Nick, Peter and Fraser discuss what cosmopolitanism is, and how it affects our beliefs about the world.

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, where we take a look at interesting topics and what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making.

My name is Fraser McGrew, and I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights.

And today we're talking about cosmopolitanism, which is appropriate because we're in North London as we record this, where we're surrounded by all sorts of ethnicities of which we are one.

And.

And what we want to take a look at, I think what we want to discuss is how this affects us and maybe more specifically our perception of the world.

So, Peter, can you start us off?

Sure.

I think an interesting, important part of cosmopolitanism, to be cosmopolitanly minded, is accepting that other things might be true, other than things that you're used to within your culture or your family or your immediate circle.

So to me, that seems like you're not instantly rejecting potential.

Other explanations or other hypotheses as to what might be true and how things might work.

So I think what this essentially does, if this is your modus operandi, this is your way you operate, is you are able then to assimilate other building blocks or axiomatic building blocks that allow you then to try these building blocks together to generate new ideas.

So I think potentially a cosmopolitan attitude makes you a better thinker because you're not instantly chucking out things which are useful for working out other problems later on.

Okay, I can see that's a positive aspect to it, or presumably a positive aspect to it.

Maybe we'll come back to why that doesn't always happen, or what could be a negative thing of being in a cosmopolitan area but not having a cosmopolitan mindset, let's say.

But perhaps we'll come back to that later, Nick.

Yeah, well, actually, that reminds me.

My granddad was.

He had a thing about.

He didn't like Chinese food, and his attitude was that it was wrong that different types of food was sort of put in the same dish.

That.

That was his.

He.

So if you take a stir fry, it might contain some.

Some pork and some vegetables and some sauce.

He thought that was sort of morally wrong.

I mean, he.

He wanted to have.

He wanted to have.

You know, he thought that you should have some slices of beef and then separately, you know, some carrots and then put some potatoes that were separate.

And that was why he didn't like Chinese food.

Now, for him, that was almost a factual issue.

It was sort of a fact that Chinese food was wrong.

It's just that approach was just, you know, they shouldn't do it.

It's bad.

Keeping the food separately is better.

And I think the interesting thing about cosmopolitanism is that it challenges you to think about what things are actually your preferences and what things are actually your beliefs.

Right.

So there's a very good essay by Montaigne, the French philosopher, where he really goes into a lot of detail about the things that he likes and the things that are purely preferences.

And actually, you can see it's quite a challenging thing to try and.

To try and ask that question of yourself.

And he uses an example of an argument between, I think it was a German and a Swiss person about the design of their ovens or the design of their fires and their stoves.

And, you know, they both adamantly held to the fact that the design that they had in their country was clearly better.

You know, and it's very hard for us to separate our preferences from our beliefs when we think about things like.

So an example might be accents, you know.

So in Britain, you know, people tend to think, well, the received pronunciation accent.

Listen to Peter, he went to a good school.

That's how he talks.

Sort of received pronunciation is somehow better.

It's just better than a Cockney accent or a Scouse accent.

And people will justify that belief by claiming things like, well, you know, Cockney speech is kind of lazier in some way.

Now it isn't.

There's absolutely nothing you can point to about a Cockney accent that makes it in any way better or worse as a means of communicating than a received pronunciation accent.

But our sort of belief, our values that say received pronunciation is how announcers should talk on the radio and so on, make it really hard for us to separate the preference from the beliefs.

Well, hold on.

So is it ever possible to fully shake those shackles off?

Because I challenge you, is there any kind of accent or way of speaking, you don't have to say which, but is there any kind that you ever hear in just.

Great.

That makes you think, oh, why should I do these words properly?

Yes, of course.

And the thing is that you.

But you have to.

The point about being exposed to lots of these things, you then are able to say, well, is it me or is it them?

And I think the reaction, the sort of.

I suppose the naive reaction to being exposed to different cultures is to.

Is to say, well, actually, everything is kind of equal.

