23. Pete Trimmer: Croquet, from maths anxiety to maths degree, and ecological rationality

Pete Trimmer is a behavioural scientist who works as a senior teaching fellow at the University of Wawrick. His research, almost exclusively theoretical, focuses on the evolution of learning, decision-making, and physiological processes. In this conversation, we talk about a wide range of topics: how Pete became a world-class croquet player (former World No. 3), how he got into academia, how he overcame maths anxiety to become a mathematical biologist, and his work on ecological rationality.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith. New conversations every other Friday. You can find the podcast on all podcasting platforms (e.g., Spotify, Apple/Google Podcasts, etc.).

Timestamps
0:00:04: Pete Trimmer, former world-class croquet player
0:15:01: Combining outside activities with work
0:22:14: Pete's path from industry to academia
0:30:30: How to reduce time marking exams by almost 50%
0:36:41: How Pete overcame maths anxiety in school
0:52:21: Start discussing ecological rationality
1:00:17: Do we still need to argue against expected utility theory?
1:07:33: Are we just adding lists of if-statements to theories?
1:09:40: Tinbergen's 4 whys
1:14:17: When is an evolutionary theory a useful theory?

Podcast links

Pete's links

Ben's links


References
Kipling, R. (1902/2011). Just so stories. Penguin Classics.
Niven, J. E., Anderson, J. C., & Laughlin, S. B. (2007). Fly photoreceptors demonstrate energy-information trade-offs in neural coding. PLoS Biology.
Strang, Gilbert's (free) course on linear algebra: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear-algebra-fall-2011/
Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie.
Tinbergen's 4 whys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinbergen%27s_four_questions
Trimmer, P. C. (2013). Optimal behaviour can violate the principle of regularity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Trimmer, P. C. (2016). Optimistic and realistic perspectives on cognitive biases. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.
Trimmer, Pete's blog post about beating better players at croquet: https://www.croquet.org.uk/?p=members/players/tactics/BeatBetter
Trimmer, Pete's cover of the thinking croquet player: https://bit.ly/3pXaFNq

  • [This is an automated transcript with many errors]

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [00:00:00] So I want to talk about ecological rationality later. But before we get to that, you know, as I said before we started recording, I'd like to ask a bit about the biography section of your website. 

    Pete Trimmer: Okay. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So maybe can we start with what is the left-handed Solomon Grip? 

    Pete Trimmer: Oh wow. You've had a dig, a deep dig there, right?

    Okay. Um, so yeah, so this is referring to croquet, which is a game I enjoy playing. And there's loads of clubs started around the world that most people just don't even know about. So I've been playing since I was a teenager and it gets very competitive and different people have different, uh, styles of play and different people hold the mallet in totally different ways.

    It's not kind of like cricket or golf where they're very, very standard set of grips most of the time. So some people kind of. Hold the [00:01:00] mallet with, uh, knuckles pointed forwards, and some people hold it with a knuckles pointed backwards, and I have one hand at the top. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: How do you, how do you do that? 

    Pete Trimmer: Well, so they bend down more and they, their hands are lower down if their, if their palms are, oh, sorry.

    Yeah, you're 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: bending. Okay. 

    Pete Trimmer: So sort of pushing the mallet forwards. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Ah, I see, I see. 

    Pete Trimmer: And, and some of us, I'm one of the ones where I have one hand, one way up and the other, the other way up. So I've got my knuckles on the top point forward. So I think this is out. Most people in the world, just as a kid, will naturally hold a, a mallet as, you know, one hand facing forwards and then lower down, you're holding it so you can put some force in with the bottom hand.

    Anyway, the Solomon Grip is, um, is this grip that a famous player became extremely good with, where both his knuckles are pointed forward. So it's very unusual at the time. So since then, you know, 50 odd years ago, or more than that now, it's been referred to as the Solomon Grip. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Yeah, no, that [00:02:00] was from a.

    Um, on your website there's a link to a article you wrote about how to beat better players, something like that. Uh 

    Pete Trimmer: right, yeah. Okay. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And I think there was one that's specifically from a section where you wrote about something like, if you want to improve, you have to change up your technique, even if you want to go back to the one actual one.

    Yeah. And you kind of try a different style out and then that can help you. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. It's funny how if you try something a bit different and when you go back to doing your basic thing, it suddenly seems easier. You've almost freed yourself up. I wonder how much it applies to other sports. I mean, if you've had, I've been famous cases, you know, with basketball players trying to try out baseball or something, and then they returned to basketball and they're, they're relaxed 'cause they're doing what they know they can do suddenly.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, isn't there also this thing where this is not Yeah, this is more similar to what you just mentioned. Isn't there something that, dunno where I got this from, that if you [00:03:00] try. A different sport like bowling or something, then you get better at some basketball throws or something like that because there's a certain kind of shared movement, like not obviously the entire movement, but parts of it are kind of shared.

    So you can kind of transfer something, you learn to one sports tune the muscles 

    Pete Trimmer: differently. Yeah. That might be the, I dunno about that, but it, it sounds plausible for sure. Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Or I like how lots of athletes do ballet or something because it helps 'em like Right. Body awareness and that kind of stuff.

    Even if you are a swimmer or football player or whatever. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Maybe it, uh, tunes up your core muscles better or something like that. Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. But, um, so I mean, the reason, obviously I'm not that interested in the left-handed Sodom grip per se. 

    Pete Trimmer: Sure. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Uh, but I was just curious how you got into croquet because, um, I have to admit, I think the only game of croquet I've ever seen was, um, from Alice Wonderland.

    Right. Um, with the flamingos. Yeah. The, what's it called? Mallet you said. Right? 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah, sure. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But I [00:04:00] think they use them more like golf clubs from the movement. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, but yeah. But how do you get into, I mean, I grew up largely in Germany where I don't think this thing exists at all. 

    Pete Trimmer: Uh, there's not much in Germany.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: No. There is a little bit, there are a few clubs started around in Germany. I lived in Germany for 18 months, but uh, yeah, back in England, I, when I was a kid, I used to think that we played cro cocaine back on the, our like back lawn, you know, each summer we'd knock in some hoops and tap some balls around and I thought, well, this is fun.

    You know, didn't think much more of it. And then my dad joined a club and it's half an hour's drive to get there, so I was thinking, well, half an hour there, half an hour back. He's driving for an hour to play a game. We've got on our back lawn. I thought this, this like the first sign of senility because why would you do that?

    I mean, that's totally nuts. And then, uh, one day I was driving down there, we were driving down. To Paul for a different reason and he said, oh, I just wanna stop in at the club. And I'd got fed up with hearing about this place. Oh God, not this [00:05:00] croquet club for god's sakes. And um, yeah, we drove in and I saw these huge, perfectly flat lawns, you know, with a grass cut down to two millimeters long and balls just rolling and rolling and rolling, hardly stopping at all.

    And I just instantly thought, oh, well, I wouldn't mind having a quick go and, uh, sort of instantly hooked from actually seeing a proper lawn. So yeah, got into it from, from that point really. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And then just did it a lot or so, I mean, on your, you know, on your, on your website that says you were the British men's champion on world number three and it sounds very impressive, but then again, I dunno anyone who actually played croque.

    So I wonder how, I dunno, like this is 

    Pete Trimmer: number three outta four players. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Not exactly mean, you obviously must have been still, you know, better than the people at your club and that kind of stuff, but 

    Pete Trimmer: Oh, sure, sure. I mean, when you take it up when you're young. Yeah, I think a lot of, [00:06:00] most of the top players took it up when they were young.

    Um, and it takes quite a while to get decent. You know, you've gotta be playing it for kind of 10 years before you get sort of properly good to national kinda level. But yeah, I mean, I used to just go down to start with just once a week. For first couple of years, just like club evenings and, uh, I was the youngest by far, you know, early teens and all these old 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: people.

    Five generations or? 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. Yeah. I mean a lot of them are 50, but I mean, I. Yeah, it's quite a sociable game. And I sort of figured, oh, I can chat with some of these people. You know, get some insights on life. You know, how much do you aim for studying? How much do you aim for enjoyment of work? How much do you just work to, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah.

    Pete Trimmer: Do other things at holidays or whatever. And so, you know, I, when I wasn't playing, I would be sort of gently quizzing all these nice old people about their lives. Um, and, you know, finding out what they regret in life and that sort of thing. That's, that's all good for [00:07:00] me, I think. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So it's almost like golf where the sport is more a vehicle to networking that.

    Pete Trimmer: Well, it was at that time. Yeah. And then gradually, of course, you build up friends in the game. It's like anything, isn't it? You know, you, you do it for a while and you, you start to build some good friendships. And these days I do it as much as anything for the social side, just the enjoyment. Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Do you still do it then, or, 

    Pete Trimmer: oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

    Still play. Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: It's not competitively or. 

    Pete Trimmer: I play, I do still try and play competitively. Um, I seem to have lost my edge a little bit of late. Um, it's partly with moving around, you know? I mean, uh, the trouble with academia is they make you work quite hard, so I haven't had that much time whilst going through the ranks from PhD and so on.

    Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. So that's kind of stopped, or when, when did you kind of stop doing it? Like, it seems like you did it more intensely until a certain point and then less, or, 

    Pete Trimmer: well, I got really good kind [00:08:00] of nearly 20 years ago now, back in 2003, 2004, I was probably at my, at my best, and then it's been a sort of bit of a downhill since then.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. 

