00;00;03;22 - 00;00;07;16 Athena Aktipis Have you been zombified by bad ideas? 00;00;08;23 - 00;00;12;04 David Lundberg-Kenrick Do you really need to ask that question? 00;00;13;10 - 00;00;30;13 Athena Aktipis Welcome to the Zombified podcast, your source for fresh Brains. I'm your host, Athena Aktipis, psychology professor at ASU and executive producer of Zombified Media and all of our crazy platforms, including this podcast. 00;00;31;02 - 00;00;40;24 David Lundberg-Kenrick And I am your co-host, Dave Lundberg-Kenrick, creative director for the psych department at ASU and Bad Idea Enthusiast. 00;00;41;01 - 00;00;42;29 Athena Aktipis Oh, you love bad ideas, don't you? 00;00;43;02 - 00;00;47;26 David Lundberg-Kenrick I think I think I've never met a bad idea that I. I don't like. What about you? 00;00;48;25 - 00;00;56;25 Athena Aktipis I was going to make some quip about your relationship history, but I love bad ideas and bad relationships. 00;00;58;08 - 00;01;10;19 David Lundberg-Kenrick I mean, I combine them, I will, like, make relationship choices based on seeing shooting stars, which I'm pretty sure is not a scientifically valid point of view. Right. But I do it, so I don't know. I like all sorts of bad ideas. 00;01;10;20 - 00;01;15;16 Athena Aktipis Fireworks, too. I hear that if you see fireworks, then that's a good sign in a relationship. 00;01;16;11 - 00;01;18;12 David Lundberg-Kenrick I've never heard that you just made that up. 00;01;18;20 - 00;01;21;26 Athena Aktipis Well, just like people say, like there were fireworks when we met. 00;01;22;00 - 00;01;29;25 David Lundberg-Kenrick That's a metaphor. Yeah. Okay. All right, so you're bad idea filter. You thought it was literal fireworks. 00;01;32;05 - 00;01;32;20 Oh. 00;01;33;04 - 00;01;45;27 Athena Aktipis This is a nice little preview of just how, like, wild this episode is. I feel like because we're talking about, like, bad ideas, we're talking about, like, metta bad ideas. We're talking about filters for bad ideas. We're talking about what even means to be a bad idea. 00;01;47;06 - 00;01;57;05 David Lundberg-Kenrick Yeah, I mean, and I think we eventually come up with some that I'm like, Oh yeah, no, that is a bad idea. So but, but there's a lot that I'm like, that sounds like the. 00;01;57;11 - 00;02;21;05 Athena Aktipis Yeah, So I mean, some bad ideas are compelling, which is why we need mental immunity, which is kind of what we talk with indie Norman are amazing guest about. He has this book Mental immunity where he breaks down a lot of like how we deal with bad ideas in terms of this sort of metaphor that our brains are functioning like an immune system. 00;02;21;19 - 00;02;22;01 Yes. 00;02;22;01 - 00;02;23;01 David Lundberg-Kenrick And they get hijacked. 00;02;24;09 - 00;02;25;17 Athena Aktipis Thumbs are taken. 00;02;25;17 - 00;02;27;05 Over. Yes. Yeah. 00;02;27;12 - 00;02;33;10 Athena Aktipis Some bad ideas in me. So bad that they can compromise our ability to filter bad ideas. 00;02;34;01 - 00;02;37;26 David Lundberg-Kenrick That's true. So. So what's your favorite part of this episode? 00;02;38;16 - 00;02;47;15 Athena Aktipis Um, I think my favorite part was my zombie dog. How about you? 00;02;47;24 - 00;02;52;22 David Lundberg-Kenrick I also Really? I find that a little terrifying, to be honest, you know? 00;02;53;08 - 00;02;55;18 Athena Aktipis So you got really involved in the story. I know. 00;02;56;07 - 00;03;22;14 David Lundberg-Kenrick I did. Well, you're laughing it off now because you've been zombified by your zombie dog. Well, I know the truth of all of it. You know, it's just and he's a fantastic guest. And I think it was just it's so in line with what we're always talking about, everything from discussing what is a bad idea to, I don't know, this whole idea that the tooth fairy isn't real, that you guys were trying to push the truth. 00;03;22;14 - 00;03;22;29 Athena Aktipis The tooth. 00;03;22;29 - 00;03;27;06 David Lundberg-Kenrick Fairy. Tooth fairy? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good that. 00;03;27;20 - 00;03;41;27 Athena Aktipis We we learn so much from talking to andI, and I think you all will really enjoy this episode. So I think it's time for us to jump in. So let's hear from this week's Fresh Brain. Andy Norman. 00;03;43;09 - 00;04;15;26 I know it's crazy, but it seems so logical to add a side, but it's something psychological is doing. Makes me. Actually, I do. I'm not trying to be all analytical. Pretty simple. I am to remind myself how good she is. Something else is taking over me. 00;04;19;02 - 00;04;51;15 Athena Aktipis We started. We're here. This is awesome. So we are really, really excited to have with us today Andy Norman. Andy has written a book called Mental Immunity that is basically kind of like a handbook of like design bifurcation or like at least of your brain, right? I mean, there's so many different kinds of ramification, but one of the things that we're really susceptible to is having our brains hijacked by all sorts of information that might be coming in that might not actually be in our best interest. 00;04;51;15 - 00;04;55;12 Athena Aktipis So. Andy, welcome to zombified. 00;04;55;21 - 00;05;03;26 Andy Norman Thank you, Athena. I wish I'd come across the concept of design bifurcation before I chose a subtitle for my book that would fit in beautifully. 00;05;03;26 - 00;05;05;01 And also. 00;05;06;15 - 00;05;23;11 Athena Aktipis So is there any where did your interest in this topic of mental immunity come from? Like, how did this come about that you're like, Yeah, I want to write a whole book about how our brains actually have something like an immune system for dealing with information. 00;05;23;20 - 00;05;24;06 Mm hmm. 00;05;24;29 - 00;06;12;27 Andy Norman Well, philosophers have been thinking for a long time about how bad ideas are in, for lack of a better word. In fact, minds and irrationality seems to be contagious. And so philosophers have been trying to think about how to sort of tame our irrational impulses and the ideas that that that turn them loose for a very long time, I've been tempted by the by the virus immune system analogy since the early nineties, and I've been kind of patiently trying to work through the idea that the mind has an immune system of its own that protects us from zombie fighting ideas when it's working properly. 00;06;13;09 - 00;06;15;10 Andy Norman And all too often it doesn't. 00;06;16;20 - 00;06;45;16 Athena Aktipis Well, I love this too, because it's like, you know, you're using these analogies between, you know, the the immune system that protects us from, you know, viruses and pathogens and parasites to talk about our brains and ideas. And so like, you're like 100% here, like on the zombified bandwagon of like zombie vacation is a general thing. Like, we can use this framework to, like, think about, you know, things across systems in terms of zombie vacation. 00;06;46;09 - 00;07;01;22 Andy Norman Yeah, the fit is fantastic. I have to confess that I had to brush up on my zombie lord before coming on today because I hadn't realized that zombie ification spread by by virus. But apparently that is part of the whole. 00;07;01;23 - 00;07;02;04 Athena Aktipis Me. 00;07;02;16 - 00;07;03;15 Andy Norman Zombie thing. 00;07;03;26 - 00;07;04;09 Andy Norman Yeah. 00;07;05;15 - 00;07;07;29 Andy Norman So yeah, the fit the fits even better than I had imagined. 00;07;08;07 - 00;07;12;26 Athena Aktipis Yeah. What was your favorite thing that you came across when you were brushing up on your zombie lore? 00;07;13;07 - 00;07;21;26 Andy Norman Well, I came across the fact that the guy responsible for reviving interest in zombies was the guy George Romero. 00;07;22;02 - 00;07;24;00 David Lundberg-Kenrick Was bringing bringing zombies back from the dead. 00;07;25;13 - 00;07;26;17 Andy Norman You had something to speak. 00;07;26;18 - 00;07;27;08 Exactly. 00;07;28;06 - 00;07;46;06 Andy Norman So George Romero, the director of Night of the Living Dead, is from Pittsburgh, from my hometown. So there are zombie festivals and stuff around here every once in a while to honor the guy who brought zombies back from the dead. 00;07;46;06 - 00;07;53;28 David Lundberg-Kenrick So. So how do how do these sort of mental you talk about these ideas spreading. How does that how does that work? 00;07;54;24 - 00;08;09;19 Andy Norman Yeah, so I think so it's I think everybody understands that human beings have been living with bad ideas for a very long time. And in fact, everybody admits that we that each and every one of us hosts many bad ideas. 00;08;09;20 - 00;08;13;16 Athena Aktipis What do you think was the first bad idea that humans had? 00;08;13;26 - 00;08;30;22 Andy Norman Whoa. That's that. That's what I'm prone to asking. Big early questions. That one tops. I haven't even thought about that. But I bet you it for any first bad idea that you find. I bet you can find an early one. 00;08;32;07 - 00;08;34;14 Athena Aktipis So it's like bad ideas all the way down. 00;08;34;25 - 00;08;35;24 Yes, all the way that. 00;08;35;25 - 00;08;38;14 Athena Aktipis Bad Got ideas built on a foundation of other bad ideas. 