Thanks for writing this, Dan, and thanks for using the word “Pinsofian.” My thesis in A Big Misunderstanding has some boundaries and exceptions, as nearly every thesis does, and you’ve done a great job of articulating them here. We’re probably more aligned in our thinking than not, but there are nevertheless a few parts of your post I’d push back on:
1) Mismatch is increasingly being recognized by evolutionary psychologists to be overrated as an explanatory approach—I’ve talked about it with a few guests on Evolutionary Psychology (the Podcast), in particular with Daniel Nettle and Josh Tybur, and my sense is that the idea is losing steam in the field. The story about humans gorging on junk food is too simple: it has been complicated by research by Daniel Nettle and colleagues (and a moment’s reflection will make you realize that we obviously have mechanisms for curbing overconsumption of food and craving nutrients that we lack). The story on obesity may have to do with adaptively storing energy in the form of fat when we receive cues of future food insecurity, as Nettle has argued (and he has some data on this), but plenty of questions remain. The story about ancestral, small-scale, egalitarian groups has also been challenged by Manvir Singh, who has argued that ancestral hunter gatherer groups were considerably more variable in structure than is commonly assumed, with some societies being very large and very unequal. Perhaps the main purpose of our big brains is to figure out how to achieve our adaptive goals in novel contexts, so even if conditions are novel right now, our brains will very often be up to the task of figuring things out. In any case, even if mismatches were a big issue, it is unclear whether intellectuals would be much better at getting over them than the masses. After all, intellectuals have their own highbrow versions of junk food and misinformation.
2) The point about humans being overly zero-sum in the modern world is a good example of mismatch being overapplied, in my opinion. Yes, we can create wealth together, but we can also form groups to hijack the state apparatus to direct resources or privileges toward our groups, and people correctly see that. Also, status is zero-sum, and money is a status symbol, so it is arguably not a misunderstanding for people to view money as zero-sum. Moreover, the state has interwoven itself so much with capitalist wealth production that we should no longer view capitalism and politics as separate entities (Randall Holcombe has argued this in his book Political Capitalism). Our zero-sum mentality is exactly what we should expect in the zero-sum political system we currently inhabit, where Republicans and Democrats cannot win at the same time, and where the winner gets to coercively enforce its will on the loser. It would be better if our political system were not so high-stakes and zero-sum, but given that it is, we should not be surprised that the masses are rationally responding to it. Creating paranoid myths about conspiring outgroups is not stupid in this context: it is a good strategy for mobilizing one’s group and gaining power (not to mention signaling various things to others). Just look at how well the ignorant, conspiratorial mindset worked out for Trump and his cronies. And the left has surely gained many political victories by exploiting conspiratorial mindsets historically. I agree that political elites can sometimes push these narratives on the gullible masses for their own benefit, but it’s important to remember that the masses often benefit from these narratives too: political coalitions can rise to power as a group, with both leaders and followers sharing in the victory.
3) I too feel optimistic about the positive trends in health, wealth, and safety that have occurred throughout history, as documented by Pinker and others. But I don’t think we should attribute these trends to any kind of conscious, overarching motivation for enlightenment that we can redouble by giving more power and status to intellectuals. These trends must be explained in mechanistic terms, with exogenous (rather than endogenous) causes, like any other phenomenon in economics or social science. Ironically, viewing these positive trends as the product of conscious intent is the very same error of overattributed intentionality you accuse the masses of falling prey to. So I don’t think the world became better because intellectuals got together and decided to help us all out of the goodness of their hearts. The world became better in the same way the world changes in any way at all: by people rationally responding to their incentives. In this case, I think the relevant incentives have more to do with global markets than with the good intentions of intellectuals. You seem to agree on the importance of markets for explaining positive trends, citing the insights of Adam Smith and others, but then write that “for this progress to be possible, societies require a critical mass of people to appreciate these insights.” I actually disagree here: societies can get richer without anyone knowing or caring about Adam Smith. People do things that put cash in their pockets. No abstract theories from intellectuals are required for this to occur. Smith’s insights only emerged after the wealth-creating properties of markets were well underway, so he (or any other thinker) cannot take credit for producing them. I think the same is true of many other positive trends that intellectuals like to take credit for.
4) I agree with the point about people sometimes making catastrophic mistakes based on errors and misjudgments. But it is important to remember that we are talking about the design of human nature—not the wisdom or folly of specific humans. Predators often fail to catch their prey, and prey often fail to evade their predators, but this doesn’t mean that predators or prey aren’t well-designed for chasing or evading each other. Deadly failures at the individual level and impeccable design at the species level are not mutually exclusive. Political revolutions often devour their children, but plenty of animals devour their children for adaptive reasons. The devouring does not necessarily make those animals, or their devoured children, irrational.
5) We can argue over the semantics of what it means to have a “genuine” motivation to fix the world. Regardless of semantics, we seem to agree on this much: whenever people claim to be trying to fix the world, it is mostly because of deeper motives for esteem, prestige, admiration, etc. The important point here is that if we want to understand this world fixing business, we have to delve deeper into the prestige economy that gives rise to it. And once we delve deeper into that prestige economy, we will discover some grounds for pessimism. Because what gets a person prestige can often be disconnected from what actually fixes the world. Oftentimes people can damage the world and get lots of prestige for it. The key point here is that it is the appearance of world fixing to a prestige-granting audience, and not objective world fixing in reality, that intellectuals are pursuing. And insofar as the prestige-granting audience has a hard time knowing what actually fixes the world, or is (rationally) politically biased in their assessments of what fixes the world, then intellectuals’ prestige striving will often be uncorrelated with objective improvements in the world. Intellectuals’ prestige striving may even in some cases be negatively correlated with improvements in the world. That is the broader point I was trying to make in my post, and that is why I am more pessimistic about the world-improving power of explicit world-improving motivations. The lack of depth to these motivations is precisely what should make us skeptical that they will always lead to good outcomes, or that they are the main causes of everything good in the world.
