How is Man Better Than Beast? IQ or I Will

Should you bank on being clever, or is persistence the ultimate key to success in life? We discuss why persistence enabled early humans to hunt successfully and how valuing persistence over intelligence has shaped our lives and values. We talk about using incentives and shaming to instill the importance of persistence in kids, how persistence helps you roll the dice more times, stories of persisting even when others laugh, and more.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] the thing that helps persistence and endurance beat out cleverness is that you have, you know, a billion rolls of the dice. So even if the dice is loaded against you, eventually you're going to roll something great.

Malcolm Collins: People who are persistent get mini dice rolls. In D& D terms, or Baldur's Gate terms, it's the difference between having high stats and rolling with advantage.

Rolling with advantage means you roll twice and then you take the highest roll. Whereas high stats just add a number to your role after the role and you would always rather role was advantage than have high stats. This is, this is just true for life, right? Like you can actually just have advantage on everything so long as you are willing to accept failure and try again and again be rejected again and again.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Malcolm, one thing I really appreciate about you is that you loved that my motto when we first met was repeated blunt force. Like you got it instantly and no one else. Yes. [00:01:00]

Malcolm Collins: I was like, oh, this is someone I want to marry, but I want to ask you a question because I want to know if you actually know this other than our intelligence as a species, which is just.

Off the charts. Do you know what other thing is almost holistically unique in humans?

Simone Collins: Endurance, right? Like long, long endurance hunting and whatnot that, that we've even really early humans did, which is why so many mega fauna have gone

Malcolm Collins: extinct. Yes. So, there are some African tribes that still do this and I'll see if I can find a video of it or something.

Cause it's insane to watch. So what they will do to hunt a deer or gazelle like in Africa, right? Is they'll just chase them.

And they just keep chasing them. They can run faster than people. Yes, to start. But, they just keep chasing them until the deer just falls over exhausted. They walk up to it and they break its neck.

These are the San people of the Kalahari Desert, the last tribe on earth to [00:02:00] use what some believe is the most ancient hunting technique of all, the persistence hunt. They run down.

The animals have taken fright.

They will concentrate on the bull. He will be carrying a heavy set of horns, and therefore will tire more quickly.

After hours of tracking, they've entered an almost trance like state of concentration.

At times, it's impossible to see any sign of the kudu's tracks, and the hunters must imagine the path it will have taken., they're now close enough for the next stage in the hunt. The chase.

Only one man will undertake it. Kuroe, the runner.

It's now a test of endurance. Who will collapse first, the man or the animal?

This was how men hunted before they had weapons. When a hunt had nothing more than his own physical endurance with which to gain his prize, running on two feet is more efficient over long [00:03:00] distances than running on four. A

man sweats from glands all over his. Body and so calls himself a kudu sweats much less and has to find shade if it's to cool down,

and a man has hands with which to carry water. So during the chase he can replenish the liquid, he loses as sweat

then the kudu collapses from sheer exhaustion.

Malcolm Collins: It's

Simone Collins: like those those horror films. Where the person who's being chased is just screaming and running and, and like, you know, acting all manic. And then like, the killer's just like slowly walking behind them. Like very, just

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, like, like, well, I mean, it's interesting. I, I sometimes imagine like when humans go into space because all space faring entities will be marked for their intelligence, right?

Like they'll all have been the most intelligent species on their planet. So like, what makes humans unique? Like, what's the other really weird thing about humans? Because all species will likely have something that's like. [00:04:00] I can almost guarantee that interstellarly, if there are multiple intelligent species, one of the things that humans would be known for is...

Stupid amounts of persistence. Like, other species will be like, Oh yeah, they'll just keep chasing you. Like, you piss them off, and they'll just follow you forever. Until they have killed you and everyone you know. But, no, I mean, I, I... I don't think that that's a bad thing to have as a species, but I also think it's a very interesting thing to, to have that marks what makes us different.

Because I think so many people, when they define what makes them human, and what they're proud of for being human, They talk about the intelligence and the wit and the cunning of our species.

Simone Collins: Yeah. That's what people celebrate. Like, you know, James Bond isn't necessarily, I mean, he does show some, some signs of persistence, but that's not what's emphasized.

What's emphasized is his cleverness and his fighting and his suaveness [00:05:00] and blah, blah, blah. But that's,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. But, but the other thing that makes us human. Is there a persistence and I actually think within our own family culture when I think about the values that I want to elevate for my kids, when I think about why I married a woman who on her dating profile, her quote was repeated blunt force, it was because I think venerating persistence is more important than venerating.

intelligence.

Simone Collins: Yeah. If there were a polygenic risk score for persistence and we had access to it, we would probably wait it in our calculations above intelligence.

Don't you agree?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, so there is a polygenic risk score for an internal locus of control, and I view that as highly correlated with resistance believing that you, so, internal versus external locus of control, for people who aren't familiar, a person with an external locus of control, if they're trying to explain the [00:06:00] events in their life, they will explain it through external means, whereas a person with internal locus of control will try to explain the events of their life through internal means, so for example, if a person with an external locus of control gets fired, it's, Because X had it out for me.

Because the company was racist. Because, you know, whatever. A person with an internal locus of control will say, I didn't do this right. I didn't do this right. Right? And every outcome always has an internal and external locus of control explanation. There's always answers from both perspectives. And That, that is, and sometimes one is truer than the other, but what's interesting is that people who persistently have an internal locus of control will come up with internal locus of control answers, and this helps psychological health, having an internal locus of control whereas having an external locus of control hurts psychological health, and it's something that the urban monoculture in any soft cultural tradition will always elevate, is external locuses of control, because they're easier in the moment, they just cause more pain in the long run.

So it is something you ca