00;08;38;29 - 00;08;40;13 Andy Norman All the way back to the Big Bang. Yeah. 00;08;40;13 - 00;08;44;11 David Lundberg-Kenrick Yeah. I wonder if the if the better question is, what was the first good idea? Oh. 00;08;44;26 - 00;08;52;15 Andy Norman Oh, yeah, that came much, much later. I'd say there. There are got to be hundreds of bad ideas for every good one. 00;08;52;15 - 00;09;11;02 Athena Aktipis I mean was the first bad idea like, oh I wonder if your teeth are sharp like a predator or like, you know what I mean? Was it like a bunch of, like, curiosity? But then led to death or bad ideas is and just like, things that'll, you know, hijack your fitness interests in general, like, is that what a bad idea is? 00;09;11;02 - 00;09;12;17 David Lundberg-Kenrick Yeah. Yeah. What is a bad idea? Yeah. 00;09;12;17 - 00;09;15;00 Andy Norman What's the answer? You know, you're getting philosophical. Are you. 00;09;15;00 - 00;09;15;10 Okay? 00;09;15;12 - 00;09;43;10 Andy Norman I'll yeah, This is the kind of the big philosophical question at the heart of my project. So it tends to come up and there are different ways to define badness when it comes to ideas. But most people agree that falsehood is bad. Making quality in an idea or a piece of information. I would argue that there are also ideas that are true but harmful. 00;09;43;10 - 00;10;19;12 Andy Norman Yeah, I mean, just think about a true fact taken out of context in a way that mislead or that creates a misapprehension. I would argue that that's relevantly similar, shall we say, to a falsehood and false narratives, rigid ideologies, conspiracy theories. These are all for me, examples of of bad ideas and also examples of mind parasites, because I take it as one of my axioms that every bad idea is a minor parasite. 00;10;20;25 - 00;10;32;22 Athena Aktipis Or maybe every successful bad idea, or is like being a bad idea, like it's like a badge. Like to get to like being a bad idea. You have to be like, good in some way. It's kind of like you. 00;10;32;22 - 00;10;34;04 Andy Norman At least have to be good at spreading. 00;10;34;08 - 00;10;34;18 Yeah. 00;10;35;21 - 00;10;41;18 David Lundberg-Kenrick So is there like, is there a ecosystem of competing bad ideas? Like. 00;10;42;16 - 00;10;44;09 Andy Norman Have you have you heard of the Internet? 00;10;44;09 - 00;10;52;01 Things you? Oh. 00;10;53;10 - 00;10;54;26 Andy Norman Yes. It's called social media. 00;10;55;09 - 00;11;01;14 David Lundberg-Kenrick Okay. And so on Social media, bad ideas are competing. Is that what's happening? 00;11;01;14 - 00;11;02;20 Well, so. 00;11;03;17 - 00;11;34;14 Andy Norman Information competes for attention. And so in a in any information economy or attention, economy, certain things draw attention away from other things. And so you can think of individual bundles of information as competing for mindshare, if you will. And the ones that do a better job of it tend to spread through cultures and in fact, more minds. How's that as a down payment on an answer? 00;11;34;14 - 00;11;39;26 Andy Norman I think that was another piece of that sort of queuing up. Remind me, bring me back to well. 00;11;40;02 - 00;11;47;29 David Lundberg-Kenrick We were just sort of talking about how bad ideas compete and, you know, the maybe even how they evolve could. 00;11;47;29 - 00;12;18;10 Andy Norman Be left and right and why social media has become such a place for the spreading of ideas. So it turns out that social media posts that express strong emotion, especially outrage, or that that fear monger that generate fear, those tend to spread more widely than more dispassionate ones. And so there's kind of an arms race for more and more in slimmer Tory material. 00;12;18;10 - 00;12;41;03 Andy Norman In fact, the more inflammatory you can be, the better your odds of becoming a major social media influencer. So think about Alex Jones. Is he is he particularly smart to know? Is he particularly well informed? No. What's he got that so many others don't have? He's outrageous and he's willing to be willing to go to. He knows no shame. 00;12;42;01 - 00;13;10;29 Athena Aktipis When you said the word inflammatory, it made me think, right. You're talking about mental immunity and like information. Like, is there a way in which by actually, like, stimulating like our systems of like, oh, that's like a bad idea or that's crazy that it it gets more attention share, which then in some way confers like higher fitness to those means, even if it's not directly getting into the brain of the person who's responding. 00;13;11;05 - 00;13;31;07 Athena Aktipis It's getting more attention to the meme, perhaps from other brands that can lead it to have higher fitness. Overall. It's like it's like extended phenotype manipulation. It's like manipulating someone who doesn't like the idea to like, respond and get all in a half, which then like attracts the attention of other people who might actually take up the idea. 00;13;31;15 - 00;13;43;06 Andy Norman This is fascinating. So and you're calling attention to the way in which inflamed worry. Information can actually spread and inflame passions even without like, taking up residence as belief, say. 00;13;43;09 - 00;13;43;20 Mm hmm. 00;13;44;22 - 00;13;56;29 Andy Norman Right. Yeah. And and that's fascinating. I'm not aware of any really detailed study of how that works, but I'm fascinated and think it would be worth examining. 00;13;57;21 - 00;14;23;20 Athena Aktipis Right. Because all of this is happening in this, you know, complex ecosystem, not just of the ideas themselves, but the social environment that, you know, we are all occupying in these online spaces. And then the algorithms that are determining what we're seeing are not right. So there's you know, there's a lot of different systems in which the fitness of these bad ideas get affected, right? 00;14;24;01 - 00;14;46;01 Andy Norman Yeah. And I think we're learning now in part through work like yours, like yours, that, you know, that that the social media companies algorithms have been selecting for inflammatory or attention. Well, actually, we know that we know this, that they're selected for their ability to keep people engaged with the social media platform. 00;14;46;11 - 00;14;46;16 Yep. 00;14;47;05 - 00;14;56;19 Andy Norman And it turns out the being, you know, level headed does not help you in the battle for attention. So being fair minded now. 00;14;57;24 - 00;15;04;08 David Lundberg-Kenrick So is it the social media algorithms or is it our own internal attentional algorithms that are selecting for these? 00;15;04;15 - 00;15;29;08 Andy Norman Well, long before the Internet, I think was it Mark Twain, I think might have been somebody else who said a falsehood can travel halfway around the world before the truth even gets its boots on. I think false rumors. And I'm sick of salacious rumors. They spread rapidly through gossip networks long before the Internet came along. They they had a kind of trends, transmission, fidelity. 00;15;29;08 - 00;15;44;24 Andy Norman What's the word for heresy now that transmissibility, I guess, that exceeds that of many humble truths. So, yeah, the Internet doesn't none of this is brand new with the Internet, but the Internet sort of cranks it up to 11. 00;15;45;23 - 00;16;06;04 Athena Aktipis Yeah, Yeah, I'm I'm still thinking like, you know, this idea of like, what is a bad idea and does it have to do with, like, the way that it affects the host of the idea, or does it have to do with the way it affects the broader environment that the individual It's a one. 00;16;06;09 - 00;16;27;25 Andy Norman So so we're free to define it either way we like, but I like to define it in in the latter way. So think about the idea that it's okay to swindle that idea might actually benefit its host financially because he might lead him or her to swindle, but it would harm others. I would call that a bad idea, right? 00;16;27;25 - 00;16;47;13 Andy Norman And there are many ideas that are relatively similar because they cause behaviors that are harmful to the to the larger, to the common good, but to the larger to the welfare of of of all of us, even if they might be short term beneficial, say, for the host. 00;16;47;13 - 00;16;52;08 David Lundberg-Kenrick So why or if those ideas are better for us, why aren't they as sticky. 00;16;54;11 - 00;16;56;11 Andy Norman Ideas like if. 00;16;56;22 - 00;17;14;01 David Lundberg-Kenrick Good ideas, right. If I guess I guess I'm wondering why. What is it that makes these bad ideas like catch on even when they're assuming on the internet competing with good competing with ideas that are genuinely helpful, Right? 00;17;14;08 - 00;17;50;00 Andy Norman Oh, that's a wonderful question. I think I guess the way I think about it is that the especially the norms that prevail in any community of discourse have a lot to have a big effect on which ideas succeed in the battle for mindshare and which ideas don't. So think about in Q and on as a subculture. And in that subculture, wacky ideas spread almost unchecked. 00;17;50;00 - 00;18;15;23 Andy Norman But the community of scientists, which has a brings a very different set of norms to the table, are far less susceptible to wacky conspiracy theories. So it's the norms that prevail in the conversation. Communities that we belong to that I think are one of the key determinants of whether you're susceptible to is bifurcation. 00;18;15;23 - 00;18;43;27 David Lundberg-Kenrick So I'm thinking about this in terms of sort of my own online communities, right? I like rock climbing and skateboarding videos and there's a lot of kind of bad ideas that are expressed like, Hey, see if you can ride a skateboard down a flight of stairs or climb this thing without a rope. Right? But I'm trying to think of what is it that makes that it's compelling? 00;18;43;27 - 00;18;54;05 David Lundberg-Kenrick Like there's something like when I see it and I'm like, Oh, that's a really bad idea. Like, you know. 00;18;54;05 - 00;18;56;00 Andy Norman So are you saying that you're part of the problem? 