I want to know if you think that the sort of some weird preoccupations may have led us to be overconfident, may be about our role there. Dave mentioned about the Mueller liar thing that disturbed him and he found that deeply unsettling and he hoped it wasn't true. He says, and I'm reading now, that the idea that I can only perceive reality through a distorted cultural lens was unnerving. For me, the notion raised all sorts of metaphysical questions is my thinking so strange that I have little hope of understanding people from other cultures? Can I mold my own psyche or the psyches of my children to be less weird to think like the rest of the world? If
Joe Henrich joins the podcast to tell us that we know nothing about his work and that how we got to teach a class in anything is absolutely amazing. We continue our discussion from Episode 17 about his critique of the social and behavioral sciences in "The Weirdest People in the World" and his work in small scale societies on fairness norms. We also talk about the weird American obsession with happiness, monkeys throwing cucumbers, and why some people reject "hyper-fair" offers of more than the half the pot in the ultimatum games.
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Special Guest: Joe Henrich.
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