case by Joseph Henrich.

Henrich, in his book, The Secret of Our Success, which is a good book, that is pretty much a state of the art on that particular school of cultural evolution that really wants to explain a lot by assuming that culture is blindly imitated and selectively retained.

In that book, Henrique takes one of his poster examples to be a cassava processing.

No, it's interesting.

There's lots of cool work from Hugo Mercier and related colleagues about epistemic vigilance.

This idea that we have evolved psychological and epistemic defenses to being manipulated, to being conned, to being talked into doing things or misled in various ways.

And we're actually... quite skeptical of most information and quite hard to fool um and you know there's there are these prevailing narratives that are actually quite wrong that humans are very gullible and they'll believe anything it's actually quite the opposite we're quite vigilant we're quite resistant to being manipulated we're quite skeptical um and the sort of conspiratorial mindsets that you see flourishing in different spaces are actually an example of the opposite of gullibility It's being so skeptical of even the most established wisdom that you're willing to entertain these conspiracy theories.

in the first place.

It extends from this kind of hyper skepticism rather than a hyper gullibility a lot of the time.

And so there's this wonderful book, Not Born Yesterday, where Hugo Mercier goes into this psychology of epistemic vigilance and skepticism of information.

But what's interesting, what I find to be an extremely underexplored topic is the flip side of this.