00;18;56;00 - 00;19;12;23 David Lundberg-Kenrick Dave I mean, I may be realizing in this moment that I do and thinking like, yeah, I don't know, is this, is this part of what for people who are conspiracy theorists, are they like, oh, that one is out there? Or are they like, Oh, no, that makes sense. Like, I don't know, like. 00;19;13;26 - 00;19;28;29 Andy Norman That's a I bet you there's some of each. I mean, I think your example of a, you know, a skateboard video that that tempts the young kids to try death defying things and might even cause a few. 00;19;29;07 - 00;19;29;20 David Lundberg-Kenrick Sure. 00;19;30;12 - 00;19;51;13 Andy Norman That's bad because it's harmful, Right. I'm mean, in other words, one of the qualities of an idea is that if it's taken up in the mind and it results in certain behaviors, if those behaviors turn out to be destruct, then we can we can call the idea that triggered those behaviors bad, at least in a sense. 00;19;52;18 - 00;19;52;29 Right. 00;19;54;05 - 00;20;07;13 David Lundberg-Kenrick Although it also the with those ideas, with the skateboarding ideas, they do also tap into some sort of, I think, more beneficial desires, right. Where it's like, okay, you want to look cool, you know, and you want to impress your friends. 00;20;07;13 - 00;20;24;11 Andy Norman And so you want to be courageous. You want to be, yeah, that the be there's an artistry involved and good skateboarding. So yeah, yeah. I mean they're very it's a very complex mix of good and bad in these death defying. 00;20;24;11 - 00;20;24;21 David Lundberg-Kenrick Yeah. 00;20;24;24 - 00;20;26;15 Andy Norman Sports videos right. Yeah. 00;20;27;03 - 00;20;58;25 Athena Aktipis I want to dig us in a little bit to like the, the nitty gritty of like what mental immunity is, what it means. So. So, Andy, when, when did you start pulling these threads together? You know kind of going back to our earlier chat just about like using these metaphors from the immune system to talk about what's going on in the brain and, you know, and how do you see the process sort of working like on it, sort of like step by step basis, like what is happening? 00;20;59;10 - 00;21;00;11 Athena Aktipis Yeah, in that. 00;21;01;21 - 00;21;36;21 Andy Norman So Richard Dawkins wrote an article in the early nineties called Viruses of the Mind, and he pointed out that, you know, six year olds are particularly susceptible to tooth theory belief, where many of the rest of us have developed a kind of immunity to it. You might say that there in fact he compared six year old children to immune compromised adults because they don't just don't have the antibodies to fight us, you know, to theory believe this was just a passing thought that where he didn't really develop it. 00;21;36;25 - 00;21;56;23 Andy Norman But it really struck me. And so I spent about a year that about ten years just kind of thinking about, gee, two minds have immune systems, and if so, how do they work and why is it that they work so well for some, but not for others? And how do you develop a mental immunity and how do you lose mental immunity? 00;21;56;23 - 00;22;09;09 Andy Norman Can you damage your mind's immune system? I think the answer to that is yes. In fact, the wrong ideas can compromise your mind's immune system, kind of like it's kind of like HIV that way. 00;22;10;05 - 00;22;23;25 Athena Aktipis Whoa. Say more. So this is like almost a meta issue here, right? That you can pick up certain ideas that might not just be bad ideas, but they might compromise. You're ability to detect bad ideas. 00;22;24;00 - 00;22;37;12 Andy Norman Exactly. So imagine think of the idea. It's okay to accept things without evidence. That idea can make you more susceptible to other bad ideas. 00;22;38;04 - 00;22;38;17 Mm hmm. 00;22;39;29 - 00;23;01;02 Andy Norman And there are, I think, many other many others. So I actually argue that there's this great big, fat, bad idea that's sitting under all of our noses, and that's had a big impact on the it's helped it come from size, the immune system of our culture. That idea is that everybody's entitled to their beliefs, everyone's entitled to their opinions. 00;23;02;08 - 00;23;34;08 Andy Norman Now, I think in a legal sense that's true. We don't want governments running around telling us what we have to believe, but it's just not true that I have a moral right to indulge in misogynistic delusions. I don't have a moral right to engage in white supremacist fantasies. That's just wrong. And there are many other examples. And the way the concept of rights works, you're not supposed to do anything to interfere with the right a right is something you never supposed to infringe upon. 00;23;34;27 - 00;23;57;24 Andy Norman Well, if I have a right to my beliefs and somebody raises questions that disturb my beliefs, they've interfered with my beliefs. So according to a prevailing orthodoxy, namely, everyone is entitled to their opinion, we're transgressing against each other. Every time we ask ourselves tough, critical questions, we're actually infringing on one another's rights to believe if we ask each other tough questions. 00;23;58;25 - 00;24;26;17 Andy Norman All of that follows logically from the proposition that we're entitled to all of our opinions. So it's time. That's why I argue in the book that that's an idea that compromises US mental immune systems. It's deeply compromised our our culture, the cultural ethos we belong to. And it's made it's very hard to enforce sensible norms of responsible thinking. 00;24;26;17 - 00;24;53;20 Athena Aktipis That's heavy. That's really heavy. Yeah. So. So are you saying that like that people might like if if we say that everybody is sort of entitled to their beliefs, that then what necessarily follows from that is that you can't interfere or that you shouldn't interfere. And the problem is sort of in that like not interfering part. 00;24;54;09 - 00;25;21;26 Andy Norman Well, all of us here, I assume, are fans of critical thinking. And and we know that critical thinking done right can disturb or interfere with beliefs that you think critically about a belief and you can lose your belief in it. So it's just kind of causally true that critical thinking interferes with belief. Combine that with the idea that you should never interfere with a right and we have a right to our opinions. 00;25;22;15 - 00;25;35;28 Andy Norman And you've already you've got all the axioms you need to prove. The critical thinking is transgressive of a fundamental right of a deeply fundamental right. 00;25;35;28 - 00;25;36;13 Athena Aktipis Interesting. 00;25;36;21 - 00;25;52;27 David Lundberg-Kenrick Now, in the in the context of the Internet, right. Critical thinking is welcome, I assume, but it doesn't necessarily eliminate bad ideas, right? 00;25;53;13 - 00;25;54;01 Yeah. 00;25;55;10 - 00;26;20;25 Andy Norman I like to say that I don't think critical thinking skills are up to the job of taming cognitive contagion in the Internet age. We for about a hundred years now, we've been trying to spread critical thinking as the antidote to bad ideas. And it's just I think it's becoming obvious that critical thinking skills alone are not enough. And I'll give you a clear example. 00;26;20;25 - 00;26;45;17 Andy Norman Suppose I'm given some really hard core, critical thinking skills in college and then I graduate and just use those critical thinking skills as an ideological weapon to just slice and dice every argument that competes with my ideology and to fabricate rationalizations for my ideology. 00;26;47;19 - 00;27;08;11 Andy Norman That's critical. Thinking turned up to 11, but it sure as heck gained mental immunity. It sure as heck gave a recipe for fair mindedness or curiosity or it's not what what we're really trying to do when we teach critical thinking. So in other words, you can be too critical for your own good. Actually, that's not the same. That's a slightly different point. 00;27;08;20 - 00;27;10;24 Athena Aktipis But to be too critical for everybody's good. 00;27;12;04 - 00;27;12;22 Exactly. 00;27;13;08 - 00;27;39;20 Athena Aktipis So as you're talking, I can't help but think back in our conversation to Dave's skateboarding videos and how like I mean, part of the issue is that, like, bad ideas can be fun, right? And like, bad ideas can be a lot more fun than critical thinking. So, I mean, I don't think it's necessarily an inherent feature of bad ideas, but they're more fun than good ideas. 00;27;39;20 - 00;27;52;09 Athena Aktipis But there are a lot of bad ideas that are more fun than than good ones. Or in the process of like sifting through to figure out what information is, you know, more useful or veritable or whatever. 00;27;52;24 - 00;28;23;12 Andy Norman Yes, that's right. I mean, if you if you go if you read about your interviews of Trump supporters, many of them were like, yeah, I supported him because at least he's interesting. You know, his outrageousness is is at least not boring. So I voted for him. I delivered a set of workshops on an Air Force base that was struggling with polarization issues. 00;28;23;12 - 00;28;53;08 Andy Norman And I encountered some young Air Force cadets who were surprised to even meet a pointy headed philosopher who thought it was important to think responsibly because they have grown up in a time when just doing stuff that's fun and outrageous and owning the libs and stuff that that that was all just good, clean fun in their world. And when they were asked to come take my workshop, they were suddenly invited into a very different world. 00;28;54;00 - 00;29;21;26 Andy Norman And I did not I did not live up to their their expectations of pointy headed liberal professors because I was not just completely wrong headed about everything. By the end, we ended up being quite good friends. But it was I could I could see them struggling with the idea that they had an obligation, that they had duties, obligations to think and speak responsibly. 