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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kevin Simler
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April 23, 2019 - October 9, 2022
In this transaction, the patient is assured of social support, while those who provide such support are hoping to buy a little slice of loyalty from the patient. And it’s not just doctors who are on the “kissing” or supportive side of the transaction, but everyone who helps the patient along the way: the spouse who insists on the doctor’s visit, the friend who watches the kids, the boss who’s lenient about work deadlines, and even the institutions, like employers and national governments, that sponsored the patient’s health insurance in the first place. Each of these parties is hoping for a
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The human brain, according to this view, was designed to deceive itself—in Trivers’ words, “the better to deceive others.”
a portrait of the human species as strategically self-deceived, not only as individuals but also as a society. Our brains are experts at flirting, negotiating social status, and playing politics, while “we”—the self-conscious parts of the brain—manage to keep our thoughts pure and chaste. “We” don’t always know what our brains are up to, but we often pretend to know, and therein lies the trouble.
Why do so many people brag about travel?
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.
self-deception can be useful when facing an adversary with mind-reading powers.
But in addition to biases in the evidence itself, we are also biased in the way we approach it. In this respect, we’re not so much drunk as we are vain;
Ecological challenges,
opportunities for cooperation.
Social challenges,
competitive and potentially destructive.
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?
All else being equal, we’d prefer to look for the keys to human intelligence under the light of cooperation, a light that makes us look good. But if there’s reason to believe the keys are elsewhere, we need to take a deep breath, roll up our sleeves, and start looking under the harsh light of competition.
“Both the detection of deception and often its propagation have been major forces favoring the evolution of intelligence. It is perhaps ironic that dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tools for truth have been sharpened.”6
sex, politics, and social status—
They overlap and share intermediate goals. Sometimes the prizes of one game become instruments in another. To succeed in the mating game, for example, it often pays to have high status and political clout—while an attractive mate can, in turn, raise one’s social status.
the New School sees it as primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving.
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.
In the game of chicken, you don’t win because you’re unable to steer, but because your opponent believes you’re unable to steer.
The entire value of strategic ignorance and related phenomena lies in the way others act when they believe that you’re ignorant.
Self-deception, then, is a tactic that’s useful only to social creatures in social situations.
Their conclusion is that we, humans, must self-deceive.
“We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”
the best way to convince others that we believe something is to actually believe it.
our minds aren’t as private as we like to imagine. Other people have partial visibility into what we’re thinking. Faced with the translucency of our own minds, then, self-deception is often the most robust way to mislead others.
belief is a political act.
When we deceive ourselves about personal health, whether by avoiding information entirely or by distorting information we’ve already received, it feels like we’re trying to protect ourselves from distressing information. But the reason our egos need to be shielded—the reason we evolved to feel pain when our egos are threatened—is to help us maintain a positive social impression.
We don’t personally benefit from misunderstanding our current state of health, but we benefit when others mistakenly believe we’re healthy.
The benefit of self-deception is that it can, in some scenarios, help us mislead others. But what about its costs? As we’ve mentioned, the main cost is that it leads to suboptimal decision-making.
blindsight,
blindsighted patients swear they can’t see. But when presented with flashcards and forced to guess what’s on the card, they do better than chance.
Self-preservation systems have no business dealing with abstract concepts.
They should run on autopilot and be extremely difficult to override (as the difficulty of committing suicide attests41).
Self-discretion
mental habit of giving less psychological prominence to potentially damaging information.
differs
self-deception, in which we actively li...
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strategic ignorance, in which we try our best not to learn potentially ...
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