    Pete Trimmer: But I, I can still, you know, I can still occasionally take games off really good players, but it's just the odds, isn't it? 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, yeah, yeah, 

    Pete Trimmer: yeah, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. But I mean, yeah. Yeah. You obviously you have to be. You know, a complete novice, the odds are still not very good, right? 

    Pete Trimmer: Oh, no. Uh, yeah, you'd struggle if you were a novice, you, you wouldn't beat me personally.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, you'd have first have to ex, I mean, explain to me what the rules are. That would be step one. Like, well, what's even the objective of this? I guess you have to hit it through the hoops or whatever they 

    Pete Trimmer: call. Yeah, it's, it's very like snr, you know, when you're so in snr when you've put a ball, then you get another shot, and then croquet.

    When you go through a hoop, you get another shot 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: and then you'd like go through a circuit a bit or, 

    Pete Trimmer: yeah, rather than six pockets, you've got six hoops and you've actually [00:09:00] got the same eight colors of balls, but you only play with four balls at the time. So there's two, one person has two balls, the other person has two balls.

    And yeah, there's a set course of hoops that you've gotta get your, your own balls through. And when you hit another ball, you get two extra strokes. And one of those is, uh. That's a thing to hit the other 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: ones. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah, that's right. So you build breaks. It's very light smoke. In that respect, you think in your head, not just about the next hoop, but how you're gonna set yourself up for afterwards.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: Quite tactical. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. It's, I mean, it's like lots of sports, right? In that you, even if you play tennis or something, you don't just hit a shot to win the point. You hit a shot to get the podium to be somewhere or whatever, right? 

    Pete Trimmer: Absolutely. Yeah. Always building for the future. Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: Do you play much, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: uh, tennis or quet?

    Pete Trimmer: Well, tennis presumably given you 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: didn't play the 

    Pete Trimmer: rules? 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Uh, no. I mean, I, I, I used to [00:10:00] play, I actually never played that much. I start, the problem is I started when I was I think 13 and a half or something. Um, yeah. And then I, I was pretty good pretty quickly, but, you know, I'd be playing against people who've been played for six, seven years or after a time.

    So it was still competitive. So that's, you know, how I was, you know, talented in that way, but I still usually lost because I'd just been playing it for half a year or a year. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yep. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So I stopped like a year and a half or two years later because I just lost most of the games against people who had like five times as much training as me.

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. Bit depressing. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. It's also with, I dunno whether this is the same with croquet, but with tennis it's also expensive because you 

    Pete Trimmer: Right. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: You know, you have the courts and you have to book them and, and in our case, the tennis courts were. My parents had to drive me there, so, you know, I could train like twice a week.

    That was just pretty much the upper limit in terms of like what times I could put in. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. One of my nephews played quite a lot of tennis and it did seem to be expensive. Croquet is a lot cheaper. Um, because he basically just paid a [00:11:00] bit a member of a club and then you can borrow a mallor or, you know, ultimately only need one mallet.

    It's not like golf where you need a whole set of different clubs. Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: okay. 

    Pete Trimmer: So yeah, it's not bad. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, no. With tennis and you need then all the equipment around at the Yeah, the shoes, the, the, also the balls. I mean if you, you, you know, there's a reason why tennis, they change the balls, uh, every six points.

    Um, you know, not like individual point or like six every six games. Right. They actually change the ball. So 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Obviously we didn't do that as like 14 year olds or something, but there's a point where you have to replace those, the racket, all that kinda stuff, right? 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, no, so it's, it is something, I dunno, I'm assuming this is the same in.

    Croquet because as far as I could tell, it's the same with almost all sports. Where to have a good game, you need someone who's your, more or less, your level. So I ha I've had, surprisingly, I'm, I mean, I guess I'm just one of the few people who actually had lessons in, in tennis for like a [00:12:00] year or two. Um, and that seems to put me ahead, you know, most people I know, um, of course anyone who's actually really trained tennis is gonna be way better than me, but it's surprisingly it's still the case.

    So that. I dunno, it's just very diff it's difficult to find someone who, where you can have a decent match, um, without it being very one-sided. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. You need that more for tennis than you do for croquet because there's a handicap system in croquet, um, which I don't think works very well in tennis. You know, if you got a certain number of points given to you, it wouldn't, you still wouldn't be able to have a good game, you know?

    Whereas in croquet, you know, you can have this kind of sense. Trying to catch up where someone's had, like they get extra strokes 'cause it's a static ball game. It's different. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: I think you could have a similar thing in snooker, but for some reason they don't use it. You could, you know, you could have extra shots occasionally in snooker would work quite well I think.

    But I've never actually seen that used. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: No. The problem in 10 antenna, it just [00:13:00] doesn't work. Because basically if, you know, if my serve, if like there's very little you can do. If you can't hit return my serve. Right? Yeah. Am I supposed to only have a second serve or That's the most you can do. But yeah, it's, I mean even like even if you were to say, okay, I.

    Start, you start with one point more per game or something. It's still kind of boring if I can just get through you because you dunno how to return hard shots or something. Yeah, sure. It's, there's no point to it. Yeah. Um, so like I have had times where I had someone with who were kind of similar level and that's really cool because then I can play regularly, but you kind of, yeah, you kind of need that kind of thing and I haven't really been looking out for that, so I haven't really played much.

    I just watch way too much and then waste half of my life doing that 

    Pete Trimmer: when you're not doing podcasts. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Because that's the only thing about tennis. There's a world class game pretty much every day of the year. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. It's 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: not like football where you have one or two games basically you can watch per week or the weekend every day [00:14:00] anyway.

    Um, but yeah. But I'm just curious at a kind of meta level, is there anything from croquet that you. Learned that you're using in your science? Maybe not, I guess immediately direct skills, but, 

    Pete Trimmer: um, 

    I 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: don't know. 

    Pete Trimmer: Not so much from the croque itself, that's just the enjoyment of hitting balls and making them do what you want.

    But yeah, just the social side, you know, people, the old guys is to say, you know, you'd, when you're on your deathbed, you don't look back and, and say, I wish I'd spent more time in the office. You know, they'd give me advice like that, you know, where I'd sometimes think about it and think, oh yeah, okay.

    That's sort interesting view on life that, you know, find the balance. Um, yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So the lesson from croquet is to play more croquet. 

    Pete Trimmer: Absolutely. I think that probably goes for most, uh, games and sports, right? 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. [00:15:00] Yeah. Um, but a more kind of general question is also, I mean, I. On your, on your website, it mentions lots and lots of stuff you've done.

    I mean, learning German, doing various kind of dances, snooker, table, tennis, go wing, chun, circus skills, uh, scuba diving, whatever. How do you, how do you actually combine that kind of stuff with, as you said, academia taking up a lot of time and, 

    Pete Trimmer: yeah, so well, some of that lot I did before I got properly back into academia, so I've got a somewhat unusual route in life where I, I'd first done a diploma in engineering and I did a maths degree.

    That was like hard work because I didn't have high level maths at the time. But then I got a job in industry for 11 years, um, analyzing aircraft systems. And so during that time, after the first, you know, only the first few months of that job, I then really had my [00:16:00] weekends and evenings fully free. Um, and I could learn dancing and all sorts of things.

    There was, I lived near college where they had evening classes and all sorts of things so I could go and try out different options in different terms. Uh, which I really enjoyed actually sort of spreading my mental wings a bit. And I did that for quite a while before I decided, oh, right, let's, you know, I wanna do, uh, more research.

    And the best way of doing that in life is to have gone and got a PhD. So at that point I kind of, uh, returned to academia and I started off with a master's course and then my PhD. So kind of had somewhat less time, I would say, since re-engaging properly with academia. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So that's all from before, basically 

    Pete Trimmer: some of it, quite a bit of it's from before.

    Um, yeah, and some, some interests that just sort of tinker along, you know, so things like bronze casting, I didn't, [00:17:00] didn't know any of that before academia, but, you know, some universities have really good resources. So when I was over in the States, they, they had this lovely center where you could do glass blowing and, and ceramics and all sorts of different things.

    And uh, they had some nice bronze making courses. So that's where I took that up. I 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: see. 

    Pete Trimmer: Can't be working all the time. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, you mentioned that it's that you sold. One of the things I.

    Was that the thinker with the croquet mallet or was that a different thing? 

    Pete Trimmer: The 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: thinker I just saw. Okay. You had the, on the book to edit, edit. No, it wasn't, I was wondering whether that was Photoshopped, uh, where you have the thinker by, and then he has like a, a croquet. Mallet. Right. Yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: whether that was photoshopped or whether that was actually something you replicated with and added 

    Pete Trimmer: to.

    Right. Okay. So, right. So firstly, no, the thing that I sold was [00:18:00] different to that. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. 

    Pete Trimmer: And that picture that you see in on the book, I was an editor of that was, that was when I was in Germany. I was editing a book on creative tactics and they had the, the thinker as one of their statues outside of museum there.

    So I just propped my croquet mal up, up against it. Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: oh, okay. 

    Pete Trimmer: And with my partner and, uh, we took a picture of it and then just kind of etched out the back, the background of it. So, worked quite well. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. What was the sculpture of that you did then end up, 

    Pete Trimmer: oh, well, funnily enough, that was also croquet related.