00;29;21;26 - 00;29;23;16 Andy Norman That was kind of a new thing to them. 00;29;24;10 - 00;29;47;16 David Lundberg-Kenrick So I have a question sort of going off of this and also of the ways that I feel. And I think I'm not the only person who feels that this country is very divided. Right. And we've sort of gotten into our little silos. What does a mental immunity look like and how is it different from simply mental quarantine? 00;29;48;01 - 00;29;53;09 David Lundberg-Kenrick Because I think my fear would be that it's just all of us in our own little mental homes. 00;29;53;22 - 00;30;26;00 Andy Norman So, yes. So one way to prevent viruses from spreading is is to quarantine people. Right. For social distancing, isolate them in immunization. Well, immunity is quite different because you actually go out of your way to expose people to to micro doses of the of the very thing that's that's dangerous so that their bodies or in this case your mind's immune system can learn to recognize them. 00;30;26;00 - 00;30;39;29 Andy Norman So so it's not about building walls around ourselves so ideas can't get in it's letting in ideas, even bad ideas, slowly until you get used to them and you can spot them. And that way we don't have to build walls around each other. 00;30;41;04 - 00;30;45;22 David Lundberg-Kenrick Okay, So are we at the time where we can ask how to do that, or do we have other. 00;30;45;29 - 00;31;15;03 Athena Aktipis Can I can I say okay, So I like I like fine ideas. I'm just going to I'm just to put that out there. I like fun ideas, even some that aren't true because that's what a lot of stories are. They're like, you know, they're wrong, they're not truthful. They're something that we have spun from our imagination. But they can contain within them, you know, a sort of landscape that allows us to do things and explore things that we otherwise couldn't do. 00;31;15;03 - 00;31;18;28 Andy Norman And stories make amazing that way, right? Yeah. 00;31;19;05 - 00;31;39;04 Athena Aktipis Yeah. And so, you know, stories can be great ideas. They can be very untrue, but they can provide ways for us to engage with each other that can be really valuable, not just as as individuals, but as collectives too. 00;31;39;10 - 00;32;07;10 Andy Norman Yeah, and stories are really interesting because they they appeal to us in a very visceral way as sometimes a well-told story will grab your attention and keep it for a long time. And, and there's some really interesting work that suggests that stories kind of break down your your mental resistance to new ideas and open you up to learn things sometimes more rapidly than you would if you were cagey and yeah, and suspicious of everything. 00;32;07;24 - 00;32;20;22 Andy Norman So stories I think, have a huge role to play in any good culture, any culture worthy of the name. They certainly have a role to what they do play a role in spreading bad ideas. False narratives are very, very can be very dangerous. 00;32;21;13 - 00;32;46;00 Athena Aktipis Right? So then there's the question, you know, why is it that stories are able to get our mental immune system to stand down? And, you know, I mean, thinking about conspiracy theories, right? I mean, many of those are stories with characters and tension and, you know, like they're they're not just a fact, dry fact. Yeah. 00;32;46;16 - 00;33;15;11 Andy Norman So all of that all of fiction is arguably in a certain sense, false. And yet it's important and valuable. Much of it is important and valuable. I mean, I think one of the big one of the important features of stories is that they let you simulate that. They trigger a mind simulation. If a story helps you enter a scenario and run the scenario to see how it turns out. 00;33;17;10 - 00;33;52;13 Andy Norman And all of the I think cognitive scientists are more and more think that the that the forebrain, that the human neocortex is all about trying to run more and more sophisticated simulations. So we can get guess the future more predict the future more reliably and running just dry simulations where the stakes are low, like when you're sitting around as a kid reading a story and it's all pure fiction, your mind is spinning out scenarios and and trying out causal connections and trying to figure out how the world works. 00;33;52;23 - 00;33;56;14 Andy Norman And you can learn a lot about how the world works just by reading about fictional characters. 00;33;56;28 - 00;33;57;12 Mhm. 00;33;58;01 - 00;34;04;12 Athena Aktipis Right. So you can kind of learn these broader truths, even through these narrower fictions sometimes. 00;34;04;20 - 00;34;05;28 Andy Norman I think so, yeah. 00;34;06;07 - 00;34;41;09 Athena Aktipis Yeah. Also, you know, it, it strikes me that when we talk about, you know, reading fiction or watching a, you know, show or playing a video game or something, right? There's this idea of suspension of disbelief. And you could just as well say suspension of mental immunity. Right. You let that down maybe because, you know, if you think about it, it's going to be much more cognitively taxing to, you know, every for everything that you're representing in your brain or everything that you're interacting with to be like tagging that. 00;34;41;09 - 00;34;55;04 Athena Aktipis Oh, but that's not true. And that's not true. And that's not true. You just say, okay, I'm just going to go into a different mode now and pretend that all this is true and interact with it as if it's true. And then just remember later, you know that like it's not real. 00;34;56;07 - 00;34;56;14 Yeah. 00;34;56;26 - 00;35;14;26 Andy Norman That's exactly right. And, and of course, sometimes suspending disbelief that way and just entering into a fictional narrative or whatever is is transporting and an important. So last night I saw a TV show on the making of the new Avatar movie. 00;35;17;12 - 00;35;39;16 Andy Norman And I got to tell you, the original movie I know it's kind of some people loved it, some people hated it. But for me, it was genuinely transporting. I love I just I love it. I found I found the world of Avatar. Pandora was just extraordinary. And and this it looks as though Cameron has done that. Again, I don't know how good the story is going to be, but it looks visually stunning and transporting. 00;35;39;16 - 00;35;48;14 Andy Norman And I think that's important. I mean, it's clearly fiction start to finish, but important fiction in all. 00;35;48;14 - 00;36;11;29 Athena Aktipis All right. So so here's a question then. Let's say, you know, I tell you both a story that is, you know, not true on some level. Like, you know, there's there's zombies like right now in my door, right. And like, I'm trying to figure out what to do. It's really just my dog. But, you know, there's there's zombies at my door and I'm trying to figure out what to do. 00;36;11;29 - 00;36;22;22 Athena Aktipis And then, like, you guys are like, Oh, will I get into this? And like, improv with her a little bit? And then we're both kind of like, you know, talking about, you know, zombies at the door and we kind of create a you guys. 00;36;22;22 - 00;36;43;26 David Lundberg-Kenrick Heard about this thing. I don't know if you guys have read about it, about zombies that now pretend to be people's dogs because apparently this is a big thing. Oh, yeah. That they show up, there's a new strain of zombies. They can look exactly like your dog in order to let you in. And then once once you let them in, it's over. 00;36;44;04 - 00;36;45;05 Andy Norman Because the careful. 00;36;45;05 - 00;36;45;18 Attention. 00;36;46;23 - 00;36;50;21 Andy Norman To you is good at this improvising. 00;36;51;25 - 00;36;52;24 Yeah. 00;36;52;24 - 00;36;53;13 Athena Aktipis Improv thing. 00;36;54;17 - 00;36;55;05 So. 00;36;55;18 - 00;37;03;26 Athena Aktipis Yeah. So, you know, so we can create these, you know, alternate realities that exist not just in our own minds, but in our, in our collective minds. 00;37;04;03 - 00;37;04;27 Pretty. 00;37;04;27 - 00;37;39;02 Athena Aktipis Easily. And we can use those to potentially, you know, play out possibilities of the future. And we can also use them to try to potentially interpret the past what has happened. And so things that are, you know, speculation or improv or whatever, they can turn into shared realities. I think if people are, you know, together representing them and kind of on the same page and then they may be kind of like slip a little bit from, you know, being an understood fiction to being fact like at these. 00;37;39;02 - 00;37;51;26 Athena Aktipis I imagine that sometimes that's what happens with, like conspiracy theories is like people are like, oh, are the lizards. Yeah. You know. Oh, you're into the lizards too. Yeah, me too. And then you're like, Oh, yeah, the lizards grow into the lizards. And it's like, true for them in a way. 00;37;51;26 - 00;38;11;16 David Lundberg-Kenrick I mean, just thinking about the zombie dogs, right? Like, there's, like, I remember, like, two years ago when people were like, Hey, I hear there's a disease that's going to come across and it's going to just wreck America. And I was like, okay, right. Like, I've heard this before. I've heard this with stars, I've heard this with Ebola. 00;38;11;16 - 00;38;26;08 David Lundberg-Kenrick And then I remember a friend of mine like being like, Yeah, I don't think I'm going to go to my friend's wedding in Seattle because I'm really worried about this disease. And it was like, come on, you know? But apparently, I don't know if that was real. How do we know the zombie dogs aren't real? 00;38;26;22 - 00;38;31;13 So how. 00;38;31;13 - 00;38;32;13 Andy Norman Many differences between. 