The Elephant in the Brain
My preferred way of engaging with books is reconstruction. These notes were created during my reading process to aid my own understanding and not written for the purpose of instruction. With that said, I’ve decided to share these unedited notes on the off chance they are helpful to other readers.
This is a summary of The Elephant in the Brain. It is separated into three parts: 1. The Core ideas are condensed in “Summary” 2. “Themes/Implications” includes my interpretations of the most important lessons to draw from this new model of human behavior 3. “Summary” contains a very long and in-depth summary.
Summary
The origination of our disproportionate intelligence is better explained by the competitive social challenges against other humans in the zero-sum games of sex, status, and politics rather than the cooperative ecological challenges against nature in positive-sum games of survival. These social challenges require players to evaluate and attract allies. This is done through signals: honest and expensive signs of status.
Zero-sum competition is inefficient for groups as little progress is made in aggregate yet resources are spent. Norms, which are agreed upon punishments enforced by a collective against a subject who committed a certain action, limit the resources spent in zero-sum competition. Norms against discreet actions (killing, rape) are hard to bypass, but norms against intentions (romantic intent towards someone’s spouse) can be bypassed. Norms paradoxically, reduced the resources you can direct into zero-sum competition but increased the incentives to be a clever competitor: one who operates on selfish/ugly motives but convinces others that they are prosocial/pretty ones.
To reap this reward people lie a lot, but lying is costly as it takes a lot of mental resources and getting caught is expensive. Therefore, we started deceiving ourselves of our true intentions in order to better deceive others. This also gives us plausible deniability if we are “caught”. This explains the evolutionary advantage to the psychological idea of “repression”: we hide elements of ourselves to our conscious so that we can present a better version of ourselves towards others.
We are great at operating under hidden motives, but the danger is poor optimization since our conscious and unconscious goals are different. Our saving grace is that we are inconsistent and incongruent: It is possible for our brains to maintain a relatively accurate set of beliefs in systems tasked with evaluating potential actions, without certain harmful beliefs surfacing into consciousness where we manage social impressions.
Finally, we are great at rationalizing decisions as seen by split brain patients and disability denial. There is an interpreter module in our left hemisphere that is great at coming up with narratives and reasons for our actions that we actually have little visibility into.
The existence of hidden motives accounts for a lot of friction in personal relationships, but this expands to institutions as well. In many areas, our hidden agendas explain a surprising amount of our behavior, often a majority. When push comes to shove, we often prioritize our hidden agendas over the official ones. Here are some hidden agendas in seemingly innocent domains:
Body Language: signals dominance
Laughter: signals playfulness and friendliness, psychological distance to subject with the added protection of plausible deniability.
Language/conversation: instead of lending someone a specific tool (information sharing) we want to signal to people that we are a diverse toolbox and that by allying with us they gain access to all of our tools.
Consumption: for a great proportion of products, we purchase for status rather than utility
Art: a function of art is to signal the genetic fitness of the artist as well as those who are able to discern good art.
Charity: visibility (are we recognized), proximity (is the person a neighbor or across the world), relatability (one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic), mating (men more likely to give money when observers are female).
Education: credentialing and socialization.
Healthcare: the sick signaling allies that would come to his aid, the caretakers signal the efforts they put in helping their allies.
Religion: community building and sacrificial signaling.
Politics: motivated less by civic virtue than by our desire to appear loyal to certain parties. We use far-fetched national politics to jockey for local advantages. Politics is a performance where the audience is mostly our social group.
Themes & Implications
How to Live
If we want to improve it must be through better understanding of our biological heritage.
1. Judge moral character (and set your ideal) according to motives (your entire set of motives extrapolated from your actions), intent (consciously what you said you wanted to do) and awareness (how much of your motives do you understand) in that descending order.
The final vector of the summation of your motives determines the type of impact you will have to everyone and is of highest importance. Secondly, conscious intent matters because you have to rationally agree with it which indicates your ethical compass: Aristotle said the truly virtuous character not only acted virtuously but felt joy and wanted to act virtuously. It’s different when someone thinks of helping and hurts and when someone hurts with the conscious intention to hurt. lastly, he also claimed that ignorance is punishable to the degree that you are responsible for that ignorance. I think we all have responsibility in being introspective and to increase the awareness of our motives as to not burden others with our indecision.
To justify this ordering: a non-aware individual who actually acts compassionately > a semi-aware individual who thinks he acts from selfishness but acts compassionately > a semi-aware individual who thinks he acts from compassion but actually acts selfishly.
