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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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

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.

So, societies have varied over time in what counts as good evidence and what counts as a good argument.

So one of the psychological changes that we see emerging in Europe compared to other places is how much – how important is what the ancients say?

So in lots of societies, you're really – if someone says something and you can say Aristotle or Confucius didn't believe that, then it's like, oh, gosh, I guess I'm sunk.

Whereas at some point, Europeans decided actually who cares what Aristotle thought.

We know a lot more than he did.

So this is a big epistemological change.

And then the emphasis on empirical evidence in science is not something you find in earlier traditions within Europe, and it's quite variable across different societies.

So you should think of the very standards by which we count a good argument and good evidence is itself culturally evolved.

Yeah, absolutely.

So polycentricity, there should be lots of different competition amongst these groups, no single funding sources.

Lots of different priorities.

One thing I point out in this book I'm working on is that scientific papers tend to be more impactful when the authors are from more diverse societies.

But interestingly, people are biased to work with people from their own society.

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