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by
Kevin Simler
Read between
March 31 - May 28, 2018
elephant in thebrain, n. An important but unacknowledged feature of how our minds work; an introspective taboo.
Large randomized studies, for example, find that people given free healthcare consume a lot more medicine (relative to an unsubsidized control group), yet don’t end up noticeably healthier. Meanwhile, 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 pursue them.
In other words, expensive medical care does heal us, but it’s simultaneously an elaborate adult version of “kiss the boo-boo.”
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.
The line between cynicism and misanthropy—between thinking ill of human motives and thinking ill of humans—is often blurry.
Knowledge suppression is useful only when two conditions are met: (1) when others have partial visibility into your mind; and (2) when they’re judging you, and meting out rewards or punishments, based on what they “see” in your mind.
And our babies are among the most helpless in all the animal kingdom.
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.”
There are good reasons to believe, for example, that our capacities for visual art, music, storytelling, and humor function in large part as elaborate mating displays, not unlike the peacock’s tail.
Two-against-one maneuvering is what lends chimpanzee power struggles both their richness and their danger. Coalitions are key. No male can rule by himself, at least not for long.
Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. This is what enables the egalitarian political order so characteristic of the forager lifestyle.
We are social animals who use language to decide on rules that the whole group must follow, and we use the threat of collective punishment to enforce these rules against even the strongest individuals.
“Nearly 100% of elite competitive swimmers pee in the pool,” says Carly Geehr, a member of the U.S. National Swim Team. “Some deny it, some proudly embrace it, but everyone does.”2 Why? Because it’s too inconvenient to take bathroom breaks in the middle of practice.
The word conspire has a fun etymology. It comes from the Latin com-, meaning together, plus spirare, meaning to breathe.
We name-drop and #humblebrag.
“Hello Internet” reference?!
In many ways, belief is a political act.
There’s a famous Chinese parable illustrating the Loyalist function of our beliefs: Zhao Gao was a powerful man hungry for more power. One day he brought a deer to a meeting with the emperor and many top officials, calling the deer a “great horse.” The emperor, who regarded Zhao Gao as a teacher and therefore trusted him completely, agreed that it was a horse—and many officials agreed as well. Others, however, remained silent or objected. This was how Zhao Gao flushed out his enemies. Soon after, he murdered all the officials who refused to call the deer a horse.31
The startup founder who’s brimming with confidence, though it may be entirely unearned, will often attract more investors and recruit more employees than someone with an accurate assessment of his own abilities.
The Happiness Hypothesis,
Thus the very architecture of our brains makes it possible for us to behave hypocritically—to believe one set of things while acting on another. We can know and remain ignorant, as long as it’s in separate parts of the brain.
What’s more—and this is where things might start to get uncomfortable—there’s a very real sense in which we are the Press Secretaries within our minds. In other words, the parts of the mind that we identify with, the parts we think of as our conscious selves (“I,” “myself,” “my conscious ego”), are the ones responsible for strategically spinning the truth for an external audience.
In other words, even we don’t have particularly privileged access to the information and decision-making that goes on inside our minds. We think we’re pretty good at introspection, but that’s largely an illusion. In a way we’re almost like outsiders within our own minds.
In one classic study, researchers sent subjects home with boxes of three “different” laundry detergents, and asked them to evaluate which worked best on delicate clothes.16 All three detergents were identical, though the subjects had no idea. Crucially, however, the three boxes were different. One was a plain yellow, another blue, and the third was blue with “splashes of yellow.”
In their evaluations, subjects expressed concerns about the first two detergents and showed a distinct preference for the third. They said that the detergent in the yellow box was “too strong” and that it ruined their clothes. The detergent in the blue box, meanwhile, left their clothes looking dirty. The detergent in the third box (blue with yellow splashes), however, had a “fine” and “wonderful” effect on their delicate clothes.
In this way, humor is like opening a safe. There’s a sequence of steps that have to be performed in the right order and with a good deal of precision.
“What are the biggest, most important lessons you’ve learned in life?”
Now, in Miller’s theory, speakers are primarily trying to impress potential mates, while for Dessalles, the primary audience is potential allies.
We enjoy art not in spite of the constraints that artists hold themselves to, but because those constraints allow their talents to shine.
32% for relegation. Madness
If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good.
Americans today spend more than $2.8 trillion a year on medicine.1 That’s 17 percent of GDP and more than the entire economic output of almost any other country.
In this ritual, the patient takes the role of the toddler, grateful for the demonstration of support. Meanwhile, the role of the mother is played not just by doctors, but everyone who helps along the way: the spouse or parent who drives the patient to the hospital, the friend who helps look after the kids, the coworkers who cover for the patient at work, and—crucially—the people and institutions who sponsor the patient’s health insurance in the first place. These sponsors include spouses, parents, employers, and national governments. Each party is hoping to earn a bit of loyalty from the
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Patients in higher-spending regions, who get more treatment for their conditions, don’t end up healthier, on average, than patients in lower-spending regions who get fewer treatments. These results hold up even after controlling for many factors that affect both medical use and health—things like age, sex, race, education, and income.
Roughly 11 percent of all medical spending in the United States, for example, goes toward patients in their final year of life.
Another way we’re reluctant to question medical quality is by getting second opinions. Doctors frequently make mistakes, as we’ve seen, and second opinions are often useful—for example, for diagnosing cancer,55 determining cancer treatment plans,56 and avoiding unnecessary surgery.57 And yet we rarely seek them out.
Religion. There’s perhaps no better illustration of the elephant in the brain. In few domains are we more deluded, especially about our own agendas, than in matters of faith and worship. When Henry VIII sought to have his first marriage annulled under the guise of piety, or when religious leaders launch imperialist crusades, we can be forgiven for questioning their motives.7 But most of what people do in the name of God isn’t so blatantly opportunistic. And yet, as we’ll see, there’s a self-serving logic to even the most humble and earnest of religious activities.
Сраные кретины
Even in the modern world, religious observance continues to be an important social cue. To give just one example, Americans seem unwilling to support an atheist for president. A 2012 Gallup poll, for instance, found that atheists came in dead last in electability, well behind other marginalized groups like Hispanics and gay people.40 In fact, Americans would sooner see a Muslim than an atheist in the Oval Office.41 An atheist kneels before no one, and for many voters, this is a frightening proposition.
Какой ад.
What feels, to each of you, overwhelmingly “right” and undeniably “true” is often suspiciously self-serving, and if nothing else, it can be useful to take a step back and reflect on your brain’s willingness to distort things for your benefit.
Enter here the philosophy of “enlightened self-interest.” This is the notion that we can do well for ourselves by doing good for others.
Even if a philanthropist’s motives are selfish, her behaviors need not be—and we would be fools to conflate these two ways of measuring virtue.