Note I did not include competency or even effect which the Buddhists do (it’s intent & effect for them). Since effect = motive + competency + luck and we don’t want to factor luck into someone’s moral character, so we judge competency instead. But I don’t think competency is a factor in the moral character as much as it should inform one’s approach/avoidance decision towards someone.
2. Strive for maximum self-awareness. The problem of self-deception is that you make poor decisions because your stated intent differs from you actual motives. To live the best life you can you need to make conscious decisions that are congruent, thus you need to learn as much as your hidden motives as possible.
Thought experiments are the best way to understand your true motives. E.g. would you rather work hard for twenty years make radical change in society and not be recognized rewarded for it or would you not make that change but be rewarded for it?
3. Strive for mutual benefit over self-sacrificing altruism. There are few actions which are truly 100% altruistic, even dying for your comrades in battle renders you a hero and your family exalted. Any attempt to categorize one’s actions as fully altruistic usually involves self-deception (see 2.). Instead, we should be aware and communicate what we and other participants get out of an activity and strive for mutual benefit, elevating all parties to places previously unreachable. This is true from startup recruiting to relationships.
To simplify actions to the altruistic/selfish dichotomy is to fall prey to the complexity of value problem which states that human values are not easily reducible to just a few dimensions much less one.
4. Strive for environment-person congruence. Once you gain self-awareness try to be in a situation where you don’t have to repress your motives. E.g. if you really want to make money, join a hedge fund rather than a non-profit.
5. Gain better situational awareness. Prosocial explanations offered by individuals or institutions may contain partial truths, but what’s left unstated is often just as important.
When someone’s body language makes us uneasy in some sense, it may be intended to do so, even if they don’t realize or acknowledge it.
When meetings at work seem like an unnecessary waste of time it may be a ritual sacrifice or to help anxious leaders cement control over their subordinates.
When someone recommends you their past vacation place you might want to deduct a few points of desirability adjusting for exaggeration due to their need in signaling.
Society/Team Design
1. Recognize the inevitability of signaling. The author of the book said that about 90% of human interaction involves some form of signaling. The least signaling behavior is probably “scratching your butt”.
2. Direct status/prestige/signals from social games to ecological games. Once you acknowledge people’s universal need to show off, we can divert their efforts away from wasteful activities and towards those with bigger benefits and positive externalities. You would want status to be associated with ecological challenges which makes everyone better off (e.g. musk) rather than social challenges which are zero-sum (e.g. political coalitions in companies).
3. Make signals cheaper but just as difficult to obtain. Another way of redirecting social challenge resources to ecological resources is to make signals cheaper but just as difficult to obtain. A great example of this is the Thiel-Fellowship. You no longer have to spend four years in college signaling your work ethic and intellect to signal the same if not higher level of both.
We should try to be able to accurately place people in hierarchies with the least amount of resources spent.
Against Cynicism
It is always dangerous to present a cynical view of human nature. Theoretically, predictive-processing theory of cognition and George Soros’s reflexivity theory all explain how such a view may alter humans actions in an undesirable manner. Empirically, studies have found that people are more willing to lie after learning how frequently we lie. Anecdotally, me introducing this theory to my friends have already resulted in some of them justifying their actions by concluding “we all just want to do good for ourselves anyway”.
There are two ways to view humans in a positive light despite this whole theory of signaling (in decreasing convincingness):
1. We shouldn’t feel bad that our prosocial behavior has such selfish roots, but great that our selfishness results in prosocial behaviors. In the evolutionary landscape, the best strategy was to build ethical, cooperative brains.
Think about how the US got to the moon, the hidden motive was to beat the Russians but the stated motive was to advance space exploration. You can choose to see it as pathetic: we were lying to ourselves. Or, you can choose to see it as inspiring: we redirected violent, selfish competitive drives into one that makes humanity better off for everyone.
2. Usually, an entity’s imperfections is what makes it so lovable.
Repression and Optimal Imperfect Models
The view of reality which we converge to is, tautologically, that which will better help us propagate our genes in the long run. Perhaps this one underlying reason can explain most human biases.
One of the most powerful things about the model represented is that it can explain why we repress information from our consciousness that no previous theory could.
Ecological vs. Social
Things that exist either have utility (ecological) or signaling power (social). While ecological selection abhors waste, sexual selection (a subset of social selection) favors it.
The best signals are hard to fake, that’s why they are usually wasteful: what is wasted in ecological resources is made up by social resources.
It becomes profitable to look at costly behaviors in organizations and in individual lives. If they haven’t been weeded out they must pay for themselves somehow.