You know, our way of doing things is no better or worse than anyone else.

And I don't think that's true either.

I mean, I think There are things where we can point to, we can point to aspects of culture that we can think of as a kind of social technology that outperforms other potential ways of doing things.

I use the example of queuing.

Obviously we're British and they therefore we think that queuing for things is better than just a scrum.

Now I would defend that in kind of economic terms.

It seems to me that having just a scrum will still lead on average to the same outcome.

It's just, it's a lot more effort.

So it's better to have a queue, in my view.

And I think you can make the same argument about things like cultures where you haggle over prices compared to where you go in and pay the price that it says.

I mean, I think the price mechanism is just more efficient.

So there are things where we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater and say, well, you know, all values, all cultures are kind of equal because it's not true of everything, but it is true of quite a lot of things.

And it's important for us to try and distinguish the things that are purely a way of doing stuff from things that are a better way of doing stuff.

Peter, you were nodding vigorously at something that Nick said about social technology, which is two words I've never heard together.

So I don't even know what that means, but perhaps we'll come back to that in a minute.

But just talking about cueing.

I want to talk about cueing for a second because I love the fact that we're, we queue in the UK and I was defending ourselves, British culture to a friend of mine recently who's Argentinian, who was complaining that we don't stand up on the tube as much as we should.

And I said, okay, there's that, but there's lots of other stuff as well.

And I love the fact that we queue and I love the fact that there's an unseen queue in a pub, for example, when you're queuing for a drink, and that everyone is aware of even though it's physically not there.

And what I like about that and things like zebra crossings and the way we use them in the uk, which cars do stop, is I think it's about trust, is that we trust the system.

We know that if we do this that everything will be fine.

And I kind of like that.

And I think that sort of speaks volumes about British culture and history in general.

That's my little flag waving advert there.

But any.

Anyway, social technologies.

He was, Nick was giving some examples.

There about what's good about cosmopolitanism.

And you were nodding, Peter.

So is there something you want to pick up on there?

Yeah.

I think you can define any metrics of betterness that you like and apply them to different languages, and different languages will score higher or lower on those scores.

So, for example, from an engineering perspective, certain languages are easier to process with natural language processing than others.

English written English is quite compressible because the laws of how frequently words appear is quite predictable.

And you can use that to generate an algorithm which efficiently compresses and then transmits text.

Whereas other more pictorial languages are potentially more difficult because the symbol set is more complicated.

But then you could argue that actually they are inherently more dense themselves, informationally dense, because each Pictor, if you have a number, if you have hundreds of characters rather than 26, each character carries more information.

So it's a different protocol for transmitting information.

But whether or not one is objectively better across all parameters, it really depends on what you're trying to do with it.

Exactly.

I think there's an interesting social or cultural observation, I think, about actually British.

Everyone thinks the way they do things is more or less.

It's just right.

Other people are a bit too something or other.

And you mentioned crossing the road, Fraser, and I love this example because you can use it to sort of challenge British people and their assumptions about things.

Now, sort of culturally, when we cross the road, we expect to be able to sort of, if there's no cars coming and we're a pedestrian, we will happily cross, you know, pedestrian crossing, even if the Green man isn't showing.

And that just seems completely sensible.

You're on an empty road, there's no cars coming.

Why not cross the road?

Germans don't have that attitude at all.

Germans will shout at you in the street.

I know someone who was called a child murderer because he crossed the road while the Green man wasn't showing.

That strikes us as, you know, vastly overly legalistic.

And probably we can't enjoy that because it seems like it fits in with our caricatures about what Germans are like.

But the Italians think exactly the same about us in cars at red lights.

You know, where in Britain you would never go through a red light, broadly, even if there were no other cars coming.

And that was obviously true.

Whereas Italians take the more pragmatic view in general, if there's no cars coming and you can see that, then you can ignore the red light.

Now, we see ourselves as just right there, but of course, so do the Germans and so do the Italians.

