ElephantInBrain
The Elephant in the Brain (Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson)
- Decent. Read the whole thing. Some good concepts. Lite in places. Lots of duplication.
- Our basic thesis – that we are strategically blind to key aspects of our motives – has been around in some form or another for millennia. Any yet this thesis still seems to us neglected in scholarly writings; you can read a mountain of books and still miss it.
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- "Elephant in the Brain" - An important but unacknowledged feature of how our minds work; an introspective taboo.
- Large randomized studies find that people given free health care consume a lot more medicine, yet dont end up noticeably healthier. Non-medical interventions such as efforts to alleviate stress or improve diet, exercise, sleep, or air quality – have a much bigger apparent effect on health, and yet patients and policymakers are far less eager to purse them. Patients are else easily satisfied with the appearance of good medical care.
- Were suggesting that key human behaviors are often driven by multiple motives – even behaviors that seem pretty single-minded, like giving and receiving medical care. More importantly, were suggesting that some of these motives are unconscious.
- Human beings are a species that not only capable of acting on hidden motives, were designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brain keep "us", our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others. Self-deception is strategic, a ploy our brain's use to look good while behaving badly. The human brain was designed to deceive itself, the better to deceive others.
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- Aim of the book: not just to catalog the many ways human behave unwittingly, but also to suggest that many of our most venerated institutions – charities, corporations, hospitals, universities – serve covert agendas alongside their official ones. We must take these covert agendas into account when thinking about these institutions, or risk radically misunderstanding them.
- Human species are strategically self-deceived, not only as individuals, but also as a society.
- We act on hidden motives together, in public, just as often as we do by ourselves in private. When enough of our hidden motives harmonize, we end up constructing stable, long-lived institutions – schools, hospitals, churches, and democracies – that are designed, at least in part, to accommodate such motives.
- Education isn't just about learning; its largely about getting graded, ranked, and credentialed, stamped for the approval of employers.
- A practical use for the book is to help readers develop better situational awareness.
- Knowledge suppression is useful when two conditions are met:
- others have partial visibility into your mind
- they are judging you, and meting out rewards or punishments based on what they "see" in your mind.
- Just as camouflage is useful when facing ad adversary with eyes, self-deception is useful when facing an adversary with mind-reading powers.
- Many signs suggest the keys to our intelligence lie in the harsh, unflattering light of social challenges, the arena of zero-sum games.
- Like the redwood we weren't competing primarily against other species, but against ourselves.
- Form the perspective of evolution, mating, not survival, is the name of the game.
- The acts of judging and being judges are mediated by signals. Signals are said to be honest when they reliably correspond to an underlying trait or fact about the sender. Deception allows an agent to reap benefits without incurring costs.
- Note that we dont always need to be conscious of the signal were sending and receiving.
- The deeper logic of many of our strangest and most unique behaviors may lie in their value as signals.
- Once weapons enter the picture, physical strength is no longer the most crucial factor in determining a hominids success within a group. Political skill takes over as the determining factor.
- Our mental processes act in bad faith, perverting or degrading our picture of the world.
- Two schools of thought on why we deceive ourselves -) 1st treats self-deception as a defense mechanism -) 2nd treats self-deception as manipulation
- In a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winning move. There is no value in sabotaging yourself per se. The value lies in convincing other players that you've sabotaged yourself. Sabotaging yourself works only when you're playing against an opponent with a theory of mind
- Ignorance is most useful when it is most public. It needs to be advertised and made conspicuous.
- Whats the value of self-deception over a simple, deliberate lie? Our minds aren't as private as we like to imagine.
- The truth is a poor litmus test of loyalty.
- Usually we dont have to bear the full brunt of our own deception. Typically, at least part of our brain continues to know the truth. Our saving grace is inconsistency.
- We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each much more like a committee who members have been thrown together working at cross purposes.
- Modularity: instead of a single monolithic process or small committee, modern psychologists see the brain as a patchwork of hundreds or thousands of different parts or "modules", each responsible for a slightly different information-processing task. (Probably needed given the constraints of evolution)
- Its possible for our brains to maintain a relatively accurate set of beliefs in systems tasked with evaluating potential actions, while keeping those accurate beliefs hidden from the systems (like consciousness) involved in managing social impressions.