Summary Part 1: Theory
1. Machiavellian Intelligence: Growth by Competition
One of Man’s most distinctive features is our intelligence: we are disproportionately smarter than any other animal.
Wanting to paint our species in a good light, we have explained this rising intelligence due to cooperative ecological challenges rather than competitive social challenges. This is a mistaken view, for often the biggest impetus for a species to evolve is competition within rather than without.
The missing explanations for our intelligence lie in the harsh unflattering light of social challenges, the arena of zero-sum games in which one person’s gain is another’s loss. These were the three biggest zero-sum challenges our ancestors faced:
Sex: sexual competition is a locally zero-sum competition for mates.
Status: status comes in dominance (push) and prestige (pull), while we commonly only think of the former as zero-sum, there is only so much prestige and symbolic value to be shared.
Politics: A dominance hierarchy is too simple to warrant the label “politics”. What turns robotic hierarchies into politics is coalitions: allies who wield power together (there is a qualitative difference between two chimpanzees ganging up on another and two lobsters fighting one-on-one). This label is meant to be taken liberally: whenever we anguish over the guest list for a party, or join a group because we feel welcome, we’re playing politics.
These three overlapping games are competitive zero-sum activities where not everyone can win it depends on our ability to evaluate partners and our ability to attract partners. Both of these abilities are mediated by signals.
Signals are honest when they reliably correspond to an underlying trait or fact about the sender. The best signals, the most honest ones, the ones that last, are expensive. You cant fake a lions growl without a deep body cavity.
2. Norms: Limiting Competition
However it would be ideal if we could limit the resources that goes into zero-sum competition and direct that all into positive-sum cooperation.
The redwoods which have grown in unfettered competition to the physically maximum height above which water can no longer be propagated upwards is an exemplar of wasting resources in competition. Instead of growing so tall they could spend the resources to replicate more or grow sturdier roots etc. They would all fair better if they could agree upon being shorter.
Our species superpowers is that we’re partially able to turn wasteful competition into productive cooperation by developing norms which benefit the majority of people in the group.
Norms are agreed upon guidelines upon which people behave. The essence of a norm, lies in the behaviors that are punished and the form the punishment takes. Norms have a cultural element (e.g. what is sexually acceptable varies) but also a strong innate biological component (e.g. the feeling of being betrayed).
Collective enforcement is the essence of norms: if you refrain from hitting in worry of retaliation or if you’re afraid of speaking against a regime afraid of punishment from said regime, those are not norms. But if you’re worried that your neighbors might disapprove and even coordinate to punish you, that is collective enforcement. It is a reverse dominance hierarchy.
Gossip, for all its bad connotations, constructs reputations which reinforce norms and social order amongst a group.
There are norms against greater crimes such as killing, rape, theft that are (nearly) impossible to circumvent as a transgressor. The norms which we can bypass, given enough dexterity, are the subtler ones usually against crimes of intent: e.g. talking to spouse of friend with romantic intent. Incentives matter a great deal when judging behavior on a moral dimension.
If we were to split human motivation into the prosocial/nobler motivations (altruism, love, desire for beauty…) and the more selfish/uglier motivations (greed, jealousy, desire for power…), then it is game theoretically advantageous to disguise our intent under the former whenever we operate under the latter. For example, when you are helping someone with their homework, it is advantageous for you if he believes you are helping him out of friendship or kindness rather than expectation this will be repaid in the future.
Thus norms only (usually) succeed at circumventing the blatant types of competition such as murdering someone who you dislike. These competitions are extremely wasteful as they direct almost all resource to social rather than ecological challenges.
The existence of norms however, increased rather than reduced incentives to be a clever competitor and our brains ballooned because of not despite of them. Specifically, we started chasing the advantage we occur if we can break norms of intent without punishment. But it did decrease the resources you could blatantly spend on zero-sum competition (e.g. killing someone).
3. Lying: Circumventing Norms
All of us lie (average for the adult is around six times a day) it lets us reap the benefits without incurring typical costs. Lie is to be taken liberally in this context: it means any attempt at norm-defection rather than only the epistemic falsehoods we tell. In fact, the most skillful liars are the ones who can generate plausible deniability.
There is an evolutionary arms-race between norm-defectors (liars) and norm-enforcers (lie-catchers). This arms race is both biological (bigger brains) as well as epistemic (more knowledge on how to detect/tell lies). Once a new mechanism is understood (body language for example), people exploit it, thus a new equilibrium is then reached (e.g. bluffing in poker).
