Latest / Why We Do What We Do / Why I'm Not Doing Something Else Right Now

Transcript

Why I'm Not Doing Something Else Right Now · Why We Do What We Do

• 0:03
  You're listening to Why we Do what we Do. Welcome to Why we Do
• 0:16
  what we Do. I am your Weighing my Options host Abraham, and I'm
• 0:21
  your Prime Choice host Shane. We're a psychology podcast. We talk about all
• 0:26
  of the things that people do and animals do and why they do them and
• 0:30
  sometimes how we describe those things quantitatively using math and Yeah, so thank you
• 0:35
  for joining us. If you're here with us for the first time, we
• 0:37
  appreciate you being here. If you enjoy what you hear today, consider liking
• 0:40
  and subscribing, leaving a rating and review, joining us on Patreon, head
• 0:43
  of our to our website, tell some friends all the cool stuff. But
• 0:46
  if you're listening to this on the day that it publishes, I'd like to
• 0:49
  wish you a happy backwards day. Yeah. It's a backwards day, apparently
• 0:55
  backwards day, which is different than in opposite day from what I understand.
• 0:59
  It's also not the same as Dackwards bay ah man. See that's a Spoonerism
• 1:03
  day. Yeah, that's different. They're all different. It's also appreciate your
• 1:07
  Social Security check day. Okay, So I feel like that's a fairly unique
• 1:11
  American experience. Yeah, in like fifteen years. No one will even know
• 1:15
  what that means, right, Ooh. It's also Gorilla Suit Day to bust
• 1:21
  out your gorilla suit. Yeah. It's also Eat Brussels Sprouts Day, which
• 1:25
  I am a big fan of. I like that. Absolutely hell is freezing
• 1:29
  over day, so okay, all right. It's also Hugging Economist Day.
• 1:34
  You know, I don't know that I need too. Yeah. It is
• 1:38
  Inspire your Heart with Art Day, which is what it sounds like. Do
• 1:42
  art. I like that, look at art, buy art from artists.
• 1:45
  Yeah, especially local artists, support them. Yeah. It's also National Hot
• 1:49
  Chocolate Day, which I think Abraham needs one right now. I do I
• 1:53
  need a hot chocolate filled with coffee? Just hold choolate. I think that's
• 1:57
  a mocha. I do love moochus. No, I love chocolate. I
• 2:01
  just I just need the coffee. It is a Scotch Tape Day, yep
• 2:07
  it is. It's also Cordova ice Worm Days, so it's like a Cordova
• 2:10
  ice worm week. Oh I remember this. I remember talking about this like
• 2:15
  a year ago. Yeah, it's so weird. It's an International Hot air
• 2:19
  Balloon Week. Yeah, where it's more temperate, I guess. Yeah,
• 2:22
  as I say, like, I feel like, at least in our part
• 2:24
  of the world, this is not the week to do that sort of thing.
• 2:27
  But no, I think it's fine here in my part of the world,
• 2:32
  and my part of the world, I think you're okay. I think
• 2:35
  it's probably pretty nice to do it. Sure, it's a national Cowboy Poetry
• 2:40
  gathering week, which sounds like so many things coming together, and I want
• 2:46
  to watch that. I want to see what happens there. I don't know
• 2:50
  if you know this, but Elko, Nevada, this rural town and northeastern
• 2:53
  Nevada, hosts Cowboy poetry and it is like a national event. A lot
• 2:58
  of people go to this this thing that actually sounds really wholesome. Feel free
• 3:01
  to stop by. I will wish you good tidings in your journey. I
• 3:06
  appreciate that it is us snow sculpting week. Yeah, I mean not here.
• 3:15
  That does make sense with now with my part of the world. Okay.
• 3:16
  Anyway, we're actually we're not a podcast that just talks about days of
• 3:21
  the week. That would be a short podcast, and I mean there's only
• 3:24
  seven of them, although there's lots of things to talk about. What those
• 3:27
  seven shore Anyway, as I said, we're actually talking about psychology things.
• 3:31
  In this particular instance, we're going to get down into the nerdiest of nerdy
• 3:36
  math things. So trigger warning for those of you for whom math is not
• 3:39
  your forte. We are not going to ask you to do math. We're
• 3:44
  barely going to ask you to think about math, but we are going to
• 3:46
  be talking a lot about how people use math in a very specific way.
• 3:51
  Yes, as somebody who is math diverse, I approve this episode. Okay,
• 3:54
  so I think we'll be okay, Okay, that's very helpful that you
• 3:58
  can weigh in with. Oh yeah, here, yeah, I got I
• 4:00
  got a covered. We do have three real stories to help couch this narrative
• 4:05
  into the real human experience, and these are real that they have all happened
• 4:11
  to a real person at some point. Story one, a person brings the
• 4:14
  groceries to the checkout counter, they receive the total, do for their groceries,
• 4:18
  they pay for their groceries, and they leave. That is a thing
• 4:20
  that has happened. It is a real story. Yes. Another real story
• 4:25
  is that a their universe person who never developed a comprehensive ability to speak or
• 4:29
  understand language digs Fexis out of the toilet and throws it at a nearby caregiver
• 4:33
  or support staff. That does happen, That does happen, That has happened.
• 4:39
  Story three. A person starts gambling and gets so hooked that they spend
• 4:43
  all of their savings to continue their gambling habit. One day they sold their
• 4:47
  jewelry and their dishes just to get more money to fuel their gambling habit.
• 4:51
  Yes, so all three of these scenarios that we just talked about, these
• 4:56
  people were in a situation and they did some particular thing in which of these
• 5:00
  with someone making a choice one of them, all of them, none of
• 5:03
  them. But we've got to start kind of looking at that perspective of like,
• 5:08
  which scenario was the choice scenario? Yeah? What is choosing? How
• 5:11
  and why do we do it? And so this is a discussion in part
• 5:15
  about making choices and why people make choices and how we understand the choices that
• 5:21
  they make. But it's also and this is directly linked to choices a primmer
• 5:27
  on the idea of the matching law inside of behaviorism behavior analysis that specifically choice
• 5:33
  more broadly so general category choice specific thing that we're talking about inside of that
• 5:39
  is the matching law and understanding what that means and what it is. If
• 5:44
  you're new to behavior analysis, or maybe you're totally tangential and have never heard
• 5:47
  of behavior analysis or you or behaviorism or whatever, and you're just here for
• 5:51
  the psychology kicks, that's cool. I think that this is something that anybody
• 5:56
  can can grasp onto and understand what it's proposing to say. Yeah, and
• 6:00
  so to go on record, we want to make sure and I just I'm
• 6:03
  I'm gonna be the buffer on this. Okay, Now, Abraham is going
• 6:06
  to be as nice as possible, and it's trying to be nice. You
• 6:11
  may see some leakage here, though I'm going to try. I also want
• 6:15
  to invite you, Shane, to both hold me accountable to that and also
• 6:18
  feel free to challenge me on my arguments here, because so I took the
• 6:24
  lead on preparing the discussion for this and jotting down notes and outlining our ideas
• 6:28
  here. And I also understand that I sometimes live in an echo chamber of
• 6:31
  my own making, in my own world, where I just sort of talk
• 6:34
  to myself and then agree with the things that I've said and that that I'm
• 6:38
  not always right, and a lot of people point out, like, know,
• 6:41
  how about this thing. I'm like, oh, I never thought about
• 6:43
  that, and so I prefer to be challenged. But I have outlined my
• 6:47
  ideas around this thing now so that we can have this discussion, get it
• 6:51
  out there, and then you know, get back to me, let me
• 6:54
  know what you think. Maybe I got it wrong, but yeah, I
• 6:56
  also really appreciate that you talked about being in an echo chamber. You're sitting
• 7:00
  in a room full of padding to prevent echoes from happening. This is true.
• 7:03
  I have tried to reduce the echoes, and we'll see how well it
• 7:08
  works. I just use books for mine. I just use books. Trip
• 7:11
  blocked the echo of mine. So, like, there's just so much paper
• 7:13
  in my room right now. I'm pretty sure it's a fire hazard. Ye,
• 7:17
  yes, although Florida not maybe as much as other places. We call
• 7:23
  it wet fires here wet fires, Yeah, they are. They're at risk
• 7:26
  of being moist books. Sure. All right, let's get into some of
• 7:29
  the background on our topic here. In nineteen thirty eight, BF Skinner,
• 7:33
  famous behavioral scientist arguably the progenitor of behavior science more generally, although there were
• 7:41
  people who preceded him, but he really kicked us off. In nineteen thirty
• 7:45
  eight, he published a book called The Behavior of Organisms, which I actually
• 7:48
  I always assumed this was a reference to Darwin's On the Origin of Species,
• 7:53
  although I realized the only thing they have in common is the word on sure
• 7:58
  and of, I know they don't have on. It's just of. That's
• 8:01
  pretty much it. Anyway, it was the cadence of it felt similar.
• 8:05
  I could be wrong, but I just assumed that it had some reference to
• 8:07
  that I don't know. In this book he published The Behavior of Organisms,
• 8:11
  He recounts many experiments, largely with rats, to understand how and why they
• 8:16
  learn to perform specific types of actions when they receive food rewards. Right,
• 8:20
  and so this eventually spawned an entire field inside of psychology, several journals unaccountable
• 8:26
  research strands uncountable I'm sorry, sorry, not unaccountable. They are very accountable.
