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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kevin Simler
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March 12 - March 21, 2021
Here is the thesis we’ll be exploring in this book: We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re 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 brains often 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 therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly.
we must take covert agendas into account when thinking about these institutions, or risk radically misunderstanding them.
“We” don’t always know what our brains are up to, but we often pretend to know, and therein lies the trouble.
We now realize that our brains aren’t just hapless and quirky—they’re devious. They intentionally hide information from us, helping us fabricate plausible prosocial motives to act as cover stories for our less savory agendas.
Education isn’t just about learning; it’s largely about getting graded, ranked, and credentialed, stamped for the approval of employers. Religion isn’t just about private belief in God or the afterlife, but about conspicuous public professions of belief that help bind groups together. In each of these areas, our hidden agendas explain a surprising amount of our behavior—often a majority. When push comes to shove, we often make choices that prioritize our hidden agendas over the official ones.
Consider how some ideas are more naturally viral than others. When a theory emphasizes altruism, cooperation, and other feel-good motives, for example, people naturally want to share it, perhaps even shout it from the rooftops: “By working together, we can achieve great things!”
When an idea emphasizes competition and other ugly motives, people are understandably averse to sharing it. It sucks the energy out of the room. As your two coauthors have learned firsthand, it can be a real buzzkill at dinner parties.
There are facets of our evolutionary past that we spend less time poring over because we don’t like how they make us look. In this sense, our problem isn’t that the light is too dim, but that it’s too harsh.
What’s much harder to acknowledge are the competitions that threaten to drive wedges into otherwise cooperative relationships: sexual jealousy, status rivalry among friends, power struggles within a marriage, the temptation to cheat, politics in the workplace. Of course we acknowledge office politics in the abstract, but how often do we write about it on the company blog?
This is what’s known in the literature as the social brain hypothesis, or sometimes the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis.3 It’s the idea that our ancestors got smart primarily in order to compete against each other in a variety of social and political scenarios.
“Interacting with an organism of approximately equal mental abilities whose motives are at times outright malevolent makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition.”
Quoting Pinker & Bloom
social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige.
Sometimes the prizes of one game become instruments in another.
To understand the competitive side of human nature, we would do well to turn Matthew 7:1 on its head: “Judge freely, and accept that you too will be judged.”
The problem with words is that they cost almost nothing; talk is usually too cheap. Which is a more honest signal of your value to a company: being told “great job!” or getting a raise?
One thing that makes signaling hard to analyze, in practice, is the phenomenon of countersignaling. For example, consider how someone can be either an enemy, a casual friend, or a close friend. Casual friends want to distinguish themselves from enemies, and they might use signals of warmth and friendliness—things like smiles, hugs, and remembering small details about each other. Meanwhile, close friends want to distinguish themselves from casual friends, and one of the ways they can do it is by being unfriendly, at least on the surface. When a close friend forgets his wallet and can’t pay for
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we’re occasionally able to turn wasteful competition into productive cooperation.
the desire to skirt and subvert norms is one of the key reasons we deceive ourselves about our own intentions.
For minor transgressions, then, we have an arsenal of soft sanctions we try to use before escalating to more serious forms of punishment. Instead of lashing out physically at a transgressor, we might roll our eyes or flash a disapproving scowl. If body language doesn’t work, we might ask the transgressor to stop (politely or otherwise) or yell and demand an apology, perhaps in front of others.
Foragers tend to be patrilocal, meaning that men stay in their native band, typically for their entire lives, while women move to another when they come of age.
When abstract logic puzzles are framed as cheating scenarios, for example, we’re a lot better at solving them. This is one of the more robust findings in evolutionary psychology, popularized by the wife-and-husband team Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.
The key to understanding this fairy tale, and much of what we’re going to discuss in this book, is the concept of common knowledge.10 For a piece of information to be “common knowledge” within a group of people, it’s not enough simply for everyone to know it. Everyone must also know that everyone else knows it, and know that they know that they know it, and so on. It could as easily be called “open” or “conspicuous knowledge.”
But actually there are two dimensions to keeping a secret: how widely it’s known and how openly12 or commonly it’s known.