00;38;32;13 - 00;38;35;06 Us? 00;38;35;06 - 00;38;36;16 Athena Aktipis I'm going to let my zombie dog in. 00;38;36;19 - 00;38;38;26 Oh, my gosh. No, don't do it. Don't go. 00;38;39;11 - 00;38;40;26 David Lundberg-Kenrick Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. 00;38;41;15 - 00;38;46;26 Andy Norman I hope the zombie zombie dog can't spread through the Internet hook. 00;38;47;10 - 00;38;48;06 David Lundberg-Kenrick She seems all right. 00;38;48;16 - 00;38;49;28 Yeah, so far. 00;38;50;09 - 00;38;54;23 Andy Norman So zombie dogs may not spread across was send cats. 00;38;54;29 - 00;39;03;23 David Lundberg-Kenrick So, Andy, I've heard that once you let a zombie dog in, it takes over the host and then the person is actually the zombie song. 00;39;04;11 - 00;39;06;02 Andy Norman Oh, I love the wordplay here. Oh. 00;39;07;10 - 00;39;07;18 Oh. 00;39;08;04 - 00;39;32;02 David Lundberg-Kenrick So I have a question about zombie ification of ideas that goes back a little bit because one thing we've talked about in terms of biological zombie fixation throughout other episodes, like things like toxoplasmosis and how it affects rats and it makes them like cat urine and these other sort of like wasps that take over cockroaches is sometimes the host creature loves it, right? 00;39;32;02 - 00;39;37;23 David Lundberg-Kenrick It takes over the parts of their brain that make it like this is the best thing ever. 00;39;38;04 - 00;39;39;26 We're all going to go get eaten by cats. 00;39;41;03 - 00;39;47;24 David Lundberg-Kenrick So do these ideas. Do something similar? 00;39;47;24 - 00;40;16;19 Andy Norman Well, you've heard of the philosopher Daniel Dennett. He opens his his book about the philosophy of religion by telling the story of a small microbe called The Lancet Fluke that reproduces in the stomachs of but sorry, it gets carried by ants. But the toxoplasmosis microbe needs to get it find its way into the gut of a cow in order to reproduce. 00;40;18;01 - 00;40;42;04 Andy Norman And so the Lancet fluke actually hijacks the ant's brain and gets it to climb ups stocks of grass to where they're more likely to get chomped by a cow and end up in a cow stomach. So here's an example of a microbe that's actually commandeering the nervous system of an ant and sending it to its own death so it can reproduce. 00;40;43;15 - 00;40;45;22 Andy Norman And of course, this is all an analogy for. 00;40;45;27 - 00;40;51;01 Athena Aktipis So many examples of this kind of thing. In biology, it's all over the place. 00;40;51;01 - 00;40;51;12 Right? Right. 00;40;51;22 - 00;41;16;06 Andy Norman And then it's suggestion was that this is more common in the world of ideas than we like to think too. Ideas can spread it at their hosts expense. They can get their hosts to do self-destructive things. They can get their hosts to sacrifice their own interests. Think. Think about the person who gives their entire life to spreading the gospel or spreading the to proselytizing. 00;41;17;22 - 00;41;20;06 Athena Aktipis Or teaching evolution to ever. But wait a. 00;41;20;06 - 00;41;25;24 Second. Maybe that's a good idea. Worth was asking if these ideas. 00;41;25;24 - 00;41;26;09 Andy Norman Parallel. 00;41;26;09 - 00;41;26;27 This. 00;41;27;21 - 00;41;30;28 Andy Norman Yes, in all fairness, we have to ask both questions now. 00;41;31;10 - 00;41;46;09 Athena Aktipis But we do get hijacked by spreading ideas for sure. Good ones and bad ones, right? And sometimes the ideas are good, but they could still hijack us against our own evolutionary interests to spread them, even if they're good. I guess I was I was trying to say that in a roundabout way. 00;41;46;15 - 00;41;52;21 David Lundberg-Kenrick I guess. I guess the question is who is benefiting? Who is benefiting here? Is there so is there a person benefiting or. 00;41;53;07 - 00;41;56;03 Athena Aktipis The idea itself, the fitness of the idea? 00;41;56;06 - 00;42;28;07 Andy Norman Yeah, I think we have to take seriously the idea that ideas can spread to their own benefit, but to the harm of all human, to all of their human hosts. I think that examples are are too numerous to say. So. So a colleague and friend of mine studied the spread of witchcraft beliefs in early modern Europe, and he analyzed very closely who was who benefited from know certain people gained power by spreading accused by accusing people of witchcraft. 00;42;28;29 - 00;42;49;24 Andy Norman But but this almost always came back to bite them in the ass that they ended up getting accused themselves. Right. So it turned out a very detailed historical analysis of how witchcraft beliefs spread. The answer to the question is certain witchcraft beliefs spread because they were better at spreading and other witchcraft beliefs died out because they were less good at spreading. 00;42;49;25 - 00;42;54;20 Athena Aktipis Do you have any examples of the good versus bad witchcraft beliefs? I just I'm fascinated. 00;42;54;23 - 00;42;54;28 That. 00;42;55;00 - 00;43;10;05 Andy Norman I can give you an example to my to my way of thinking. They're all bad ideas. But but the idea that witches can. So in certain parts of Europe, the idea rose that witches could could spread by sorry could travel by broom broomstick. 00;43;10;17 - 00;43;11;24 Athena Aktipis Mm. 00;43;11;24 - 00;43;40;14 Andy Norman And all of a sudden this meant that you could, you could accuse a hundred women within a ten mile radius instead of just the three women who might be within walk within walking distance of the of the satanic ritual that occurred on a certain night. So certain festivals of witchcraft were said to have happened. And then the question is, as of rounding up all of the witches, but if witches can travel by broom, you have to round up 100 witches. 00;43;40;20 - 00;44;05;22 Andy Norman Not just the three, two or three witches who are within walking distance. And so where the concept of witchcraft combined with the idea that witches can come back, can travel by broom, the the accusations got much bigger. The show trials became bigger and that infected other triggered other waves of accusations. Does that make sense? 00;44;05;22 - 00;44;06;08 Yeah. 00;44;06;16 - 00;44;13;08 David Lundberg-Kenrick That were these oh, were these witch trials is benefiting somebody though or. 00;44;13;22 - 00;44;43;13 Andy Norman It's it's hard to find anybody who is a clear beneficiary. I mean it basically taught the social fabric. It destroyed a lot of towns. It destroyed trust among people. There were some people who rode the witch accusation train to early riches or fame. But but it the better explanation seems to be that their minds were hijacked by things that weren't even serving them well. 00;44;44;03 - 00;44;45;04 Hmm. Interesting. 00;44;45;13 - 00;45;00;27 Athena Aktipis Yeah. And in this case, the ideas that sort of allowed just for a quicker expansion of the, you know, the audience, I guess. 00;45;01;02 - 00;45;01;17 Yes. 00;45;01;18 - 00;45;08;23 Athena Aktipis In a way there this is like, you know, kind of early lessons for social media algorithms or something like that. 00;45;08;23 - 00;45;10;06 You know, your audience. 00;45;11;01 - 00;45;23;24 Andy Norman I keep hoping that, you know, the people at Twitter will read the work of on this witchcraft belief early and oh, my goodness, we need to adjust our algorithms. 00;45;23;24 - 00;45;28;13 David Lundberg-Kenrick We need to add brooms instead. 00;45;28;13 - 00;45;29;06 Brooms. Yeah. 00;45;30;19 - 00;45;36;05 Andy Norman Do do zombies fly on brooms? 00;45;36;05 - 00;45;38;27 David Lundberg-Kenrick They could only only the ones that can transform into dogs. 00;45;39;08 - 00;45;43;02 So. Wow. 00;45;45;06 - 00;46;09;29 Andy Norman So just to, you know, to bring it around to, you know, what do we do about these mind viruses and so on, I think we can develop our immunity to two bad ideas. Now, none of us is perfectly immune. We all harbor some bad ideas, but it's quite clear that some of us are better at spotting bad ideas and weeding them out than others. 00;46;11;06 - 00;46;41;21 Andy Norman And and the basic skills involved, I think, can be taught. So when we understand the mind's immune system scientifically, how it works, what helps it work better, what causes its functioning to to break down or or to degrade, then we can start redesigning our culture so that Iraq contagions of irrationality. Outbreaks of unreason don't spread as as easily. 00;46;42;04 - 00;46;42;16 Hmm. 00;46;43;22 - 00;47;02;01 Athena Aktipis I think I'm still not 100% clear on like what we still mean by a bad idea. Like, is it just is it something that's harmful to the host's fitness and or the fitness of others? Is that a bad idea? 00;47;02;01 - 00;47;07;17 Andy Norman So here's the thing that this is the kind of question that will occupy philosophers for the next thousand years. 00;47;07;22 - 00;47;13;16 Athena Aktipis Yeah, but functionally, pragmatically, for thinking about mental immunity. Yeah. 00;47;13;16 - 00;47;30;05 Andy Norman I mean, look, I can approximate what what I think we should mean by by. I think an idea that is both good and useful has a strong claim to be a good idea and a claim that is either false or harmful. 00;47;32;08 - 00;47;34;06 Athena Aktipis For either the host or others. 00;47;34;26 - 00;48;07;14 Andy Norman For either the host or others has a serious strike against it and probably should be viewed with a jaundiced eye. So we should try to fill our heads with claims that are both true and good for humanity and any we indulge in beliefs that are either false or harmful to self or others. There's an opportunity to rethink their and to put our thinking into a better place. 