• 8:30
  Let's be clear. They are uncountable research trands at thousands of careers,
• 8:33
  all based on operat learning theory. So this was kind of like the face
• 8:37
  that launt a thousand ships, right. This was the sh was a hellen
• 8:41
  of Troy of behavioral science. There we go. Okay, and at the
• 8:43
  risk of being reductionist because we're going to sort of gloss over the fine details
• 8:48
  here, one of misimportant detail and nuance. Let's briefly describe how Skinner studied
• 8:54
  learning and Skinner's experiments. He arranged a situation in which these rats were in
• 9:00
  a cage with a lever that they could press despite all their rage. Yes,
• 9:05
  I had to. I set it up. That's fair. So there
• 9:09
  are sequence of steps in which the observer Skinner or maybe a hapless grad student,
• 9:15
  whoever the observer was, they would release strategically timed food rewards. The
• 9:18
  rat would eventually approach touch and eventually press the lever. And the shaping of
• 9:22
  their behavior toward a specific target in this case was they were shaping towards pressing
• 9:26
  a lever specifically, so they were actually kind of leading the rat to learn
• 9:31
  how to press the lever. Then the food they earned would be automatically distributed
• 9:35
  at a predetermined interval or responses of pressing the lever, depending on how they
• 9:39
  arrange the experiment. All right, very good. So to be clear,
• 9:43
  because we want to make sure we're really we're really understanding the arrangement of the
• 9:48
  situation here you have the rats are in a cage. Despite the rage,
• 9:52
  they're just being rats. And they eventually learned that certain movements, orientations,
• 9:58
  or actions will reliably produce food. Okay, sure, So most of the
• 10:01
  time they that they're in these cages, they're kept on a calorie restricted diet
• 10:07
  so that they would be highly motivated to earn that food, and so they're
• 10:11
  usually a little hungry. Then the food would be made available to them if
• 10:16
  and only if they performed a certain action, in this case, pressing the
• 10:20
  lever. As we've been discussing, right, They tried experiments of just putting
• 10:24
  a light in the room and food was only available for the lever press if
• 10:28
  the light was illuminated, and saw that the rat would come to learn the
• 10:31
  light signal the availability of food and would only press if the light was on.
• 10:33
  So there are these kinds of things, these different variations of the experiment
• 10:37
  that have really expanded from this original press the lever get food. And we
• 10:43
  do need to kind of put a pin in that idea of what the light
• 10:45
  signals there, because that we'll come back a little bit later when we're talking
• 10:48
  about understanding behavior shaping in these situations. Okay, right, so they were
• 10:54
  motivated because they were hungry, there was a lever, there was food available
• 10:58
  for pressing the lever. That's just a brief synopsis of essentially what was going
• 11:03
  on in these cages. Now, if you wanted to, you could say
• 11:05
  that every time that the rat pressed the lever, they chose to press the
• 11:11
  lever. Sure, they could have done anything else, but they made the
• 11:13
  choice to press the lever. Why because they were hungry, it was available,
• 11:18
  They earned food by doing so. As I just said, okay,
• 11:22
  so why not frame this then as a choice instead of just talking about the
• 11:26
  fact that they did it. Why frame it as a choice? Well,
• 11:28
  I don't think we need to. So saying that they made a choice implies
• 11:31
  to some extent that they were saying the independent variable which was the cause,
• 11:35
  or that we are saying the independent variable which is the cause, or at
• 11:39
  least an independent variable is their choice making. So choice making in itself is
• 11:43
  the IVY and an oversimplified but very useful framework for thinking of this kind of
• 11:48
  ABC always be closing. Wait, I meant antecede behavior consequence. So if
• 11:52
  we start looking at it from that paradigm, antecedeon being what happened before the
• 11:56
  behavior itself was B and then consequence or what happens after a C. We
• 12:00
  can kind of look at it from that perspective, and in choosing you would
• 12:01
  need an extra B or maybe a separate A. So this becomes a unique
• 12:07
  challenge. So let's kind of map this out. Antecedent, the lever's present
• 12:11
  and they are hungry, right, so that's kind of what we see there.
• 12:15
  That's the antecedent. Okay, good beginning. B they choose to press
• 12:18
  the lever, but B two as they press the lever, So choosing to
• 12:22
  press the lever and pressing the lever are both behaviors in this kind of context.
• 12:26
  And then C they receive the food. So that's kind of an easy
• 12:31
  way to simplify, or that's a simplified way of looking at that particular context.
• 12:35
  Yeah, it's a useful heuristic for understanding the sequence of things that are
• 12:39
  related to a behavior that occurs. Okay, so we added and we sort
• 12:43
  of shoehorn in this be there. It's maybe an antecedent. Maybe a behavior
• 12:46
  seems to be on the behavior side, since it's something organism is doing anyway,
• 12:50
  If we take choice out of the equation, the orderly and predictable sequence
• 12:54
  of offense is not changed. It's not more mysterious by the fact that we
• 12:58
  are not saying that they may a choice. Said another way, adding the
• 13:01
  concept that they choose to press the lever adds nothing but confusion and fantasy to
• 13:07
  our understanding of their behavior, because we now have to try and insert some
• 13:11
  other thing and relate it to the things that we can directly observe, and
• 13:16
  presumably assume that it plays some causal role in their behavior. Right, Because
• 13:20
  I think at the end of the day, what's really helpful to for those
• 13:22
  folks that are listening is that choice is something that an organism does. Right,
• 13:28
  So choosing to do something is something that we specifically do, we specifically
• 13:33
  engage in. A dead person cannot do that. A dead person can also
• 13:37
  not listen to ads. Okay, so we talked about this arrangement. Here
• 13:48
  we have the rats are in the cage, the pressing the lever. You
• 13:50
  could say that they're choosing the press the lever instead of doing anything else,
• 13:54
  but we also know that they are in a situation where they're hungry. The
• 13:58
  levers available. Pressing the lever earns food food. If we add the idea
• 14:01
  of choice in there, doesn't actually change our understanding about this. Arguably it
• 14:05
  makes it more confusing and makes it less easy to actually drive a comprehensive analysis.
• 14:11
  But what if we gave them two levers? Ooh, now do we
• 14:13
  have to specify that this is choice? Okay? So in the nineteen sixties,
• 14:18
  a scientist by the name of Richard Hernstein or maybe Hernstein either way,
• 14:24
  published studies that showed that if you teach a pigeon to peck a button that
• 14:28
  produces food reinforcement intermittently, which means kind of like randomly, not randomly,
• 14:33
  but kind of randomly, not as often as one, yes, every once
• 14:37
  in a while, Yeah, and then another button next to it that also
• 14:39
  produces food intermittently, but on a slightly different schedule or kind of like pattern.
• 14:43
  Yeah, the bird will essentially learn to peck each button at a rate
• 14:48
  that is approximately equal to how much food is available per button. So basically,
• 14:52
  simply put, they'll peck the button that produces more food more often.
• 14:56
  They'll peck the button that produces less food less offen. Yeah, they'll pick
• 15:01
  both because in most of these experiments like they can maximize how much they can
• 15:05
  earn by pecking at both because it's at usually certain intervals. It's like as
• 15:09
  in intervals is a sort of about to elapse. Actually in this case,
• 15:13
  they're usually unpredictable intervals. But they'll essentially allocate the majority of their responses to
• 15:18
  the one that produces the most reinforcement, and a proportionate less amount of responses
• 15:24
  to the one that has less reinforcement. And he summarized his finding in a
• 15:28
  mathematically quantitative formula. I don't know if that's redundant to say, but he
• 15:33
  did that. Here's the math. Here's the math part. You're gonna listen
• 15:35
  through it and you're gonna ignore what I say. And that's fine because it
• 15:37
  doesn't matter. Basically, you had response one or behavior one divided by behavior
• 15:43
  one plus behavior two equals reinforcement one divided by reinforcement one plus reinforcement two.
• 15:50
  That gives you a rate of behavior is equal to a rate of reinforcement.
• 15:54
  That's basically all the equation says. And he found that this effect was so
• 15:58
  consistent and predict like Skinner had done three decades earlier in his career. HU
• 16:03
  that he dubbed it a scientific law, and the formula states that again,
• 16:07
  as I said, the relative rate of responding from an organism, in this
• 16:11
  case the pigeon behavior one divided by behavior one plus behavior two matches the relative
• 16:18
  rate of reinforcement reinforcement one divided by reinforcement one plus reinforcement two. Sure,
• 16:22
  that is the whole equation as it was originally conceptualized to talk about understanding the
• 16:29
  choice between these two buttons. I think the thing that is really important to
• 16:33
  kind of pinpoint here is that this equation he is saying is a law.
• 16:37
  It is so so consistent that it is a law that it is essentially it
• 16:44
  is it is written to be. There's not really a lot of variation from
• 16:47
  that. If you break the law, you go to nature jail. I
• 16:51
  don't want to go to nature jail. It's probably full of I don't know,
• 16:53
  scary things in the woods, and I don't like being outside. And
• 16:57
  you want to be really nerdy about these data points. These data that we're
• 17:00
  talking about are plotted on a log rhythmic graph, where the one axis is
• 17:03
  the rate of response permitted and the other axis is the rate of reinforcement per
• 17:07
  mint it as a scatterplot type of analysis. So you can kind of see
• 17:10
  a scatter plot of this, and the dots aligne such that the rate of
• 17:12
  response increases. So two does the reinforcement in a nearly perfect straight line,
• 17:18
  which is kind of fun to see. Eureka, we've discovered it. And
• 17:22
  analysis of behavior is so eloquent, so consistent that it can be quantified with
• 17:26
  a simple mathematical formula and predicted with nearly surgical level precision if it works that
• 17:33
  way. Sure, sure, so, of course we know, especially when
• 17:38
  you kind of get into the muck of it, it's not that easy for
• 17:41
  a lot of different reasons. For one thing, we can easily quantify how
• 17:45
  many responses a pigeon does, but how do we quantify how much reinforcement they
• 17:48
  receive? That one of the questions kind of arises out of this. You
• 17:52
  got to think about that sort of thing. Yeah, right, at the
• 17:53
  most basic, does one food pellet mean one reinforcer? What if it varies
• 17:57
  in size or freshness? What about the pigeon becoming less hungry as it eats?
