Joseph Henrich

speaker

1,282 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 25 May

Joseph Henrich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · 12 Mar 2025 podcast

So we have a database of the diffusion of Roman bishoprics through Europe.

And then what we do is we look at what happens when a bishopric arrives.

And I mentioned before you get a flow of people.

But another fact is if you look at the production of famous people, these places where the bishopric has arrived start producing more creative individuals relative to non-creatives.

So there's an uptick and it keeps going up for centuries.

So the relative increase.

And so that suggests you're producing more authors and inventors and writers and whatnot.

And then if you take each of those and you look at you correlate it with modern patents, places that spent more time under the church produce more patents between 1980 and 2014 based on European patent data.

And this holds if you just compare regions within the same country.

So you can see long-term effects of this and you can see immediate effects in the historical record on the production of creatives.

Well, so he's, I mean, I guess one of the things that I think is a mistake is to focus too narrowly on England.

Because, I mean, England was benefiting from ideas that were flowing in from France.

There's a lot of great science being done in France.

And, I mean, I don't think Gregory Clark's right.

I can explain almost everything he explains with cultural evolution.

And he doesn't even really take that seriously.

Right.

So patience.

So one of the things he argues is patience.

So in Weird, I use the exact same data.

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