What Kind Of Apes Are We?

Photo by Marc-Antoine Dubé on Unsplash

This is a guest post by David Pinsof, who writes the excellent ‘Everything is Bullshit’ Substack.

---

One of the great joys of intellectual life is finding someone to argue with in good faith. As someone who thinks most arguing is bullshit, it’s all too rare and precious to have a genuine exchange of ideas stripped of character attacks, strawmanning, and status jockeying. Thankfully, I think I’ve found such a good faith interlocutor in the ever-brilliant Dan Williams, who has written a moderately cynical yet optimistic essay in response to my soul-crushingly cynical and pessimistic essay, A Big Misunderstanding.

Dan’s post is called “We Are Confused, Maladapted Apes Who Need Enlightenment.” What Dan means by “enlightenment” is something like: “the culture and ideas of intellectuals.” And what he means by “confused and maladapted” is something like: “irrational, ignorant, self-deluded, and in dire need of the culture and ideas of intellectuals.”

My essay has a different message. I argue that we humans are pretty savvy and rational, shaped as we are by millions of years of natural selection, and that intellectuals often overstate the demand for their grand ideas, in large part by pretending we humans are confused and maladapted, so that they can cast themselves as humanity’s saviors.

So my response to Dan might be something like, “Yea, maybe humans are kind of confused and maladapted sometimes, but it’s also really insightful to see humans as savvy animals strategically pursuing their Darwinian goals.” And Dan might say something like, “Yea, it’s pretty insightful to see humans as savvy animals strategically pursuing their Darwinian goals, but it’s also really important to recognize that humans are confused and maladapted sometimes.” It’s basically a disagreement over where to put the italics.

But if it was all about italics, I wouldn’t be writing this. There are a few areas where Dan and I might truly disagree, which is very exciting to me. Maybe one of us or both of us will change our minds or come to see the world a bit differently. Maybe you, dear reader, will benefit from the back and forth. What a beautiful thing. Let’s go through what I see as the biggest potential sources of disagreement.

Stone Age Minds in Modern Skulls

A big part of Dan’s post is about evolutionary mismatch. This is the idea that the human brain is primarily adapted to an ancestral environment of cave paintings and tribal warfare and saber-tooth tigers, which is very different from our modern environment of cellphones and skyscrapers and pornography. The lesson Dan draws from this is that if we’re so mismatched and maladapted, we could really use the help of intellectuals to tell us to put away our phones and read some economics. If we’re gorging on junk food that was scarce in ancestral environments, we might need a friendly reminder to eat healthy.

I take a different view. Mismatch is a thing, but it is increasingly being recognized by evolutionary psychologists to be overrated as an explanatory approach. I would know: I co-host Evolutionary Psychology (the Podcast) and talk to different evolutionary psychologists every week. The popular story about gorging on sugary or fatty foods that were scarce in ancestral environments has a bit of truth to it, but it’s too simple. A moment’s reflection will make you realize that we obviously have mechanisms for curbing our appetite when our stomachs are full, or when we’ve had too much bacon or fudge, or when we need to lie down because we’re in a food coma. If you don’t believe me, try eating nothing but Oreos for a couple days. You will feel like complete and utter dogshit. Your body will punish you; your mind will be driven to the brink of madness. Our evolved food psychology is more well-designed than the popular caveman story would suggest, in which the only thing stopping us from subsisting on Oreos is willpower. In reality, we have a variety of subtle cravings for specific nutrients that are sensitive to the vicissitudes of our diet and personal history and local ecology.

With regard to obesity, there’s a lot we don’t know, but part of the explanation may relate to the body’s tendency to store energy in the form of fat to ensure against the risk of future food shortages. Research by Daniel Nettle and colleagues suggests that obesity is more likely to occur when people experience skipped meals and food insecurity early in life, potentially explaining why poverty and obesity go together. It’s not that poor people lack willpower; it’s that their bodies are rationally stockpiling energy reserves when they’re getting cues that access to food is uncertain. If Nettle is right, then one could easily see why stress and obesity go together (thereby confounding the relationship between obesity and health), and why an obsession with dieting and fasting could tragically make matters worse.