Thanks again for your post and for the shoutout. Hopefully this was some good food for thought for you and your readers. Looking forward to reading more from you, as always.
Love (even if, ultimately, only modest) disagreement between great thinkers!
However, I’m somewhat puzzled by this:
“Perhaps the main purpose of our big brains is to figure out how to achieve our adaptive goals in novel contexts, so even if conditions are novel right now, our brains will very often be up to the task of figuring things out.”
In what sense could this be a main purpose of our big brains without smuggling in the idea of adaptations for novelty, which seems implausible — because wouldn’t there have to be recurrent features of “novelty” for evolved mechanisms to exploit?
Thanks, Rob. Yes, I’m not saying we have adaptations for novelty per se. I think we have adaptations for particular types of things (food, mates, groups, status, zero-sumness), that can vary greatly from environment to environment, as well adaptations for tailoring our behavior to the particular tokens of those types we find in our current environment. The types of things we evolved to deal with are, for the most part, common to both modern and ancestral environments, so our adaptations should be up the task of tailoring our behavior to “novelty” in the sense of novel *tokens* (not types). Many of these types might be very broad like “informative intention” or “socially valued skill,” enabling unprecedented stuff like sign language or lawyers to emerge. Finally, I’m increasingly partial to the idea that something like reinforcement learning can do a pretty good job of adjusting our behavior to totally novel things, even things outside the range of anything we might have encountered ancestrally. Reinforcement learning can, over time, bundle together adaptations in new ways (like with reading), or turn an amateur into a chessmaster who dreams in pawns and rooks. So basically what I’m saying is, there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical that humans will be vexed, dumbfounded, flabbergasted, or ill-equipped to figure their shit out in modern environments. The whole point of a brain is to tailor one’s behavior to one’s environment, and humans have the biggest brains in the animal kingdom, inhabiting the widest range of environments in the animal kingdom. If a bear can figure out how to get food out of a garbage can (something it never encountered ancestrally), then surely humans can get their shit together in modern environments.
1. Status is not zero‑sum because humans operate in multiple prestige systems.
Within a single hierarchy status is zero‑sum, but humans uniquely create many parallel hierarchies — wealth, intelligence, virtue, creativity, expertise, beauty, generosity. This pluralism reduces conflict and allows many people to hold high status simultaneously.
Decades of research show that autonomy, competence, and relatedness fundamentally determine the quality, depth, and sustainability of motivation. Incentives can trigger behavior, but need satisfaction determines whether people internalize values or merely comply.
3. Institutions influence behavior not only through incentives but through the structure of the situation (stimulus control).
Choice architecture, norms, defaults, and information environments shape what people notice, how they reason, and which actions feel possible. Institutions guide behavior by structuring perception and meaning, not just by rewarding or punishing.
On the obesity: imo it’s better to treat obesity in old age as default, not the exception. As in - 1) if we live past 45+yo; and 2) we are not dying of hunger, then 3) we will be obese. Given that the body has to decide now, how much energy (sugar) should put in the blood, versus direct to the cells that will store it as fat (energy reserve), to guess what will be needed many minutes from now. The body has to predict the future. The error will never be zero.
Let’s say the error is one apple over/under eating per day. An apple is 70-90 kcal, that’s approx ~10 grams of fat. Multiply x365 days in a year x 10 grams = makes for approx ~3.6 kg. Times 10 years, that makes for 36 kg. Now if someone 72 kg at age 40yo lost half the weight dropped to 36 kg - they will likely die. So by method of elimination :-) - the body must err on the upside. The body is actually twice to trice as good: most people, it takes them not 10 years, but 20-30 years to put on extra 30-40kg in their old age, relative to when they were young.
You seem to agree on the importance of markets for explaining positive trends, citing the insights of Adam Smith and others, but then write that “for this progress to be possible, societies require a critical mass of people to appreciate these insights.” I actually disagree here: societies can get richer without anyone knowing or caring about Adam Smith. People do things that put cash in their pockets. No abstract theories from intellectuals are required for this to occur. Smith’s insights only emerged after the wealth-creating properties of markets were well underway, so he (or any other thinker) cannot take credit for producing them. I think the same is true of many other positive trends that intellectuals like to take credit for.
I agree with this. Hopefully Dan will read your note, you 2 being able to interact is a substsck highlight real
This is good stuff. The quality of this kind of exchange is also why I am eager to do some integration with Page's insights.