Resolving this tension turns out to be straightforward. Classical decision theory has it right: there’s no value in sabotaging yourself per se. The value lies in convincing other players that you’ve sabotaged yourself.
Another way to look at it is that self-deception is useful only when you’re playing against an opponent who can take your mental state into account.
Spend enough time pretending something is true and you might as well believe it.27
There are at least four ways that self-deception helps us come out ahead in mixed-motive scenarios. We’ll personify them in four different archetypes: the Madman, the Loyalist, the Cheerleader, and the Cheater.
Rationalization is a kind of epistemic forgery,
So why is it left out of the curriculum?
[it] = reading body language
One answer is that consciousness is simply too slow to manage the frenetic give-and-take of body language.
A cue is similar to a signal, in that it conveys information, except that it benefits only the receiver.11 In other words, a cue conveys information the sender might wish to conceal.
This is the principle of honest signaling, which we encountered in Chapter 2.18 Signals need to be expensive so they’re hard to fake. More precisely, they need to be differentially expensive—more difficult to fake than to produce by honest means.
It would be a faux pas for a subordinate to get up and leave before the boss signaled that everyone was free to go.
Or a defiant display of subtle rebellion? Greater status than the so-called leader?
Social status influences how we make eye contact, not just while we listen, but also when we speak. In fact, one of the best predictors of dominance is the ratio of “eye contact while speaking” to “eye contact while listening.”
Making video conferencing confusing! Because you don’t know where the screen is relative to the camera!
And humans, in the same vein, have laughter. But not just laughter—we also use smiling, exaggerated body movements, awkward facial expressions (like winking), and a high-pitched, giddy “play scream.” All of these signals mean roughly the same thing: “We’re just playing.” This message allows us to coordinate safe social play with other humans, especially when we’re playing in ways that hint at or border on real danger.
The sparks of laughter illuminate what is otherwise murky and hard to pin down with precision: the threshold between safety and danger, between what’s appropriate and what’s transgressive, between who does and doesn’t deserve our empathy.
But this is not what human conversation looks like. Instead we find that speakers are tightly constrained by the criterion of relevance.
When clothes fit well, we hardly notice them. But when anything is out of place, it suddenly makes us uncomfortable. So too when things “fit”—or don’t—with our social and self-images. Any deviation from what’s considered appropriate to our stations and subcultures is liable to raise eyebrows, and without a good reason or backstory, we’re unlikely to feel good about it.
Today it’s considered inappropriate to wear sweatpants to a dinner party or around the office. But in an Obliviated world, where no one is even capable of noticing, why not?
LOL pandemic life
Let’s call this lifestyle advertising (sometimes known as image advertising). It’s an attempt to link a brand or product with a particular set of cultural associations.
A popular explanation for this kind of ad is that it works by targeting our individual emotions.
[this kind of ad] = lifestyle advertising
Davison dubbed this the “third-person effect,” and it goes a long way toward explaining how lifestyle advertising might influence consumers.
i.e., “I’m not affected by that, but THEY are.”
Art poses a challenge for evolutionary thinkers. It’s a costly behavior, both in time and energy,5 but at the same time it’s impractical6
To hazard a definition, we’re partial to Ellen Dissanayake’s characterization of art as anything “made special,” that is, not for some functional or practical purpose but for human attention and enjoyment.
In his book The Mating Mind, the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller gives a promising answer. Miller argues that while ecological selection (the pressure to survive) abhors waste, sexual selection often favors it.
But in fact, the bowerbird male provides more than just cheap sperm; crucially, he provides battle-tested sperm.
Our disdain for replicas strongly suggests that we often use art as something other than a trigger for sensory or intellectual experiences.
vis-à-vis art
If she found it on the beach: meh.
But therein lies the rub… a natural found object as art? WITHOUT radical recontextualization? FRAUD
Artists routinely sacrifice expressive power and manufacturing precision in order to make something more “impressive” as a fitness display.
And yet consumers continue to relish live performances, shelling out even for back-row seats at many times the price of a movie ticket. Why? In part, because performing live is a handicap.