Norm-enforcement involves identification as well as persecution. Persecution requires incentives, both positive incentives for persecuting as well as negative for failing to do so. Usually, skillful norm defectors prevent some subset of information from being common knowledge (something which is known by all, and everyone knows everyone else knows ad infinitum) which lessens the incentives for persecution. Take these as examples:
People drink alcohol in brown paper bags because it gives police officers plausible deniability. A police officer who turns a blind eye to conspicuous public drinking is open to a lot more criticism than an officer who ignores discreet public drinking. (There is alcohol in the bag isn’t common knowledge)
King Henry divorced his wife on the pretext he found out 20 years into the marriage that she wasn’t a virgin on his wedding night. This pretext didn’t need to fool everyone, it just needed to be plausible enough o make people worry that other’s might believe it. (Her virginity is not common knowledge)
If two guards both overheard a group of nobles wanting to assassinate the king, they will have much less incentive to report if they didn’t believe the other guard overheard. (Their plot is not common knowledge)
Subtexts function the same way: you risk miscommunication (in the case the listener really doesn’t understand the true meaning) to gain protection of innocence from the lack of common knowledge. The more cryptic the message the higher the risk and the greater the protection.
Individuals occur the benefits without blatantly breaking norms through lying.
4. Self-Deception: The Pinnacle of Lying
We have established that lies, specifically lies of intentions (much harder to lie about actions), are game-theoretically advantageous to the liar and common in everyday life.
Let’s turn to another form of lying, self-deception.
The old school view is that we repress information to protect our egos. But this doesn’t make evolutionary sense. Since information is so crucial, shouldn’t we have evolved better self-esteem to handle more information instead of mentally-handicapping ourselves?
The new school views self deception as manipulation. It’s function is primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and self-serving. We have indeed evolved to directly care about our egos and self-image, but only because it is a proxy for how other’s perceive us in competitive games. We protect our egos to protect our image and status.
Schelling studied mixed-motive games where players’ interests overlap but also diverge (every human game is a mixed-motive game). In these games, limiting your options can be strategic:
Closing channels of information (e.g. turning off phone when you are expecting a favor)
Opening oneself up to punishment (e.g. the ability to be sued makes people trust you more in the current)
Ignoring information (e.g. not seeing your kidnappers)
Purposefully believing a falsehood (e.g. general who thinks he will win with 100% certainty)
Burning boats (e.g. the best way to win at chicken is to take off your steering wheel and wave it at your opponent)
While the author says the value of these strategic limitations lies solely in convincing your opponent that you’ve sabotaged yourself, I think that depending on context, the limitations could be imposed for internal motivation as well (the amount of general’s who have burned ships for troop moral can attest to this).
“Modeling the world accurately isn’t the be-all, end-all of the human brain”, instead the reality we model is, tautologically, the reality which will help gene propagation statistically in the long run. For most cases, these two realities are the same: if you can’t accurately model projectile trajectories you won’t last long in the forest.
So how do these two realities diverge? In other words, where do we deceive ourselves? In broad strokes, deception is evolutionarily advantageous when you bloat the odds of success for certain tasks and your own importance to increase motivation or you are interacting with other actors with theory-of-mind whom you are locked in mixed-motive games. Thus we would expect our deceptions to be centered around self-aggrandizement for the former as well as repressing selfish and surfacing prosocial data about ourselves for the latter.
The perfect example of both of these advantageous (internal motivation + external signaling) is the startup founder whose brimming with confidence (though it may be entirely unearned) that attracts more talent and capital than someone with an accurate assessment of his own abilities and the certainty of the venture.
The main cost of self-deception is that it leads to suboptimal decision making. A lack of awareness of your true intentions leads to your conscious and subconscious optimizing for different things. The military analogy of self-deception (in it’s worst case) is the general whose cornered in a mountain range and begins erasing a side of the mountain on the map.
Our saving grace, ironically, is our inconsistency and incongruence. Due to the modular nature of the brain, we have have sensitive information strategically hidden from consciousness. It is possible for our brains to maintain a relatively accurate set of beliefs in systems tasked with evaluating potential actions, without certain harmful beliefs surfacing into consciousness where we manage social impressions.
5. Hidden Motives: Action from Self-Deception
We deceive ourselves to better deceive others. Our dominant mode of self-deception is to disguise our ugly selfish motives as noble prosocial ones.
Let’s draw comparisons to the animal kingdom.