• 18:02
  What if the food fails to meet the nutritional requirements for the pigeon?
• 18:06
  Even if we don't account for those things, those specific things that we just
• 18:08
  asked. We do know that reinforcement can vary in terms of its quality,
• 18:11
  how quickly it's delivered, how much of that reinforcer is delivered itself. What
• 18:15
  if one piece of food is extra hefty or extra small. Thus they revise
• 18:19
  their equation to accommodate the relative value of the reinforcer. So now this law
• 18:26
  has changed to include value. Yes. Now, as we said the rate
• 18:30
  of reinforcement, they were essentially saying, like food pellet is how you quantify
• 18:34
  rate of reinforcement so that you can say it's equal to rate of response.
• 18:38
  Sure, But we also, as we were just saying, like does a
• 18:41
  food pellet equal one? Though? Does it equal one to the pigeon?
• 18:45
  Does it change over time? Are they completely even? And how they're made?
• 18:48
  Because I've been willing to bet there's some amount of variation that may not
• 18:52
  seem like very much to you, but might seem like a lot to the
• 18:53
  pigeon. Right, And just things to consider. And if you consider that
• 18:59
  the idea of the matching law is the amount of responding is equal to the
• 19:03
  amount of reinforcement, then one thing you can do is flip it and say
• 19:07
  the probability of a given response is equal to the amount of reinforcement that is
• 19:11
  available, because basically we're saying the rate of behavior is equal to the reinforcement
• 19:17
  that's earned. And you can just then say, well, if that's true,
• 19:19
  then also the probability of a behavior is equal to the amount of reinforcement
• 19:23
  that is available. So if there's more available, there's a higher probability that
• 19:26
  behavior will be allocated toward that option. Right, if there's more reward available,
• 19:32
  there's more behavior toward that reward. Like, essentially there are more pink
• 19:37
  starbursts, you are more likely to see responding. But if they are more
• 19:41
  or in starburst, I don't know. Not so much for Shane and for
• 19:45
  Kimmishmidt. That's my understanding at least of starbursts. I haven't had a starburst
• 19:49
  in a very long time because I don't think the're vegetarian, so I can't
• 19:52
  have them. I don't know. I don't know it anyway, And maybe
• 19:56
  we just totally I just totally discredited our entire podcast by saying that I know
• 20:00
  something. But interestingly, organisms will sometimes respond more than what reinforcement is actually
• 20:07
  will respond more than what reinforcement has actually received, so there's going to be
• 20:10
  a higher rate of responding versus reinforcement, or they will respond less than what
• 20:15
  reinforcement has actually received, so the rate of responding changes despite reinforcement. Sometimes
• 20:22
  this has been called overmatching or undermatching, respectively. So if I respond more,
• 20:26
  it's overmatching, if I respond less, it's undermatching. So to accommodate
• 20:29
  these trends, the equation was amended to include variables called a free parameter,
• 20:36
  and so essentially, a free parameter is a number you plug into the equation
• 20:38
  once the data have all been collected and analyzed, then you add in whatever
• 20:42
  numbers will make the data make sense according to that model. I know what
• 20:48
  it sounds like, but I would like Abraham to kind of take the lead
• 20:51
  on this and really tear this to shreds. Yeah. So basically what you
• 20:56
  do is you create this equation that is supposed to describe been predicted behavior.
• 21:00
  You're like, this is how behavior works. If we take this equation and
• 21:04
  look at the behavior pattern, we will be able to predict with relative certainty
• 21:10
  how that behavior will play out. Accept it doesn't seem to work as well
• 21:14
  as we want it to. So instead, what we're going to do is,
• 21:15
  we're going to take this equation. We're going to look at the behavior
• 21:18
  first, we're going to quantify what's happening in that behavior. They're want to
• 21:22
  take those numbers, plug them into the equation, and then say, aha,
• 21:26
  our equation does lurk to predict their behavior, except that it happened after
• 21:30
  the behavior took place, so it's not really predicting it. It's just describing
• 21:33
  it after it has already taken place. And then the model doesn't actually predict
• 21:38
  what it does. So yes, the free parameters in this case are just
• 21:41
  plug in whatever values into the equation. Make the data do what you want
• 21:47
  the data to do according to the model you're looking at, right, And
• 21:49
  that is I'm trying to say this without being snarky. That is what it
• 21:53
  is. I mean, it's like, let me just say like a little
• 21:57
  bit differently, because as I said, they usually plot these on these loger
• 22:00
  Than graphs to make the lines fit closely with what the models say that the
• 22:04
  lines should be doing. They just wait until they have all their data and
• 22:08
  then they they figure out what numbers would need to be plugged into the model
• 22:14
  to make the lines fit those data better. Then they have their equation afterward.
• 22:18
  So it's the equivalent of going and another thing. What's sort of like
• 22:23
  I am probably getting probably gonna get in trouble from somebody for saying this,
• 22:27
  But there's like this I think it's called the bullseye logical fallacy, where it's
• 22:33
  like you shoot an arrow at something and then go draw bullseye around it.
• 22:37
  That's like largely what has happened in this the situation is they're like, I'm
• 22:42
  basically going to go just draw the target around my arrow and say that,
• 22:47
  look I got a bullseye, right, yeah, you drew it after it
• 22:51
  landed. Like it's one thing to set up the target and then aim at
• 22:55
  it. It's another thing to like let the error just go where it's going
• 22:57
  to go and then just go draw target wherever it lands. Didn't say like
• 23:00
  look what I did. Like that's it. I mean, like I said,
• 23:03
  I'm sure some people are going to say I'm being disingenuous, but tell
• 23:07
  me I'm wrong. You are changing your equation to make it fit the data,
• 23:12
  rather than using your equation to describe and predict the data, right,
• 23:15
  I mean I think you know you're talking about and I think I could hear
• 23:19
  from like the quantitative quantitative behavior analysts out there that are going, well,
• 23:23
  an equation is supposed to be your plugging numbers in to create kind of or
• 23:27
  like to balance an equation, right, Like I could see, like you
• 23:30
  know, the law of gravity being one of those things where like there's probably
• 23:34
  certain levels that you have to plug in, certain specific unique variables to that
• 23:37
  context that do that. But it doesn't really seem to make sense for a
• 23:40
  behavior because at the end of the day, reinforcer qualities can't be accounted for
• 23:47
  in a mathematical equation, I think the same way that other things can.
• 23:48
  Well, they do certainly try to do that with that revised nineteen sixty nine
• 23:53
  model, But so you're right, like you do plug numbers into the equation
• 23:56
  to make it make sense. Now for most of those numbers, they're in
• 24:00
  the original equation. That was just what happened. Here's the number of behaviors
• 24:03
  of the curb. They don't make that number up. It is just the
• 24:07
  number that happen. Here's the number of reinforces that weren't. They don't need
• 24:10
  to make that up. Right again, assuming that they can count it Pellett
• 24:12
  as one. Here's the number of reinforces that weren't sure. Then they have
• 24:15
  these variables that say like, okay, well the thing is now now on
• 24:18
  my left side of the equation, I have this number. On the right
• 24:22
  side of the equation, I have this number, and they do not equal
• 24:23
  each other, right, and yet I have an equal sign between them.
• 24:26
  So now what I need to do is put an extra number in here,
• 24:30
  and I'm going to multiply them until they equal each other. And so those
• 24:33
  are the free parameters that they're just like, well, they don't equal each
• 24:37
  other. So I'm just gonna plug in a number that's based on nothing.
• 24:41
  It's not an observation. It's not something I counted. It's just the number
• 24:45
  to change the two so that they're equal. Right. It's the Trump map,
• 24:52
  Yes, what it is. See, I think see you were worried
• 24:53
  about saying something offensive and upsetting. I think I'm gonna be the one that
• 24:56
  says more. I know, I'm going to find the real life exam spot
• 25:00
  to be like, Nope, it's that thing. It causes some trouble.
• 25:02
  So that's great. We need the real word, we need those those applications.
• 25:06
  Okay, so let's let's we'll continue through here. So, like Skinner
• 25:10
  before him, Hernstein's matching equation kicked off. I mean, just an enormous
• 25:12
  amount of research and other sort of sub fields and specialties of application. So
• 25:18
  if research for the sake of research is inherently good, then yay, we
• 25:22
  you know good? Did the did the thing sure to be charitable? I
• 25:26
  think that there are other fields who have come up with laws and theories and
• 25:32
  things that have kind of launched a thousand studies that we've discovered new things as
• 25:37
  a result of a faulty law, Like like I feel like all of psychodynamics
• 25:41
  is that where it started with. Like I guess we're just going to piss
• 25:45
  off everybody on this show, but I think, like, you know,
• 25:48
  originally coming from Freud's theories and stuff, you find that like not a lot
• 25:51
  of it holds water today, but there is some useful stuff that has come
• 25:53
  out of the research that was done over the years that started with this kind
• 25:57
  of nugget of an idea. That's fair, Okay, I buy that.
• 26:00
  I'm good at that. That's the charitable part. That's the charitable part that
• 26:03
  I would say. So anyway, So matching law was extended to the concept
• 26:07
  of delay discounting, which researchers evaluate how the effect was effectiveness of reinforcement decays
• 26:12
  over time depending on how much time passes between the response and the reinforcement.
• 26:17
  Kind of so there is that piece too, which is like a fascinating line
• 26:19
  of research, but again kind of has its roots in this matching law thing.