But isn’t this just a different kind of mismatch story? I’m not sure: maybe stockpiling energy is still smart in the modern world, given that poor people really do face future food shortages, and given that civilization, the planet, and the international order are looking rather precarious right now. Maybe when catastrophic climate change or war with China or the AI apocalypse happens, fat people will inherit the earth. Regardless, what I like about Nettle’s hypothesis is that it avoids insulting the intelligence of both the evolutionary process and people living in poverty.

Then there is the story of ancestral, mobile, small-scale, egalitarian hunter gatherer tribes—another supposed example of mismatch to our swarming cities and towering wealth inequalities. Again, this story is too simple. Research by Manvir Singh and Luke Glowacki suggests that ancestral hunter gatherer societies were more variable in structure than is commonly assumed, with some being very large and very unequal. Singh and Glowacki have also gathered evidence from the ethnographic record to show that humans in forager groups often try to enforce the rules and social norms that personally benefit them, consistent with my cynicism about the intentions of intellectuals in the modern world. Finally, research by Duncan Sibbard-Hawkes and Chris von Rueden suggests that the “egalitarianism” found even among the most idyllic hunter gatherers has been greatly overstated, with many forms of brutal competition and hierarchy bubbling beneath the surface.

And as long as we’re on the subject of names you don’t know or care about, we should get into an important concept introduced by Clark Barrett: the difference between tokens and types. The idea is that we have cognitive adaptations to deal with particular types of things, like food, mates, groups, status, and zero-sum conflict. These adaptations help tailor our behavior to the particular tokens of those types we find in our current environment—the particular food items, groups, conflicts, mating opportunities, and status games we’re confronted with. The types of things we evolved to deal with are, for the most part, common to both modern and ancestral environments. We have groups now; we had groups then. We have status now; we had status then. We have politics now; we had politics then.

What’s more, many of these types are very broad, like “informative intentions” or “socially valued skills.” This enables unprecedented stuff to emerge, like sign language and constitutional lawyers. Then there are the various systems we call “reinforcement learning” or “predictive processing,” which provide us with additional tools to adapt our behavior to the novel tokens we’re confronted with in our lives, even tokens that are totally unprecedented in the history of life on earth. These learning systems can cleverly bundle together adaptations in new ways (like the bundling of object recognition and semantics that occurs with literacy), and they can turn amateur chess players into chessmasters who dream in pawns and rooks.

In other words, there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of the idea that humans will be vexed, dumbfounded, flabbergasted, or ill-equipped to get their shit together in the modern world. Given the enormous range of social and physical environments our species currently inhabits, and likely inhabited ancestrally, it is a mistake to think there is one simple, caveman past that is tragically out of sync with the present moment. Our minds evolved in a bewildering variety of contexts, and part of the reason we have such huge brains is to reduce the bewilderment—to help us land on our feet in whatever urban or actual jungle we’re thrown into.

So if you’re tempted to call a human stupid for doing something that looks irrational, I think you should first ask yourself the question: “Am I grasping the entirety of that human’s situation, including all the relevant uncertainties and constraints?” If the answer is “yes,” then you should ask the follow-up question: “Is that human sufficiently incentivized to behave rationally in this context?” If the answer is “yes” again, then I would ask another follow-up question: “Am I correctly understanding that human’s motivations, including the motivations they may not want to admit to?” If you get another “yes” there, then sure, go ahead and call the human stupid. But please: don’t skip those first three questions.

Besides, even if it turns out that humans are woefully mismatched to the modern world—cavemen in suits, grunting their way through life—we have to ask ourselves another follow-up question: “Is there any reason to expect intellectuals to be more ‘matched’ than the masses?” The answer to this question is far from clear. After all, intellectuals have their own highbrow versions of junk food and misinformation.