00;48;07;14 - 00;48;20;27 Andy Norman So so I think that's a pretty good rough and ready concept of good idea, bad idea. And we can go a long ways with that even before we address the hyper technical questions some of my philosophical friends are raising. 00;48;21;04 - 00;48;45;20 David Lundberg-Kenrick Would reasonable would it be safe to say that the sort of I don't know whether you'd call it the patient zero of bad ideas or the first, you know, covert One of bad ideas is the idea that in order for one person to get ahead, somebody else has to fall behind. Is that who is that idea? Laying the foundation? 00;48;46;14 - 00;48;47;19 Athena Aktipis Zero. Yeah. 00;48;47;19 - 00;48;49;21 This idea that's a. 00;48;49;23 - 00;49;00;02 Andy Norman That's a strong candidate for a a pretty bad one that I don't know about. It's it being sort of patient zero or, you know, bad idea. Zero. 00;49;00;02 - 00;49;00;22 David Lundberg-Kenrick Sure, sure. 00;49;01;08 - 00;49;23;09 Andy Norman But yeah, I mean I think the idea that others have to lose so that I can win causes and a lot of bad behavior and so that would be I let's call it let's agree to call that a a pretty nasty mind above All right. 00;49;23;09 - 00;49;23;25 Oh. 00;49;24;11 - 00;49;38;10 Athena Aktipis Speaking of nasty mind bugs, I know that we want to get into solutions, but we for we get into solutions. I feel like we just have to go a little bit deeper with the zombie apocalypse of all of this. I know that already. I'm dealing with a zombie dog in my household, so that's just not the apocalypse going on. 00;49;38;10 - 00;50;23;07 Athena Aktipis But I feel like there's also a zombie apocalypse of ideas that are not good, that are taking over brains, right, and making people behave in ways that they might not otherwise behave. You know, and you can think of some of these ideas is like making it into the brain, getting past that mental immune system. Right. That that you've articulated, and then proceeding to affect the neural pathways and maybe even gene expression throughout the body in ways that change people's inclinations to behave in various ways and change how they interact with others and in ways that sometimes might be bad for them, sometimes might be bad for others. 00;50;24;12 - 00;50;43;21 Athena Aktipis So if we take all of this in, you know, all of what we know is kind of already going on in terms of brains being hijacked by bad ideas, and we turn it up, you know, we're like, okay, what if instead of this happening as much as it's now, let's like turn up 50% or turn up to 11 or whatever, whatever you want. 00;50;43;21 - 00;50;45;18 Andy Norman To with turning a mental immunity here. 00;50;45;26 - 00;50;50;18 David Lundberg-Kenrick No, no, no. We're turning down we're turning up the spread or this is the apocalypse. It's just. 00;50;51;29 - 00;50;52;02 Andy Norman A. 00;50;52;02 - 00;50;53;00 David Lundberg-Kenrick Bad idea. 00;50;53;11 - 00;51;04;13 Athena Aktipis Yeah. So what does that look like? If if the bad idea spread is worse, If our mental immunity was more compromised than it currently is. What's that? Zombie apocalypse? 00;51;04;13 - 00;51;37;24 Andy Norman Well, so we don't have to go far for examples here. And let me give you a I think a very a case that in my mind is a very clear one. America's last president, Donald Trump, just delighted in flouting norms of responsible speech. He just he remember when he used a Sharpie to to alter a weather map and retroactively justify a claim he had made. 00;51;38;15 - 00;52;10;12 Andy Norman He was basically saying, I don't care about your evidence and I'm not bound by this. These these norms of of evidential these these evidential expectations that the rest of you all are bound by. Some of his followers were thrilled by that simply because he was defying norms that they feel that that to them feel oppressive. And yet he was trampling all over the norms that keep bad ideas in check. 00;52;11;27 - 00;52;57;07 Andy Norman So for four years, we got to see one of the most powerful, probably the most powerful man in the world, basically defy and defile the norms of responsible speech. And we watched bad and then human not happened and flatterer theory is back and neo-Nazis are are are rallying in the streets. I think we got to see up close and personal one of the most damaging things you can do to a culture's immune system, which is is brazenly defy the norms of accountable talk in public in ways that invite others to do so. 00;52;57;07 - 00;52;59;25 Athena Aktipis So you're saying, like we basically were. 00;53;00;07 - 00;53;00;17 We're. 00;53;00;17 - 00;53;09;20 Athena Aktipis In it and maybe we're still dealing with the aftermath of the the zombie apocalypse of of, you know, mental immunity being compromised? 00;53;10;01 - 00;53;42;27 Andy Norman Absolutely. I mean, I think this the prevalence of bad ideas and and not just bad ideas, but bad ideas that hijack minds and warp them. And when you think about how many people are saying that political ideologies are tearing their families apart with people who said, I can't talk to my parents anymore, I don't even want to go home for Thanksgiving because I can't see eye to eye with my crazy uncle Frank, who won't shut up about people trying to take the government, trying to take his guns, whatever it is. 00;53;43;07 - 00;54;09;27 Andy Norman I mean, look, these are forces that are tearing families apart. This is harming people in very fundamental ways. And yeah, it's here. And I think it's it's tearing at the social fabric in ways that are genuinely alarming. And I think the zombie apocalypse is a wonderful metaphor for what's happening because it is contagious. It is. And the Internet is helping it spread. 00;54;10;22 - 00;54;34;18 David Lundberg-Kenrick Can I can I ask a question? Sort of going back to the examples you said real quick, because you'd mentioned splatter theory and neo-Nazi ism. And to me, one of those ideas is that neo-Nazi ideas much worse, right? Is the flat theory that bad or is it just silly? I guess it's sort of like it's just wrong. Yeah, but I mean. 00;54;34;18 - 00;54;39;19 David Lundberg-Kenrick But is it is it because to me, it doesn't necessarily seem wrong in a way that's harmful, right? 00;54;40;02 - 00;55;04;21 Andy Norman Yeah, I would say that the overall amount of harm being caused by flat are serious is pales next to the amount of harm being caused by, you know, neo fascism. But when you indulge in irresponsible thinking in one area of your life that can damage your mind's immune system, leaving you more prone to other forms of of kooky idea. 00;55;05;05 - 00;55;29;22 Andy Norman So so there's been a really interesting study by a team in Canada that basically says if you take the idea that you have an obligation to change your mind when new evidence comes in, if you take that idea seriously, you become less susceptible to conspiracy thinking and political zealotry and flat earth and climate denial. And it goes you can go down the list. 00;55;30;22 - 00;55;58;13 Andy Norman That willingness to to change your mind in the face of evidence is like the linchpin of the minds immune system. If that idea is operative for you, you are have a certain degree of immunity to a number of bad ideas. And then if your religious springing upbringing tells you no, no, no, it's more important to accept things on faith that can damage the minds immune system. 00;55;59;07 - 00;56;20;17 Athena Aktipis It's interesting because ultimately, you know, if what you're saying is true here, that we need to remain open to evidence for our mental immune systems to be healthy, that's basically saying we have to be willing to let things in in order for our immune system, our mental immune system to be healthy. 00;56;20;20 - 00;56;30;02 Andy Norman That is a you've just juxtaposed two things in a really interesting way there for me. I love Yes, yes, and yes. And there's a curious little. 00;56;31;17 - 00;56;32;28 You're willing to let stuff. 00;56;32;28 - 00;56;35;11 Andy Norman In its important for your ability to keep things out. 00;56;35;22 - 00;56;38;01 Mm. Yeah. 00;56;39;03 - 00;56;52;09 Andy Norman Yeah. But I think in part because if you let in the wrong stuff and grow attached to the wrong stuff, then you become willfully resistant to new to real evidence or new evidence. 00;56;52;18 - 00;57;25;08 David Lundberg-Kenrick So, so going back just again to climate change, right, Because I accept that climate change is real. So essentially on faith, I accept it because somebody who I believe is an expert on climate change has told me this is real and I don't think I would have an easy time determining that. Right. The Flat-earth one is an interesting one because like and I like thinking about the flat Earth because I can try to figure out how could I figure that out on my own? 00;57;25;08 - 00;57;38;24 David Lundberg-Kenrick And it feels like the sort of thing that I could probably call a friend in Europe and sort of say, Hey, is it dark there? You know, or things like that. But some of these but there doesn't there come a point where we have to trust other people? 00;57;39;01 - 00;57;39;15 Yeah. 00;57;40;26 - 00;58;06;15 Andy Norman Wow. Wonderful question. And I guess so. I know what you're saying when you say that to a certain extent we have to take it on faith that climate change is real. And I'm going to push back slightly by saying that there's I think there's some important differences between accepting the testimony of climate scientists and taking something on faith in the religious sense that there are similarities. 00;58;06;15 - 00;58;24;16 Andy Norman And your and you're not wrong to call attention to the similarities, but there are also important differences. And because of that, I would urge you not to use the word faith. I think you actually improved your own description of the situation when you replaced Take It on Faith with take it on the testimony of of others. 