• 26:23
  It also inspired the development of behavior momentum theory, which evaluates how much
• 26:29
  the amount of reinforcement earned in the past is likely to affect the extent to
• 26:33
  which that behavior is likely to persist even if reinforcement is no longer available or
• 26:37
  changes for some reason, or something else about their situation changes. So basically
• 26:41
  a lot did come out of it. It started with this simple equation which
• 26:45
  evolved and morphten changed over time into a freewheeling hydro monster. But like out
• 26:52
  of that came these other lines of research that like people's whole careers are based
• 26:57
  on like just that thing, right, And so in short, what's kind
• 27:02
  of come out of this is matching law states that whatever you or any organism
• 27:06
  is doing at any given moment is because there is more reinforcement for that behavior
• 27:11
  than any other alternative behavior that you might be doing. That's essentially kind of
• 27:14
  the main thesis of matching law. There was, maybe there still is,
• 27:18
  this humorous logo that some have put on coffee mugs or on T shirts and
• 27:21
  whatnot, and it has the matching law formula on whatever merchant's on, and
• 27:26
  the underneath the formula it says, why I'm not doing something else right now?
• 27:30
  And so yeah, the joke being that, like, I'm doing whatever
• 27:33
  I'm doing because there's more reinforcement here than there is for other things that I
• 27:37
  could be doing. Like that's that's sure of what the what the the humorous
• 27:40
  thing is supposed to be. And you know, I get it, like
• 27:42
  I you know, it's a good job everyone very funny, haha humor.
• 27:48
  I know, I understand human humor. That's right, I get I get
• 27:52
  your doing good. So, you know, it is one of those things.
• 27:56
  Though as we start to unpack it, you are to learn that there
• 28:00
  are enough holes in it that to call it a laws is unfair. I
• 28:06
  think it certainly would be worth actually unpacking, like the difference between a law
• 28:08
  theory and a law and uh, it's different sort of levels. Yeah,
• 28:15
  Okay, we want to stick on here. So I think generally what I
• 28:18
  wanted to do with the initial part of this is just unpack matching law,
• 28:21
  what it says, how we understand it, what it means, that sort
• 28:22
  of thing. And also I think be charitable in considering what kinds of quote
• 28:29
  unquote good things that's done. And before I do that, though, you
• 28:33
  can account for my choice to go to ads by there being reinforcement from those
• 28:37
  ads in the terms of dollars and cents, I mean mostly sense, but
• 28:41
  here they are more sense less dollars. Okay, so hopefully we have some
• 28:52
  sense. Now that's a pun that works on multiple levels. Really so good.
• 28:57
  But let's talk about some of these practical applications that have come out of
• 29:02
  matching law, Why people like it, what has done for them. If
• 29:04
  you are working in some setting and you are shaping behavior or helping to develop
• 29:10
  the skills of some person, and you just spend just zero seconds thinking about
• 29:14
  how reinforcement works, even if you were explicitly trained to use reinforcement, think
• 29:18
  about it. The matching law formula in general idea is extremely useful for getting
• 29:22
  people to think about how whatever behavior a person is doing is being reinforced,
• 29:26
  and importantly, behaviors that they're not doing are not being reinforced, or at
• 29:32
  least not as much. And I do think that like that is a very
• 29:34
  helpful heuristic for many people to help them guide their thinking around solving a problem
• 29:41
  or again helping some person develop some skills of some sort that they might have
• 29:45
  been tasked with that job. Sure, so in part, this could mean
• 29:48
  that people are more likely to try and leverage positive reinforcement to help guide behavior
• 29:52
  more so than more averse of alternatives, which I think is I think a
• 29:56
  good general rule that we probably want to follow enforced behavior, you know,
• 30:02
  that we want to see in all this stuff. So another part of this
• 30:04
  is that it could mean that people are compassionate to the fact that whatever the
• 30:07
  person they are serving is or isn't doing, is influenced by whatever their reinforcement
• 30:12
  history is. So there's another layer to that that we have to unpack a
• 30:15
  little bit. And I think, you know, with the values of human
• 30:18
  beings and humanists, those are good things, like we're happy with the facts
• 30:22
  that we are. We're thinking about this from a more compassionate standpoint. Another
• 30:26
  extension is considering that if someone has an extensive history of reinforcement for some pattern
• 30:33
  that is, for whatever reason, problematic for them and or others, then
• 30:36
  it will be harder to coach a change in that behavior and expect the change
• 30:40
  to be slow the whole. You can't teach an old dog new tricks adage.
• 30:44
  You can, it just often takes longer. It's undoing some things,
• 30:47
  redoing some things. It's a lot of rearrangement. Yes, Also, behaviors
• 30:52
  rarely relied on statistical analyzes for their data in the past, which greatly confused
• 30:56
  other psychologists, scientists and lay people. It confuses everyone. I mean,
• 31:00
  the thing that's funny about that is that we don't use a lot of statistical
• 31:03
  analyzes, and that confuses people. But statistical analyses confuse everybody, So you're
• 31:10
  confused why we don't use the confusing thing? Okay, I just wanted to
• 31:14
  make sure we got that. But then the matching law on others come along
• 31:17
  with mathematical formulas to describe behavior, and now behavior science can be taken seriously
• 31:21
  according to some folks. Now that is matching law gave behaviorism a lot of
• 31:26
  street cred with other psychologists. Yeah, and like other fields generally, Yeah,
• 31:30
  And the other thing about matching law is it also illuminated for many how
• 31:34
  and why people make the choices that they make. There is more reinforcement,
• 31:37
  or at least a greater history of reinforcement for certain choices that they make,
• 31:41
  or similar sort of related choices. So that just demystifies the nature of some
• 31:48
  of what people do. For some people is just thinking about it in that
• 31:52
  way. So sure, I think again that creates the opportunity for some compassion,
• 31:56
  for some perspective, taking, some sort of understanding and so where other
• 32:00
  people are coming from. And I think that again, that is generally something
• 32:06
  I would think of as being good when we're thinking of our sort of values
• 32:08
  and science and that sort of thing. Sure, So with all that being
• 32:12
  said, we're going to get to the actual criticisms. Now, if we
• 32:15
  weren't critical enough as we have gone through this, let's start with a little
• 32:19
  bit of the mathematical criticisms that go along with this. Now matching law inspired
• 32:23
  behavior momentum theory. And although it did, matching law it self does not
• 32:27
  account for a history of reinforcement. So it accounts for what we would describe
• 32:30
  as current or maybe like contextual reinforcement in that moment, but lacks any sort
• 32:36
  of analysis of the history. In fact, the matching law essentially predicts that
• 32:40
  if reinforcement stops, the behavior will stop, which we know is not true.
• 32:45
  Yeah, in our third story that we started with, there was this
• 32:47
  person who was gambling and losing all their money. They played but lost and
• 32:52
  lost and lost money. Why did they continue the behavior if reinforcement was not
• 32:57
  forthcoming. Well, because behavior does not necessary or almost ever stop immediately if
• 33:02
  reinforcement stops. Just a quick example, if you go into a room and
• 33:07
  it's dark and you flip a light switch, the light turns on, presumably
• 33:10
  the light coming on as a reinforcer for tapping the light switch, right right.
• 33:15
  If you go into a room and turn on a dark room and you
• 33:19
  hit the light switch and the light does not come on, most people hit
• 33:22
  it like four more times, sure, or like a bunch of more times
• 33:25
  four. I just came up with the number four totally arbitrarily. So essentially,
• 33:30
  behavior does happen when reinforcement stops, and even when it has been reinforced
• 33:35
  every single time and not intermittently, like you can expect that sort of thing.
• 33:39
  So, in addition, to the fact that matching law repeatedly failed to
• 33:44
  adequately capture actual behavior, even in ideal circumstances. Remember we talked about overmatching
• 33:50
  and undermatching, and also reinforcement quality and the value differences in reinforcers and the
• 33:54
  need for free parameters. It also didn't adequately what describe if reinforced stops suddenly,
• 34:00
  So it really wasn't doing a very thorough job and sort of predicting an
• 34:05
  understanding behavior contextually situated. Sure. So, obviously, for those of us
• 34:09
  who are conservative about our data analyzes, the need to employ free parameters to
• 34:15
  post hawk solve a problem that the equation can't handle is unsatisfactory to say the
• 34:20
  least, Like it doesn't I don't feel good about going, oh, my
• 34:23
  equation was wrong. Let me add this thing to fix my equation so that
• 34:28
  my my equation is now right, Like yeah, yeah, that's like that's
• 34:34
  the thing that like I, as a clinician, just don't feel good about,
• 34:37
  Like I wouldn't go do that with my client's data, so, like
• 34:39
  why would I feel good about doing that? In research? Now, some
• 34:43
  of the commonly stated goals of science are to describe, predict and influence variables.
• 34:47
  That's a bit you know, so description prediction control so a huge part
• 34:51
  of our work. Most of these quantitative models stop at prediction, but the
• 34:55
  use of free parameters means that they aren't even doing that. They are just
• 35:00
  describing. And to be fair, matching law isn't even the most offensive of
• 35:04
  these things. Some have several free parameters all over the place, as if
• 35:07
  the equation is really more of a gentle suggestion or nudge in the right direction.
• 35:13
  Yeah, so we kind of run in this issue where it's like the
• 35:15
  more free parameters you add, the less I guess accurate that becomes, or
• 35:22
  the less authentic it becomes. It seems like to me, I mean,
• 35:24
  the less describing the model is doing in terms of sort of understanding what's taking
• 35:29
  place in the behavior. I mean it sure, you know, like it.