Winners and Losers

Dan argues that one of the biggest sources of mismatch is in our zero-sum attitudes. Dan writes that “zero-sum thinking makes sense for hunter-gatherers. When you live at the subsistence level, one person’s dramatic gains likely mean someone else’s dramatic loss. Consequently, we struggle to comprehend how modern trade and innovation could make everyone better off, especially when gains are unevenly distributed or delayed.”

I think this is a good example of mismatch being overapplied. Dan is right that the modern world presents us with unique opportunities for wealth creation, but it also presents us with unique opportunities for cronyism, classism, cartelization, rent-seeking, censorship, surveillance, sectarianism, regressive redistribution, and regulatory capture. Status is zero-sum: when I rise, someone else falls. Political power is zero-sum: when the Republicans win, the Democrats lose. So once we correctly see wealth as an instrument of power-grabbing and status-seeking, it no longer seems like such a misunderstanding to view wealth in zero-sum terms. This is particularly true in a world where governments have interwoven themselves so much with capitalist wealth production that capitalism and politics can no longer be seen as separate entities. Perhaps our zero-sum mentality is exactly what we should expect to emerge in the sociopolitical system we currently inhabit, where political tribes cannot win at the same time, and where the winner gets to enforce its will on the loser by threat of imprisonment.

Of course, it would be better if our political system weren’t so high-stakes and zero-sum—with such a terrifying and enormous prize to fight over—but given that it is, we should not be surprised to see the masses rationally responding to it. Creating paranoid myths about conspiratorial outgroups is not stupid in this context: it is a good strategy for mobilizing one’s political coalition and gaining power—not to mention signaling one’s loyalties and jockeying for ingroup status. Just look at how well Trump’s preposterous bullshit worked out for him and his cronies: they’re some of the most powerful people in the world. Also, the left is hardly devoid of propaganda and has surely gained many political victories through fearmongering and Manicheanism historically. Yes, political elites can sometimes use propaganda to exploit the masses, but it’s important to remember that the masses often benefit from the propaganda too: political coalitions rise to power as a group, with both leaders and followers sharing in the victory.

The Arc of Progress

Dan talks about the positive trends in health, wealth, and safety that have occurred throughout history, citing the work of Steven Pinker and others. He views these salubrious trends as evidence that a kind of enlightenment has occurred—a march of progress led by the light of reason. I agree that positive trends have occurred throughout history, but I’m not so sure about the enlightenment bit.

I think it is a mistake to attribute these uplifting trends to any kind of conscious, overarching motivation for enlightenment. These trends must be explained in testable, mechanistic, incentive-based terms, like any other phenomenon in economics or social science. Ironically, viewing these trends as the product of conscious intent is the very same error of overattributed intentionality that Dan thinks the masses fall prey to. Insofar as intellectuals anthropomorphize “the enlightenment” as a brainy homunculus striving for a better world, it would be an example of intellectuals being just as cognitively mismatched as the masses—or, more plausibly, a case of them being biased toward self-aggrandizement.

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. Instead, the world became better in the same way the world changes in any way at all: by people rationally responding to changing incentive structures. In this case, I would bet that the relevant incentives have more to do with expanding trade and global markets, which create wealth and break down tribal barriers, than with the good intentions of intellectuals, who often demonize markets.

Dan seems to agree on the importance of markets for explaining positive trends, citing the insights of Adam Smith and others, but then writes that “for this progress to be possible, societies require a critical mass of people to appreciate these insights.” I would 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, including moral progress. Once you realize that markets pay people enormous sums of money to treat each other fairly and extend cooperation beyond tribal boundaries (as many different scholars have argued, including me), it begins to seem dubious that the primary cause of moral progress was a bunch of philosophizing.

Negative Nancies

Dan talks about our “deep-rooted negativity bias,” our “evolved (and, for hunter-gatherers, adaptive) tendency to attend disproportionately to threats and dangers.” He thinks that “the result is an information ecosystem systematically skewed towards catastrophe, conflict, and outrage.” The implication is that this negative skewing of reality is maladaptive in the modern world—something we should overcome with more enlightenment.

