Podcast transcript, then questions at the bottom

So what do we do now? Well, Paul has been thinking about perversity, and he's going to describe to us what that is. I have been increasingly interested in perverse desires and perverse actions. And when this comes out there may, if I'm lucky, to be a piece in The New Yorker website by me called Perverse Incentives, unless my editor kills, in which case there will not be. But in any case, I am interested in perverse choices. And these come in all sorts of flavors. They're everything from perverse impulses, like you're you're standing in front of a subway and you have this uncomfortable feeling you want to throw yourself in front of it, in front of the oncoming car. I know know, people who can't carry a baby onto a balcony, or can't even watch somebody on a balcony, not because they're going to throw the baby off, but they just can't stop thinking about it. And then there's what I'm maybe a bit more interested in is honest to God, perverse choices like the classic example is St. Augustine is with a bunch of friends and they steal some pears. And they weren't hungry. They threw them to the hogs. He says, "I did it just because it's wicked". And I think there are all sorts of things we do occasionally, people to different differing extents, which are done, which are irrational or wicked or foolish or unexpected. And we do them because they're irrational or foolish or unexpected. And I'm kind of interested in why. So what are some more examples of everyday perversity? Well.

I think one example of everyday perversity is fairly common, where people hold on to a view, even though there's abundant evidence against it. And so you see this in the political arena a lot. So it's no great puzzle why, you know, you guys discuss this in previous episode, why we have various cognitive illusions, cognitive biases, but sometimes people just hold on to a view. It's like such and so is a great politician or so-and-so has no chance at all, even though everybody thinks they do, just because it's different and maybe just because it's not grounded by the facts. I am tempted to believe, and there is some social psych literature in favor of this, that sometimes people hold different views just because there's so much evidence against it. And so have sort of a perverse pleasure in being the guy who believes X when everyone else believes not X. Yeah, I watched an amazing documentary about Flat Earth-ers "Behind the Curve", I think is what it was called. It's on Netflix, which definitely seems to have that sort of characteristic to it. Like they they are aware that it's crazy, but they enjoy that it's crazy and they seem to sort of enjoy that a riles people up. Yeah. I have a theory and I have no evidence for it. It comes from reading existentialists for what goes on. I like to figure out some way to test us, which is suppose you guys do everything right. You make the moral choices by what you view as the relevant considerations. You're rational. You figure out what the best things to do or that that that maximize whatever it is you want to maximize. You are reasonable. Your beliefs match the data to the requisite extent and so on. You may say to yourself one day, well, what use am I? What use is my consciousness? I'm just following the rules and following the algorithms and doing exactly the right thing. But I'm kind of superfluous in all of that. And so I think there's there's an occasionally healthy impulse to say all of the considerations say do X, I'm going to do Y. And it's I think and again, this is sort of more anecdotal. I think it's interesting that this impulse shows up in three times of of life, the terrible twos, adolescence and midlife crisis, all times where you're very concerned about asserting your autonomy. And so I think there's some sort of pleasure in that, and sometimes there's a pleasure in watching other people do it.

Perversity to me is a little bit different in that it's you're doing something that you know is going to make you worse off, right? That you're not going to like just to do it. Yeah. But let me give a - and at times it can just be stupid, it could just be stupid and ugly and evil. But let me give a sort of justification from just based on an analogy. In evolutionary theory, there's this notion, discredited by many, of the hopeful monster, and the idea is that evolution usually works by by, you know, very subtle changes in phenotypes going up and down the fitness landscape. But a hopeful monster is a case where there's a macro mutation that just jumps the creature to just a totally different space. And mostly they die. But sometimes the claim goes and even people like Richard Dawkins very critical of this have made the argument that sometimes it flourishes a whole new lineage. And so imagine doing that with your life. Imagine, you know, abandoning your family and running off to a different part of the world, say proposing marriage to somebody you barely know, having kids when you're not prepared to have kids. Perverse actions because they are not rational, grounded, but they put you in a whole new space and maybe something good will come of it. So, yeah, that's an interesting idea, so if we follow that logic a little bit. Would you argue that the people who are the least happy, who have the least meaning of their life, or at least feel the most dissatisfied with their lives, are most likely to engage in a perverse act or to benefit from perverse acts. I would suggest the second. I would think that if things are really going well for you, try to avoid perversity, you know, just just just do whatever's rational. You're already kind of on the top of a fitness peak. You know, don't screw it up. On the other hand, if your whole life is gone to hell. Well, you know, maybe maybe your algorithm for determining the right thing to do is itself messed up and you can't correct it. You're using some sort of wrong algorithm. So do something else. There was an episode of Seinfeld - your younger listeners, sorry, your older listeners may remember to show, where George, who is the show's perennial screw up, decides he's going to go on a quest where he figures out what he wants to do. He follows it, and then does precisely the opposite. And of course, it works out very well for him. Because because his instincts are terrible and if your life is going badly, maybe you have terrible instincts. And so, so, so get perverse. Again, nobody should be following our life advice. Yeah. We're like full of life advice in this episode. Terrible advice. There, we have a title for the episode. End of podcast

1) Perversity could be considered an extreme version what concept? Which one? Explain your answer.

2) What do anti-mask or anti-vax people gain from their refusal to wear a mask/get vaccinated? What do they lose?

3) How could need for autonomy at the 3 life stages he mentioned (terrible 2s, adolescence, and mid-life crisis) be satisfied by making a perverse