    I've got a theme it would seem, yeah. That was of, um, so it was a bronze hand holding a croquet ball against another ball, and I made, uh, the balls look like the world. So the sea was the pattern of the croquet ball. It's got sort of texture to it. And then the land masses rose out of that, but they're like croquet, ball size.

    Mm-hmm. Um, then I sold it [00:19:00] to a, another croquet player. It, it just won the world championships and was over the moon. And I'd taken this along to the event to show people because I thought I'd be interested and he was very interested in buying it. So I thought, what the heck? It saves me lugging it back.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. And now you can say you are a. Dunno what the term is, but a successful artist. Right. A professional artist who's selling his work. A sculpture, I suppose 

    Pete Trimmer: so. Well, yeah, I mean, again, it's just fun. It's really nice making stuff, you know? Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I mean that's one thing I noticed that, I dunno whether this is intentional on your part, but almost all of the hobbies you meant, or practically all of the hobbies you mentioned on, on hobbies, but like activities on your website are things that are very different from doing research.

    They're all either physical or they're usually, you know, there's something to do with making things manually or manipulating things manually, be it sports or whatever. Mm-hmm. Was [00:20:00] that, is that like an intentional, I guess some of the stuff was from before, but the stuff that you're doing now, is that like an intentional move to kind of have.

    S balance or something that's, um, 

    Pete Trimmer: not, not that I'm consciously aware of. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. 

    Pete Trimmer: I mean, I do, I enjoy thinking and yeah, work's. Got plenty of thinking involved in it, but, um, you know, CRO case's got lots of thinking in it as well and, and dancing, you know, partner dancing is still having to think ahead and, you know, think about the music and what moves are gonna fit and what your partner's capable of and what you're feeling like at the time.

    So I think most things even, you know, if you're making something out of bronze, you start off with wax, you've gotta think how are you gonna shape the thing? And then, you know, it's quite interesting once you've made something, how are you gonna convert that into bronze? You've gotta think how you put these screws and things on it for when you turn upside down to pour some stuff, pour out the wax and, and uh, pour in the bronze when it's a different way up and so on.

    So [00:21:00] there's. I think most things in life, when you start trying to do them well, involve quite a bit of thinking. Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, definitely. I mean, I guess the, the point, um, or maybe why I noticed this is because, I mean, I haven't been doing it much recently, but for a while I did quite a lot of photography and ah, I specifically chose that because it was unlike research.

    'cause I said like, okay, I have want something where I can move. I want something where I can be outside but don't have to. Yeah, I can, it can be, you know, alone or with other people. Um, it's, I'm not thinking verbally, but I'm just looking at things or you know, I, that kind of thing. So I was, I was very intentional about like, I need something that just takes you out of the mindset of thinking verbally or logically about things and just going, yeah.

    I don't like this. Let's see what happens if I move 30 centimeters to the right or whatever. 

    Pete Trimmer: Nice. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But I guess you didn't think about it. 

    Pete Trimmer: No, I've just kind of, through life, I've just kind of randomly [00:22:00] found things that seem to appeal and I've tried them out and enjoyed them. Um, and if I start on something and I don't seem to enjoying it, then I just drop it.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah, 

    Pete Trimmer: that's, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. Um, I guess you already mentioned the whole engineering and then maths. I guess the question is, uh, why did you want to do, like, why did you go back basically to university or 

    Pete Trimmer: Right. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: What kind of was the thinking behind that? Was it like, um, I dunno, you were fed up with work in that sense or?

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah, so it wasn't so much that I was fed up with it, but I thought that I might become fed up with it. So, um, I'd been doing it for quite a few years and I could do the job fairly well. When I'd started the job, I started as an analyst. So what 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: did the job involve? 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah, so I was looking at military aircraft for the Navy, usually helicopters and occasionally fixed wing aircraft as well, but it's mainly looking at, uh, [00:23:00] helicopters and working out what the crew should do with our equipment, searching for submarines and search and rescue and that sort of thing.

    Um, but also how we ought to develop the aircraft to make them better at their jobs. So it's quite an interesting job and I enjoyed it. But once I've been doing it for a little while, you know, a few years in, they start gradually promoting you up the ranks, which is good in terms of salary. Yeah. But it means that you are managing people rather than looking at the technical problems.

    And I could do it, I think I was a successful manager. People were happy to have me as a, a project manager, but I. I didn't enjoy it as much, and I thought, hmm, if I carry on doing this for much longer, then I'm not gonna get the opportunity to change. So I started off looking at other jobs. My first thought was not, Hey, let's go and, you know, do a PhD or anything.

    I started looking around at other kind of jobs, research jobs and things, the possibility of work for the government in some other [00:24:00] form and stats department or something like that. But whatever I looked at, I thought, Hmm, once I've been there for a couple of years, I would find myself back in this role of managing people.

    So I thought, well, I think what I enjoy is the technical thinking and I'm, you know, reasonably good at it. So how do I. Get a job like that for years to come. And again, you know, and I'd known people, older people that had done research throughout their lives, but they'd had PhDs. And I thought, well, maybe that's the route to go.

    And it was kind of big sucking of teeth moment for a while where I thought, oh, can I really go without a salary for that long to do a PhD? And I was pretty naive at the time, to be honest. I've kind of imagined that I would go off, get a PhD, and then just get a job, you know, return to having a permanent job.

    But in. Something research oriented. And of course it doesn't really [00:25:00] work like that in academia, right? You, by the time you've finished your PhD, then you need to get a postdoc or maybe another postdoc, try and find your own funding, all sorts of different routes, but it's very insecure for a while before you finally get yourself a, a solid permanent position or tenured, tenured position.

    So, yeah, so I'd, I'd kind of naively. I thought, well, let's start off with a master's course. Just to check that I'm happy to spend several years studying. So I, yeah, I found this course at Bristol was quite a good course, machine learning. I thought that'd be an interesting topic and I've probably got the skills to do it.

    So, um, yeah, I booked myself onto the course and handed in a notice. I've been there for 11 years and thought, I'm sure this will be fine, you know, and then I looked back a few years later, I looked back and thought, my God, if I'd really understood how academia worked, I wouldn't have taken that risk. You know, [00:26:00] like it worked out okay for me, but, um, it doesn't work out for everyone.

    And when I, you know, since then, the risks, I think, crikey. We put in that situation again and actually understood what I was taking on, I probably wouldn't do it. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I mean, I have two points about your, two questions about your decision to go into academia because you were managing people, 'cause you're being promoted into management positions in industry.

    The first is. Could you just not have taken the promotion and continue doing the technical thing? And the second thing is, isn't that what happens in academia, that the more senior you become, the less you do the technical stuff and the more you manage people like PhD students, postdocs, that kinda stuff, and you become almost more like an advisor than an actual scientist.

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. So that's true of a lot of people. I do know some people in academia that have been incredibly successful and are still very much at the coalface because that's where they choose to be. So, you know, a couple of [00:27:00] Frss that I've worked with are really top of the tree. But you know, they, they're very much doing their own research still a lot of the time.

    Although they manage people as well, you know, they've got that bandwidth to kind of do both. So it is not automatic that you have to do. And yeah, going back to my, going back to my job that I'd had in industry, could I have turned down the promotions well? To some extent. I, I partly did at the time. You know, they, they asked me if I'd take on some management things and I said, well, no, I'd prefer to stay on this technical thing I'm on at the moment.

    But I could see that it would become gradually more and more problematic pushing down that route. I could have done it, but it wouldn't have been good in the long term in terms of my, either my salary or my, you know, it would've just become a bit awkward in the company if I'd become sort of more expert than I should be for, you know, what I was, I mean, in that particular company, it just [00:28:00] wouldn't have worked particularly well.

    Now, doubtless, some companies do research and development where you could do that. I looked around at, I didn't, I didn't find much in in that way. So most of the time, I think you're right, that the better you get at things that you often get shuffled up the management route. Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: And it's one of these mysterious things right across the world.

    I mean, it happens in the army. It happens basically in any kind of discipline. If you're good at doing your job, you get moved on, you do another job. And if you're bad at doing your job, then you get stuck with doing that job because you don't get familiar. And it's kind of, it's kind of madness really how we set up society that if you're good at something, then you go off and do something else.

    And if you're bad at something, you get stuck doing it. So 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I mean that is the, what's it called? The something effect or whatever, that everyone's promoted to their level of incompetence. Right. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Because when you're really good, you get promoted until you basically aren't good at your job anymore.

    Yeah. And then you [00:29:00] get stuck there, um, which is kind of cynical, but also not more accurate than we'd probably want to speak. 

    Pete Trimmer: Sadly. Yeah. There is some truth to it, I think. Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean there's, you know, there's many examples I think of academics who are great researchers and terrible PIs. You know, there's 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Many examples of that where you think like, this person shouldn't supervise people because they're just not good at managing people. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: You know, that's what you do once you've got your PhD and you, you're good at that. 

    Pete Trimmer: Sure. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. I guess there should be more like just research scientist positions where you don't have to apply for funding or whatever, but is that, I mean, you've worked in the uk, Germany, and the us.