Grooming time amongst apes is very irrational:
Grooming time is correlated to group size rather than amount of fur
Primates spend a lot more time grooming each other than they spend grooming themselves
Most primates spend far too much time grooming than necessary
This is better explained by the alliance building character of grooming in addition to the health reasons, supported by the correlation between grooming time and alliances during conflict.
Of course if you were to ask the grooming ape he would reply that he was just trying to clean his friend’s fur and he would be telling the truth. They don’t need to be conscious of their own motives. They just need instincts that make them feel good when they groom each other. In fact, an individual would fair worse if others had reason to suspect that he was helping for selfish reasons.
Another prominent example of action from self-deception are these small birds which form rigid alpha, beta, gamma hierarchies. They compete to help each other and the group: they would bully smaller birds from guard duty, and even force feed other birds by shoving food down their throats.
The surface-level appearance of altruism belies deeper, more complex motives. The activities aren’t purely altruistic or even mostly for altruism, it is to develop “credit” amongst other birds. What looks like altruism is actually, at a deeper level, competitive self-interest.
Tautologically all of our motives were developed because they were dominant strategies in gene propagation for our genes. As explained by Dawkins, over a long enough time period of evolution, motivations necessarily optimize for this base layer of selfishness. Fortunately, as social animals, this meant forming alliances and creating just societies. To create brains focused on mutual cooperation was the dominant strategy for selfish reproduction.
Caring for others has become so important that we have developed feelings of compassion, but this does not hide the descriptive (but not normative) truth that every intention which governs action was evolved to optimize for selfish propagation.
6. Confabulation: Press Secretaries for our Hidden Motivation
What’s fascinating is that even though our intentions are interweaved by both selfish and altruistic motives we rarely share the former as our motivations, if they are even conscious to us in the first place.
A press secretary has enough visibility to know that’s going on but not full visibility. They speak authoritatively on things they do not fully know in order to better the optics of whomever they are representing. The interpreter module in our mind acts as press secretaries, they are the ones who deceive ourselves through confabulation: rationalizing our actions usually in a positive altruistic light which is only partially true if at all.
Here are some examples of confabulation:
Split brain patient’s left hemisphere give completely made up reasons for why they are leaving the room “getting coke” when the real answer should be “I do not know”.
Disability Denial: making up crazy reasons for why part of one’s body isn’t functioning in an attempt to deny the blatant disability.
People are even happy to rationalize decisions they did not make. In a study, participants chose one out of two female faces that they thought was more attractive, the researchers secretly gave them the opposite and a surprising amount of people were happy to rationalize why they found the less attractive face as more so.
This is not to say that people lie all the time but just that we are happy to rationalize what we have very low visibility to, convincing ourselves in the process. We should always be skeptical about taking anyone’s stated motives on face-value and instead induce true motives through action.
Perhaps another important distinction needs to be made here. There is no such thing as “selfish” or “altruistic” motives. We just have a set of behavioral tendencies from biology, cultural influence, and rational adjustment. It is our press secretary that assigns a moral attribute to these tendencies (usually prosocial for ourselves and selfish for others). What I am attempting to negate here is the false dichotomy between selfish and altruistic actions. This is not a criteria selected for in evolution, only propagation is. Therefor, I want to correct the misconception that the birds were actually selfish disguising it as altruistic, or actually altruistic with mild tendencies to optimize for selfishness. Those were just the bird’s tendencies that it evolved into and it assigns no label. It is only in human society, where we have theories of mind that it became advantageous to explain our behavior in one way or another, that these concepts of selfishness or altruism even came to be. TLDR, we attach a simple dichotomy, to explain motives that were only meant for propagation.
A good example is that I have the tendencies to care for others well-being to an abnormal degree, before I was always proud of that and attributed it to altruism. After reading so many books like this I feel psychopathical and attribute my willingness to help to more selfish motives. My motives and actions have not changed, but I assign them different explanations.
Summary Part 2: Examples
On Body Language
Stated aim: NA
What stated aim can’t explain: NA
Hidden motives: Signaling in a discreet manner with plausible deniability.
Body language is all about signaling in a discreet manner. We aren’t aware of it and that’s what’s great about body language, it gives us plausible deniability. If we flirt with words or we politically maneuver with words they are too formal and the common knowledge is dangerous, but if we do so with body language, we can communicate “hey I am the most important person in this room” without being called out on our lack of self awareness.
Interesting anecdote that the time spent looking into another’s eyes when talking over eye contact when listening tells you the power dynamic between the two (the higher your ratio the more powerful you are, and this is consistent between same hierarchies).
