Joseph Henrich

But of course when you begin to make cities, you led to all kinds of epidemic diseases.

So if you had anticipated that, you might have worked on some of the public health procedures before you built the cities.

So foresight can be good.

Right.

Right.

So I would say that the lesson from secret is not to disregard it, but just to be cautious because we could be dismantling things that are really important for the structure of society.

And you shouldn't do that.

You shouldn't just dismiss valuable cultural practices as the relics of a medieval age or the relics of a pre-enlightened age or something like that.

So ritual is a good example because rituals seem to have real psychological benefits and binding people in community and helping develop self-regulation.

But it's easy to be an atheist like me and say, oh, rituals are stupid.

We got to stop doing them.

It turns out they're doing a bunch of stuff.

And if you don't want to lose that stuff, you got to figure out another solution.

Oh, you mean how or what we're up to is different?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, we're trying to apply science, which has been very successful in all these different areas.

Yeah.

So, you know, evidence, and we all put out our arguments, and we go through the process, and some evidence is better than others, and, you know, that's our epistemology.

Right, right.

And I do think, you know, I'm interested in the cultural evolution of epistemologies.