    Is that, is it the similar system everywhere, or are there. I dunno, some countries where it is more likely, I mean, for example, in the uk right? You, as far as I can tell, you're pretty much the academic route is to start off as a lecturer or senior lecturer. If you start, if you [00:30:00] have more postdoc experience or something.

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Basically you have to teach. Whereas in Germany, I think there are more opportunities to just do science and without teaching, um, or with less teaching. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. From what I've seen, they're all fairly similar. You know, the differences are small enough that you can largely ignore them. It's not like by moving countries you'll really get much of a change.

    So at least that's, that's from my fairly low level of what I've seen. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Yeah. Um, I have one kind of last question before we get more into the actual topic of ecological rationality, which is, you had this one interesting sentence on your website, which was along with Tim Fort. Is that how you said? Oh 

    Pete Trimmer: yeah.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Is it Ft or, yeah. Okay. Tim Ft. Along with Tim Ft I came up with a method of reducing exam marking by almost 50%, saving Bristol biology lecturers a thousand hours of intensive work each year. Although, by the way, you wrote [00:31:00] Bristol rather than Bristol, but, 

    Pete Trimmer: oh, did I? Thanks. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I just copied that sentence into my note thing and it immediately gave me a, like a red underlines of tal.

    Anyway, sorry. The, the quest. I didn't want to like point that error at the type out, uh, the quest. The point was more to, yeah. What did you do to, to, 

    Pete Trimmer: well, yeah, so I mean, that's incredibly simple actually, as you just kind of, they've got all these historical records, you know, of, of what exams people have taken and you can work out what.

    A student, what their overall grade will be. Basically, if you know all their marks, then uh, you can stick 'em all effectively into a massive spreadsheet and go, okay, here are all these different students. Here are all their marks. They've got through the different years of their degree. And you know, we know how they combine.

    We know what the different weights are and hey, Presto, this one's got a 66 on average, this one's got a A, whatever. Um, and so you can go and group them up and say, well, this is [00:32:00] what the different students would get. And then you can say, having got all that data, you can then play tunes to it and say, well, what if we only have half the amount of data from each year?

    You know, what would happen if we just reduced the amount of marking? You know, you only mark one of every two scripts kind of thing. What would happen or what would happen if you took out a third? You know, do all sorts of tunes with it. And so Tim and I built this spreadsheet, got all the data from the department, stuck it all in there and went, you know, it's really kind of a blunt tool to look at what seems like a refined question.

    How much can we reduce things because people were maxed out. And when, and you know, it literally started with, well, what happens if we chop it in half? And my first thought was, well, it's gonna be too extreme, but let's at least see what the effect is there. And it had an amazingly small effect on the marks because there were so many different marks feeding into the system.

    You get the sort of central limit theor I'm [00:33:00] applying of, you know, how many, how much benefit you get from extra marks. And after a while you don't really get much benefit. The, the students that are working hard and and getting good marks tend to get good marks further down the line as well. And as long as you're taking some marks still from year two and some from year three or whatever, then you, uh, what we found was that hardly anyone changed their overall degree classification if you chop them in half.

    So yeah, when we, when we took this back up to the, like the management and said, here you go. Here's some quantitative analysis for you. They went, oh my god. Right, okay, let's, let's act on this. They ended up changing it in a different way, but they knew from, from that analysis that they could, they could really cut back a lot on the amount of marking that was being done, and they rolled it out to other departments as well.

    So, I don't know in the end how much it got reduced across the whole university, but certainly a lot just in the one department. So there's probably [00:34:00] something that could be looked at all across, you know, across the world, the UK and potentially the world. I don't know. I'd be interesting to try it out where I can now.

    Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So just so I understand this correctly, you basically said the idea is that there's just redundant information about how good of a student someone is, basically because you have all these different marks. Okay, but doesn't that. At least in theory kind of missed the point of marking X something in the sense that marking is also supposed to tell you what to improve so that the marking isn't necessarily there to primarily, I mean, in some sense it is primarily there to kind of categorize people into groups of how good they are.

    But I mean, it seems to me like I'm imagining right now if I just didn't get certain things, then I'd. Wouldn't know what to improve and, or I just wouldn't prepare for it because I knew I had one exam list. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah, sure. So you can't structure the exam, so you just [00:35:00] take things out. 'cause of course, it's the motivation for them to learn and then the feedback that they get for Yeah, for that learning.

    So, so some things like the projects or particular coursework would definitely still remain, but when it comes to things like exam marking, you can basically, you can have a system where the student even does the same amount of work and you, you know, you, if you just mark one of the questions rather than two.

    Oh. So if you were gonna be marking, you know, six questions, then you could just mark three of them instead and the overall outcome across the board would, would still come out. Well, it's, it's because of what you raised there that they didn't just do this blunt approach and go, right, okay, let's chop everything in half.

    They came up with something more subtle. But knowing that there were so many redundant marks in the system. Meant that they could go, okay, it doesn't matter if we're, you know, we don't have to be highly fine tuned on exactly how well they've done on every course here in order to know their [00:36:00] overall degree result.

    Yeah. Um, that can be a bit more coarseness within, with a confusing term to say coarseness within a course, but 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I know. Yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: Um, yeah, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: with an a. Yeah. But the, uh, so then you just told the students, you'll be writing, I don't know, six answers and three of them randomly will be marked or, 

    Pete Trimmer: well, that was our kind of initial suggestion, but as I say, they ended up doing something a bit more convoluted where they changed the structure and, and the length of exams as well.

    They realized they could reduce the length of exams and that way the students write less and there's less to mark. Um, but they still need to have vised as much and so on. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. A more general question, do you think. There's much of a point to this whole grading exams and that kind of stuff. I always felt like, I mean, I'm, I think, very critical of this stuff in general, and in part because I'm not good at exams.

    'cause I just, I'm very bad at like doing something if I know I'm not, it's not gonna be useful in this sense. Like, I'm not writing an essay [00:37:00] that's actually worth being read. So I always, I don't know, could just get rid of the whole thing. 

    Pete Trimmer: Well, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: maybe that's a bit too radical for university, but, 

    Pete Trimmer: well, the thing is, if you get rid of it, what do you replace it with?

    I mean, I'm not, I don't, I'm not much a in favor of lads exams and stuff, but I can see that it gets some students very motivated. So it works better for some than others. I think it depends a little bit on your philosophy of what you're aiming for in life, but. Well, I, I totally agree with you. I think is for younger children, you know, you get parents just getting very stressed about their 9-year-old, you know, coming up to some test or, you know, 11 plus or whatever it is.

    And I just think, oh my God. Like I was dreadful at things back at that age. You know, I had a school report where it said, Peter will never be a mathematician, you know, and I just totally [00:38:00] believed it. I didn't even rebel against it 'cause I was just so bad at that stage, you know, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: like, what were you bad at?

    Pete Trimmer: I was just terrible at maths. I mean, I just couldn't do it, you know, when I was 10, I was just awful at maths. And then, um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: well, like you didn't understand how, how letters can be stand out for numbers, so what was the problem? 

    Pete Trimmer: Well, well, I mean, you know, we'd sit there trying to do these maths problems and I'd read the question, try and understand it.

    I did, I was sort of patient. I would try and understand it. I wouldn't just give up instantly, but I just didn't seem to get it at all. I didn't really. Understand what was going on. And then, um, I was ill, it was, it was a weird thing. I was just ill for, I was off off school for like a week or two and my parents said, oh, you've gotta keep up with one subject at school.

    And I said, oh, okay. It was just something where I would've been contagious, just, I can't remember whether it was measles or what, but I just had to like [00:39:00] lounge around the house for a few days and they said, oh, you've gotta keep up with maths. And I was like, oh God, maths, I can't, I don't understand what I'm doing.

    You know, we have this book and, and like the book explains stuff, but I, I would read the book and just not understand it. So I thought this is totally pointless, you know, seemed like an absolute waste of my time to be trying to keep up with maths 'cause I couldn't do it in the first place. So, um, I found myself sitting there and I thought, well, let's just try and manage one question.

    So I'd basically never managed a maths question. And then, um. You know, I read through this chapter and I got to these questions and I couldn't do it. I didn't see how that question in any way related to the chapter I just read. And I thought, well, it must relate to it in some way. And I read through the chapter again and I thought, well, I still can't understand that.

    I put it to one side, you know, I came back to it later. I thought, well, let's have, let's have one more go. And I sort of flicked back and forth as I was trying to read this chapter. I kept gander question, trying to keep it in mind thinking, well, which [00:40:00] part does this relate to? It's really like nuts. And then, uh, there was this amazing sort of moment where I thought, oh, hold on.

    And that bit is a little bit like that, only a little bit different. And oh, in that bit's a little bit like that. And then suddenly it was like this crystal suddenly forming in my head. You know, I suddenly started thinking, oh yeah. Oh yeah, that, that, that makes sense. I'd know what the answer is to this, like one A, you know, and I was like, delighted.

    'cause my whole aim was to like one, manage one A by the end of the day. And I suddenly, suddenly it was so obvious I could do it. And I thought, well, let's have a quick look at tomorrow. You know, one, let's try and do one B tomorrow, you know? And I looked at one B, but of course I'd never kn known before that point that one B is gonna be exactly the same as one A, just a different numbers.