Here's a few notes that I think bridges perspectives:
In response to 1) There are two levels of “mismatch” being discussed here which are not mutually exclusive. Evolutionary Psychology has been slow to absorb the implications of Berridge & Robinson's research that shows ‘wanting’ (incentive salience) and ‘liking’ are differentiable. This is likely because the internal mismatch is thought to be a special case (addiction) rather than a general phenomenon. Behavioral analysis is made tractable by conflating the two using terms such as “rewards,” or by tracking them in a third person mapping (“motives” & “incentives”) over first person mapping (salience & valence). But both common overconsumption without addiction (eating despite disliking the last few bites) and the deserted island trope of being forced to eat something disgusting (barely choking down what is needed for survival) are internal mismatches where ‘wanting’ outcompetes ‘liking’ in the same behavioral frame; the former being maladaptive, and the latter being adaptive. That these mechanisms can be brought into tension at all is evidence of both: 1. “Big brains for adaptive goals on novel contexts” (local mismatch as signal), and 2. Social/evolutionary mismatch (global mismatch as noise), both of which can be approached with mappings such as 3. Homeostasis as a kind of internal Nash equilibrium of discrete and competing biological/cognitive systems (ala Dual Process theory) and 4. Nash equilibria as a kind of temporary social homeostasis that grants negotiative, cognitive tractability to collective action problems (ala Damasio).
2) I would argue that “status” is to social capital as “leverage” is to money. The former are types of “power” derived from the relative distribution, best treated as zero sum. The latter (social and financial affordance) are not zero-sum, but for the rise of narcissism (overconsumption of social capital) and greed (overconsumption of financial capital) that might handwavingly be called “addicted elites.” The rub is of course they are winning a game we are all playing, at least to an enabling degree.
3) This is largely the Hayekian insight, and part of what I am writing about is generalizing from “price” as an “opportunity-costly signal” enabling “decentralization.” the same mapping works for effort, discomfort, and signals of vulnerability. That is to say, we are expressive exactly where it would inform others of internal tradeoffs being made, seeding theory of mind recursion. Arguably, all social animals signal and understand “vulnerability,” and can use it to establish hierarchies and territories without direct conflict or wars of attrition. Importantly, this is to say Dawkins was wrong when he said “the Poker Face would evolve” in response to the pressure of attrition. Instead, a tower of “tells” seems to have evolved, and that's why a poker face remains a skill rather than a trait. Selection effects also explain why the skill directly references a game highly associated with gambling addiction. Those who are prone to affective flattening would have an advantage— an external match based on an internal mismatch.
4) If “human nature” includes adaptability to novel contexts, then there is good reason to include “the wisdom or folly of specific humans” so as to not wash out (behavioral statistics) and erroneously smooth over (statistical behaviors) internal conflicts where the concrete processing actually occurs.
5) If by “deeper motives” we mean “evolutionarily older,” then these are also resource-rational constraints of action. A recursive theory of mind and an intellectual theory of growth are also resource rational for understanding mutual benefit. If “grubby motives” are resource-rational, then they are only so “grubby” as they are contrasted with the narrative “purity” of other-serving motivations, not how “genuine” they are otherwise. If they were not the least bit genuine, then the feeling of internal conflict is much harder to explain. But that unpacking is for another time and place.
An expansion on the discussion and thank you to you both again for having provided yet another week of inspiration for intellectual nerdiness:
“Our surplus of neurons, an amusing way to highlight cognition as an evaluative predictive processing device, has catapulted us to the head of the animal pack, surpassing all forms of humanity before us. Our species’ adaptations have centered on the growth of imagination and the ability to conceptualize possible future failures. We don’t need to wait for failures to actually occur in experience; we can imagine them and plan accordingly.”
Sometimes unlearning one's common sense is what is required. But most of the time, the reason that something appears to be a great foolishness is because that is what it is.
I largely agree with this essay, but I don’t think what we’re seeing is an evolutionary mismatch between so-called “Stone Age brains” and modern complex societies. It’s closer to something like upgrade pressure: modern environments create real, visible opportunities to improve on strategies that were once the most effective solutions—things like confirmation bias and tribalism.
It’s not that they are not effective anymore. There is no maladaptation. It’s just that through cultural and developmental change, scientific progress, economic development, and (crucially) a growing understanding of human psychology, nature, and complex systems, we’re discovering that we can do better. The modern world raises the ceiling: it reveals attainable alternatives—better epistemic tools, better institutions, better norms—and that’s what generates the feeling of mismatch.
So the “mismatch” isn’t a fact; it’s a perception produced by expanded possibility. What gets labeled as “Stone Age biases” could still be adaptive shortcuts—yet now placed under upgrade pressure to be refined, scaffolded, or sometimes left behind for
A magnificent piece — beautifully thought through, beautifully written, beautifully structured. The generous supply of sources and links is especially appreciated.
It set off a lot of thinking on my end; I could comment on many parts. But I’ll stick to just one here: your conclusion that we must “unlearn our common sense.” I think that’s largely right — though, as with most good insights, it has limits if applied too mechanically. In a recent essay of my own, I explored a related concern: how the liberal intelligentsia sometimes turns a generally sound pattern — that more abstract or theory-driven ideas often outperform common-sense ones — into an unexamined heuristic.
Once it becomes a heuristic, it also becomes hackable: it creates an opening for dubious ideas — sometimes advanced in good faith, sometimes not — to be smuggled into credibility by presenting themselves as sophisticated and explicitly counter–common sense. It’s a bit like traffic patterns: once enough drivers learn the shortcut, it stops being a shortcut. And when a rule becomes widely understood, people start optimizing against it, and it stops working as a filter. That vulnerability in the pattern struck me as adjacent to your conclusion, and very much in conversation with it.
If you're curious, here's the relevant bit from my essay:
Well, if you do read it, I would love to hear what you think. (Either publicly or privately. My DMs are open!) I'm very open-minded and open-hearted. I don't bite, I promise!