I disagree. If threatening, scary stuff is a kind of group mobilization fuel, then a good chunk of this catastrophism is politically rational. After all, it’s hard to mobilize a group by saying everything is peachy and getting better all the time. And once we realize that humans are not primarily dispassionate truth-seekers who care about accurately assessing intergenerational changes in health and income, but social primates who care about capturing each other’s attention, paying attention to what others are paying attention to, gaining and expressing sympathy for each other’s plights, signaling their competence and seriousness, being included in “important” conversations, demonizing their rivals, and saying things that are interesting and provocative, even our catastrophism has a certain kind of rationality to it. Positive trends are boring. Doomerism is exciting. Of course, all this doomerism takes a toll on our happiness. But as I’ve written about extensively (see here and here), we’re not pursuing happiness, so this shouldn’t count as evidence of human maladaptedness.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)

Dan lists a litany of bloody and catastrophic mistakes that have been made by humans throughout history, and I think this is where Dan is at his most persuasive. Humans have certainly done a lot of terrible shit. But while I acknowledge the tidal wave of stupidity that Dan is pointing to, it is important to remember that we are talking about the design of human nature, and how good we should expect that design to be—that is, whether the human mind is about as well-designed as the “hawk’s eye or the cheetah’s sprint,” as I put it in my post. When answering this question, we should not let ourselves get distracted by the specific failures of specific individuals, which are an inevitable part of life for any creature.

Predators often fail to catch their prey. Prey often fail to evade their predators. These failures cause death, which I’m told is a bad thing. But we shouldn’t conclude from these failures that predators and prey are dumb and irrational, or that they’re poorly designed for chasing and evading each other. “Haha, that gazelle just got eaten by a lion—what a dumbass!” In a world of fearsome competition and formidable constraints, 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 in the wild. The devouring does not necessarily make those animals, or their devoured children, maladapted.

Besides, even if we accept the Homo Stupidicus model that Dan is gesturing at, we have to ask ourselves the same question we asked previously: “Is there any reason to expect intellectuals to be less prone to these terrible blunders than the masses?” Given that many of the mistakes Dan cites were a result of intellectuals’ utopian visions, the answer is far from clear.

A Real Fixer Upper

Dan argues, contrary to my soul-crushing cynicism, that intellectuals often have a “genuine” motivation to fix the world. Rather than getting into a semantic debate about what it means to have a “genuine” motivation for something, I’d rather focus on what Dan and I seem to agree on: whenever people claim to be trying to fix the world, it is mostly because of deeper motives for esteem, prestige, admiration, etc. So 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 serious grounds for pessimism. Because what gets a person prestige, and what fixes the world, are two very different things.

It is the appearance of world fixing to a prestige-granting audience—not objective world fixing in external reality—that intellectuals are striving for. And insofar as prestige-granting audiences do not actually know what fixes the world, or hold politically biased beliefs about what fixes the world, then intellectuals’ prestige striving will be uncorrelated with objective improvements in the world. You might even get a few cases where intellectuals get showered with virtue points for creating hell on earth. The disconnect between audience perceptions and objective reality is why I am more pessimistic than Dan about the world-fixing motivations of intellectuals. 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 moral and material progress throughout history.

Enlightenment Now?

Aside from some differences in style, Dan and I probably agree on at least 90% of the substance, and I suspect he will be on board with most of what I’ve written here. That’s the beauty of good faith disagreement: it often reveals how little of it there is. And truth to be told, I’m just as enchanted by the ideals of the enlightenment as any other intellectual: it’s the animating force behind all my writing and researching and podcasting. So I really do get the emotional core of Dan’s essay. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.

But in spite of all the beauty and grandeur of the life of the mind, I cannot help but take a long hard look in the mirror and ask myself: “Is it all bullshit?” I think it’s important to ask ourselves this question, and if we’re going to ask it, we must be genuinely and uncomfortably open to the possibility that the answer is yes.