• 35:31
  It's already failed to be predictive, and now it's at the point where
• 35:35
  it's barely descriptive. Also, right, what's your goal here to just write
• 35:39
  down a bunch of umbers, because you can just do that, you don't
• 35:42
  have to pretend it's like a thing, right right, right, Okay,
• 35:45
  So we're doing some criticisms here of matching law, and in this this next
• 35:50
  one is not really an important criticism of matching law itself, but it is
• 35:53
  worth you know, we would be remiss if we didn't mention and point out
• 35:58
  that Hernstein and the author of the matching law, who's presumably sort of it,
• 36:04
  kicked off all all the quantitative study of behavior, at least in the
• 36:08
  way that it has turned out to be. He co authored a book in
• 36:12
  nineteen ninety four called The Bell Curve, Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
• 36:16
  That was my best sort of news anchor reading of that. That was
• 36:20
  really good. I like that. Thanks. And in this book the authors
• 36:22
  make many controversial claims, not least among them is the idea that race and
• 36:28
  intelligence are linked, assuming of course that in this book the way that they
• 36:31
  put it, white people are genetically superior and therefore gifted with superior intelligence.
• 36:37
  We have done a several part episode on intelligence. Obviously, this is a
• 36:40
  very racist idea, and we espouse an anti racist position on things. And
• 36:45
  Stephen J. Gould responded with a just masterclass in absolutely dismantling their entire discussion.
• 36:52
  He did it mathematically, he did it conceptually, and this really good
• 36:57
  book everyone should read. Called the mismeasure of man. He basically just took
• 37:00
  on their whole thesis and just destroyed it. He just took it, the
• 37:05
  whole thing completely apart, and I think did so beautifully. It's a strong
• 37:08
  recommend I do think for most people. If you do choose to read this,
• 37:13
  read this book, you're gonna want to have a dictionary with you.
• 37:15
  Stephen Jay Gould had a if I may say, so be cund vocabulary.
• 37:23
  Sure, speaking of vocabulary, what does that word mean? Yeah, that's
• 37:30
  fair. I sort of set that one up. So fea cun essentially just
• 37:35
  or fecund. I've heard it also said essentially just refers to a wealth of
• 37:39
  something, an abundance of something. Ficunity is like an abundance like if you
• 37:44
  were looking at nature. They often described nature as being fee cunned when it
• 37:47
  produces a lot, you have new growth, new offspring, that sort of
• 37:51
  thing. So he has a rich, productive vocabulary. I guess, okay,
• 37:55
  okay, that's fair, that's fair. So I think even move being
• 38:00
  like taking out the horrible racist stuff like obviously that's a bad thing. But
• 38:06
  looking directly at this guy's math, this is two times where his math has
• 38:12
  been not really great. Right, So, like we've kind of showed that
• 38:15
  matching law is like kind of we're massaging data a little bit. We've showed
• 38:17
  that like the Bell curve stuff, like it's been destroyed entirely. So this
• 38:22
  guy is zero for two when it comes to mathematical models. Several people would
• 38:27
  strongly disagree with that samement, but that's okay. It does depend on how
• 38:31
  you measure it, which is kind of the crux of what we're talking about
• 38:35
  here really, So yeah, yeah, yeah, So let's take a second
• 38:37
  to consider what matching law offered behaviorism. Okay, so in the original animal
• 38:40
  experiment, Skinner and future researchers were able to assemble comprehensive philosophy's behavior from simple
• 38:47
  reactions to complex cognitive mechanisms. So there's a lot of stuff kind of as
• 38:52
  we're starting to unpack that they observe that an animal in a box can be
• 38:54
  taught to press a button or lever or whatever poll chain. There's all kinds
• 38:59
  of things there to learn conditional associations such as different colors or sequence of lights
• 39:02
  that signal reinforcement, to learn to combine behaviors to accomplish complex tasks. Could
• 39:07
  learn to demonstrate a concept of self according to common infant experiments et cetera,
• 39:13
  et cetera, et cetera. So in behaviorism, there are all these really
• 39:16
  complex experiments that kind of break down behavior at its core and really show the
• 39:22
  animals can do a whole lot of really complex things and being applied to humans
• 39:27
  as well, and understanding a huge amount of the complexity in human behavior,
• 39:31
  right, using again all building off of that framework. And so going back
• 39:36
  to these experiments that Skinner performed, why does the animal press the lever or
• 39:38
  button, as we said, because of its motivation it was hungry, or
• 39:43
  there were some other motivating arrangement. Sometimes they made it really hot or really
• 39:45
  cold, and there could be a change in temperature and the signals indicated that
• 39:50
  food or whatever reinforcement was available. And Skinner often marveled at the quote special
• 39:55
  kind of orderliness and a smooth curve end quote that the data that they obtained
• 40:00
  it in their experiments could produce is just very systematic, orderly data that always
• 40:07
  like they were so consistent and observable that you could reliably predict what they were
• 40:13
  doing, not describe dvia mathematical equation. It was just here are what the
• 40:16
  data like. He arranged a pretty simple but I think ingenious way of measuring
• 40:22
  it, where essentially it was he called it a cumulative recorder, I meaning
• 40:25
  that every response, every time that they press a lever or pressed a button,
• 40:30
  it would just tick up on this little sheet of paper that was scrolling
• 40:34
  continuously, and once it reached the top, it would like go back down,
• 40:37
  so it could continue ticking up. And that way you could see these
• 40:38
  really clear curves in the data that just are what they were. I mean,
• 40:43
  you could certainly quantify those mathematically if you wanted to, but you could
• 40:45
  also just look at the data and see the trends that were that were emerging
• 40:51
  that were very clear, and you could show how you could manipulate variables to
• 40:53
  affect those trends. Sure, and so of course what we started discovering was
• 40:59
  that the animals press the lever buttons and consistent predictable patterns. We understood this
• 41:02
  immediately. Okay, that there, and that's the only reason that science and
• 41:06
  behavior was able to form, and it's in the first place, is because
• 41:08
  we were able to see that right away. So said another way, what
• 41:13
  Skinner and colleagues observed recorded and published was that behavior occurred when reinforcement was available?
• 41:19
  Okay, what was added by suddenly discovering that behavior occurred when reinforcement was
• 41:22
  available in the matching law. There have been some practical applications since, but
• 41:27
  conceptually we would argue very little. If anything, it repackaged something that was
• 41:31
  so implicitly and explicitly baked into the philosophy and discoveries of our science that it
• 41:37
  would be like if I suddenly discovered that a vacuum could be conceptualized as a
• 41:40
  lack of matter. I guess the more we're doing this episode, I just
• 41:44
  am not buying it, you know what I mean. I'm just kind of
• 41:46
  like, why are we even still talking about matching law at this point in
• 41:49
  time? It's clear that it doesn't work. Yeah, okay, So that
• 41:53
  is us sort of unpacking a lot of the sort of criticisms of matching law,
• 41:59
  and we haven't talked very much about like choice, in the idea of
• 42:02
  choice. I think it's inherently wrapped up in this idea of if you're choosing
• 42:07
  between two alternatives, it could be that there's only one clear choice, and
• 42:09
  there's a lot of other things that you could be doing that are unclear.
• 42:13
  There could be many alternatives that are all relatively equally weighted. Whatever. So
• 42:16
  they're talking about this idea of choice, So talk about choice. If we
• 42:21
  generally understand how behavior works without matching law, and we do, then we
• 42:25
  are faced with a dilemma about the concept of choice. Virtually everything you do
• 42:30
  is a choice between what you did end up doing and what you didn't end
• 42:35
  up doing. Right. Sure, as we move through the world and do
• 42:37
  things, we do so because what is available around us, what we have
• 42:42
  learned up to that point, how much reinforcement and punishment is available for certain
• 42:45
  behaviors, how we are doing biologically, that is, if we're sick,
• 42:47
  hungry, tired, energetic, alert, healthy, whatever language or cognition we're
• 42:53
  doing in that circumstance. Is everything we do that or is it choosing every
• 42:59
  act over every other action that we could be taking. Could it even be
• 43:04
  both of those things? Do we need both of those things? Like?
• 43:07
  So little if anything, was added by conceptualizing behavior in this way, and
• 43:14
  so much confusion and misunderstanding can be introduced. I honestly think the nicest thing
• 43:19
  that I could say about this and matching law is that it feels superfluous,
• 43:23
  it seems unnecessary. Yeah, the more we kind of get into it,
• 43:28
  and I'm starting to think that, like maybe part of the problem is that
• 43:30
  they've conflated choice and options, Like I feel like that's and that's something we
• 43:35
  can kind of maybe unpack because I think choice in itself is a behavior,
• 43:37
  but options are like the anesete conditions in which you could you know, behavior
• 43:42
  is selected based on available options or availability, and again it still ultimately comes
• 43:45
  down to availability, right. I like that. I like this idea of
• 43:49
  parsing choice from options. So I think that's helpful, Yeah, because I
• 43:52
  think I think that's ultimately what that's kind of where where I keep landing is,
• 43:54
  I'm like, well, choice, I make choices, but I make
• 43:59
  choices engaged behavior based on available options, and so availability and options seem to
• 44:02
  me like a simpler way to understand this. But there's more So if someone
• 44:08
  is presented with two clear options and chooses one of them, why do they
• 44:12
  make that choice. They're going to make that choice because of what was available
• 44:15
  and around what they have learned up to that point, how much reinforcement or
• 44:19
  punishment is available for that behavior, how they're doing biologically in whatever language cognition,
• 44:23
  we are engaging in that circumstance, So they are going to choose the
• 44:28
  thing that makes the most sense to them in that specific moment, and in
• 44:31
  that case, was the option that they didn't pick really even a choice if
• 44:36
  they were going to select the option that they did, which leads to another
• 44:39
  point. Yes, and honestly one of the most foundational points and the whole
• 44:45
  discussion we have today, And that's a great cliffhanger to leave us on before
• 44:47
  we have to do some ads. As you just said, if we sort
• 44:58
  of are understanding that all of these confluence of variables that came together that ended
• 45:02
  up resulting in someone engaging in one set of options, there is multiple things
• 45:07
  that were available, they went a particular route. We can kind of unpack
• 45:10
  the reinforcement history and all of their circumstances, and we probably could understand and
• 45:15
  even maybe predict the option that they went with. If that is the case
• 45:19
  and the other option kind of isn't really necessarily a choice for them because of
• 45:22
  that confluence in variables, then the concept of choice doesn't really make sense,
• 45:27
  and a basic understanding of the universe generally speaking, So Hayes, Adams and
• 45:31
  Ryden in nineteen ninety four point out the paradox of choice, and I believe
• 45:36
  we've used this quote before, but I'm going to keep using it because I
• 45:38
  love it so much. And so what they say is quote the concept of
• 45:44
  choice assumes that any number of alternative courses of action are possible at any moment,
• 45:51
  and inasmuch as only one action actually occurs at any given moment, an
• 45:57
  appeal is made to the evidence of what might have been. Choice implies that
• 46:02
  something other than what did happen could have happened, as though what did happen
• 46:07
  were not the culmination of history. As argued in Hayes, nineteen ninety eighty
• 46:13
  eight, page twenty five, this is a quote within a quote now so
• 46:15
  quote reduction quote. We cannot speak of what might have been when confronting what
• 46:22
  is, because what is is a point in the evolution of what has been.