There’s a certain level of subversiveness to the idea that beneath all the good we see in this world, it’s all partly because we hide our “true intentions” pretty well. That beneath it all, we want power, status and all that jazz. But I dont think people can develop trust in that manner. I think, to some degree, there needs to exist the capacity for something genuine and sincere, otherwise we would call bs on it by our actions; by not wanting to cooperate with the person. It can’t all just be pretend.
I would argue it's mostly not pretend, but often mostly unconscious. We are built to do and enjoy positive things for others because that behaviour has served, and continues to serve, a positive social power function for us and our tribes.
In that way it's a perfect example of the kind of thing that common sense doesn't naturally intuit which this article highlights - a quality that quietly emerges from the structural incentives rather than being explicitly and intentionally thought out.
The premise that it’s unconscious is eerily similiar with psychoanalytic dictum. And yet, “sometimes the cigar is just a cigar”. I think an even more counterintuitive notion is that it’s more efficient for just things to be as it is, rather than having to always operate on many levels.
By unconscious I meant not conscious of/devoid of intention rather than the Freudian understanding. The idea being we have evolved biological systems which drive our behaviour in certain ways as it achieves a certain functional benefit.
Sorry if that wasn't clear! I don't think about Freudian theory of mind much, in the same way I don't think about phrenology.
In practice, the way often these hidden motivations are being applied is no different. My question is how do you prove that these unconscious motivations is lurking around
Wow. You said exactly what I wanted to say (if I could have figured out what I wanted to say) after I read Pinsof's essay. Your response amounts to a cynic's manifesto for the Enlightenment.
My quibble is that I think that prosocial motives are deeper and more sincere than you assume. You say, "the best way to convince others that you want to help them and fix our broken world is to develop a genuine passion for doing so." I wonder: "Why isn't the best way for evolution to make us fit for an environment that rewards prosocial behavior for it to select for those who naturally have that passion?" Of course, it's never pure or absolute b/c we have other drives that pull us in other directions, but I disagree with the assumption that prosocial desires are an artificial social creation at odds with human nature. But this may be a distinction w/o a difference w/ regard to this essay.
This is the most significant post I’ve seen on Substack . And that is saying quite a bit. I have long thought that the human critter evolved in one environment and worked itself into another it has not yet figured out how to adapt to. This post explores the complexities, consequences and possibilities of that evolution. Living in the US those possibilities seem rather distant but hopefully enough people will survive the current mess to achieve those possibilities. Huge thanks to Dan Williams.
An interesting essay. But in my view it sidesteps an elephant in the room of the modern intellectual and epistemological environment. All the way from Hobbes to Kant, intellectuals were a tiny part of the societal elite and their audience was similarly an elite one. But the vast 20th century expansion of institutions of 'higher education' has seriously diluted and devalued non-STEM intellectuality.... created a vast surplus of self-appointed humanities 'intellectuals' and their equally vast self-referring intellectual audience.
The same tiny number of genuine profound-thinkers still exists but is drowning in that pseudo-intellectual sea to the extent that the most perverse and counterproductive political and philosophical thinking in our time has come more from the graduate professional middle class than from the school-leaver 'ignorant' masses. A Madness of Intelligentsias in other words as I explore in this essay series: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
“Show me an animal that has succeeded in surviving and reproducing in a hostile environment for millions of years, and I will show you a rational animal.”
Homo sapiens has not been around for millions of years. Yes, the hominid lineage, including the genus Homo, has been here for millions, but can we speak intelligently about the "rationality" of our pre-Sapiens ancestors?
One indication that we struggle with the complexity we have created is that we struggle to imagine the long-term consequences of something like the internet or social media. Though I'm not one, I'm willing to think that economists do best, at least with short-term predictions, because someone invented money so that they've had their most important variable handed to them.
Really enjoyed this essay — especially the pushback on the idea that widespread confusion is mostly illusory rather than an adaptive mismatch with modern complexity.
One lens that came to mind while reading Pinsof (and your response) is a rough evolutionary division between three cognitive roles: an order-oriented group sensitive to personal threat, an enlightenment-oriented group sensitive to societal or abstract threat, and a large pliable middle. Each seems adaptive under different conditions of scarcity vs abundance.
If that’s roughly right, then persuasion alone may matter less than reducing felt threat across these groups — making enlightenment-style institutions feel personally stabilizing rather than destabilizing.
Curious whether that framing resonates with how you’re thinking about the problem.
This is one of the best posts I've read in some time. People need to understand the beneficial aspects of ambition balancing ambition to produce collective, better outcomes. The post contains an abundance of good analysis on human behavior and the impact of systems and the media on behavior, thinking and formation of beliefs. Highly recommended.
An interesting and well-done account of the issues, but I don't think that any other comment has noted that the two Enlightenment discoveries you build around were old news to the Indigenous societies the men of the Enlightenment called "savage,: but which long established mechanisms to deal with our predictable cognitive misfires and channel energy in ways that served the community.