And I think, you know, hearing examples like that challenges you to think about, well, you know, which, which of that is a preference and which of that is actually, we have got it.

Right, okay.

But bringing it back to our initial starting point of cosmopolitanism, it just seems that what we're saying is, isn't it, hey, isn't it nice if we can be broad minded and be exposed to different, different cultures and people, and if we do that and make sure we immerse ourselves in that, then that's really good, it's a good thing because then we see the world in a different way and we can see things from another point of view.

Okay.

I think I can imagine some people saying, no, that's not the case.

And we're drifting into a debate about multiculturalism there perhaps, but is there anything.

It doesn't seem to be, I don't think we're saying anything terrifically profound there.

Is there anything we can say beyond that?

And we can say, okay, well if we're like that, then therefore this can happen and this is the result.

Can we just go.

I just think what we're saying so far isn't particularly deep.

I think we focused on cognitive benefits.

So we've said, you know, being exposed to these things challenges your understanding of your own beliefs and therefore will perhaps cause you to be more open minded.

But society still has to work.

And I think, and there are some things which, you know, where actually we have to coordinate.

We've got to decide that there are one, you know, there's one way of doing things.

The most obvious example is perhaps which side of the road you drive on the, you know, where you.

Everyone has to do it the same way and we just have to make a decision.

But there are other things, more subtle things.

I'd say tipping is one of them.

You know, we, Britain, you know, you tip certain people, we'll tip taxi drivers and waiters, but not bar staff.

Whereas in the US you would, you would always tip bar staff.

And we kind of have to coordinate on that.

You know, as a society, as long as we do it one way or the other way, that's fine.

As long as everyone knows that's fine.

So there are some things where we just, we can't have multiple ways of doing things because there's a coordination benefit to getting it all right.

It's getting it all one way rather than another.

Peter?

Nothing.

No, nothing.

Peter?

Yeah, I don't know, this reminds me, I'm still not sure if we've got.

If we're getting anything there.

I don't know.

It just broadly speaking.

Reminds me, I read an interesting quote recently, which maybe you're familiar with, and I'm sure I'll get it wrong.

But it's something like, you know, an intelligent person or an educated person is having the ability to entertain an idea without actually accepting it.

Just, I know something that in another podcast that we've done is what's happening or something.

I see this a lot in America, and thinking about Donald Trump and his supporters is just being unable to perceive, actually that there are other points of view.

And even if you disagree with those points of view, that you can still see why someone, you know might hold those views.

Well, let's distinguish between points of view, meaning beliefs about the world versus, you know, how we should behave.

So they're two quite different things.

Beliefs about the world.

I mean, I believe there can be right or wrong.

I mean, the world is one way.

If we, you know, it's not, I think, the sort of relativist idea that, you know, you can believe some things and I can believe some things and they're different, but they can sort of both be true from your perspective or true.

It just cannot be made to work, that idea.

I'm not suggesting that.

No, no.

But then, you know, the question of what our preferences should be and how we should behave and what sorts of things we should do as a society is a different one.

And I think the interesting thing about conservatism with a small C is that the default assumption is that our way of doing things is probably because it's better.

And, you know, that's quite an interesting viewpoint.

It can be probably defended on certain empirical grounds.

You know, that actually probably the way that societies behave evolves towards situations which are broadly better.

You know, the conservative assumption, and I would say probably most of Trump supporters are kind of conservatives will just tend to assume that their way of doing things is probably better than other.

Other ways of doing things.

Sometimes that's going to be true.

Okay, I can't think of anything to sort of sum this up.

Has anyone got a summing up sentence at all?

Anything about cosmopolitanism?

Cosmopolitanism, we don't have anything to sum this up with.

Okay, so cosmopolitanism is a good thing and it affects us in positive ways.

Okay, all right, we'll wrap up there.

So thank you once again for listening to another episode of the Cognitive Engineering podcast where we looked at cosmopolitanism.

Thank you very much.

From myself, Fraser McGrewer.

And from Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights.

That's all until the next time.

Thank you.