On Laughter
Stated aim: To show joy and dominance, express relief, show resolution.
What stated aim can’t explain:
why we laugh much more in a social setting to the same stimuli.
Hidden motives: Laughter comes from norm violation and signals playfulness and friendliness, psychological distance to subject with the added protection of plausible deniability.
There are three dominant theories of humor/laughter they are. Superiority theory: we laugh and scorn at those below us. Relief theory: laughter is tension followed by relief. Incongruity-resolution theory: laughter are expectations violated that are resolved in a new way (the classic setup + punchline routine).
But what these dominant theories are overlooking is the social dimension of laughter, that laughter is optimized for social situations, and that it not only is a passive response but a signaling tool.
The author argues that, in addition to those three theories, norm violation is the cause of laughter. The danger as adults is usually not physical but regarding cultural norms. Therefor you can either 1. Feint to cross the norm boundary, but then retreat back to safety or 2. Cross the boundary and find out that it is safe. What our brains choose to laugh at is thus indicative of our own beliefs. What’s sacred to one can be a mere object of play to another.
These are what laughter signals:
1. Playfulness and friendliness: when in danger laughter or smiling can signal friendliness or playfulness. This explains why elements of danger are so common in laughter, because only when you are in danger do you need to signal playfulness. E.g. if you are play-fighting you need to signal your playful intent not when you are doing crossword puzzles.
2. Psychological distance to subject: “tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die“. This is a form of norm violation
3. Deniability: the beauty of comedy is that you get to tell the truth while being in the safe harbor of deniability “chill, its just a joke bro”.
We often say that there is an element of truth to every joke. This is because if jokes are about norm violation 1. they need to update with culture’s new norms therefore they must be grounded in reality 2. they cross the boundary and find out it is safe, which is a truth statement about the invalidity of that boundary.
On Language
Stated aim: Information Sharing
What stated aim can’t explain:
Why we like to share more (talk) than we like to receive (listen).
Why our communication isn’t more fact based (“This is what I learnt: A, B, C. What do you know that I don’t?”)
Why there isn’t an internal tallying mechanism for keeping track of information debt (“I told sally where the food is two more times than she told me, I will withhold information from her now”).
Hidden motives: Language isn’t only about information sharing but also about signaling. Instead of lending someone a specific tool (information sharing) we want to signal to people that we are a diverse toolbox and that by allying with us they gain access to all of our tools. The text says “here’s a new piece of information” the subtext says “I’m the kind of person who knows such things.”
Here are some examples:
A function of reading the news is so that we can seem impressive when talking with people. That we are aware of current events.
This view of information as primarily signaling rather than utility exists in research where there are these decade long trends of prestige. “The reliability of research decreases with the popularity of a field.”
Academic referees, the gatekeepers, seem to care more about the prestige indicators of the work they accept and how it will reflect on them and their organization. They care more about the methods and the spit and polish rather than long-term potential for substantial social benefit. Study: when articles previously published were resubmitted with obscure names only 10% were recognized as published before and only 10% of the 90% were accepted under the new names.
Even this book, was designed partially as a signaling tool, not only to “put the author’s ideas out there” but to signal to others the diversity of the author’s toolbox.
The author’s made sacrifices for it that would be suboptimal if they were purely out to maximize the overall learnings of society e.g. maybe the book is longer than it needs to be with more scientific language than is optimal for understanding.
On Consumption
Stated aim: Utility and morality
What stated aim can’t explain:
Why we work so hard even when there is material abundance.
Why the bread eaters are jealous of the rice eaters in communism when they practically have the same amount of material resources.
Why people who say they support products due to morality choose to buy green over inexpensive much less when in private, online, or not being primed for a status-seeking motive.
Hidden motives: It is symbolic value rather than physical utility we desire in many of our products. E.g. We assume we buy green but less affordable products to protect the environment, but that doesn’t seem to be fully the case. There is at least a degree of signaling your prosocial motives which factors into the decision.
We’re locked in a game of competitive signaling. No matter how fast the economy grows, there remains a limited supply of social status. (This is also why instead of focusing on material equality we should focus on the diversity of symbolic hierarchies. There is much less status to go around in a perfectly equal communist society than in a diverse culture which has many different subcultures each with their own status hierarchies).
