Mark Manson

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But we're going to continue with Alport here because he really did stumble upon, I mean, some people would definitely argue the most important branch of psychology or at least probably the most stable and replicable branch of psychology and how we understand people today.

So Alport returned to Harvard, and he started thinking very deeply about this problem.

And if you think about it, it's actually a very difficult problem, which is, A, how do you define who a person is?

Because you can't define change unless you can actually define who somebody is.

And then secondly, once you define who that person is, how do you actually measure if they have

changed at all or not there are a lot of different approaches a lot of different schools of thought obviously the freudian school of thought had to do with unconscious motivations and drives there was another school of thought that emerged slightly after this called behaviorism which we've talked about in previous episodes which was all about just measuring actual actions and behaviors kind of treating the human mind as like a input output machine alport stumbled upon a pretty novel approach to this problem

I did not appreciate how brilliant this was until we started researching for this episode.

So I had heard about this before, but up until we started prepping for this episode, it really gave me an appreciation of just how brilliant this was.

So there was a guy in the 19th century

named francis galton he was darwin's cousin he was a bit of a polymath uh wrote books and papers and articles on all sorts of different topics also was like apparently a virulent racist and nationalist and like proto-nazi but we'll leave that for another podcast yeah

But Galton had a really interesting insight.

He said that if you want to actually measure who a person is, you should start by looking at language.

Because if you think about why we invent words for things, we invent words for things because those behaviors are significant in some way that they're worth identifying with some shared language.

piece of meaning, lexical piece of meaning, right?