Michael Shermer with Kevin Dutton-Black-and-White Thinking: Burden of Binary Brain in Complex World

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Listen to The Michael Shermer Show # 153 (audio-only):
bit.ly/MichaelShermerShow153
Several million years ago, natural selection equipped us with binary, black-and-white brains. Though the world was arguably simpler back then, it was in many ways much more dangerous. Not coincidentally, the binary brain was highly adept at detecting risk: the ability to analyze threats and respond to changes in the sensory environment - a drop in temperature, the crack of a branch - was essential to our survival as a species. Since then, the world has evolved - but we, for the most part, haven’t. Confronted with a panoply of shades of gray, our brains have a tendency to “force quit:” to sort the things we see, hear, and experience into manageable but simplistic categories. We stereotype, pigeon-hole, and, above all, draw lines where in reality there are none. In our modern, interconnected world, it might seem like we are ill-equipped to deal with the challenges we face - that living with a binary brain is like trying to navigate a teeming city center with a map that shows only highways.
Shermer and Dutton discuss:
• black-and-white thinking in: physics, biology, psychology, politics, economics, society,
• What are categories and why do we need them?
• When does a hill become a mountain and how many grains of sand makes a heap?
• from quantitative scaling to qualitative categories,
• analogue vs. digital, vinyl records vs. DVDs,
• What is a species, exactly?
• How can there be dozens of genders if there are just males and females?
• Abortion: where do you draw the line?
• from categories to stereotypes to bigotries,
• tribalism, xenophobia, & racism: the dark side of black-and-white thinking,
• the difference between a cult, a sect, and a religion,
• What constitutes mental disorders? Are we all a little crazy?
• Consciousness: when do the lights come on?
• When is a Republican a conservative and not a liberal?
Dr. Kevin Dutton is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a research psychologist at the University of Oxford. He regularly publishes in leading international scientific journals and speaks at conferences around the world. He is the author of Flipnosis and The Wisdom of Psychopaths, for which he was awarded a Best American Science and Nature Writing prize. His work has been translated into over twenty languages, and his writing and research have been featured in Scientific American, New Scientist, The Guardian, The Times, Psychology Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among other publications.
This dialogue was recorded on January 12, 2021 as part of The Michael Shermer Show (formerly Science Salon) presented by The Skeptics Society, in California.
Listen to The Michael Shermer Show via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.
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4 июл 2024

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Комментарии : 37

@sherrydionisio4306 2 года назад

Brilliant, illuminating podcast, gentlemen. Thank you both.

@thebestlutz 3 года назад

I agree Michael. In Florida On the interstate the speed limit is 70 and as long as I stay right around 78 there is no drama.

@PClanner 3 года назад

Replying to "The World Series" I understand the game was sponsored by a newspaper called News of the World and insisted on labelling the baseball games World Series. Not sure this is real but that is an explanation. Great guest and fantastic interview - thanks for your work here Michael.

@houndofzoltan 3 года назад

The Sorites paradox seems useful for explaining evolution.

@carolinewalker3106 Год назад

Such an informative and interesting podcast , thank you .

@meinking22 3 года назад

Binary thinking pretty much defines current American popular culture. Whether that was biologically or socially contrived is a different question.

@ellengran6814 3 года назад

To me, the problem is «binary» religions. The consept of God and Devil from the religions created in the Middle East. A world of good and evil, two seperate entities. In Asia, god and bad can have the same entity.

@andybeans5790 3 года назад

The UK's Tier system was really good, unfortunately everyone in tier 4 counties came shopping in tier 3 and 2 areas and the divisions broke down so quickly we had to lockdown again 🙄

@grantlauzon5237 3 года назад

1:42:32 I disagree on his music point. I think genre is more of a marketing term in that sense. There are so many different kinds of Rock and Metal that have overlap. I don’t think getting rid of the terms would cheapen the music especially when those terms were made to describe something new. I think that genres/descriptions of music or any art work subtractive like in the sense pigments. An Army green has cyan and yellow the same way that Portal 2 is a linear, first person shooter, narrative, comedy, 3D plat-former, cooperative, puzzle game.

@ArcadianGenesis 3 года назад

Uploaded in the dead of night, as always.

@jps0117 3 года назад

It's always the dead of night somewhere on the planet :)

@ArcadianGenesis 3 года назад

@@jps0117 True, but I assume this podcast is made in North America. Not complaining - I'm a night owl.

@dakrontu 3 года назад

1:39:xx "man with a fork in a world of soup" - great expression

@mehdibaghbadran3182 3 года назад

Of course there’s a lot’s of other beautiful colours, between them , white & black, are the final’s of each side , and you can find mostly lovely colours from the distance’s at the middle of them.

