Don't be a sphex

0:00 Well, I got so many comments last time about how I really should learn how to edit videos that I finally roped a kindly friend showing me the basics. So, you can see the fruits of his labors in today's clip. Um today I want to tell you about a particularly interesting kind of insect called the Sphex. It's a sort of wasp. And when the Sphex wants to reproduce, uh she goes out hunting and finds a particularly big, juicy insect like this cricket here.

0:28 Um and she bites it and paralyzes it and then drags it back to the burrow that she's dug in the ground. Leaves the cricket right outside the entrance to the burrow and then goes inside the burrow to inspect and see if there are any predators that found their way inside while she was out hunting. Once she's satisfied with her inspection, she comes back out, drags the cricket inside the burrow, and then lays her eggs, and uh then exits, seals up the burrow, and flies away. And then when little baby Sphexes hatch, they have a nice big feast waiting for them uh to build up their strength before flying off into the world.

1:03 So, if you ever encounter a Sphex in the wild and you want to have a little fun, here's something you can do. While the Sphex is inside the burrow doing her inspection, take the cricket and just move it an inch or two to the left. When the Sphex comes back out after doing her inspection, she will see that the uh cricket is not at the entrance to the burrow anymore. And she'll pick it up and move it back a couple inches to the entrance.

1:27 And then she'll go back inside the burrow and do her inspection all over again. And while she's inside redoing her inspection, you can budge the cricket again an inch or two to the side. And when she reemerge or reemerges, sure enough, she will move the cricket back to the entrance to the burrow, then go inside and do her inspection again. You can do this pretty much as many times as you want. In one case, scientists repeated this process over 40 times before they finally gave up and went home. And every time it was the same. Sphex would just move the cricket back to the entrance and do her inspection again.

1:58 Over and over and over and she would never actually take the cricket and drag it inside the burrow. Um and so what this simple intervention reveals is that the Sphex's behavior seems intelligent and thoughtful and intentional um but actually the Sphex is just following a pretty simple series of steps a simple algorithm and the step put cricket in front of burrow is always followed by the step inspect burrow. So by moving the cricket to the side a couple inches, the scientists were essentially resetting the Sphex's program to that step again and again and again. So the term Sphexish has been used by some scientists and philosophers to refer to behavior where a creature is essentially following a simple set of automatic rules and lacks the reflectiveness to notice, hey these rules may often work fine but in this case they're counterproductive. In this case they're not actually helping me get what I want.

2:56 Um and I think that a lot of rationality is just about noticing your own Sphexishness. So for example, if you're anything like me you've probably been in fights uh in arguments where if you stepped back in the thick of it and asked yourself, what am I trying to achieve here? What am I hoping to get out of having this argument? It would occur to you that nothing. Like there's literally nothing that I could plausibly hope to get uh out of this fight that I would want. Like um changing the other person's mind or just diffusing the conflict.

3:27 Um and yet you're following this like sort of simple series of uh rules. Like in my case historically, that used to be someone says something that's wrong, therefore I tell them why they're wrong. Um and I would lack the reflectiveness to notice hey, following that algorithm is not actually helping me get anything that I might want and in fact is probably uh counterproductive.