00;58;25;01 - 00;58;25;07 Mm. 00;58;25;22 - 00;58;49;24 David Lundberg-Kenrick Oh I close but, but I guess well I mean this is, this would be a whole other episode possibly, but I think when I think about let's say the tooth fairy. Right. That comes from this idea of not just trust any information on the street, it's trust your parents, right? Trust an authority. Um, and I don't know, maybe the moral of the truth for fairy is that we shouldn't always do that. 00;58;49;24 - 00;58;50;29 David Lundberg-Kenrick But of. 00;58;51;01 - 00;58;53;05 Athena Aktipis Truth. The truth, fairy truth Fairy. 00;58;53;05 - 00;58;54;07 David Lundberg-Kenrick Yes. Oh. 00;58;54;19 - 00;58;55;08 Hey, guys. 00;58;55;21 - 00;58;59;23 Andy Norman Made that very same verbal slip on the Joe Rogan experience. 00;59;00;06 - 00;59;01;02 But you fairy. 00;59;01;18 - 00;59;18;26 Andy Norman And what's contact that by some of his listeners who said you got to write that? And so I've written a children's book called The Truth Fairy. And if any of your listeners want to publish an awesome kid's book that teaches critical thinking to eight year olds, I've got the manuscript I just need. I just need to hear from the publisher. 00;59;20;00 - 00;59;42;29 David Lundberg-Kenrick But but I think even I think so. I think when we think of parents and I think for a lot of people and we think of religious leaders, I grew up, you know, somewhat religious. And I think that I am looking to people who have achieved. And when I look to scientists, I'm looking to people who have achieved a certain degree of success in a certain field, whether that is academic or whether that is sort of living a life that I find admirable or. 00;59;43;08 - 00;59;54;12 David Lundberg-Kenrick Right. And so I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how do we how do we still do that while building mental immunity? 00;59;54;18 - 01;00;21;06 Andy Norman Yeah, I mean, I think you're doing the right thing. So in any complex society, there's going to be division of labor. And in any society that's concerned to understand a lot of things, there's going to be division of cognitive labor. And so smart people saying, you know, end up saying things like, well, my expertise is music, so I'm going to let I'm going to trust the the experts on nuclear physics to do what they tell me about nuclear physics. 01;00;21;12 - 01;00;50;04 Andy Norman That's that's just smart. Right. But that's and the trick here is trying to figure out who the genuinely reliable sources are. So if you put your trust in a reliable source, you're liable that your mind is liable to fill up with true beliefs. If put your trust in an unreliable source, then you become then that unreliable source becomes a kind of a transmission vector for for bad ideas. 01;00;50;04 - 01;01;06;19 David Lundberg-Kenrick Okay, that's interesting. But now if I put my if I look to the wrong if I look to somebody who's an expert because I could totally see this idea of, oh, I've got to figure out something about nuclear physics, I'll ask my music teacher because he seems real smart, right? 01;01;07;05 - 01;01;07;12 Oh. 01;01;07;22 - 01;01;14;05 David Lundberg-Kenrick And I like how to determine. I'm not sure I even know what the question is. I'm just processing what you're saying. 01;01;14;05 - 01;01;16;21 To be honest. Well, there. 01;01;16;21 - 01;01;28;22 Andy Norman Is a phenomenon where where somebody becomes an expert in something and they start getting so full of themselves that they fancy themselves experts on pretty much everything. And then they, you know, venture outside of the realm of. 01;01;29;02 - 01;01;34;04 Athena Aktipis Oh, you mean being a public intellectual? 01;01;34;04 - 01;01;35;25 Oh, I've always wanted. 01;01;35;25 - 01;01;36;19 Andy Norman To be one of them. 01;01;37;09 - 01;01;37;15 Yeah. 01;01;37;18 - 01;01;49;29 Andy Norman Mean, there are there are pitfalls on the road to public intellectual and absolute big ones. 01;01;49;29 - 01;01;52;19 David Lundberg-Kenrick So it's now time to start talking about solutions. 01;01;52;20 - 01;02;17;10 Athena Aktipis I need to know what do we do? How do we how do we cultivate that, you know, mental immune system. And actually also before we get into that, there's this I heard you say a few things, you know, about kind of our responsibility in terms of like what we're actually thinking and then also what we're saying and that there's like a moral dimension to this. 01;02;17;10 - 01;02;39;27 Athena Aktipis And I want to hear about that just like, explicitly. Like what? Like you think we all have a moral responsibility to not think certain things and think other types of things. Like I'm just curious about that maybe before we talk about what we should be doing, because if there's a moral element to it, ethical side, you know, then that's, that's a cool thing to explore as well. 01;02;39;28 - 01;03;08;00 Andy Norman All right. So I'll start with the latter and we'll come back to the former. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a chapter in my book called The Ethics of Belief, and I build here on a really famous exchange between a brilliant Harvard psychologist who defended the ethics of believing in God and an equally brilliant physicist who thought it was ethically wrong to believe things without evidence. 01;03;08;00 - 01;03;41;18 Andy Norman And their arguments played out brilliantly. And I explore those arguments and show that both men had a piece of the truth, that there's a larger truth here, that that in order to really understand the difference between good ideas and bad ideas, we have to learn from the debate. They had that over 100 years ago. But but yeah, I think part of developing a strong mental immune mental immune system is involve recognizing that you have obligations, ethical responsibilities because of belief. 01;03;42;05 - 01;04;10;28 Andy Norman So here's a here's a common point raised by my students when I teach the stuff, I'm why should my beliefs and my thinking be constrained by ethics when it's only my overt behavior that can impact others? So so thoughts and beliefs don't impact others directly. They can only harm others indirectly. So at least on the face of it, we don't really have ethical responsibilities with regard to believe. 01;04;11;15 - 01;04;38;12 Andy Norman We only have ethical responsibilities with regard to external overt behavior. But I think that's wrong, as my students themselves discover for themselves. Because if you entertain beliefs, you're actually sowing the seeds for different behavior down the road. If you indulge in, I don't know, self-serving beliefs, at one point in your life, you've become more likely to indulge in harmful beliefs later and harming others. 01;04;40;08 - 01;04;58;29 Andy Norman So the the way I read this debate, the physicist who said that we have that that there is an ethics of belief and we need to learn to take it seriously in order to cultivate our minds properly. I think we need to bring the ethics of belief back and teach it so that everybody knows how to think responsibly. 01;04;59;17 - 01;05;15;02 Athena Aktipis So what do we have a ethical responsibility to believe or not believe or is about the process of how we've come to believe things? Where does the ethical and moral piece come in? 01;05;15;02 - 01;05;42;09 Andy Norman What I mean, I guess I see ethics as it is shot through everything. So it it's not that it comes in, it's that it's already there and it's kind of already everywhere. No matter what we think or no matter what we say, we we could be thinking or saying or doing something different that might have a better impact on others. 01;05;42;09 - 01;06;06;00 Andy Norman And that makes every decision a moral decision. There are there are ethical dimensions to every decision we make, and we can either tune into those considerations and take them into account. I think I think that's what the most ethical people do. Or we can tune them out. And that's often not a good thing. Does that. 01;06;06;14 - 01;06;07;12 Yeah. Speak to you? 01;06;08;14 - 01;06;23;11 David Lundberg-Kenrick So how can we so how can we promote this sort of ethical thinking on a global level, not just in college campuses, but just around the whole? You know what I mean? For everybody? 01;06;24;02 - 01;06;56;02 Andy Norman I, I have been asking myself this question for a long, long time. I think people who live in university environments get to enjoy a there's a there's a marvelously invigorating and mind protecting thing that happens when you belong to a community of people who are really curious and who like to test each other's ideas. Everything becomes more interesting. 01;06;56;02 - 01;07;20;27 Andy Norman You become you bump elbows with physicists who can tell you how how fundamental particles work and you bump into music teachers who can tell you how harmony works. And so it's I think we should build a world where everybody gets to live in something like a university community where learning all the time out of passionate love of learning is just what everybody does. 01;07;22;12 - 01;07;27;24 Andy Norman That would be a world where cognitive contagion is much less common. 01;07;29;06 - 01;07;30;29 Athena Aktipis Or when it happens, it's a good kind. 01;07;31;11 - 01;07;31;29 There we go. 01;07;32;11 - 01;07;36;18 Athena Aktipis Right? Because learning is I mean, teaching, right? It's like you're trying to transmit. 01;07;37;00 - 01;08;05;05 Andy Norman It quite right. I think that's right. So by contagion, I mean the bad. