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by
Kevin Simler
Read between
February 20 - September 22, 2018
In other words, we hold ourselves back, collectively, for our own good.
Farmers have norms supporting marriage, war, and property, as well as rough treatment of animals, lower classes, and slaves. To help enforce these new norms, farmers also had stronger norms of social conformity, as well as stronger religions with moralizing gods.
However—and this was Axelrod’s great contribution—the model can be made to work in favor of the good guys with one simple addition: a norm of punishing anyone who doesn’t punish others. Axelrod called this the “meta-norm.”
a pretext doesn’t need to fool everyone—it simply needs to be plausible enough to make people worry that other people might believe it.
remove the steering wheel from your car and wave it at your opponent
We don’t personally benefit from misunderstanding our current state of health, but we benefit when others mistakenly believe we’re healthy.
This is the magic of nonverbal communication. 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.
“Tragedy,” said Mel Brooks, “is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.”
Imagine a group of three popular middle-school girls standing by their lockers in the hallway. One of their unpopular classmates, Maggie, walks by and trips, spilling her books and papers everywhere—and the popular girls start pointing and laughing. Clearly this laughter is rude, perhaps even aggressive. When someone gets hurt, the humane response is to break from a playful mood into a serious mood, to make sure they’re OK. The popular girls’ laughter, then, reveals that they don’t take Maggie’s suffering seriously. They’re treating her pain as an object of play—a mere plaything. Note that
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The act of speaking is a reward unto itself, at least insofar as your remarks are appreciated.
listeners generally prefer speakers who can impress them wherever a conversation happens to lead, rather than speakers who steer conversations to specific topics where they already know what to say.
And although there are many different ways to look at prestige, we can treat it as synonymous with “one’s value as an ally.”
It might be surprising to learn that more than 275 years ago the English—though they had no radio, television, satellites or computers, and though men obtained much of their news at the coffeehouse—thought their era was characterized by an obsession with news… . Nor were the English the only people before us who thirsted after news. In the middle of the fourth century b.c., for example, Demosthenes portrayed his fellow Athenians as preoccupied with the exchange of news… . Observers have often remarked on the fierce concern with news that they find in preliterate or semiliterate peoples.
And for our part, as consumers of news, we compete to learn information on these hot topics before others, so we aren’t confused in conversation and so our talk can seem more impressive.
Even if they sometimes claim otherwise, researchers seem overwhelmingly motivated to win academic prestige. They do this by working with prestigious mentors, getting degrees from prestigious institutions, publishing articles in prestigious journals, getting proposals funded by prestigious sponsors, and then using all of these to get and keep jobs with prestigious institutions. As Miller points out, “Scientists compete for the chance to give talks at conferences, not for the chance to listen.”
Many possible reforms, such as a review process that’s blind to a paper’s conclusions, could help journals to increase the accuracy of their publications.47 But such reforms would limit journals’ ability to select papers more likely to bring prestige, so we see surprisingly little interest in them.
consider a hypothetical scenario in which the Mona Lisa burned to a crisp, 80 percent of them said they’d prefer to see the ashes of the original rather than an indistinguishable replica.
A similar trade-off arises for musicians (e.g., lip synching is anathema) and standup comics, and for improv versus sketch-comedy troupes. A live performance, or even more so an improvised one, won’t be as technically perfect as a prerecorded one, but it succeeds by putting the artists’ talents on full display.
Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats.
savvy consumers—those with refinement and taste—quickly learn to value everything about the silver spoon that differentiates it from its more vulgar counterpart, imperfections and all.
Signs of handmade authenticity became more important than representational skill.
Whenever we prefer things made “the old-fashioned way”—handwritten instead of printed, homemade instead of store-bought, live instead of prerecorded—we’re choosing to celebrate the skill and effort of an artist over the intrinsically superior results of a more mechanical process.
This suggests that we evaluate each other not only for our first-order skills, but for our skills at evaluating the skills of others.
Only 3 percent of donors do comparative research to find the best nonprofit to give to.
But despite the 10- and 100-fold differences in projected impact, people in all three groups were willing to contribute the same amount.13 This effect, known as scope neglect or scope insensitivity, has been demonstrated for many other problems, including cleaning polluted lakes, protecting wilderness areas, decreasing road injuries, and even preventing deaths.
Only around 1 percent of donations to public charities are anonymous.
up to 95 percent of all donations are given in response to a solicitation.
Since it takes roughly 500 mosquito nets to save one life (on average),45 there’s no single individual a donor can point to and say, “I saved this man’s life.”
“A millionaire does not really care whether his money does good or not,” said George Bernard Shaw, “provided he finds his conscience eased and his social status improved by giving it away.”
Empathy, he argues, focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale.
If Charles’s physicians had simply prescribed soup and bed rest, everyone might have questioned whether “enough” had been done. Instead, the king’s treatments were elaborate and esoteric. By sparing no expense or effort—by procuring fluids from a torture victim and stones from exotic goat bellies—the physicians were safe from accusations of malpractice. Their heroic measures also reflected well on their employers, that is, the king’s family and advisers. On Charles’s part, receiving these treatments was proof that he had the best doctors in the kingdom looking after him.
Our species, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, is wired to form social bonds when we move in lockstep with each other.48 This can mean marching together, singing or chanting in unison, clapping hands to a beat, or even just wearing the same clothes.
When meetings at work seem like an unnecessary waste of time, such waste may in fact be the point; costly rituals can serve to keep a team cohesive or help anxious leaders cement control over their subordinates. And if we want to waste less time on such activities, we’ll need to address the root of the problem, or else find other ways to fulfill the same functions.
A common problem plagues people who try to design institutions without accounting for hidden motives. First they identify the key goals that the institution “should” achieve. Then they search for a design that best achieves these goals, given all the constraints that the institution must deal with. This task can be challenging enough, but even when the designers apparently succeed, they’re frequently puzzled and frustrated when others show little interest in adopting their solution. Often this is because they mistook professed motives for real motives, and thus solved the wrong problems. Savvy
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One promising approach to institutional reform is to try to acknowledge people’s need to show off, but to divert their efforts away from wasteful activities and toward those with bigger benefits and positive externalities.
It is a wonderful quirk of our species that the incentives of social life don’t reward strictly ruthless behavior.