• 46:27
  Had it been otherwise, it would have been otherwise. But it is
• 46:30
  not otherwise. It is as it is, end quote, end quote.
• 46:37
  That it sounds it sounds wild when you say it like that, but it
• 46:43
  makes sense when you really drill down into it. Yeah, Essentially every action
• 46:46
  that happens, And honestly, everything in the universe that happens like it happened
• 46:52
  in the production of its circumstances. There were variables that pushed it that way
• 46:58
  one way, or you know, one way or or whatever way it went
• 47:00
  right. If the circumstances had been different, the choice would have been different,
• 47:05
  the effect would have been different, the outcome would have been different.
• 47:07
  But the circumstances led up to the fact that that at that juncture in time,
• 47:14
  when those variables conlided, that was the direction they were going to go.
• 47:17
  Like, I think about this a lot because I love to play games
• 47:22
  of like when you roll a die or dice, you essentially are are trying
• 47:25
  to introduce an element of luck and randomness. But sure, the orientation of
• 47:31
  the dice when it leaves your hand, how far it is until it hits
• 47:36
  the thing that is going to roll on, the shape of the dice,
• 47:38
  how fast it's moving, the ambient like air, atmosphere, and the room
• 47:43
  you're in. Those are all variables that will affect what it lands on.
• 47:46
  It does not actually land randomly. It lands according to the laws of nature
• 47:51
  and physics, and like we just we don't we can't predict them well enough
• 47:55
  to know so it feels random enough to use it for things like for games.
• 48:00
  You know, right, and that's great. I'm perfectly good with that.
• 48:04
  But the same general logic applies to understanding human behavior, like it still
• 48:08
  follows all of the things that we know about behavior. It is shaped through
• 48:14
  the world, just like evolution, just like physics in that it is driven
• 48:17
  by its circumstances and environment up to the point where a thing like if you
• 48:22
  want to conceptualize on the environmental arrangement of options, it was going to go
• 48:25
  one of those directions, right, that makes total sense. So okay,
• 48:30
  I think as we go forward, it's important to point out so haz it
• 48:32
  all further elaborate on this that this does not mean that we or any scientists
• 48:37
  really believe that everything is predetermined, destined, or unavoidable. It's just that
• 48:43
  we reached the juncture at which the choice occurred. It happened in the way
• 48:46
  that made the most sense at that moment given its historical context, And I
• 48:51
  think that's really really important the choice that was made in that context. The
• 48:57
  reason it was made is because everything that happened before, right, Yes,
• 49:01
  And I would love to have a conversation at some point about what stochasticity and
• 49:07
  randomness really mean. And I kind of alluded to all of that just now
• 49:09
  and how it applies to the psychology of human behavior. But we'll save that
• 49:14
  for another day. Arguably we've unpacked it enough here that we don't need to
• 49:16
  save it for another day. In our last episode that we released, we
• 49:21
  were talking about stochasticity. So if you haven't heard that, our guest on
• 49:25
  that episode, Joseph Daly, does a really nice job unpacking that term,
• 49:30
  and so you can go check that out there. But you could think of
• 49:32
  it, as you know, roughly as randomness. Sure, it is an
• 49:37
  interesting philosophical sort of debate to get into. Yeah, with all that being
• 49:42
  said, if we can account for the variables that lead to a choice being
• 49:45
  made, and we often cannot because we don't know them all, then we
• 49:46
  can understand why the behavior happened the way it did. We don't need an
• 49:50
  equation to do that. We don't need laws and rule like we We kind
• 49:53
  of already have an understanding of general rules that lead to that space, a
• 49:58
  history of learning, history of reinforce, horseman availability, all of those things.
• 50:01
  We have a good enough idea of general rules to lead to that space
• 50:05
  without creating a really complicated and unnecessary equation. Okay, and you kind of
• 50:07
  set me up for this, don't. We also don't need the concepts of
• 50:12
  ghosts, wizards, or magic superimposed on behavior for it to make sense if
• 50:16
  the objective variables we are aware of can adequately describe behavior. Choice is kind
• 50:22
  of a magic wizard ghost that's just extra in our understanding of behavior. You
• 50:27
  know, we'd gain as much by saying that all behavior is a plan like
• 50:31
  and no one in our field says that because we don't need it. It
• 50:35
  doesn't add anything. You know, I could try and say, like,
• 50:38
  I'm discovering that whenever you did something, you plan to do it, But
• 50:43
  what would that tell us anything different about behavior than what we already understand.
• 50:46
  All it would do is introduce confusion and an extra variable that we now need
• 50:51
  to try and wrap our heads around that would not have in any way change
• 50:54
  our analysis of that behavior as it occurred. So we don't need a super
• 50:59
  impose these variables into our understanding because are under like the parts the variables that
• 51:05
  we already know about, even if we can't account for them. They are
• 51:07
  all of them anyway, they are sufficient to understand behavior, and we don't
• 51:12
  need to introduce new ones that we can't observe, that are only hypothetical and
• 51:17
  that do not adequately add anything to the conversation. Even more simply put,
• 51:22
  like, I don't think that matching law is as parsimonious as our understanding of
• 51:25
  the simple principles of behavior. Oh beautiful, And I think that really is
• 51:30
  ultimately what I land on with that is that I think it's an extra step
• 51:35
  to discover the same thing. Yes, Shane, I think what we're describing
• 51:37
  is like, behavior is better explained through what we described before. Antecedents,
• 51:42
  motivations, consequences, history of learning, options and discrimination, training and conditional
• 51:46
  discriminations. All of those things are better explanatory ways of looking at behavior than
• 51:53
  going, oh, this this thing of choice, this matching law thing is
• 51:58
  really kind of it's like you said, it's not parsimonious. We have better
• 52:01
  ways of explaining it already. That was lovely, Hey, thanks, Okay,
• 52:06
  there are some critical misunderstandings that may arise from someone listening to this,
• 52:09
  hearing my passion, hearing our discussion, and we want to make sure that
• 52:14
  we sort of clear these up before we walk away from this and wipe our
• 52:17
  hands and say, all right, we did the thing. We're done.
• 52:21
  The first one is we are not advocating. We are not advocating that people
• 52:25
  and animals should not be given choices. In fact, we would stay at
• 52:30
  the opposite. Often, giving someone a choice helps tell you what their reinforcers
• 52:34
  are when you don't know, and we often don't know, so like you
• 52:37
  just give them a choice, and then they then get to sort of choose
• 52:39
  a thing that you give them options. They select a thing and you did
• 52:45
  not know what they were going to select because you didn't have their history ahead
• 52:47
  of time. And now you have a better idea of kind of what their
• 52:51
  reinforcers are, and you can then leverage that positive reinforcement to help guide them
• 52:54
  in whatever skills they're trying to develop. It also it may help whoever you're
• 53:00
  working with, person or animal or otherwise feel a sense of control, which
• 53:04
  is a kind compassionate thing to do. What control is we don't need to
• 53:07
  get into at the moment. The point is we can experience the feeling of
• 53:10
  autonomy, and most many of us, if not all of us, will
• 53:15
  generally seek out a sense of autonomy and most of our general interactions, and
• 53:20
  honestly, sometimes the choice is all that is needed to help someone feel safe
• 53:23
  and open to feedback. And that kind of guidance is that like they were
• 53:28
  maybe very resistant to you trying to steer them in a different direction, and
• 53:34
  once they had choice, once they have choices, then they're like, Okay,
• 53:37
  now I feel like I get to have a say in this, I
• 53:39
  can participate more in meaningfully, And they're less likely to be resistant to that
• 53:44
  kind of attempts at guidance, if you will, right. Absolutely. The
• 53:47
  second point that we would make is that arguing against the idea of choosing does
• 53:51
  not mean that we think people should not be held accountable for the bad things
• 53:53
  they have done. So and you kind of talked about this earlier. For
• 53:58
  one thing, the circumstances, most of which we don't know, we're present
• 54:00
  that led to them doing whatever horrible thing they did and either still are present
• 54:05
  or may quickly become present again. So they may be a danger to others
• 54:08
  if not held accountable for their actions, even if we can understand why those
• 54:13
  actions unfolded the way they did. And I think it's also important too.