Thanks for writing this, Dan, and thanks for using the word “Pinsofian.” My thesis in A Big Misunderstanding has some boundaries and exceptions, as nearly every thesis does, and you’ve done a great job of articulating them here. We’re probably more aligned in our thinking than not, but there are nevertheless a few parts of your post I’d push back on:
1) Mismatch is increasingly being recognized by evolutionary psychologists to be overrated as an explanatory approach—I’ve talked about it with a few guests on Evolutionary Psychology (the Podcast), in particular with Daniel Nettle and Josh Tybur, and my sense is that the idea is losing steam in the field. The story about humans gorging on junk food is too simple: it has been complicated by research by Daniel Nettle and colleagues (and a moment’s reflection will make you realize that we obviously have mechanisms for curbing overconsumption of food and craving nutrients that we lack). The story on obesity may have to do with adaptively storing energy in the form of fat when we receive cues of future food insecurity, as Nettle has argued (and he has some data on this), but plenty of questions remain. The story about ancestral, small-scale, egalitarian groups has also been challenged by Manvir Singh, who has argued that ancestral hunter gatherer groups were considerably more variable in structure than is commonly assumed, with some societies being very large and very unequal. Perhaps the main purpose of our big brains is to figure out how to achieve our adaptive goals in novel contexts, so even if conditions are novel right now, our brains will very often be up to the task of figuring things out. In any case, even if mismatches were a big issue, it is unclear whether intellectuals would be much better at getting over them than the masses. After all, intellectuals have their own highbrow versions of junk food and misinformation.
2) The point about humans being overly zero-sum in the modern world is a good example of mismatch being overapplied, in my opinion. Yes, we can create wealth together, but we can also form groups to hijack the state apparatus to direct resources or privileges toward our groups, and people correctly see that. Also, status is zero-sum, and money is a status symbol, so it is arguably not a misunderstanding for people to view money as zero-sum. Moreover, the state has interwoven itself so much with capitalist wealth production that we should no longer view capitalism and politics as separate entities (Randall Holcombe has argued this in his book Political Capitalism). Our zero-sum mentality is exactly what we should expect in the zero-sum political system we currently inhabit, where Republicans and Democrats cannot win at the same time, and where the winner gets to coercively enforce its will on the loser. It would be better if our political system were not so high-stakes and zero-sum, but given that it is, we should not be surprised that the masses are rationally responding to it. Creating paranoid myths about conspiring outgroups is not stupid in this context: it is a good strategy for mobilizing one’s group and gaining power (not to mention signaling various things to others). Just look at how well the ignorant, conspiratorial mindset worked out for Trump and his cronies. And the left has surely gained many political victories by exploiting conspiratorial mindsets historically. I agree that political elites can sometimes push these narratives on the gullible masses for their own benefit, but it’s important to remember that the masses often benefit from these narratives too: political coalitions can rise to power as a group, with both leaders and followers sharing in the victory.
3) I too feel optimistic about the positive trends in health, wealth, and safety that have occurred throughout history, as documented by Pinker and others. But I don’t think we should attribute these trends to any kind of conscious, overarching motivation for enlightenment that we can redouble by giving more power and status to intellectuals. These trends must be explained in mechanistic terms, with exogenous (rather than endogenous) causes, like any other phenomenon in economics or social science. Ironically, viewing these positive trends as the product of conscious intent is the very same error of overattributed intentionality you accuse the masses of falling prey to. So I don’t think the world became better because intellectuals got together and decided to help us all out of the goodness of their hearts. The world became better in the same way the world changes in any way at all: by people rationally responding to their incentives. In this case, I think the relevant incentives have more to do with global markets than with the good intentions of intellectuals. You seem to agree on the importance of markets for explaining positive trends, citing the insights of Adam Smith and others, but then write that “for this progress to be possible, societies require a critical mass of people to appreciate these insights.” I actually disagree here: societies can get richer without anyone knowing or caring about Adam Smith. People do things that put cash in their pockets. No abstract theories from intellectuals are required for this to occur. Smith’s insights only emerged after the wealth-creating properties of markets were well underway, so he (or any other thinker) cannot take credit for producing them. I think the same is true of many other positive trends that intellectuals like to take credit for.
4) I agree with the point about people sometimes making catastrophic mistakes based on errors and misjudgments. But it is important to remember that we are talking about the design of human nature—not the wisdom or folly of specific humans. Predators often fail to catch their prey, and prey often fail to evade their predators, but this doesn’t mean that predators or prey aren’t well-designed for chasing or evading each other. Deadly failures at the individual level and impeccable design at the species level are not mutually exclusive. Political revolutions often devour their children, but plenty of animals devour their children for adaptive reasons. The devouring does not necessarily make those animals, or their devoured children, irrational.
5) We can argue over the semantics of what it means to have a “genuine” motivation to fix the world. Regardless of semantics, we seem to agree on this much: whenever people claim to be trying to fix the world, it is mostly because of deeper motives for esteem, prestige, admiration, etc. The important point here is that if we want to understand this world fixing business, we have to delve deeper into the prestige economy that gives rise to it. And once we delve deeper into that prestige economy, we will discover some grounds for pessimism. Because what gets a person prestige can often be disconnected from what actually fixes the world. Oftentimes people can damage the world and get lots of prestige for it. The key point here is that it is the appearance of world fixing to a prestige-granting audience, and not objective world fixing in reality, that intellectuals are pursuing. And insofar as the prestige-granting audience has a hard time knowing what actually fixes the world, or is (rationally) politically biased in their assessments of what fixes the world, then intellectuals’ prestige striving will often be uncorrelated with objective improvements in the world. Intellectuals’ prestige striving may even in some cases be negatively correlated with improvements in the world. That is the broader point I was trying to make in my post, and that is why I am more pessimistic about the world-improving power of explicit world-improving motivations. The lack of depth to these motivations is precisely what should make us skeptical that they will always lead to good outcomes, or that they are the main causes of everything good in the world.