    So, so like I looked at one B and thought, oh my God, I've done all of tomorrow's work in two seconds. Look at this, look at one C. Oh yeah, I've done [00:41:00] that as well. You know, like, you know, half a minute, I've done a whole week's work in my own mind, you know? And then I looked at like question two and thought, oh, it's, it's a bit different.

    I'm not sure. And then, you know, 10 seconds later I thought, no, hold on. It's just the same, slightly different angle. So you zip through two A to two. DOE or whatever it was. And suddenly I was like hooked because suddenly it was like, I can do this. And so I spent like, you know, I can't remember whether it was 10 days or what that was off, but I went back to school and of course I was way ahead in the book.

    We were in the, I was in like the bottom set for maths, but um, but I was well ahead of everyone. In the class. Suddenly I went from like right at the bottom with everyone else better than me, to right at the top with everyone. And at first I just sort of thought, well, they're naturally better at maths than me.

    They'll just gradually overtake me. But suddenly everything a teacher was saying made perfect sense to me because I was, had all this like clearly in my head [00:42:00] and they were effectively just recapping stuff I largely knew already. So I could just, it was like this foundation I could suddenly build from.

    Um, and so they started putting me up sets at this point. They put me in the middle set and I thought, well, you shouldn't do that on top. So sets 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: is like how 

    Pete Trimmer: ability, or how 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: good they're doing 

    Pete Trimmer: all Yeah. Sort of streaming. So I had like a top, top, mid and bottom. Yeah. Okay. And before I knew it, they'd put me in the top set, but I still just seemed to be able to do it.

    It's like something that clicked in my head. So that's very strange. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Like 

    Pete Trimmer: all within those experience, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: two weeks or whatever. That's, that's crazy. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. Yeah. It's really amazing. Yeah. And without that, I would always just have thought, well, I can't do maths. You know, and I would've doubt if it's have had a totally different life.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, you did a maths degree, right? 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. Well, absolutely. Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But is, do you think it was more a difficulty of understanding what was expected from you? Like what, what, you know, obviously not like a [00:43:00] difficulty with understanding mathematical concepts, but more like, what do they want from me in this exercise, or 

    Pete Trimmer: No, I believe it was a confidence thing because I subsequently went through it again later in life when I was looking at a question.

    I wouldn't be kind of thinking, what's the answer? I'd be thinking, well, you know, can I do this? And I'd, I'd have all these doubts and, and you know, I'd be kind of looking for excuses of, you know, what time is it or can I do something else? Or, you know, any kind of distraction to save me realize, and I really can't do this.

    I mean from that point on, when I was at school, I just sort of stormed through things. Then I went off to college two years and with this engineering, and again, I could just do it really easily. And there was another guy in the class, Siri, he would work really hard on it. And he was good at some topics, but he just couldn't do the maths.

    And I would sit there, try and explain it to him and he couldn't, he just couldn't seem to get it. And he was like me, [00:44:00] you know, years before and I'd, and I'd sort of forgotten. I'd largely forgotten at that point. Oh, I used to be dread at maths. 'cause that had been like six, eight years earlier. So I'd sort of built this belief that I could do maths and that I was a natural at maths at that point, which is kind of crazy given my background.

    But then I decided to do this maths degree and everyone else had a level maths in Britain. I've got this A level system and I didn't, I didn't have that background, so I was behind everyone. Again, when I turned up to uni, I was getting dreadful scores, you know, failing everything, and I was working really hard.

    And you know, day after day, week after week, I'd take deliberate breaks and things. I would try and do everything in the right way, but it just wasn't working. It wasn't going under my head, right? And then when I'd been there about six weeks, eight weeks, it was eight weeks in because I was coming up to the end of the term.

    I was sitting there trying to do a problem, couldn't do it at all. And then I suddenly thought, hold on. This [00:45:00] is just like one of those engineering problems I had, you know, where I would just solved it in an instant. I thought, hold on. It's like that problem from, you know, back and I suddenly realized I can do this and I, you know, did the problem.

    And then I, I sort of sat back in my chair and I thought, I've been looking at this for like 20 minutes before realizing, oh, it's similar to something that I could do before. And I knew that if I'd had been given that same problem a year earlier, I would've just immediately done it. You know, it would've been done within a minute.

    And I'd sat on since then, I'd spent all these hours studying maths and yet I couldn't then do it. And I thought, well, what's going on? 'cause this is crazy. It's like, I'm going backwards and I'm working so hard. And I thought key and I thought, I'm like our now I'm like working really hard, but I just can't seem to connect the dots I thought.

    Well, you know what's going on. And I thought the difference now is that rather than seeing the [00:46:00]question and going, what's the answer? And just all my mental focus going into finding the answer, my mental focus was instead, oh, can I do this? Could there be an easier thing that I could do first that would build up?

    Should I be rereading something before doing this? Should I be, you know, there were all these little distracting thoughts that were stopping me. So, yeah, it was quite a big wake up call for me. And at that point I thought, okay, I've gotta change what I do. And for the next, like four weeks of the last couple of weeks of term and some of the holidays, I, I split my time evenly when I was supposedly working.

    Half of it, I would spend trying to do maths and half of it I would've looked like an absolute nutter to anyone that could see me. I sat there literally saying out loud things like, I can do maths. I'm good at maths. I remember being good at maths. Yeah, I can still do maths. [00:47:00] I'm getting better and better at maths.

    Each time I do a maths problem, I'm getting better. And I would like just keep saying this sort of stuff to like rebuild that inner confidence so that when I did, I'd try and then look at a problem full, you know, full on concentration of let's try and solve this in a short time. It, and it seemed to work.

    It pulled me through. I went from definitely failing and jus wanted me to leave the course to obviously succeeding. Yeah, very strange. That's 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: amazing. Yeah, I, and I kind of know what you mean. I mean, I never, in school, I just didn't care. I was like, I was good enough to get like a B without thinking about it.

    And that's pretty much, that was my school life, basically. And then I, I mean, I studied psychology, so there's no maths in there. I mean, I also remember like, there was one guy in school, you know, who would study really hard. Like I, you know, I barely listened to the class and would get like a B minus, or B or b plus or whatever.

    And you know, you'd have these [00:48:00] people who would be studying really hard and like an E or an F or whatever, like, you know, yeah. Just doing terribly. You could like, like how can they not get, like there's nothing to get E right? It's, yeah, it's very easy. It obvious. Yeah. And then, you know, I mean, of course I had stuff I did where I didn't do well and sometimes, but like, you know, in the grand scheme of things.

    Put in no effort and got like a B or something. But then at university, then there was one, like, to make a long story short, I was kind of doing like, for random reasons, one kind of math course. And then suddenly I had the same thing where I was sitting there and going like, I don't get this. And suddenly then as soon as you have this, this belief of like, I don't get this, I, I don't understand this, then suddenly you really stop looking for solutions.

    Yeah. And you stop. You can hit a wall. Yeah. Questioning yourself more than anything else. And you start looking around whether other people are getting it. And it was funny to me how, how, how fast that happened. Um, yeah, I mean, in my case then I didn't work through it because [00:49:00] it really wasn't that relevant and I just stopped doing it.

    And I mean, to some extent it might also have been not a particularly well taught course. Um, yeah, that is probably part of it, but, 

    Pete Trimmer: but it didn't matter too much for you if you were already at that stage. But when it happens to someone, you know, when they turn or 12 or something and they think, oh, I'm not good at maths, it's really hampering them for life.

    So, yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I mean, I think for me it was more so, yeah, I didn't have that in maths, but I had it in, I mean, I went to school in Germany and we had, when we'd have literature, a analysis, be it a poem or a, a novel or whatever. I barely, if ever got anything better than a C in that it was pretty much always a d just because I just didn't know what, what they wanted from me.

    Right. And okay. Large part is also, I basically never read the book, so I had no idea who any of these people were in the book, which doesn't help, but, you know, you given like an ex except, and you dunno who any of the people are. That doesn't help. But, but nonetheless, even if on, on the, on the odd occasion where I [00:50:00] either knew parts of the book or where we were giving a co a completely new excerpt or something, I spent most of my time going, what do they want from me?

    And the funny thing is now, like I, I like writing fiction and I, I'm on the podcast, I'm doing some sort of literary discussion. I dunno whether any of it is any worthwhile anything, but I clearly seem to enjoy it. And in school, I just never got, what, what they, what was I supposed to write? I just didn't get it.

    And. Yeah, you just start questioning yourself more than actually trying to solve the problem. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. Yeah. I guess I'm in all, all topics to different levels, but certainly with maths it's one of those strange ones where it can be really easy or really hard and there can be a very thin line between those two.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I mean we did like a linear algebra course in the, not exactly in the lab, but with like other people from the institute a while ago, and we did Gilbert STRs course from MIT, the open course where stuff they have, and it was, I also had this, like, I was not really [00:51:00] better at understanding this stuff really than anyone else, but there was this one moment where.

    We were like 10 people and none of them, they said like, this was a really hard problem. And I was like, guys, this is the easiest problem of them all. Like, there's nothing even to do here. Like it, the problem, almost, like it just falls apart once you see it a certain way. And then, you know, once I explained that, they were like, oh, yeah, yeah.

    But if you don't see, if you don't see it, then 

    Pete Trimmer: if you don't see 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: it, be super hard. Yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. It's a bit like the nights problem in, uh, chess where a night can cover all the chess, uh, squares, you know, without covering the same one twice. And then you say, well, you know, obviously you could, you could have the same route but remove one of the.