- Its not that we are entirely or irredeemable selfish and self-deceived – just that we're often rewarded for acting on selfish impulses, but less so for acknowledging them, and that our brain's respond predictably to those incentives.
- Were strategically ignorant about our own motives.
- Human brains contain a system you can call the "interpreter module" which makes sense of our experiences by constructing explanations.
- Press secretaries and public relation teams exist in the world because they're incredibly useful to the organizations that employ them. They're a natural response to the mixed-motive incentives that organizations face with their broader ecosystems. Our brains respond to the same incentives by developing a module analogous to a president's press secretary. Above all, the job of our brain's Press Secretary is to avoid acknowledging our darker motives.
- Three's a very real sense in which we are the Press Secretaries within our minds. The parts of the mind that we identify with, the parts we think of as our conscious selves are the ones responsible for the strategically spinning the truth for an external audience.
- The conclusion from the past 40 years of social psychology is that the self acts less like an autocrat and more like a press secretary. Even we dont have particularly privileged access to the information and decision-making that goes on inside our minds.
- This is the key slight-of-hand at the heart of our psychosocial problems: We pretend we're in charge, both to others and even to ourselves, but we're less in charge than we think. We pose as privileged insiders, when in fact we're often making the same kind of educated guesses that any informed outsider could make.
- One of the facts about social psychology is how many experiments rely on an element of misdirection. Its almost as if the entire field is based on the art of distracting the Press Secretary in order to expose its rationalizations.
- Children will spend thousands of hours practicing the skills of verbal communication. However they will receive not a single hour of instruction on how to communicate with body language.
- Most of the nonverbal signaling and reading of signal is automatic and performed outside our conscious awareness and control.
- In many ways we seem to prefer it this way; we feel it is appropriate for people to act spontaneously
- Humans are strategically blind to body language because it often betrays our ugly, selfish, competitive motives.
- In spoken language, the mapping between symbols and meanings is mostly arbitrary. Body language, however is mostly not arbitrary.
- body language isn't just a way to communicate. Its also functional; it has material consequences. Body language is inherently more honest than verbal language.
- When people disagree about their relative status, nonverbal coordination breaks down.
- The magic of nonverbal communication is that it allows us to pursue illicit agendas, even ones that require coordinating with other people, while minimizing the risk of being attacked, accused, gossiped about, and censured for norm violations. This is one of the reasons we're strategically unaware of our own body language, and its helps explain why we're reluctant to teach it to children.
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- Laughter is an involuntary social behavior.
- Speakers laugh more than listeners
- Laughter is a form of active communication
- People are profoundly ignorant about laughter's meaning and purpose.
- Laughter is not nearly as expressive as language, but it has two properties that make it ideal for navigating sensitive topics. -) Its relatively honest -) Its deniable: and we can deliver these denials with great conviction because we really dont have a clear understanding of what our laughter means or why we find things funny.
- Our species seems, somehow, to derive more benefit from speaking than from listening.
- The spoils of conversation done lie primarily in the information being exchanged, but rather in the sub-textual value of finding good allies and advertising oneself as an ally.
- "The man who reads nothing at all is better than the man who reads nothing but newspapers" - Thomas Jefferson
- Scientists compete for the chance to give talks at conferences, not for the chance to listen.
- While ecological selection abhors waste, sexual selection often favors it.
- Our ability to read isn't an adaption, because natural selection had no hand in developing it.
- "Replica museum" Our disdain for replicas strongly suggests that we often use art as something other than a trigger for sensory or intellectual experiences.
- In Europe, when most people worked outdoors, suntanned skin was disdained as the mark of a low-status laborer. Light skin was prized as a mark of wealth. Later, when jobs migrated to factories and offices, lighter skin became common and vulgar, and only the wealthy could afford to lay around soaking in the sun.
- Prior to the Industrial Revolution, when most items were made by hand, consumers unequivocally valued technical perfection in their art objects. Painting and sculptures, for example, were prized for their realism. Then, starting in the mid-18C, the IR ushered in a new suite of manufacturing techniques. No longer was intrinsic perfection prized for its own sake.