@karenness5588 3 года назад

Interesting that part about information taking the path of least resistance and winning court cases. I can't say I agree that it has anything to do with psychopathy; it's a technique that could be used by either side to win a case. The technique is amoral. People who know the techniques are going to get ahead. One of the problems with libertarians, for example, is precisely not being able to present their case in a clear and salient manner. True, the truth is usually a lot more complex than the elegant sophistry doled out by most successful politicians and it requires more ability to present a complex case in a simple and truthful manner than outright lies, but that lack of that ability is either a matter of ignorance or faulty training in the analytical and summarizing process. Perhaps the prolbem is the moral stigmatization of those qualities that make up the definition of psychopath. We have defined people who do bad things more efficiently than anybody else as psychopaths, so that when people who do a socially desired thing do it efficiently with the same techniques, we find that we must stretch the label of psychopath, which has been drilled into us as a bad thing. The problem is with the category, not so much with our tendency to categorize and/or perhaps it is with our supposition that we know and/or the fact that some words have stronger connotations than others, stronger for some people than for others. The history of knowledge has been one of improving, refining categories, but there is always the inevitable fact that we can't know everything, as well as the fact that individuals have very different experiences that affect their perceptions. Humility is a useful moral habit in any case.

@christopherramos8276 3 года назад

Michael you've come out with the greatest podcast of the year so far!, joe Rogan must be taking note!, thanks for having such good guesses!

@nefaristo 3 года назад

Misused categorization is a problem _theoretically_ well known by... Every human being ever? I would bet every language has many popular saying warning about that. it's good to be reminded of , but not particularly well described here. For example he says "when applied to humans... Black and white reasoning ... Becomes a stereotype" implying that somehow good reasoning about humans should be different from other good reasoning. In fact, stereotypes about humans, or... animals for that matter, can be true and justified if 1) supported by good statistics 2) remembered as being statistical. Also the whole zoom in or out analogy is less useful than, idk, visualizing a simple and today very very familiar pie chart of histograms. Also, I think this should be discussed in terms of "fast/slow thinking" as kahnemann does, because this is just one particular case.

@boldandthebeautifulgimbal2881 3 года назад

Sorry had to stop and pause and comment here, dr. Shermer can you please tell your friend this. Vinyl records are an inferior medium for storing sonic information. If he uses an equalizer without measuring his speakers with a measurement mic and software, he is no stereophile.

@dakrontu 3 года назад

Around 50:00. the grain of sand idea: This is too simplistic. How many grains of sand do I need to make, say, a car engine, or a mobile phone? We know these things exist. We made them. When you put all the right bits together, suddenly you go from a heap of bits to something that works. Where is the transition point? It is hard to fathom. But clearly it is possible to make the transition. If you watch an engine being put together and turned on, you can prove to yourself that the transition has occurred, but you can't define the precise point. And the same could be said for a foetus. . If you decide that the moment of conception is the point at which life begins, you would preclude life-saving medical treatment for a woman if it would result in the abortion of a handful of lifeless unviable cells. That would be immoral. At which point does it become ok to force a woman to accept the risk of death so that her pregnancy has a chance? The woman herself might well agree that there is such a point. But she will likely be adamant that it has not been reached when the foetus is a handful of cells with no possibility of consciousness, no brain, no nervous system, etc. . The dilemmas are inescapable. They are something we have to live with. All we can do is minimise the instances. Avoiding abortions is impossible given that nature does most of them itself for good reasons (ie that not all foetuses are viable). But we can reduce the need for them by the use of contraception, something which, hypocritically, the religious people in the excessively religious zone within the US think should be banned, preferring abstinence. . Abstinence too would be a solution, except it does not work. It is incompatible with human nature. Insistence on a solution that is not viable is folly and when those insisting are intelligent enough to know that then their persistence is immoral. Sadly, we let them get away with pushing an unviable solution and then applying draconian measures including punishments for people who they have thereby victimised. What is even more ironic is that some of those pushing for the unviable solution end up as its victims too. . We need to be up-front in calling to account people who push a religious agenda that leads to unnecessarily poor outcomes which they claim are morally superior. Beware of people pushing rigidly inhuman solutions devoid of compassion.

@davidwilkie9551 3 года назад

This heap of sand story, (remembering the use of sand piles to define Chaos), is the Temporal Superposition Singularity positioning existence statement in another aspect of abstraction. "Discrete" is numerically relative analog density-intensity by default, so "One Universe" is tautology equivalent to "It's all-ways Now" or One Electron Theory is another aspect of Universe or Superspin-spiral, or Timing-spacing axial-tangential sync-duration orthogonality Calculus etc in ongoing terms of aspects of real-time significance. The analogous nature of comparison and categorization is a product of simultaneity in the Eternity-now Interval Conception here-now-forever, and infers the i-reflection containment temporal superposition aspect of connection in/of Unity (..of purpose). This gives a simple rule of thumb to distinguish degrees of sanity, because if you do not recognise that you (plural) in all aspects, are here-now-forever, in the self-defining omnidirectional-dimensional Origin of Temporal Superspin, your personality is faceted or fragmented and thereby "deranged". No one can be fully integrated, (into imagined Heaven), ..and totally sane continuously, that is re-evolution, re-shaping, mind-tools embodiment. Start thinking about the modulation complexity integration of Actuality Conception recognition, if you want something to occupy your thoughts, here-now-forever. (Explains Fairyland thumb sucking refuge in denialism)

@dakrontu 3 года назад

Psychopaths are useful if you can contain them and don't give them red buttons for nuclear arsenals. Otherwise they are as dangerous as the potential AI apocalypse. Same containment problem.