    Squares. That would be easy. What about if you remove two of the squares, let's say diagonally opposite corners? Could you remove them? And if you're, you know, if you don't find the right way of thinking about it, you could spend years trying to figure out whether or not there's a route. And if you spot, oh, they're the same color, and the horse always gonna [00:52:00] swaps colors each time it moves.

    So, you know, you can't take out two the same color, it just won't work. Then you've instantly solved it. So there are loads of things like that that yeah, if you find the exact right angle of thinking about it, you instantly solve it. Just, they're quite nice when you spot 'em. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, exactly. Um, shall we at least spend a little bit of time talking about what I asked you to, um, uh, I was like, when I saw your, you know, the biography party website, I thought we might be spending a fair bit of time there.

    Yeah. I mean, as I, as I mentioned like before we started recording this whole topic of, I mean, I keep calling ecological rationality. Is that, what, is that what you'd call it? Okay. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. And that's a, a term that's coming ever more into vogue at the moment. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Is is that what you'd use or 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Sometimes kind of your research or, okay.

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, [00:53:00] maybe to start like, as a kind of broad introduction, like from what angle are you approaching your research or kind of why, what, like what's the kind of overall thing that you want to find out or. Yeah. Um, yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. So, I mean, I'm interested in how organisms think and different thinking styles, right?

    I mean, in a way, I guess I'm ultimately interested in, in how we humans think about things. But we're so complicated, you know, there are so many drivers in us that to try and do anything theoretical at the moment is very, very tricky for humans. There is, there is work progressing on some fronts, but it's kind of easier sometimes to take an animal that's doing things in a somewhat more simple way, a somewhat smaller brain, a simpler system, and also where we're able to see them in the actual evolved settings.

    You know, in their actual, like natural environment because for [00:54:00] humans, the world is, we've changed the world so much that in a way we've, we're like a fish that's taking herself outta water. You know, trying to work out what we're doing and why it can get so complicated in this modern world of, you know, why are you doing such and such?

    Oh, well it, because that way I keep my job and what's the benefit of that? Well, I keep getting paid money and what's money for? And so on. I mean, it's really so, such a complex web compared with why is that animal doing that? Well, it's gonna be because that way it's either safer or it's gains at food or water or, you know, sex or Yeah.

    Or whatever. So it's much more of a direct way of looking at what brains are doing and why they're doing them. And of course we've, we have a great deal of, uh, structural similarity in our brains with, with, uh, plenty of vertebrates and mammals. So trying to understand what different animals are doing and [00:55:00] why, and the context in which we can make sense of what they're doing, I find very interesting.

    And of course animals can make mistakes as well, but a lot of the time if you really look at it in enough detail, there can be a logic that appears for why they're acting in a particular way or why they're learning some things and not learning others. And so for me, I think that looking at that and, and making sense of it gradually is at the moment the right stepping stone towards building better evolutionary psychology for humans in the long run.

    But also if we're understanding our effects in the natural world and how we can help animals, you know, with, with, uh, the climate change that we're putting them through as well. So there are lots of sort of interwoven aspects there. One other reason for looking at it is it can be useful for things like animal welfare to try and understand, well, you know, if [00:56:00] an animal is acting in this particular way, is it doing that because it's worried about things or is it doing it for some other reason?

    So there are all sorts of different, different reasons for trying to understand why different animals are behaving in particular ways. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: It's a funny, funny coincidence. Um, one of the last people interviewed, she, um, I mean, uh, we mainly talked about her work on corporation and social interactions in kind of inequality aversion in dogs and parrots.

    Uh, but now she's working with farm animals for pre precisely that reason to increase that kind of welfare. It's just a coincidence that, like, that's literally the last topic I talked to her about basically. Um, and that was, I think the last, or maybe we did another interview since. But anyway, so one thing I find slightly confusing maybe is that, so you talked about, you know, thinking about how different, or studying how different animals [00:57:00]think and that kinda stuff.

    And, but at least the papers that I've read of yours are not really about specific animals in that sense. You know, you're not saying, I'm looking at a. Macco versus chimpanzees or whatever, right. Or whatever it might be. Yeah. It's more a, a species less or like a, a, a, um, non-defined species and kind of seeing how in certain environments, you know, it's very abstract and it has nothing to do with at least the stuff that I've read with specific species.

    Yeah. So how do you, um, and maybe related to that, one question I had from your website is you called yourself a behavioral scientist, but as far as I can tell you, you do theoretical work that's, it is kind of about behaviors, but in a very abstract way. So I'm just, yeah. How do you kind of reconcile those two things?

    Yeah. If you need to be reconciled. 

    Pete Trimmer: Okay, so, so of course what we're looking for are general principles, and so there are different ways of getting at those. So. There [00:58:00] are plenty of people that look at things empirically. So down at Oxford, for instance, Alex Snick works with Starlings and various other animals, and he looks at what choices they make and how they seem to learn things.

    And then sometimes he comes up with a mystery of why they doing this. This seems irrational. And usually you don't want to find an answer that's specific to starlings, right? You want an answer where you go, it's because of this general aspect of their environment. That means that Starlings should do this and that Phish will do this.

    And perhaps there are some other organisms, you know, perhaps a difference between predators and prey, for instance. It means that some will do it and some won't do it. And so, yeah, you're right that most of my papers are pretty non-special specific, but quite a bit of the work has. It's kind of origins in particular species, uh, where the mysteries came [00:59:00] from.

    And occasionally I have worked, you know, I've done more specific models of different parts of the brain, how they interact and things. But those are more aware. Usually it's that, you know, been chatting with people that have got their hands on some ation, have got a bit of a mystery. And I think, well, can we find a general model that would, that would produce this kind of seemingly mysterious behavior, but from a purely logical perspective.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Right. Okay. So yeah. Taking, solving other people's curious findings or, 

    Pete Trimmer: yeah, I mean that 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: mysteries, 

    Pete Trimmer: yeah. It's basically, if it becomes interesting to me as a mystery, then I think it's worth solving. I'm not really trying to solve it for them. I'm just being greedy and solving the things that I think are interesting, that others are flagged up as problematic.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Other people do years work of like worth of animal studies and you say, this is [01:00:00] interesting. I'll take that problem. 

    Pete Trimmer: I'm very lazy.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Maybe that's a good thing in a theoretical scientist, right? Well, like a, a specific kind of laziness. Yeah. Yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, yeah, I mean, so this is a kind of fairly generic question that's not necessarily about your research, but about. These kinds of findings that I've, you see or I see quite a bit, um, or the way that papers are framed.

    So, you know, you mentioned, for example, you see, let's say someone is studying a particular species and they find, oh, they do this kind of irrational behavior or something. It seems to me, and I mean, for example, you've done this sometimes when you say, you know, for example, you have this paper, optimal behavior can violate the principle of regularity.

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And as always, all the references are in the description of the podcast. It's kind of set up in a similar way that, for example, [01:01:00] Kaki and Richard Thala set up the papers where they say, here is expected utility theory or utility theory, whatever you wanna call it. Exactly. And these are some axioms of it.

    And look, they're wrong. And to some extent I feel like. Like when I read their papers first a few years ago, it seemed like, okay, this is really cool. But then after reading that a few times, I felt like, okay, you're kind of, is it a bit of a strawman argument to say like, oh look, these people built this up thing and it's wrong.

    And it's kind of a nice rhetoric trick almost. And it, it makes it often nice to read a paper. But I do feel like, you know, when I read papers that come out now, I feel like, yeah, like we know, you know? Yeah. We, we, we don't need to constantly say that, you know, this one model has false assumptions, um, whatever you wanna call it.

    And this is not necessarily a critique or criticism of your paper or that approach in the paper, but I'm curious, is that kind of a, like, why is that still in there? Like, why do we [01:02:00] still need to say that? 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. So that's a really good point that you raised. Uh, quite a deep important point I think. So there are different ways of attacking things and different ways of viewing something as a straw man.

    And you're right, there's a lot of work out there that says, oh, you know, expected utility theory. You know, it's all well and good in theory, but hey, look, here are all these empirical things that don't match up. You know, just give, give out these questionnaires of a lender problem or whatever, you know, and it's all nonsense.

    And you're right, that's kind of been done to death and it starts losing. It's value once you've gone around that loop a few times. What I'm trying to do is slightly different to that. I would say, rather than attack it on from an empirical front, I'm looking at it much more of my theoretical front of at the moment.

    There are a lot of, uh, people have expectations about. [01:03:00] The theory where they think, oh yes, if this set of assumptions, then this follows. And I'm actually, I've got various papers that show, well, no, actually that's, that's not the case. You know, that this does not follow logically from that. So it's attacking it in a different way.

    It's not attacking it empirically and saying, Hey, we don't have, you know, the expected utility, or we don't have the transitivity, or whatever particular rule it is. It's, Hey, we wouldn't expect to have these particular rules that always been produced because actually they're not as logical as people have been assuming.

    So I think they're still. Reasonable worth in that at the moment because not enough people have done that. And I've, I've been to kind of doing this on various fronts with different authors, different, uh, co-authors have been working with. So, you know, there are things like signal [01:04:00] detection theory that's, that's quite well known where that's just looking at a single decision and saying, well, what should happen in this decision?

