 In which ways does culture make us dumb which ways well, so it removes a lot of need to think because it gives us Prebuilt solutions to problems. It gives us protocols so that we don't have to figure out things for ourself Just lots of pre-built solutions. So it tells us what we need to think and what we need to know in order to survive So it's made us dumb, you know when ways x y and z but what would be an example today? It's also made us smarter though Sure, I know it's made us much smarter, but what would be an area today where we're acting in a dumber way because of culture? Well, so for one thing we're all much dumber at least in terms of the amount of societal knowledge We have in our heads compared to our ancestors So if we go far enough back every single person had to know everything about how to find food cook food every feature of the Productive system how to make all the tools now left to our own devices We wouldn't be able to do the first thing in order to recreate the productive system that we have So we've been breaking knowledge down into smaller and smaller parts So in terms of our ability to produce our for ourselves, it's gotten smaller and smaller and in the book I have these cases of lost European explorers where a particular group of explorers get struck in an environment where hunter-gatherers have survived for Centuries and they're faced with the challenge of surviving and of course they can't because they're missing this large Accumulated body that the hunter-gatherers got for free, but it helps you find food and avoid disease and travel and all those As you know, it's a common 18th century theme that the division of labor Possibly will make us stupid or an interesting and it seems that was wrong in the 18th century Nicholas Karr has argued well Google makes us all shallow and we lose the ability to remember things will that also be wrong? Well, I mean The thing is we have probably been losing memory ability So as soon as we can write we can offload lots of information that we'd normally have to keep in our head So I've always been impressed living in small-scale societies the number of stories that people tell over campfires and just the amount of safe folk biological information information about plants and animals and poisonous and what's What what you can eat and what you can eat and how you have to process it? So there's just this encyclopedic knowledge, which you know I would just use the handbook for a lot of that information, but that's not available to you So we've been kind of gradually figuring out ways to download stuff And I think that's the kind of Google problem is that we have less stuff in our heads But our ability to do things can still expand