@williamvorkosigan5151 3 года назад

"Society would start breaking down if you could pick and choose how old you were". Really? But claiming to be a different gender will not. In a later episode it is asserted that there is no such thing as race, yet that was also offered as more disruptive than claiming you were a different gender. It soon becomes difficult keeping track of the nonsense we spout, does it not?

@toolame2blame391 2 года назад

A lot of people want to re live their youth, and a lot of young people want to grow up faster... If the 8 year olds become 25 and the 40 year olds become 14 (or such) yes, that wouldn't be very helpful.

@williamvorkosigan5151 2 года назад

@@toolame2blame391 Nothing you say is untrue. Nothing you say addressed the intent of my comment.

@dakrontu 3 года назад

There are millions of people whose wiring has been put in by dodgy tradesmen such as prosperity gospel holy-rollers but any attempt to fix that problem is prevented by the holy-rollers and their victims. These pernicious scams exist because they are self-reinforcing.

@peteryyz43 3 года назад

Dutton, in comparing when a foetus can be terminated, to the 'heap of sand' (Sorites paradox), makes a false equivalence in my view. Unlike multiplying, living human foetal cells in the womb; multiplying, dead, inanimate grains of sand in a heap - no matter how many grains of sand you add - that heap will never transform into a living, breathing, sentient, unique human.

@drunkrtard 3 года назад

Well the baby isn't going to turn into a heap of sand either. The point isn't what becomes what, the point is about arbitrarily determining definition points.

@StopWhining491 3 года назад

Talking in terms of "liberals and conservatives" is binary thinking: where do you draw the line?

@karenness5588 3 года назад

Me, teacher! Me, teacher! The problem is the categories. Those are useless categories. At the bottom of all politics is the use of collective force, not collective action. What are we going to use collective force for? Or, to take away all of the glitter, how do we want to use violence collectively? As we saw with George Floyd, any encounter with the police can turn deadly. Does what George Floyd did merit the potential for a mortal outcome? That is the problem with putting too many behaviors in the category of "crime," including trying to make a living during a pandemic and not wearing a mask. Do cops, whose lives are constantly at risk, speaking of the "psychopathic" qualities needed to do the job, have the ability to stop and look at each potential "criminal" and judge how much force is morally correct against the particular behavior that they have been accused of? No, most lump everybody into the category "criminal," "bad for society," "law breaker," in other words, potentially deadly and act efficiently to counter that potential, as efficiently as Nazi's eliminated the "Jewish threat" and the Soviets all vestiges of capitalism. All use of force is potentially deadly, collective force is potentially genocidal; that is something politicians just don't want to think about. The more behaviors you criminalize, the more harm you will do to society as a whole. The debate we just don't seem to want to have, whether it is liberals or conservatives, democrats or republicans, is what behaviors justify potentially genocidal force?

@wtfamiactuallyright1823 3 года назад

Wish I knew this guy in the real world for I have a shocking amount of questioning/interrogation that could only likely be satisfied after a few years. Love this sort of thing and I hate to see it abused or misunderstood by layman like myself...Or experts with conformation bias, etc. Interesting chat, enjoyed, but by the end I was starting to get a bit concerned. 'Critical race theory' By the end this was the direction you seemed to be heading IMO, I wish CRT had been brought up by this point because I see most of it as bunk/outright racist. Not that I think either of you are racist btw, it's just that this is a good example of where so many are being hoodwinked into thinking CRT is a good idea and why some of our governments are considering implementing its toxicity on our society. I think some already have, how's Biden doing on that one? :/

@KRGruner 3 года назад

Redefining "psychopath" to suit your own book-selling needs is idiotic. We ALL know the difference between psychopaths and "normal" people. To say that many can have SOME of character traits that psychopaths have, only less pronounced, does not prove anything. The examples with special forces is quite telling: these guys are tough, but the EXACT OPPOSITE of psychopaths. And to the extent that some recruits may come into the program with psychopathic tendencies,, they will either wash out or those tendencies will be tamed by the time they graduate. I know, I have worked with them. Besides, the observation that we humans automatically categorize things is trivial, well known, and an obviously necessary characteristic in order to build mental models of the world that are evolutionary relevant in a world generating essentially infinite sensory inputs. Definitely not buying or reading this book!