    You, you know, you can find a kind of positions of trade off that, where it doesn't matter which action you should take, and that should be a threshold. And then, you know, if you get a stronger signal, you should do one thing. If you get less strong signal, you should do something else. And you know, the maths of, it's very simple to do and you think, well, yeah, that's, that's just logical that that should be what an individual should do given a particular question.

    But when you then take your blinkers off slightly and look at it from a wider angle and say, well, hold on, we don't make decisions in isolation. We have whole sequences of different decisions on different topics and sometimes similar decisions on the same topic. Then what happens with this system, you know, if now rather than it being a one-off DecisionMaker, just trying to maximize something, what happens if you're trying to maximize across a [01:05:00] range of future possible decisions?

    And sometimes effects can start getting reversed. And trying to understand the conditions under which it would get reversed or the, or a particular trend would be strengthened, can help us to. Build a kind of deeper theory, and arguably that's meeting those longer term calls that you've been talking about with Ka anderski and so on, where they've been saying, hold on, look, this doesn't work.

    This isn't right. There are all these empirical challenges. Effectively, what they're saying is that the theory is too shallow, or the theory is in some way wrong. So what I'm trying to do is build deeper foundational theories that show when particular things would make logical sense. And, you know, that can explain some things.

    Of course. Um, we still run into this problem of organisms are not going to be perfect all the time. They're [01:06:00] gonna make mistakes and so on. And that's where the kind of, rather than it just being about rationality, is about the ecological rationality of given this scenario, you know, scenario, there's a limit to how much thinking you actually ought to be doing because thinking is costly.

    You know, if you need too big a memory or if you need too much power to keep everything updated, then it's not gonna work as well as the simple system that is sometimes making what economists would call an irrational decision, but from a holistic mindset, might be very much the best thing to do. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: You mean like say for example, you have, let's say you have like a time limit, right?

    You have like one second to respond to something, then it makes no sense to calculate to the, I mean you can't, if you are just 

    Pete Trimmer: count 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Biologically limited, then it's much easier. Or you are, you are more likely to be correct in a real situation when you just use your heuristic or something like that.

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah, exactly. Heuristics suddenly [01:07:00] make a lot of sense. You know, how much, how much should we be able to remember everything that's happened. It's incredible how much we are able to remember, but we've got quite big heads and quite big brains compared with most animals. How much should we ponder and think things through before making any particular decision?

    It just makes logical sense that there would be limits and trying to understand what those limits are and how they change for different organisms is, is uh, well I find it quite an interesting thing to look at. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, it's, in a way, it seems to me like kind of what you're doing is also saying that, well, number one, what the optimal behavior is very context dependent.

    So in one context this might be optimal behavior and this, and you kind of try and figure out and why, I dunno, maybe animals are more naturally in this context, but you ask them to do something in this context, therefore they just misapply something or whatever. But doesn't that then potentially lead [01:08:00] to a kind of the same theory, but with a few if statements.

    Added in it 

    Pete Trimmer: sometimes. Sometimes it's, it's simple like that and then it's kind of boring. Um, and 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: or it just becomes a very long list. That's also kind of what I'm trying to get at where you 

    Pete Trimmer: Right, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: it becomes like very much like if you're in this context, that if, in this context that, and I guess maybe that's just a sign of a theory not being developed far enough if you have to specify it so much to each context.

    But I'm just, it's just a general thing I'm wondering about like to what extent, um, you know, I'm, some of the stuff I'm doing is interested in a kind of loss or gain context or something, and some are putting in these if statements never seems particularly satisfying. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. Yeah. So it comes down to whether you are just putting in those if statements 'cause hey, that seems to solve it.

    Or if you're putting them in for good reasons, you know, that it would make sense that you would need this if statement here and there [01:09:00] at first, that might sound. Like subtle distinctions, but actually I think it's a quite a crucial aspect of whether there's worth to doing it, right? If you're just kind of looking at a dataset and going, well, you know, it works.

    If I put an if statement in here for whether if's a loss or unexpected gain kind of thing, yeah, then, then well great. Okay. We've got some better descriptive theory, um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: which could be a good start. But 

    Pete Trimmer: yeah, it, it might be a useful start, but it doesn't explain why something has happening from a functional perspective.

    So you probably know Tim Bergen's for Wise. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I actually don't for some, I've heard it a lot, but I never actually read up on it. Yeah. Which is something in your you site, in one of the papers and I again like circled the citation saying like, read this. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So can you like say what they are? 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah, so he goes, this is right back in the [01:10:00] sixties, Nico Thunberg and was a brilliant pathologist, you know, looked at behavior of animals and he realized that different people were talking at cross purposes a lot of the time.

    Different people had slightly different interests in my study and animals and different perspectives. And he realized, well, some people are trying to answer why an animal is doing something from a sort of physics perspective. If you like causation perspective or mechanism. So the mechanistic explanation of, you know, why a bird sings or something and will be, well, you know, why does it sing at dawn?

    Or something like that will be, well, you know, the light entering the eye that triggers the receptive fields. It does such and such in the brain that changes its testosterone level or whatever. And hey, presto, the, the bird then does it singing, you know, and that's a completely different level of explanation to various other.

    You know, the functional explanation would be, well, it's singing to attract mates, [01:11:00] or it's singing to protect its territory. It's a totally, totally different level of answer to the physical explanation, but he also identified two other levels of explanation. One is the ontological, so how it's developed.

    So it can be that it's, it's choosing to copy the, the song, whatever that it's heard from, its parents or its siblings or whatever. And then you can look into how that's developed and how, you know, what stage the bird's got to with its vocal chords, whatever else. Another level of explanation is in terms of the genetics and how there can be phylogenetic constraints on things or you know, at what point birds started to sing in different ways and and so on.

    And these different, it's these four different perspectives on why an individual is doing something. Well, that started off in biology. It, it has a lot of sense in psychology as well for why, uh, human individuals are doing particular things. A lot of the time people are [01:12:00] talking cross purposes to one another and we need to keep kind of reflecting back on Tim and going, hold on, are we actually looking at this?

    Are we trying to answer the same question here? Yeah. Because if we're not, we're just wasting our time. So yeah, I think it's a useful way of, of trying to reconcile what is we're answering and, and keep lined up on the questions. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Is there one of those that you are most interested in, or is it 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. Yeah, so I'm usually most interested in the functional explanation of what are the payoffs, you know, the, the benefits minus the costs kind of thing.

    Why does this behavior come about? But sometimes there aren't answers there, you know, sometimes an individual is doing something illogical and that's because you know, it's, genes are inhibiting it from doing whatever, you know, why don't we have whales? Well, because, you know, because we're, we're constrained.

    I mean, it would be quite handy if we kind of [01:13:00] popped out the womb these days, the last month, smooth roads and pavements and everything with some whales just roll down the hill. Exactly. Yeah. But we, you know, there are these limits that we have and mentally we have these limits as well. But if we start off trying to explain it functionally and then hit a brick wall and go, no, we can't make sense of it this way, then it starts to make sense.

    Well, let's look at it from one of these. Other perspectives, you know, firstly, what is actually happening? What's the mechanism that is at work, why would this mechanism make sense? And look, look at it from the phylogenetic perspective and so on. Which of course is very tricky with brains, right? 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Is it a bit hierarchy in that sense, like 

    Pete Trimmer: no 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: function mechanism, like, you know, it's like, okay, that can't explain it either.

    Let's go one step back almost. Or 

    Pete Trimmer: no, there's not like, um, you know, you start from here and you, and you then look at this all four kind of valid, [01:14:00] although they're kind of turning on different levels. It's not like one level is higher than another. At least that's my perspective on it. Um mm-hmm. They're, they're all sort of equally valid and equally niche as well.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: okay, so I have another kind of fairly broad question, which is about. When exactly an evolutionary theory is a useful theory and when not, or So I've had a, a few problems when I, um, I mean this is not about your stuff, but like when I read evolutionary theories in psychology or whatever, it seems to me, you can always make up a just so story of how things came about.

    Just so stories there. You know, Roger Kipling wrote a few famous ones where he like explains how the camel got its hump or whatever. And it's some random made up story that, you know, kind of fits that. And it seems to me that a lot of explanations can be, I [01:15:00] often don't find 'em particularly satisfying. I mean, in one, I think this is in your optimistic and realistic perspectives on cognitive biases.

    I think you mentioned, for example, well from like this local perspective, this thing doesn't make sense, but from a more holistic perspective of. In a larger context, it does make sense. And I always feel slightly like, yeah, you can kind of always say something like that. Right. Yeah. It feels to me it's very, it's rarely the case that you can't think of some sort of reason of why something might not be the case.

    So my kind of general question here is more like when is something a good or useful evolutionary theory and when is it more of a just so story? 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. Well that's, that's another good question. And I think that the answer is when it starts to have predictive power, because any theory is, you know, what's the worth of a theory?

    If you have a descriptive explanation of something, then you know that's all [01:16:00] well and good for explaining what's happened in the past. And you know, if you have exactly the same set of conditions, then it might be good for describing things in the future. But then the question becomes, well what if the future scenario is slightly different?