Here is how advertising works:
1. Providing information
2. Making a promise: a brand can be so large that you know it can’t afford to violate it’s promise to you e.g. Disney showing inappropriate material to kids
3. Lifestyle advertising: drawing associations and conditioning.
What’s really curious is the “third person effect”: you aren’t influenced by a commercial but you think other people will be influenced. Thus, they are targeting you through your peers (e.g. most BMW ads aren’t targeted for BMW buyers but to educate the masses such that future buyers know other people will recognize it’s high status. This can go the opposite direction: if you don’t want people see you eating McDonald’s because it is associated with unhealthy behavior). This has a bigger effect in social rather than personal products.
On Art
Stated aim: To appreciate intrinsic beauty and induce emotion
What stated aim can’t explain:
Why people would prefer seeing the ashes of the original Mona Lisa to an identical copy.
Why people put so much value into how art is made (did you find that seashell or carve it) independent of the final form.
Hidden motives: the fitness-display theory states that a function of art is to signal the genetic fitness of the artist as well as those who are able to discern good art.
While ecological selection abhors waste, sexual selection favors it since we prefer mates who can waste resources. Nature aggressively weeds out costly behaviors unless they somehow pay for themselves: if a costly behavior is universal it typically indicates positive selection pressure.
Bower birds build these huge nests that even humans could fit in and amazingly they don’t use them as a nest. Instead of parental care, the males spend their time building these nests and a good male can mate with up to 30 females in one season. Instead of getting a father the females get battle-tested sperm. Female bowerbirds illustrate the importance of discernment in evaluating the displays of their male suitors.
The conventional view explains art in its intrinsic properties (beauty, and emotions…) but the fitness-display theory explains the reason we create art, one dimension at least, as giving us a leg up in the social hierarchy. The fact that most people would rather see the ashes of the Mona Lisa over an indistinguishable replica should lend credence to this theory. The fact that we care about how an artwork was made and how “original/derivative” a piece of art is betray our concern for using art to evaluate the artist.
“We find attractive those things that could have been produced only be people with attractive, high-fitness qualities…” This is why broadway can be more impressive than cinema: it is handicapped by the fact that it is filmed live. Thinking about the ways an artist constrains himself is important.
Scarcity is also a big loophole for the intrinsic-value theory: as photography and manufacturing destroyed the chase for technical perfection and realism, there is now a desire for handmade authenticity and the brush-stroke which became an end in itself. Art needs to be impractical.
I now have two satisfying definitions for what is art 1. that which is created to induce emotion 2. that which is created to signal the genetic fitness of the artist and the art-discerner usually in a wasteful, impractical manner that is hard to fake.
On Charity
Stated aim: Helping less fortunate people
What stated aim can’t explain:
In U.S. donations only 13% goes to the world’s poor, the rest stays in the country
Scope neglect and scope insensitivity.
People “diversify” their donations, sometimes rendering donation ineffective due to the high administrative fees.
Highly trained professionals choose to volunteer at soup kitchens or do years in the peace corp doing low-level labor
Hidden motives: visibility (are we recognized), proximity (is the person a neighbor or across the world), relatability (one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic), mating (men more likely to give money when observers are female).
In charity, helping people effectively doesn’t seem to be our top priority. Warm-glow theory, the other prosocial narrative that we help people because it makes us feel good, isn’t fully descriptive either. The forms of charity that are most effective at helping others aren’t the most effective at helping donors signal their prosocial traits. When push comes to shove, donors will often choose to help themselves.
To counteract this, some effective altruistic says to shun empathy and focus on rationality because the former leads us to become insensitive to scale. “The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep.”
On Education
Stated aim: Learning and preparation for life skills
What stated aim can’t explain:
Education isn’t nearly as valuable at the national level then on the individual level. Individuals can expect their incomes to rise 8–12 percent for every year of additional school they complete. But nations can only expect their incomes to rise by only 1–3 percent on each additional year of school.
Most people can get access to the exact same information of “higher learning” for free by just walking into a class at an Ivy League or by taking online MOOC classes but they don’t. ie. You can get access to just the same level of information as elite institutions now for free, but people don’t seem to rush to these materials with the same fervor they idolize the elite schools.
Hidden motives: credentialing and socialization
The first hidden motive in education is credentialing. As with many of these hidden motives, the “flaw” of a drawn our repetitive process is actually to show work ethic and prove the ability to complete high-level work, rather than learning useful material itself.
The second hidden motive is socialization where you get to be around your own peers, develop friends, find romantic partners, be domesticated with the ways of work, and be introduced to the value systems of society.
On Health Care:
Stated aim: curing diseases making people healthier
What stated aim can’t explain:
We focus on public rather than private signs of medical quality (we care about the reputation of the hospital more than the track record of the doctor).
Health is predicted by income and education but not in medical spending.