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, what we want to do is we want to make we want to create cultures where good ideas spread rapidly and bad ideas have a hard time. You know, getting mindshare any mindshare at all. And the more open and tolerant and the more critical thinking is normalized, the faster we'll get there. 01;08;07;01 - 01;08;27;21 Athena Aktipis Make sense. What are some practical things that we can do in our day to day lives to increase our mental immunity, to support that mental immune system, to cultivate the like, you know, mental analog of a good microbiome, right? Want the ideas in there that are going to help you process everything else not to interfere? 01;08;27;22 - 01;08;39;22 Andy Norman Yeah, well, here to here are two of my favorites. I can I could go on about this for a long time, but here's a couple. So it turns out doubts are the antibodies of the mind, and especially the. 01;08;39;22 - 01;08;40;20 Little. 01;08;40;28 - 01;09;14;24 Andy Norman Quiet qualms you might have about something. So somebody comes along and floats an idea and you have some qualms about it, but you brush them aside and then the idea turns out to be a really bad one. But you've invested in it now. You've paid a price. It turns out if you'd listened to that, those qualms more carefully and kind of let them speak to you, qualms are trying to tell you something about the idea that there or the action under consideration and a lot of times they'll reveal a dark side to the thing that you have qualms about. 01;09;14;26 - 01;09;37;15 Andy Norman But you have to learn to listen to that little voice in your head that says, you know something. Something's not quite right here. So I think one of the best things you can do is learn to listen to your doubts. And the other thing that's really important to do, I think, is, is to treat the challenges of others not as threats, but as learning opportunities. 01;09;37;15 - 01;10;18;11 Andy Norman So it turns out that when we perceive other people's questions as threats, we tend to get defensive in the conversations go downhill and. We tend not to learn from them. That's actually an auto immune disorder that's utterly, completely, perfectly analogous to auto immune to auto immunity. But if you learn not to overreact to challenging information or even to ideas that challenge some of your core beliefs, if you learn to say, Oh, that's interesting, let me fight them the sense of panic and give you the time of day and hear you out and listen to your objection. 01;10;18;11 - 01;10;32;19 Andy Norman Maybe I can learn from it. If I can postpone the panic that might set in otherwise and really just try to learn from different points of view. Our minds start to work better and we start get we get better at spotting bad ideas. 01;10;33;18 - 01;10;53;12 Athena Aktipis It's interesting to think about the reasons sort of, you know, that people might be defensive right? One is like if people perceive it as like a challenge to their status. I mean, you see this in academia all the time where it's like, Oh, who are you to challenge my idea? You know, I've been working on this for 45 years and you're just some, you know, young person who came into this into my talk. 01;10;53;12 - 01;11;19;22 Athena Aktipis Right? So there's a there can be like a status threat that's perceived absolutely. But, you know, if there isn't if there isn't actually you know, if there's actually a benefit to uptake in that information, then there might be some situations where the bad ideas that are already in the brain are hijacking the mental immune system to get it to like respond as if that new thing coming in is a threat. 01;11;19;23 - 01;11;37;08 Andy Norman Your quick study in? Absolutely. I think this actually happens. I think bad ideas that settle in as kind of cherished ideologies then recruit the mind's immune system to do battle with good information that might disturb, disturb them. 01;11;37;08 - 01;11;52;02 Athena Aktipis Yeah. And any any ideas Right. That are good at doing that are going to be more likely to persist in brains and more likely, you know, to have more transmission opportunities as a result. 01;11;52;07 - 01;12;06;03 Andy Norman I think we can we can now make zombie ification, real science. I think we have all of the things we need now to say. Science of design bifurcation has finally arrived. 01;12;06;03 - 01;12;24;16 Athena Aktipis Well, I think that's maybe a great place for us to to end this delightful conversation. Andy, thank you so much for sharing brains with us. And I have to say that, you know, there is there's no need to put, you know, take my mental immunity down to listen to what you have to say. And I'm glad that I did. 01;12;24;16 - 01;12;25;03 Because. 01;12;26;00 - 01;12;27;29 Athena Aktipis Really great brain sharing happening today. 01;12;27;29 - 01;12;34;17 Andy Norman So thank you. It's been a real pleasure for me of both of you. Dave, David, it's nice to meet you as well and wonderful. 01;12;34;18 - 01;12;35;07 David Lundberg-Kenrick So thank you. 01;12;35;14 - 01;12;36;23 Andy Norman Yeah. Let's do this again sometime. 01;12;37;07 - 01;12;38;18 Athena Aktipis Yeah, sounds great. Thank you. 01;12;39;01 - 01;13;18;19 And if the world says I work for legally binding, but don't fall in love, you better tell me right now. Since I went crazy in this motherfucker is going to fall in love. You better tell me right now. 01;13;18;19 - 01;13;47;19 Tell me what sounded like and sounded like it sounded right now. 01;13;55;29 - 01;14;00;28 Athena Aktipis Zombified is a production of Arizona State University and zombified Media. 01;14;01;12 - 01;14;10;18 David Lundberg-Kenrick And we would like to thank everyone who made this episode possible, including the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. 01;14;11;05 - 01;14;16;04 Athena Aktipis The Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative, and the President's office at ASU. 01;14;16;17 - 01;14;19;06 David Lundberg-Kenrick The Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. 01;14;19;17 - 01;14;23;09 Athena Aktipis Of Bad Ideas and Good Ideas. 01;14;23;09 - 01;14;26;23 David Lundberg-Kenrick The Flat Earth Society. 01;14;26;23 - 01;14;34;05 Athena Aktipis Oh, all the brains that helped make this podcast, including Tall Rahm, who does our amazing sound. 01;14;34;20 - 01;14;39;01 David Lundberg-Kenrick Mm hmm. Or so he'd have us believe. And Neil Smith, who does our illustrations. 01;14;40;08 - 01;14;43;06 Athena Aktipis Lemmy, the creator of our song Psychological. 01;14;43;29 - 01;14;54;19 David Lundberg-Kenrick And our entire Z team, who does so much from transcribing to social media to who knows secret stuff, they don't even tell us about. 01;14;54;28 - 01;14;57;16 Athena Aktipis Being there for us. We have a breakdown. 01;14;58;01 - 01;14;59;17 David Lundberg-Kenrick That's true. That's their job. 01;14;59;23 - 01;15;11;27 Athena Aktipis So in all seriousness, though, like Z team, you guys are amazing and you help support us in so many ways. So like extra little shout out. Thank you so much. 01;15;12;23 - 01;15;24;07 David Lundberg-Kenrick So and you can all follow us and support us. You can drop your mental immunity and just check us out on all platforms. 01;15;24;26 - 01;15;27;12 Athena Aktipis We are zombified media so you can look us up there. 01;15;28;05 - 01;15;31;06 David Lundberg-Kenrick From the food media dot org right. 01;15;31;06 - 01;16;04;02 Athena Aktipis Well, so I zombified mean is our handle on our platforms and then as zombified media dot org you can see all the other things that we're doing including channel Z and learn about our, you know, zombie apocalypse medicine meeting if you want to learn more about that so you can like link out to all of the things and then if you just want to go and see like all the cool podcast covers, you can go to zombified dot org and like browse, you know, all of the cool illustrations Neil has made of all of our guests over the years and then link directly to the episodes there. 01;16;04;09 - 01;16;08;23 Athena Aktipis So yes, a zombified dot org is where you go for everything podcast. 01;16;08;28 - 01;16;09;08 In it. 01;16;09;19 - 01;16;16;23 David Lundberg-Kenrick All. And if you want to support us on Patriot because we still we have a patriot. 01;16;16;28 - 01;16;17;25 Athena Aktipis We do, we have and. 01;16;18;05 - 01;16;20;11 David Lundberg-Kenrick We have a patron, right? So thank you to our. 01;16;20;11 - 01;16;20;25 Patron. 01;16;22;12 - 01;16;36;13 Athena Aktipis Is that we are educational, no ads and so please think about supporting us. As little as $1 a month on Patreon will help us keep making these awesome episodes. And also, don't forget. 01;16;37;02 - 01;16;37;27 To buy. 01;16;38;10 - 01;16;46;15 David Lundberg-Kenrick Our. All right. You know, our hats have a special coating that helps protect your brain from bad ideas. 01;16;46;23 - 01;16;49;20 They do? Yes. This. 01;16;49;20 - 01;16;56;08 Athena Aktipis So buy those hats by those stickers that if you put those stickers on your computer, they'll actually protect your computer from viruses. 01;16;56;20 - 01;16;56;29 Mm hmm. 01;16;57;18 - 01;17;01;29 David Lundberg-Kenrick And if wear our t shirts, you'll know you'll live forever. Yeah. 01;17;01;29 - 01;17;04;04 Athena Aktipis So they're really we have the best merch. 01;17;04;09 - 01;17;04;22 They're really. 01;17;04;22 - 01;17;05;13 David Lundberg-Kenrick Good. Yeah. 01;17;05;21 - 01;17;07;12 So. All right. 01;17;08;06 - 01;17;13;18 Athena Aktipis Well, thank you all for listening to zombified your source for fresh brains. 01;17;14;01 - 01;17;24;26 I know it's crazy, but it seems so logical. I can't imagine there's something supernatural with you. 01;17;26;22 - 01;17;30;23 In a hazmat.