    How much has it gotta change before this theory is no good? And if all you've got is a description of your data, then you don't really have any foundations to build useful predictions. All you can do is say, well, maybe it'll be similar to how it was without any understanding. And the aim, of course, is to understand the system well enough that when you start getting some new data or you know, look, this is what the scenario is gonna be, now we can make useful predictions.

    And that allows us to do planning on all levels, you know, whether it's climate change or pensions or you know, whatever problems it is that we're facing at the time. So some of my recent work has been kind of proof of concept and [01:17:00] that. Has often not been good for predictive purposes. It's more been about saying, hold on, we've got this existing theory.

    There's a, there's a hole in this theory. Uh, here's a proof of concept of that fact that this doesn't work under these circumstances. And you can kind of use that sometimes to make predictions under certain conditions. You can say, well look, you know, if we use the slightly more advanced theory, then, then we can make different predictions to, to what we would previously have made under circumstances.

    But more of the time it's been about identifying, no, hold on. We need to modify this theory. Here are some of the clues to what we need to incorporate, you know, under a whole range of circumstance. We need to be looking at multiple decisions, for instance, rather than one off decisions in order to understand, uh, this, this range of different [01:18:00] problems that we're getting.

    And, you know, identifying different ways of linking up the different, uh, decisions across time. So some of it is about identifying future ways of getting better predictive models, but the proof of concept in itself is often not particularly worthwhile in terms of predictions. All it's really done is predicting, well, they exist in theories wrong, you know, but it's sort of a useful jumping off point.

    But it ultimately, if you've got a theory that isn't good at making predictions that other theories, if it's just making the same predictions as other theories, then that's no good. If it's making different predictions and it's done, it's producing better predictions, then you wanna understand why that is and, and that can be real worth there.

    Without that feedback. Oh, yeah, go on. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Terms like better and that kinda stuff are always, you know, once you start to define them, it gets tricky. But for example, let's say we have something where you have [01:19:00] a particular decision making context and, uh, like, you know, let's say a fairly specific context and then you say, well, or that they find like in supposedly irrational behavior.

    But then you say, okay, look, if you look over a broad range of behaviors, then this kind of strategy would make more sense. But that also seems like a kind of dissatisfying answer to me because I'm not testing the person or the animal in all contexts. I'm just asking about this one context. Like why does a, why does it have to generalize too many things?

    If let's say you have a human, let's say, right, where you, you'd say, well, we, we should be able to specifically adapt our behavior depending on the context we're in. I mean, why, how, for example, does, and what's the trade off, right, in terms of like how well a theory predicts specific behavior and how well it predicts overall behavior.

    Yeah. There's no specific question here at the end of my statement. Um, uh, [01:20:00] did you see what I mean? Like it's, 

    Pete Trimmer: I think to some extent I see what you're kind of asking. Yeah. And I'm just trying to think how best to answer that. I mean, ultimately it comes down to sometimes, you know, you might be, you've given the example of a person has, has done something and you don't understand it.

    You'd like to understand, you know, why are they, why are they doing this in this circumstance? And. If the specific model says, oh no, ideally you'd be, you'd be doing X and instead you're doing Y. And it must be because of these background things. That doesn't seem like a satisfying explanation. It only becomes a satisfying explanation if it explains things at a wider scale, not just for that one individual, but across a whole bunch of individuals or across a range of species or whatever, where [01:21:00] suddenly the predictive power of that theory does start to pay dividends in terms of, you know, where you're gonna put your money, you know, on, on which theory makes the right prediction.

    And if that wider theory is doing a better job, then, then there's worth in it. I think the, the possibly deeper. Issue that you're identifying, which is problematic, is that sometimes you just get the kind of throwaway lines of Well, yeah, it's not the specific thing. It's probably this more general problem, you know, of not having enough memory or something.

    And there isn't really an actual theory for Yeah, for what? For what would happen under what circumstances. And then, you know, these kind of throwaway lines are just kind of annoying because they're supposed explanations for things and they are, as you, as you [01:22:00] say, just like, just those stories and yeah, that, that's irritating.

    So I think there are different ways of viewing it sometimes when that's written down. Yeah, it's just like. A rubbish filler, you know, a vague explanation, vague sort of pseudo explanation that doesn't actually do the job. And in other circumstances you can get a very similar sentence in a paper. But we're actually, there's been some deeper thought behind it where there're actually saying, look, hold on.

    We think there is a deeper theory. We don't yet know exactly what it is, but we think it's going to be along these lines. We think there's this limit in memory, for instance, due to these other ecological forces. It gives you a sort of pointer into, well, hold on. We perhaps, in order to understand this, we do need to look at the, you know, the mass of the extra neurons or whatever that would be [01:23:00] required in order to be having this extra information.

    Then we can start to look at it as some kind of trade off. Now there has been some great work done on that kind of thing. You know, things like fly's eyes. Um, some really nice work at Cambridge has looked at, uh, the type of the neuronal properties of signaling from a fly's eyes to its brain. And you can look at, well, aldon, there are these different types of pathways with different kind of costs in terms of weights and transmission of information and so on.

    And, you know, sometimes they're wired up with things that don't give them the optimal information. If you just looked at it in terms of information terms, but in terms of the actual cost to the fly of what it seemed to carry around, Hey, it makes sense. And so sometimes having these kind of vague pointers is just annoying.

    And sometimes it's actually useful for building better theory, but ultimately it's only [01:24:00] worthwhile if when you've built that better theory, it's got better predictive power. Because at that point you've thrown yourself out of it being a just so story and back into actual science of here's the theory, now we can test it.

    Just having a theory that you can't test isn't science. Of course. So 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I mean maybe, so let's assume the best case scenario where, or maybe not the best case, we, we we're disregarding the worst case scenario of someone just saying, you know, just as a kind of, um. Yeah. Like a pointless kind of half a sentence somewhere to satisfy someone in the review process or whatever.

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But, um, let's assume like a better case scenario. I'm just wondering, I mean, and I know that theories or one mark of a good theory is that it generalizes, you know, beyond just one context. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Because, well, it's not really a theory if it's just one specific context, but I do wonder to what extent it makes sense to have a theory that's supposed to work across species, like, [01:25:00]you know, across a large range of species in lots of different contexts or whatever.

    I do wonder at some point whether it's just, um, maybe if you lack a mechanistic understanding of why that is the case, whether that even makes sense to try and. I dunno. Yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: ID 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: point. Yeah. 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. But you could ask, you know, what's the point of Darwin's theory of evolution? I mean, that's trying to cover all these different species, right?

    But I think most of us would agree there's, there's a real worth to it. But if you rewound the clock, you know, 150 years, and someone said, well, why are you trying to study across all species? That's just madness. Your snails are totally different to humans. And I mean, you, you're just wasting your time. And that, and in a way it would seem like they had a valid point.

    Right. But I think, I think there is worth in, in some theories, trying to go across species, because when you do that, you sometimes start to [01:26:00] identify different. Strata where you might, so for instance, if you look at a, you know, a band of monkeys or something, you might get a hierarchy within the group to see how information flows.

    You know, who, who's making what choice on the grounds of need and food or wanting graph sex or whatever. And having some overarching theory can encourage, uh, researchers that have discovered something in their monkeys trying to build this general theory to go from the specific to the general that then starts getting tested in other species and the re researchers on snails or whatever else, you know, or some, well, probably something with a bit more of a hierarchy in snails, but, uh, whales or whatever can go, oh, hold on.

    There's, this theory is cropped up and this totally different realm. I wonder whether it applies in this scenario. So [01:27:00] there's, there's kind of some worth at the intellectual level there, but I think the deeper worth is in things like how different species do need to be before the generalizations aren't good.

    So if you look at, uh, migration patterns of birds, for instance, you can look at a particular species like White Crown Sparrow or something and say, okay, this temperature goes up by a degree or two, and they start changing their flight patterns. And whether they're doing, you know, a stopover on route to particular place, you know, does that have some predictive power for other species?

    When would we expect there to be worth in that and when wouldn't we, we, understanding that kind of thing is really important if we're gonna save some of these species. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, maybe that's what I'm more getting to. Like, when would you expect a theory to apply to specific context? 

    Pete Trimmer: Hmm. '

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: cause I guess there has to be some sort of reason, rather there being a kind of generic statement.

    Yeah. [01:28:00] 

    Pete Trimmer: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But d does, is that problem then just solved by knowing the specifics of the situation you're trying to apply to? 

    Pete Trimmer: Well, so I mean, it's a very, very difficult problem first of all. Right? I think that's worth recognizing this. You know, you, you got a particular thing, thing. Well, we've like two, three minutes left species.

    Yeah. I mean, you got one particular thing in one species, will it apply in another? It's extremely difficult to know, but at least if you've got some functional understanding of why a species might be doing something of why it's changing its flight pattern or whatever, then you start, uh. Have at least some inkling of whether another species is, is more or less likely to do it.

    And that's just because we start to get inklings about what the theories are likely to look like, even if we've not got them pinned down well enough yet. So I think it's the right route to go to at least be trying to do this. [01:29:00] Yeah, and, and you know, the criticism that, hey, the, the theories aren't good at the moment, although it's true.

    I don't think it's a general criticism in terms of, well, what are we gonna do? I mean, we, we need to strive for theory in some form in order to make any predictions. So that's, that's why I continue to press in that direction. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay.