Joseph Henrich

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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

gnawing away at problems over long periods of time and gradually accumulating not just the obvious tools, but also the cognitive tools for addressing these things.

So the first thing that we need to do, though, is to zoom back out and think about what we mean by IQ.

And so Michael Muthu Krishna and I have made the case that IQ is just a set of cognitive abilities that leads to success in 20th century contemporary institutions that have come to dominate the world.

So it's a culturally evolved system.

And we talked before about the Flynn effect, which illustrates that.

And the fact that IQ is associated with all these positive outcomes now, but certainly wouldn't be in pastoralist societies.

So that would mean that...

If you raise the average IQ of your society, it might lead them to have more abstract thoughts and do better science, and so that certainly fits.

But the interesting thing for me is that the world of the future is going to be quite different than the one now.

So the set of cognitive abilities, which is going to be favored in the new AI world, is not going to be the same set that was favored in 1900 when they designed the IQ test.

So, for example...

In the IQ test, they ask you to remember digits backwards.

I'm not sure how useful remembering lists of digits backwards.

It was in a previous world where we had to write everything down and remember a lot of stuff.

But in some sense, we're interfacing with our technology and we got to figure out how do we – what are the set of cognitive abilities which is going to make people best able to solve problems?

And like we talked about, it's even the case that the most creative people aren't the highest IQ people.

I guess one of the things I'm trying to say is that the minds that might lead us into the new world might not be the ones that have the highest IQ because the specialized – once you're sort of augmented with AI and all these kind of technological aids we have, the specialized thing that leads someone to do something creative –

probably not going to be the same abilities that did it in 1910.

Yeah.

Maybe the AI world you're imagining is different than the one I'm imagining, but I still think that people are going to figure out what problems we need to solve unless we're just going to tell the AIs to figure out what the problems are and then solve them.

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