Thanks again for your post and for the shoutout. Hopefully this was some good food for thought for you and your readers. Looking forward to reading more from you, as always.
This is, by far, some of the most informative and civil pushback I’ve ever come across
Love (even if, ultimately, only modest) disagreement between great thinkers!
However, I’m somewhat puzzled by this:
“Perhaps the main purpose of our big brains is to figure out how to achieve our adaptive goals in novel contexts, so even if conditions are novel right now, our brains will very often be up to the task of figuring things out.”
In what sense could this be a main purpose of our big brains without smuggling in the idea of adaptations for novelty, which seems implausible — because wouldn’t there have to be recurrent features of “novelty” for evolved mechanisms to exploit?
Thanks, Rob. Yes, I’m not saying we have adaptations for novelty per se. I think we have adaptations for particular types of things (food, mates, groups, status, zero-sumness), that can vary greatly from environment to environment, as well adaptations for tailoring our behavior to the particular tokens of those types we find in our current environment. The types of things we evolved to deal with are, for the most part, common to both modern and ancestral environments, so our adaptations should be up the task of tailoring our behavior to “novelty” in the sense of novel *tokens* (not types). Many of these types might be very broad like “informative intention” or “socially valued skill,” enabling unprecedented stuff like sign language or lawyers to emerge. Finally, I’m increasingly partial to the idea that something like reinforcement learning can do a pretty good job of adjusting our behavior to totally novel things, even things outside the range of anything we might have encountered ancestrally. Reinforcement learning can, over time, bundle together adaptations in new ways (like with reading), or turn an amateur into a chessmaster who dreams in pawns and rooks. So basically what I’m saying is, there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical that humans will be vexed, dumbfounded, flabbergasted, or ill-equipped to figure their shit out in modern environments. The whole point of a brain is to tailor one’s behavior to one’s environment, and humans have the biggest brains in the animal kingdom, inhabiting the widest range of environments in the animal kingdom. If a bear can figure out how to get food out of a garbage can (something it never encountered ancestrally), then surely humans can get their shit together in modern environments.
Cool, this is very helpful and clarifying — many thanks, David.
Response to David Pinsof
1. Status is not zero‑sum because humans operate in multiple prestige systems.
Within a single hierarchy status is zero‑sum, but humans uniquely create many parallel hierarchies — wealth, intelligence, virtue, creativity, expertise, beauty, generosity. This pluralism reduces conflict and allows many people to hold high status simultaneously.
2. Incentives alone cannot explain human behavior; psychological needs shape motivation.
Decades of research show that autonomy, competence, and relatedness fundamentally determine the quality, depth, and sustainability of motivation. Incentives can trigger behavior, but need satisfaction determines whether people internalize values or merely comply.
3. Institutions influence behavior not only through incentives but through the structure of the situation (stimulus control).
Choice architecture, norms, defaults, and information environments shape what people notice, how they reason, and which actions feel possible. Institutions guide behavior by structuring perception and meaning, not just by rewarding or punishing.
On the obesity: imo it’s better to treat obesity in old age as default, not the exception. As in - 1) if we live past 45+yo; and 2) we are not dying of hunger, then 3) we will be obese. Given that the body has to decide now, how much energy (sugar) should put in the blood, versus direct to the cells that will store it as fat (energy reserve), to guess what will be needed many minutes from now. The body has to predict the future. The error will never be zero.
Let’s say the error is one apple over/under eating per day. An apple is 70-90 kcal, that’s approx ~10 grams of fat. Multiply x365 days in a year x 10 grams = makes for approx ~3.6 kg. Times 10 years, that makes for 36 kg. Now if someone 72 kg at age 40yo lost half the weight dropped to 36 kg - they will likely die. So by method of elimination :-) - the body must err on the upside. The body is actually twice to trice as good: most people, it takes them not 10 years, but 20-30 years to put on extra 30-40kg in their old age, relative to when they were young.
You seem to agree on the importance of markets for explaining positive trends, citing the insights of Adam Smith and others, but then write that “for this progress to be possible, societies require a critical mass of people to appreciate these insights.” I actually disagree here: societies can get richer without anyone knowing or caring about Adam Smith. People do things that put cash in their pockets. No abstract theories from intellectuals are required for this to occur. Smith’s insights only emerged after the wealth-creating properties of markets were well underway, so he (or any other thinker) cannot take credit for producing them. I think the same is true of many other positive trends that intellectuals like to take credit for.
I agree with this. Hopefully Dan will read your note, you 2 being able to interact is a substsck highlight real
This is good stuff. The quality of this kind of exchange is also why I am eager to do some integration with Page's insights.
