Why Do You Avoid Certain Food Taboos?

6min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Cultural evolution can lead to these prigmatic truths. If you hold this belief, ok, you'll have an inaccurate view of the world, but you'll at least end up with healthy babies. And another notion that we mentioned before is, sometimes have inaccurate beliefs because of the way the social incentive structure works. You don't want to get burnt at the stake, or you want to persuade other people,. Like whitch crazes, how they spread hat around the time that science was coming on line as a strong institution of determining what's true. i wonder if there 's a kind of certain game theory, game theoretic logic to my going along with agreeing that that woman over there

Shermer, Hoffman, and Yoeli discuss: the problems game theory was developed to solve • How rational or irrational an animal are we? • the evolutionary logic of game theory • Alan Fiske’s four relationships • kin selection, altruism and reciprocal altruism • deception and self-deception • costly signaling theory • pirate rationality • virtue signaling • Putin, Russia, and Ukraine • Israeli-Palestinian conflict • justice, self-help justice, norms and laws • chemical weapons/nuclear weapons taboos/norms • dueling: what problem did it solve? • beliefs: first-order vs. second-order.

Moshe Hoffman is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, a research fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a lecturer at Harvard’s department of economics. His research focuses on using game theory, models of learning and evolution, and experimental methods to decipher the motives that shape our social behavior, preferences, and ideologies. He lives in Lubeck, Germany.

Erez Yoeli is a research scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the director of MIT’s Applied Cooperation Team (ACT), and a lecturer at Harvard’s department of economics. His research focuses on altruism: understanding how it works and how to promote it. Yoeli collaborates with governments, nonprofits, and companies to apply the lessons of this research towards addressing real-world challenges. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.