• 54:15
  If we don't hold them accountable or alter the circumstances that led there, then
• 54:21
  we're going to run into the same issue multiple times. Right, So,
• 54:22
  when someone drives drunk and causes an accident, they are more trouble than if
• 54:27
  they drove sober and caused an accident. They are in less trouble if they
• 54:30
  suffered a medical emergency while driving and cause an accident. So you see that
• 54:35
  the circumstances changed despite the fact that the response and the reward slash punishment are
• 54:42
  like could be the same according to some of these equations, looking at the
• 54:46
  choice of drunk driving being why driving drunko is considered a more highly punishable offense
• 54:52
  even if the outcome was about the same. I was thinking about this.
• 54:55
  Many people do other bad things when they're drunk, and sometimes they'll eve and
• 55:00
  drink to have an excuse for doing the bad things that they did, And
• 55:04
  some people will even excuse their behavior saying, oh, well, they were
• 55:07
  just drunk, And I've just I've always been a little bit confused, thinking,
• 55:10
  why does it make sense to do something else wrong while drunk is like
• 55:16
  okay then, or at least it's worse than driving while drunk, which we
• 55:22
  have all sort of universally acknowledged is bad. Just food for thought, just
• 55:24
  the thing to think about. It's like, you do a bad thing when
• 55:28
  you're drunk, and it's like, oh, well, they were just drunk,
• 55:30
  versus you drive drunk and you're like, oh, you are going to
• 55:32
  jail for a very long time because you drove drunk. I'm like, in
• 55:35
  both of these circumstances, they did the bad thing first, which was they
• 55:39
  got drunk, and then they did another bad thing which they probably wouldn't have
• 55:44
  done if they hadn't been drunk. So it's interesting. Yeah. Now,
• 55:49
  I think the last point would make it underneath this is that with respect to
• 55:52
  matching law specifically, despite some significant limitations, the matching law is not wrong.
• 55:57
  In fact, it is correct almost by definition. Further, it has
• 56:00
  helped a lot of people in a lot of different ways. Largely we are
• 56:02
  arguing that it was not an advance on the philosophy we already had, and
• 56:07
  maybe it was never meant to be. That it's certainly attracted a lot of
• 56:10
  talented people to do some good science, so it probably has a net good
• 56:15
  We're not saying that at the end of the day. Matching law is this
• 56:19
  terrible thing we're just saying it's not. It's gilding the lily. Essentially,
• 56:23
  there you go. Yeah, And like I wanted to essentially use this episode
• 56:28
  to unpack and describe matching law because I feel like a lot of people have
• 56:32
  maybe heard of it, but they're not really sure what it is. Maybe
• 56:36
  they're like they heard of it and they're like, oh, I want to
• 56:37
  go learn all about that thing now, and maybe that this episode will inspire
• 56:42
  them to do that. They're certainly going to be people who listen to me
• 56:45
  say anything and say I want to go prove that guy wrong, and I
• 56:46
  show more power to you. Please do I honestly, I would like for
• 56:52
  someone to try and come in here and tell me where I've gotten this wrong,
• 56:54
  because I've talked with people about this, I've thought about this a lot,
• 56:59
  I've read a lot of this, and I just keep walking away with
• 57:01
  I feel like, as you said, it's not as parsimonious as the science
• 57:07
  we started with and the science that we still have, you know, and
• 57:10
  so, and I think that it at best most of the time, I
• 57:14
  feel like that's unnecessary. But again, I don't want to ignore the fact
• 57:17
  that it has inspired a lot of people to do some really good research and
• 57:23
  like pragmatically that also, I think is a good in and of itself.
• 57:28
  So like, if I look at the utility of this for the outcome,
• 57:32
  not from the model itself, but from the people that it has touched and
• 57:37
  inspired, that it's hard for me to want to be mad at it at
• 57:39
  all because it has had some really good effects. And I also don't think
• 57:44
  that many people, if any, have used it deleteriously. I don't think
• 57:47
  it has been used for harm. Those are things I think just consider in
• 57:52
  terms of saying, like, as you said, matching law is not bad,
• 57:54
  it's not wrong. We don't hate it. I just feel like I
• 57:58
  wanted to do a little bit of un packing on what it is, what
• 58:00
  it means, how it works, and why I don't think it adds very
• 58:06
  much to the science that that I that I know and love. Yeah,
• 58:08
  I think, and I think that's completely fair. And I think there's a
• 58:12
  point that you made that I really want to kind of go back to.
• 58:15
  When you talk about the tenets of science and you talk about things like determinism,
• 58:17
  parsimony, pragmatism and all that stuff. I think where it lacks in
• 58:21
  parsimony, it makes up for in pragmatism. I think that your point is
• 58:24
  where, like you know, like it may not be the most parsimonious thing,
• 58:28
  but ultimately it does lead. It has led to so much good research,
• 58:30
  and that has resulted in a lot of good clinical work that I think,
• 58:35
  you know, I think it's okay that it's not quite as parsimonious.
• 58:37
  I think that we got to stop pretending though, that it's more important than
• 58:42
  it is. I think that's fair. Yeah, we take it off its
• 58:45
  pedestal, put it down, like you know, put it where it deserves
• 58:49
  to be. Yeah, put it put on the floor next to something where
• 58:51
  it's like, well, we don't want to forget that it's there. We
• 58:52
  can use it whenever we need to. But it can come down off its
• 58:55
  pedestal where we're pretending that it's really it has been. It's fine, it's
• 59:00
  there, people like it good. Yeah, we don't want to get rid
• 59:02
  of it. No, we just want to We just want to call it
• 59:05
  what it is. Yeah, let's just be a little realistic there. We
• 59:07
  can sort of say some take on points. I think that first we should
• 59:10
  probably let the advertisers do their thing. Ooo, the take on points I
• 59:22
  think that we have don't necessarily add a lot to the conversation, but just
• 59:24
  sort of get through them really quick. I think I want to. I
• 59:28
  want to summarize sort of the big themes. I felt like we're sort of
• 59:30
  in this discussion. And one, as I said, is that there's been
• 59:32
  so much research and discussion from smarter people than us on choice in matching law.
• 59:37
  This was really just the briefest of overviews on that topic. So definitely
• 59:42
  go read more about it if you're interested. That's kind of like my first
• 59:45
  thing to say is a lot of people have said a lot about this.
• 59:49
  I do think that we brought some discussion to the table that I've been desperately
• 59:52
  wanting somebody else to bring to the table. Yeah, and you want to
• 59:57
  very little, Yeah, I've had. I've just heard and read so little
• 1:00:00
  from people who are interested in sort of taking this to task, and so
• 1:00:05
  I want trying my hand at it. Hopefully I did. Okay, But
• 1:00:07
  like I said, go read up on that literature. There is a lot
• 1:00:10
  of it. So if you're interested in this, you have your work cut
• 1:00:14
  out for you. But if you love your job. You never work a
• 1:00:15
  day in your life. If you have fun reading this kind of research,
• 1:00:19
  like you will certainly enjoy the wealth that is and available to you. Yeah,
• 1:00:22
  I think you did a good job with this. It was fun.
• 1:00:24
  Thank you. So. Another point is the matching laws mathematical equation called a
• 1:00:28
  quantitative model that numerically describes the observation that behavior occurs lawfully with respect to the
• 1:00:32
  available reinforcement. Oh that's a hell of a sentence. Thank you. Has
• 1:00:37
  launched thousands of careers and tens of thousands of articles and attracted a lot of
• 1:00:42
  brilliant people to our science. We also think it adds little to our understanding
• 1:00:45
  of behavior and juxtaposition to the work that has already been done. And that's
• 1:00:49
  just kind of our ultimate stance that we land on here. I'll also say,
• 1:00:52
  just as a quick take on point, choice is a conceptually useless idea
• 1:00:57
  that often obfuscates and understanding of behavior. Sure, and it is also a
• 1:01:01
  humbling and important strategy for helping the people that we work with and for feel
• 1:01:07
  safe and understood. We should be searching ways to give people more choice in
• 1:01:10
  general, not necessarily more choices, a lot of choices can be very overwhelming
• 1:01:15
  and unpleasant, but more choice in general, more choice than less choice,
• 1:01:20
  like being stuck between two crappy presidential candidates that almost nobody wants either one of
• 1:01:24
  I just want more choice, you know, Yeah, we want better choices,
• 1:01:29
  more quality choices. Yes, better choices exactly. Okay, but I
• 1:01:32
  think that's what we have to say on the matching law and choice. This
• 1:01:37
  is I was afraid to do this one. It's one that, as you
• 1:01:39
  said, I've been wanting to do for a long time. I hope I
• 1:01:43
  did it justice. I'm sure I angered some people. Please write in let
• 1:01:45
  us know. I'm interested to hear your thoughts. We have a couple of
• 1:01:49
  recommendations to give to you. We have a listener mail I'm excited to read.
• 1:01:53
  And I also need to sort of get through the credits first, so
• 1:01:59
  I'm gonna do that really quick first. If you would like to support the
• 1:02:01
  show, if you agreed with what I said today, and even if you
• 1:02:04
  don't, consider joining us on Patreon, you can get access to extra behind
• 1:02:08
  the scenes content and bonus goodies and all that sort of thing, and you
• 1:02:12
  will also have my gratitude and I will read your name out and a list
• 1:02:15
  of people who have made the generous gift of joining us in their donations,
• 1:02:19
  which includes Mike, m Megan, Leila, Mike T, Justin, Kim,
• 1:02:22
  Joshua, Brad, Stephanie, Olivia, Brian and Ashley. Thank you
• 1:02:27
  guys so much. We are just very grateful for you and all that you've
• 1:02:30
  done for us. Y'all are so great. Yes. In addition, you
• 1:02:34
  can leave us a rating and review where you can make sure you subscribe,
• 1:02:37
  go out and tell a friend about us. You can go to our website
• 1:02:38
  where you can pick up some merch. You can check out some old episodes.