Here's a few notes that I think bridges perspectives:
In response to 1) There are two levels of “mismatch” being discussed here which are not mutually exclusive. Evolutionary Psychology has been slow to absorb the implications of Berridge & Robinson's research that shows ‘wanting’ (incentive salience) and ‘liking’ are differentiable. This is likely because the internal mismatch is thought to be a special case (addiction) rather than a general phenomenon. Behavioral analysis is made tractable by conflating the two using terms such as “rewards,” or by tracking them in a third person mapping (“motives” & “incentives”) over first person mapping (salience & valence). But both common overconsumption without addiction (eating despite disliking the last few bites) and the deserted island trope of being forced to eat something disgusting (barely choking down what is needed for survival) are internal mismatches where ‘wanting’ outcompetes ‘liking’ in the same behavioral frame; the former being maladaptive, and the latter being adaptive. That these mechanisms can be brought into tension at all is evidence of both: 1. “Big brains for adaptive goals on novel contexts” (local mismatch as signal), and 2. Social/evolutionary mismatch (global mismatch as noise), both of which can be approached with mappings such as 3. Homeostasis as a kind of internal Nash equilibrium of discrete and competing biological/cognitive systems (ala Dual Process theory) and 4. Nash equilibria as a kind of temporary social homeostasis that grants negotiative, cognitive tractability to collective action problems (ala Damasio).
2) I would argue that “status” is to social capital as “leverage” is to money. The former are types of “power” derived from the relative distribution, best treated as zero sum. The latter (social and financial affordance) are not zero-sum, but for the rise of narcissism (overconsumption of social capital) and greed (overconsumption of financial capital) that might handwavingly be called “addicted elites.” The rub is of course they are winning a game we are all playing, at least to an enabling degree.
3) This is largely the Hayekian insight, and part of what I am writing about is generalizing from “price” as an “opportunity-costly signal” enabling “decentralization.” the same mapping works for effort, discomfort, and signals of vulnerability. That is to say, we are expressive exactly where it would inform others of internal tradeoffs being made, seeding theory of mind recursion. Arguably, all social animals signal and understand “vulnerability,” and can use it to establish hierarchies and territories without direct conflict or wars of attrition. Importantly, this is to say Dawkins was wrong when he said “the Poker Face would evolve” in response to the pressure of attrition. Instead, a tower of “tells” seems to have evolved, and that's why a poker face remains a skill rather than a trait. Selection effects also explain why the skill directly references a game highly associated with gambling addiction. Those who are prone to affective flattening would have an advantage— an external match based on an internal mismatch.
4) If “human nature” includes adaptability to novel contexts, then there is good reason to include “the wisdom or folly of specific humans” so as to not wash out (behavioral statistics) and erroneously smooth over (statistical behaviors) internal conflicts where the concrete processing actually occurs.
5) If by “deeper motives” we mean “evolutionarily older,” then these are also resource-rational constraints of action. A recursive theory of mind and an intellectual theory of growth are also resource rational for understanding mutual benefit. If “grubby motives” are resource-rational, then they are only so “grubby” as they are contrasted with the narrative “purity” of other-serving motivations, not how “genuine” they are otherwise. If they were not the least bit genuine, then the feeling of internal conflict is much harder to explain. But that unpacking is for another time and place.
Cheers!
An expansion on the discussion and thank you to you both again for having provided yet another week of inspiration for intellectual nerdiness:
“Our surplus of neurons, an amusing way to highlight cognition as an evaluative predictive processing device, has catapulted us to the head of the animal pack, surpassing all forms of humanity before us. Our species’ adaptations have centered on the growth of imagination and the ability to conceptualize possible future failures. We don’t need to wait for failures to actually occur in experience; we can imagine them and plan accordingly.”
https://www.humanitysvalues.com/p/the-modern-world-hasnt-left-our-evolutionary?embeddedPostPublications=2203516%2C396126
Sometimes unlearning one's common sense is what is required. But most of the time, the reason that something appears to be a great foolishness is because that is what it is.
I largely agree with this essay, but I don’t think what we’re seeing is an evolutionary mismatch between so-called “Stone Age brains” and modern complex societies. It’s closer to something like upgrade pressure: modern environments create real, visible opportunities to improve on strategies that were once the most effective solutions—things like confirmation bias and tribalism.
It’s not that they are not effective anymore. There is no maladaptation. It’s just that through cultural and developmental change, scientific progress, economic development, and (crucially) a growing understanding of human psychology, nature, and complex systems, we’re discovering that we can do better. The modern world raises the ceiling: it reveals attainable alternatives—better epistemic tools, better institutions, better norms—and that’s what generates the feeling of mismatch.
So the “mismatch” isn’t a fact; it’s a perception produced by expanded possibility. What gets labeled as “Stone Age biases” could still be adaptive shortcuts—yet now placed under upgrade pressure to be refined, scaffolded, or sometimes left behind for
A magnificent piece — beautifully thought through, beautifully written, beautifully structured. The generous supply of sources and links is especially appreciated.
It set off a lot of thinking on my end; I could comment on many parts. But I’ll stick to just one here: your conclusion that we must “unlearn our common sense.” I think that’s largely right — though, as with most good insights, it has limits if applied too mechanically. In a recent essay of my own, I explored a related concern: how the liberal intelligentsia sometimes turns a generally sound pattern — that more abstract or theory-driven ideas often outperform common-sense ones — into an unexamined heuristic.
Once it becomes a heuristic, it also becomes hackable: it creates an opening for dubious ideas — sometimes advanced in good faith, sometimes not — to be smuggled into credibility by presenting themselves as sophisticated and explicitly counter–common sense. It’s a bit like traffic patterns: once enough drivers learn the shortcut, it stops being a shortcut. And when a rule becomes widely understood, people start optimizing against it, and it stops working as a filter. That vulnerability in the pattern struck me as adjacent to your conclusion, and very much in conversation with it.
If you're curious, here's the relevant bit from my essay:
https://artymorty.substack.com/i/180146814/common-sense-the-enemy-of-the-people
Thanks. And yes - great point. That's insightful. I'll check out this essay. It sounds very interesting (and relevant to my interests).
Well, if you do read it, I would love to hear what you think. (Either publicly or privately. My DMs are open!) I'm very open-minded and open-hearted. I don't bite, I promise!
There’s a certain level of subversiveness to the idea that beneath all the good we see in this world, it’s all partly because we hide our “true intentions” pretty well. That beneath it all, we want power, status and all that jazz. But I dont think people can develop trust in that manner. I think, to some degree, there needs to exist the capacity for something genuine and sincere, otherwise we would call bs on it by our actions; by not wanting to cooperate with the person. It can’t all just be pretend.
I would argue it's mostly not pretend, but often mostly unconscious. We are built to do and enjoy positive things for others because that behaviour has served, and continues to serve, a positive social power function for us and our tribes.
In that way it's a perfect example of the kind of thing that common sense doesn't naturally intuit which this article highlights - a quality that quietly emerges from the structural incentives rather than being explicitly and intentionally thought out.
The premise that it’s unconscious is eerily similiar with psychoanalytic dictum. And yet, “sometimes the cigar is just a cigar”. I think an even more counterintuitive notion is that it’s more efficient for just things to be as it is, rather than having to always operate on many levels.
By unconscious I meant not conscious of/devoid of intention rather than the Freudian understanding. The idea being we have evolved biological systems which drive our behaviour in certain ways as it achieves a certain functional benefit.
Sorry if that wasn't clear! I don't think about Freudian theory of mind much, in the same way I don't think about phrenology.
In practice, the way often these hidden motivations are being applied is no different. My question is how do you prove that these unconscious motivations is lurking around
Really interesting article that has caught me out in my recent pessimism - thank you for that!
Wow. You said exactly what I wanted to say (if I could have figured out what I wanted to say) after I read Pinsof's essay. Your response amounts to a cynic's manifesto for the Enlightenment.
My quibble is that I think that prosocial motives are deeper and more sincere than you assume. You say, "the best way to convince others that you want to help them and fix our broken world is to develop a genuine passion for doing so." I wonder: "Why isn't the best way for evolution to make us fit for an environment that rewards prosocial behavior for it to select for those who naturally have that passion?" Of course, it's never pure or absolute b/c we have other drives that pull us in other directions, but I disagree with the assumption that prosocial desires are an artificial social creation at odds with human nature. But this may be a distinction w/o a difference w/ regard to this essay.
This is the most significant post I’ve seen on Substack . And that is saying quite a bit. I have long thought that the human critter evolved in one environment and worked itself into another it has not yet figured out how to adapt to. This post explores the complexities, consequences and possibilities of that evolution. Living in the US those possibilities seem rather distant but hopefully enough people will survive the current mess to achieve those possibilities. Huge thanks to Dan Williams.
An interesting essay. But in my view it sidesteps an elephant in the room of the modern intellectual and epistemological environment. All the way from Hobbes to Kant, intellectuals were a tiny part of the societal elite and their audience was similarly an elite one. But the vast 20th century expansion of institutions of 'higher education' has seriously diluted and devalued non-STEM intellectuality.... created a vast surplus of self-appointed humanities 'intellectuals' and their equally vast self-referring intellectual audience.
The same tiny number of genuine profound-thinkers still exists but is drowning in that pseudo-intellectual sea to the extent that the most perverse and counterproductive political and philosophical thinking in our time has come more from the graduate professional middle class than from the school-leaver 'ignorant' masses. A Madness of Intelligentsias in other words as I explore in this essay series: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
Terrific essay! Too bad the premise undermines itself.
“Show me an animal that has succeeded in surviving and reproducing in a hostile environment for millions of years, and I will show you a rational animal.”
Homo sapiens has not been around for millions of years. Yes, the hominid lineage, including the genus Homo, has been here for millions, but can we speak intelligently about the "rationality" of our pre-Sapiens ancestors?
One indication that we struggle with the complexity we have created is that we struggle to imagine the long-term consequences of something like the internet or social media. Though I'm not one, I'm willing to think that economists do best, at least with short-term predictions, because someone invented money so that they've had their most important variable handed to them.
The best thing you've written Dan.
Really enjoyed this essay — especially the pushback on the idea that widespread confusion is mostly illusory rather than an adaptive mismatch with modern complexity.
One lens that came to mind while reading Pinsof (and your response) is a rough evolutionary division between three cognitive roles: an order-oriented group sensitive to personal threat, an enlightenment-oriented group sensitive to societal or abstract threat, and a large pliable middle. Each seems adaptive under different conditions of scarcity vs abundance.
If that’s roughly right, then persuasion alone may matter less than reducing felt threat across these groups — making enlightenment-style institutions feel personally stabilizing rather than destabilizing.
Curious whether that framing resonates with how you’re thinking about the problem.
This is one of the best posts I've read in some time. People need to understand the beneficial aspects of ambition balancing ambition to produce collective, better outcomes. The post contains an abundance of good analysis on human behavior and the impact of systems and the media on behavior, thinking and formation of beliefs. Highly recommended.
An interesting and well-done account of the issues, but I don't think that any other comment has noted that the two Enlightenment discoveries you build around were old news to the Indigenous societies the men of the Enlightenment called "savage,: but which long established mechanisms to deal with our predictable cognitive misfires and channel energy in ways that served the community.