Even small cults are a serious cost on the world economy, to victims, their families, employers, friends, and credit-card companies.

The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing attitudes as you get older.

I can't think of anyone who is up on evolutionary psychology and related areas who is deluded enough to be called a utopian.

I much prefer the modern world.

The information that is passed from person to person and from generation to generation is the primary factor that gives humans a competitive advantage over other animals.

Genetic studies in Iceland have found that many of the women who were the founding stock of Iceland came from England and what is now France. Some were probably captured and carried off in Viking raids only 40 generations ago.

Cult recruiting methods based on dosing victims with the brain chemicals released during capture bonding would make cults even more of a problem than they are now.

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environmen.

I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.

Could people be trained to be less gullible? Or are you as stuck with gullibility as you are with skin colour?

People repeat behaviour that leads to flooding their brains with pleasurable chemicals. The short-term reward loop acts over hours to years, and the long-term reproductive success loop over generations.

Even small cults are a serious cost on the world economy, to victims, their families, employers, friends, and credit-card companies.

People can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family.

Fighting hard to protect yourself and your relatives is good for your genes, but when captured and escape is not possible, giving up short of dying and making the best you can of the new situation is also good for your genes.

Primates will continue to play social games without the least insight into what is killing them.

Anyone who has ever had the feeling of being higher than a kite after giving a public speech is well aware of the effects of attention.

Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses.

Most of the suicide hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, a place not lacking in wealth. But due to rapid population growth, the wealth per capita has fallen by about half in a generation.

Action leads to Attention. that in the short-term releases Rewarding brain chemicals and in the long term improves reproductive success.

Successful cult memes induce intense social interaction behaviour between cult members. This trips the attention detectors.

High status males had multiple wives or additional mating opportunities in the ancestral environment.

Children do not have to learn that streets are dangerous places by potentially fatal trial and error.

Brigham Young had 47 children, and over 50 women as wives.

The drug or cult has major if not exclusive sources of brain rewards.

People under the influence of cults is similar to that we observe in addicts. Typical behaviour for both includes draining bank accounts, neglecting children, destroying relations with family and losing interest in anything except the drug or cult.

Attention is the way social primates measure status. It is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins.

Some people recovering from drugs or alcohol stay with the programs indefinitely, making the recovery program their family, a long-term source of attention rewards.

If anyone wonders why the airlines are not doing well it is because flying has been made such an unpleasant and degrading experience.

Lie detection is like language; there is a learning window. Telling whoppers to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families.

Humans have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to changes in status.

As for leadership, I am the kind who leads reluctantly and more by example than anything else. Someone had to be on the incorporation papers as president.

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environment.

People repeat behaviour that leads to flooding their brains with pleasurable chemicals. The short term reward loop acts over hours to years and the long term reproductive success loop over generations.

Even small cults are a serious cost on the world economy to victims their families employers friends and credit card companies.

Could people be trained to be less gullible Or are you as stuck with gullibility as you are with skin colour

Men are often capable of greater things than they perform - They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.

What the F.D.I.C. does is to put the full faith and credit of the United States government behind every savings account in the nation, up to a limit that has changed over the years and stands now at $100,000.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talks of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.

All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.

When you take a look at the problems our country is facing, debt is No. 1. The math is downright scary and the credit markets aren't going to keep on giving us cheap rates.

It's just that back then we didn't know that was considered being a coproducer. I would sit on the side and say what I wanted musically, but at the time we thought if you aren't the one playing it, you don't get the credit. Now you'll start seeing my name listed as producer.

Money is a poor man's credit card.

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

You can always make a film somehow. You can beg, borrow, steal the equipment, use credit cards, use your friends' goodwill, wheedle your way into this or that situation. The real problem is, how do you get people to see it once it is made?

No one ever taught me and I can't teach anyone. If you can't explain it, how can you take credit for it?

A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.

Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them.

It is only the poor who pay cash, and that not from virtue, but because they are refused credit.