In the RAND health insurance assignment 5800 adults were assigned different level of medical subsidies. The fully subsidized patients consumed 45 percent more than patients in the unsubsidized group, but there was no difference in health.
People are dismissive of cheap remedies like “relax, eat better, get more sleep + exercise…” instead they want rare treatments and “the best doctor in town”. This is especially true in terminally ill patients where people are often over-cared with unnecessary procedures. Yet few family members are willing to advocate for lesser care, fearing it will be seen as tantamount to abandoning their relative.
Marginal medicine (e.g. increasing medical spend from 5000 to 7000) shows no increase in improved health.
Hidden motives: the sick signaling allies that would come to his aid, the caretakers signal the efforts they put in helping their allies.
Conspicuous caring hypothesis: there is a subset of current health care which is equivalent to kissing the boo-boo, no actual benefit but it is psychologically comforting and is social signal that you will be cared for. The reason you would want this (e.g. your tribesman visiting you or making you an elaborate herb, or performing a long ritual) us because it shows your status, that there are allies that care for you. On the other hand you would also want to show that you care for your allies, as a caretaker. This is also why bringing something made by yourself to dinner or for a friend has so much more weight to it: the most honest signals are expensive.
On Religion
Stated aim: belief-behavior model, that everyone acts due to their belief
What stated aim can’t explain:
The world’s four big religions are anomalies in history. In the past, religions emphasized ritualistic practices rather strict beliefs.
It’s not so much that it can’t explain it, but that other models also have explanatory power.
Hidden motives: community building and sacrificial signaling
There is a lot of ecological waste that goes on in religions: Mormon men spend two of their prime years stationed in remote provinces, there are ritual mutilations, people earmark 10% of their income for church, Tibetan monks spend weeks placing grains of colored sand to produce an intricate sand mandala only to destroy it.
Indeed there is a high degree of belief involved but perhaps what that singular models does not capture is that the wasteful character of many religious practices are a feature rather than bug. You waste your time and energy to signal that you are part of the group. “you have better things to do than listen to a sermon”, which is precisely why you get loyalty points for listening patiently. Same goes with celibacy, people do it because of its expensiveness (all honest signals are expensive) not despite of it. Similarly, hazing in fraternities is a way of signaling sacrifice before allowed admission in a group.
The group needs to make sure only reputable individuals get in because the individuals who are in benefit from the public reputation of their group.
On Politics
Stated aim: “I just want to do the right thing for everyone”
What stated aim can’t explain:
Voting doesn’t make sense as a political activity, if you valued your presidential candidate’s election at $500,000, you voting has an expected value of less than a penny (1 in 60 million that you had the deciding vote).
People are uninformed of policy positions and notoriously ignorant. “We’d rather debate hot-button identity issues like gay marriage or immigration than issues that hinge on an understanding of facts, like trade agreements or net neutrality.”
One dimensional politics: why should your view on gun ownership correlate with your views on tariffs or abortion?
Hidden motives: we’re motivated less by civic virtue than by our desire to appear loyal to certain parties. We use far-fetched national politics to jockey for local advantages. Politics is a performance where the audience is mostly our social group.
In soviet Russia the apparatchik (government officials) had to show great loyalty for their leaders, to the point of clapping in an auditorium for eleven minutes because no one wanted to be the first too stop (great example of directing energy away from ecological and towards social challenges creating meaningless waste). We are faced with the same kind of incentives: rewarded for “professing the ‘right’ beliefs and punished for professing the “wrong” ones.”
All of the groups we are in: ethnicity, company, country, friends, sport… compete for our loyalty. We often date within these lines and we often hire within these lines. There are significant benefits to joining the right groups.
We are more like apparatchik than we like to believe:
Heavily favor expressive voting (showing other’s you voted) over instrumental voting (voting to make a difference)
You care about the appearance of loyalty (signaling) more than you do about outcomes (shown by the unwillingness to compromise)
At different times, different one-dimensional splits are the disproportionate focus of political affiliations (which party to vote) and narratives. In America, these single decision points went from tariffs to slavery to social justice. Members show loyalty by focusing on these issues that most clearly distinguish them from opposing coalitions, instead of discussing the issues with highest utility.
Suddenly, why media narratives and personal fascinations are focused on gendered identity disproportionately as compared to something like the rise of China or AI safety becomes obvious: the former is easier to digest than the latter, but more importantly, Republicans and Democrats disagree more about the former than the latter. Thus, if you want to signal your loyalty, it’s more effective to talk about the former.