- The advent of photography wreaked similar havoc on the realist aesthetic in painting. Painters could no longer hope to impress viewers by depicting scenes as accurately as possible, as they had strived to do for millennia. In response, painters invented new genres based on new, non-representational aesthetics.
- All the hard work at Harvard is done by the admissions officers who anoint an already-proven hyper-competitive elite. If that weren't true - if superior instruction could explain the value of college – then why not franchise the Ivy League.
- Prussian schools were designed to create patriotic citizens for war. And in the mid 1800s American educators and lawmakers explicitly set out to emulate the Prussian system.
- Schooling (which lasts well over a decade) serves as a systematic exercise in human domestication.
- The biggest prediction of the conspicuous caring hypothesis is that we'll end up consuming too much medicine.
- Marginal medical spending: Its not a question of whether some medicine is better than no medicine – it almost certainly is – but whether, $7k per year of medicine is better for our health than $5k.
- The research is fairly consistent in showing that the extra medicine doesn't help.
- More people die from medical mistakes each year than from highway accidents, breast cancer or AIDS and yet physicians still resist and the public does not demand even simple reforms.
- Few people want to be the nag telling us to change our diets, sleep and exercise more, and fix the air quality in our big cities – even though these nagging interventions promise much larger (and more cost-effective) health improvements.
- The evidence suggests that we are less interested in "health at any cost" and more interested in treatments that third parties will appreciate.
- We dont worship simply because we believe. We worship (and believe) because it helps us as social creatures.
- Personal sacrifices are a way of "paying ones dues" to a social group.
- Religions can be understood, in part, as community-enforced mating strategies
- people acting in synchrony with others cooperated more in subsequent group economic exercises, even in situations requiring personal sacrifice.
- Sermons generate common knowledge of the communities norms.
- The value of holding certain beliefs comes not from acting on them, but from convincing others that you believe them. This is especially true of religious beliefs. They aren't particularly useful or practical for individuals in isolation, and yet we experience large social rewards for adopting them and/or punishment for not adopting them. Whether you accept it can make the difference between the warm embrace of fellowship and the cold shoulder of ostracism.
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- hill-climbing: we might model the landscape of a religious community as a volcano. hill-climbing accidents aren't at all unique to religious landscapes. In dietary landscapes we seek tasty fats and sugars, which were almost always "up". In military landscapes, we learn to show bravery, earning ever more respect from our comrades – right until we take a bullet. Drug addicts.
- Instincts that are adaptive in one context can lead us fatefully astray in another.
- Voting costs time and effort and yet the personal benefits are infinitesimal. In terms of outcomes and probabilities, you'd be better off buying a lottery ticket.
- 1-in-60 million is the average US voter chance of swigging an election. Individual voters, are necessarily average, There can be up to a 1000 fold difference depending on where you live.
- An ideal political Do-Right will be opposite of an ideologue:
- concerned only with achieving the best outcomes for society
- wont shy away from contrary arguments and evidence
- will welcome fresh perspectives
- when a smart person disagrees with them, they'll listen with an open mind
- when they change one of their political beliefs they are apt to be grateful, not resentful.
- Apparatchiks: a very loyal member of an organization who always obeys orders
- Our hypothesis is that the political behavior of ordinary, individual citizens is often better explained as an attempt to signal loyalty to "our side"
- When your doing politics as a performance, like and apparatchik, you dont care about outcomes as much as you care about the appearance of loyalty.
- Instead of being caused by a key moral dispute, this phenomenon of low-dimensional politics seems to be a general feature of competing political coalitions. Political groups tend to join alliances until there are only a few major coalition, after which member show loyalty by focusing on issues that most clearly distinguish them from opposing coalitions. (And which only two main coalitions, only one main dimension separates them.) Voter and politicians who instead focus on other, less-distinguishing issues are penalized, as those issues seem to distract from the main fight.
- We ignore the elephant because doing so is strategic. Self-deception allows us to act selfishly without having to appear quite so selfish in front of others.