• 1:02:42
  We're not totally caught up on getting the new ones up yet. As
• 1:02:44
  a matter of fact, we're nearly a year behind, but there are old
• 1:02:46
  episodes there. I will get them published at some point, and there's like
• 1:02:50
  other stuff you can check out on the website as well, so you know
• 1:02:52
  it's not a totally useless domain right there, right there. I think that
• 1:02:55
  that's it for ways that you can support us. Oh, if you'd like
• 1:02:59
  to tell us your thoughts on matching law or anything that we got right or
• 1:03:01
  wrong about this or any other episode we have ever done, feel free to
• 1:03:06
  email us directly. We look forward to hearing from people. You can email
• 1:03:08
  us at info at wwdwwdpodcast dot com. Again, in case you don't want
• 1:03:14
  to hit that back fifteen seconds button, that was info at wwdwwdpodcast dot com.
• 1:03:20
  You can also reach out to us on the social media side, speaking
• 1:03:22
  of which, if you do that, you will be speaking with our wonderful
• 1:03:24
  Emma Wilson, who is our social media coordinator, who will get those messages
• 1:03:29
  to us. And of course, thank you so much to my team of
• 1:03:30
  people who help make this happen. Justin is our audio production and engineer,
• 1:03:35
  mixing sound guru Guy, and then Shane and I write in fact check these
• 1:03:40
  episodes to the best of our abilities. Yay. Is there anything that I
• 1:03:43
  miss or anything you would like to add before we get to our listener mail
• 1:03:45
  on recommendations. I think that covers that part. Groovy. Well, let's
• 1:03:49
  start with some listener mail. This email comes in response to our three Meals
• 1:03:59
  per Day episode. This is from a listener, Celeste, who I believe
• 1:04:02
  has written us before. Celeste writes, Hey, Abraham and Shane, after
• 1:04:06
  listening to your episode Three Meals per Day, I wanted to share my experience
• 1:04:11
  with dinner versus supper usage. Yay, it's yes. I'm so glad we're
• 1:04:15
  gonna get an answer on this. Yes. Yes, I live in South
• 1:04:17
  Louisiana and my grandparents and their peers refer to lunch as dinner and the last
• 1:04:23
  meal of the day as supper. When I was growing up here and my
• 1:04:27
  grandma asked me what I wanted for dinner at ten am, confused me.
• 1:04:30
  Interestingly, I remember my grandma making more elaborate meals for lunch dinner. She
• 1:04:34
  and my grandpa would usually eat very light suppers. Thanks for making my weeks
• 1:04:40
  more educational happy twenty twenty four. Interesting. Yeah, that was very interesting.
• 1:04:43
  I was I'd never heard that before, and obviously I'm not from the
• 1:04:46
  South, I'm not from Louisiana. I've spent very little time there, but
• 1:04:49
  I thought that was cool. Yeah, that's super interesting. And I've heard
• 1:04:54
  culturally that in some places like lunch is the big meal. We talked about
• 1:04:58
  it on the show too. Yeah, so I'm glad to hear that there
• 1:05:00
  is a little bit of confirmation from the world that is not our own little
• 1:05:04
  echo chamber here. So that was great. Yes, thank you, Yes,
• 1:05:06
  thank you. Celeste for writting in. That was really helpful and I
• 1:05:10
  was excited to hear it, and I appreciate your weighing in on this.
• 1:05:14
  But if other people, if you would like to be as cool as celestis,
• 1:05:16
  then you can write in, and it's very possible we will read your
• 1:05:18
  message, unless you're advocating something about Nazis or you're just trying to get us
• 1:05:23
  to push your product, in which case unlikely to receive much in the way
• 1:05:27
  of correspondence from us. But if you have something cool to say, like
• 1:05:30
  Celeste, then please write in with like hearing from you and celest right in
• 1:05:32
  again, Yeah, I love it. Let's get to some recommendations. Recommendations,
• 1:05:45
  all right, So I watched a movie recently, and this is a
• 1:05:47
  movie that I have surprisingly never seen given the field that we work in,
• 1:05:54
  my interest outside of this stuff, and my love for movies, yeah,
• 1:06:00
  horror movies at that and horror movies. This is a movie I should have
• 1:06:01
  seen many many years ago, and I've seen parts of it, but apparently
• 1:06:05
  I never watched it in full. So that movie is called The Silence of
• 1:06:10
  the Lambs. I would like to just talk for a second about how incredible
• 1:06:15
  all of the performances are in this movie. Yeah. The thing is is
• 1:06:18
  everybody talks about Anthony Hopkins as doctor Hannibal Lecter as like the scary villain guy,
• 1:06:24
  but literally every person in this movie is incredible. Jodie Foster is on
• 1:06:31
  at her best in this movie, Like she plays a green FBI agent,
• 1:06:35
  and you see her like nervousness throughout it. You see her unsure, kind
• 1:06:41
  of like am I supposed to be doing this? You see her making like
• 1:06:45
  really risky decisions and it paying off. Like, there's so many great performances
• 1:06:48
  in this movie. It's absurd. And there's so many people in it too
• 1:06:53
  that you don't realize, Like when you go back to watch it, you're
• 1:06:55
  like, I know that person, and I've seen that person, and I've
• 1:06:57
  seen that person. There's so many people. I think it's a perfect movie.
• 1:07:01
  And Ted Levine absolutely incredible in this role, and it's wild to see
• 1:07:06
  him in later roles in his career and just how incredibly different he is,
• 1:07:12
  Yeah, really showing that he has got amazing range. Yeah, And I
• 1:07:16
  mean I've heard people say that a movie is only as good as its villain,
• 1:07:20
  and that is he is definitely a part of what makes this movie absolutely
• 1:07:25
  so phenomenally good. Yes it is. I mean, and you know,
• 1:07:30
  you might be listening to the show and going, okay, Shane, you
• 1:07:32
  should catch up on the times like this is not this is movie's from like
• 1:07:34
  nineteen ninety one. It's like, yeah, but I didn't start watching horror
• 1:07:38
  movies until I was like fifteen because I was scared of them. But I
• 1:07:41
  missed this one. I was like, I just never and it's and it's
• 1:07:44
  less horror and more thriller, but it's still very very, very very good.
• 1:07:48
  So yeah, I mean, it's just it's a well done movie,
• 1:07:50
  and I think it it almost defies genres in that way, which is fine.
• 1:07:55
  Like it's just a good movie. So if you're into good movies that
• 1:07:57
  have the element of tension and some amount of scare, than this is for
• 1:08:01
  you. Absolutely. I till the second that I'm recommending again a board game.
• 1:08:06
  This is when I got Recently, I looked up some videos from people
• 1:08:10
  who play this game to help get pronunciation guides on the name because it is
• 1:08:15
  a little unclear, and they said it all differently, So I'm going to
• 1:08:18
  say all the ways that I heard it. It is called Arborea. Or
• 1:08:21
  Arborea, maybe Arborea. It's not a game totally about plants as one might
• 1:08:27
  think, or about trees specifically. But the art on this game is absolutely
• 1:08:31
  incredible. It is really surreal in a way. What I like about the
• 1:08:36
  game that's very unique is it has these pieces of the board. So you
• 1:08:41
  have your little pawns that go out on the board, and then the pieces
• 1:08:44
  move on the board and that changes what your options are. And so it's
• 1:08:47
  like the board there's like a piece of board that sits on top of the
• 1:08:50
  board, and that moves, and as it moves, your options for what
• 1:08:54
  things that you can do change, and other people might move the piece that
• 1:08:57
  you're on, you'll move the piece that you're on that might have a people
• 1:09:00
  on it, and so then that opens up kind of what things they can
• 1:09:03
  do. And that's one of the things that was really cool about it.
• 1:09:05
  But it's also just it's a beautiful game. It's a relatively simple game.
• 1:09:10
  You just sort of go through collecting resources that you'd spend on things to get
• 1:09:13
  points, like most other games, but as I said, it has that
• 1:09:15
  unique feature of sort of moving the board around that's kind of neat and and
• 1:09:19
  it's just a beautiful, beautiful game as well. I love it. I
• 1:09:23
  love it. It looks really it does look really cool. It's got a
• 1:09:26
  similar art style to like a little bit of what you see in Cult of
• 1:09:30
  the Lamb, the video game that came out. It's like it got kind
• 1:09:32
  of like the cute, like interesting GB characters, but like a little bit
• 1:09:36
  different, like a little bit more surreal looking. So like it's it's kind
• 1:09:40
  of cool. I'm unfamiliar with that one, but yeah, the surrealness I
• 1:09:42
  think is one I can get on board with. And so yeah, so
• 1:09:44
  that was Arborea or Arborea from Alley Cat Games, and then the Silence of
• 1:09:47
  the Lambs the movie as the recommendations perfect, all right, I think that
• 1:09:51
  I said all the things. Is there anything that you would like to add
• 1:09:54
  or anything that I forgot before we wrap up today? No, I think
• 1:09:58
  I think we covered quite a bit. I think we did well. Then.
• 1:10:00
  Thank you so much for recording with me today, Shane. Thank you
• 1:10:03
  audience for listening. This is Abraham and this is Shane. We're out.
• 1:10:08
  See ye you've been listening to Why we Do what We Do. You can
• 1:10:12
  learn more about this and other episodes by going to WWDWWD podcast dot com,
• 1:10:18
  Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an awesome day.