A Beauty Is Associated With Fairer Skin

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In most cultures, even to day, you'll find that a beauty is associated with fairer skin. And in our culture as well, if you look, for instance, at renaissance paintingsa, the folks being painted were typicallyA, typically a bit heavier. But nowadays we think of a folks who are the most beautiful as being fit and thin. It's not like we consciously deciding to like tan skin, fair skin. That's just, it's kind of a taste that we have, and that we develop from imitating others,. Or watching what pop stars do, or moving stars, or ore our friendsadYou know, it's culturally learned, and it's not biologically ingrained

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.