In light of research that indicates how the highly educated and highly credentialed tend to cling to their opinions in defiance of evidence (more than the less educated and less credentialed do), I'm skeptical of about intellectuals, especially when not taking critics seriously and respectfully.
I'm more inclined to resonate with the idea of our basic socio-biological programming doing what it does in response to the environment. This process has been going on long before we humans and our bigger brains came on the scene.
I appreciate the respectful and open-minded tone of this post. I see this as more of an exception to the main trend in the research cited above than as an illustration of it. But then again, I just may be automatically defending something I'm already inclined to agree with.
On mismatch, what do people say about something like contraception? This seems like such a clear, pure, and simple case of mismatch that I can't really imagine denying it. That is, something was selected for in the ancestral environment--very roughly, a certain sort of genital friction occurring in the presence of attractive members of the opposite sex--that was reliably correlated with reproduction in that environment, but now that contraception exists, there's a mismatch between the behavior that was selected for and the reproductive benefit it once conferred.
Once we accept that, are we just haggling over details about whether big macs etc. are like condoms? Or is there a way to explain why my 40-year old buddy has worn condoms all his life, and will likely never reproduce, in a way that doesn't amount to a version of mismatch?
Yea, I think contraception is the strongest case for mismatch. It would be hard to explain the structure of sexual arousal or sexual jealousy without using mismatch as part of the explanation. But even here the story is much more complicated than one might think. It’s not that we’re flabbergasted or dumbfounded by the concept of contraception; we clearly understand how it works and can intelligently factor it into our planning and decision making. We can use it or refrain from using it if we want to have kids with someone. And clearly other emotions are using it as a relevant input: we can feel fear about contraceptive failure, regret for not having used it, anger if a partner failed to tell us they weren’t using it, or excitement when we decide to stop using it for the purpose of having a kid with someone we love. So in some sense contraception is affecting our emotions in a sensible way, despite it being an unprecedented tool in the history of life on earth. Some evolutionary scientists even think we evolved to make smart family planning decisions, whether with contraception or with abstaining from sex. These scholars think fertility has declined because of increased status competition, increased pressure to accumulate a certain amount of status before having kids, and greater resources required to ensure one’s kids are relatively high-status (due to increases in education and housing costs, for example). If that story is right, the mismatch wouldn’t be contraception per se but rather the connection between status, offspring status, and fitness. Perhaps we are sensitive to a trade-off between quantity and quality of offspring that no longer holds in the modern world. Then there are the scholars who think sex has additional functions beyond reproduction, like strengthening a pairbond, explaining why humans evolved to have sex outside the ovulatory window. So yea, I find it plausible that there is a mismatch story to be told about contraceptive sex, but it is going to be a very very nuanced story. And in general I think the best way to think about mismatch is in terms of specific adaptations being mismatched in specific ways, rather than humans in general being mismatched in general.
Great piece! This also connects with hagioptasia - our evolved tendency to perceive certain people, places, objects, institutions, and ideas as inherently charged with a sense of extraordinary 'specialness'.
Once that perceptual glow is triggered, the stimulus doesn’t just seem high-status - it starts to feel deeply meaningful, even profound, as if it contains some higher truth.
Status-seeking then disguises itself as wisdom, moral seriousness, or insight.
In this sense, much of modern intellectual culture becomes less about truth, and more about managing aura.
You make me think of Kahlil Ghibran's The Prophet and Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. "it starts to feel deeply meaningful, even profound, as if it contains some higher truth."
Agreed that many of us academics deceive ourselves about our lofty motives, but I think many of us have also experienced being in the grip of a problem and exerting all our resources to solve it (at least to our satisfaction) without the hope of external rewards of any kind. Have you ever had such experiences?
The entire “A Real Fixer Upper” section can be made into a whole article on its own, but I want to focus on one particular sentence.
“Because what gets a person prestige, and what fixes the world, are two very different things.”
My question is why does those two things are very different things? Is it because “fixing the world” are inherently less prestigious? Like being a mechanic or a farmer in a rural area, cause a lot of time “fixing the world” is a maintenance job that is not high status in the workforce.
Can’t we, in theory, make “fixing the world” a more prestigious thing? Or is it because we can’t know what someone requires to “fix the world”?
Funny enough, what makes religion particularly attractive to people is that it tries to bridge the two, in the sense that so those who tries to “fix the world” will be viewed more “prestigious” in the “Lord’s eyes”.
Yea the issue is that it is very hard for us to know, and we are very politically biased about, what fixes the world. Though I guess this point has an implication that is more friendly to Dan’s view, namely that if we know more and become less politically biased, then prestige and world fixing will come closer together, which is an indirect argument for the kind of enlightenment Dan talks about. But there are likely other reasons why prestige and world fixing come apart. Prestige is ultimately about how desirable of a social partner someone is, and if they can show they are a desirable partner without fixing the world, then they will gain prestige for it. In this way, ineffective but conspicuous and in-style dogooding will likely win you more prestige more than quietly effective altruism, even though the latter fixes the world more. And if you can fix the world in a more colorful and impressive way, or in a way that is harder for less brilliant or less adept people to pull off, then you will get extra status points. So the impressiveness dimension is also orthogonal to the effective world fixing dimension. In any case, yea you’re beginning to make me think this warrants its own post.
Hell yeah, I think one question that is interesting in the post is that: “Is the divergence between prestige and world-fixing behavior an evolutionary constraint, or a coordination failure?” If it’s the latter, then I do believe that religion can become an effective method to organize “Darwinian apes”, cause it can help realign what people count as “socially desirable partner”by redefining the metrics, rewarding sacrifices (costly signaling) and moralize status hierarchies itself. In fact, they even punish “those who only try to look good” instead of being good itself (I think the last section of We Have Never Been Woke talk about this).
I agree with a lot of what you wrote, but we have to remember that humans are also very irrational at times - and this is why all utopias will fail. We are driven by both logic and emotion and selfishness and a host of other things - no Spocks here - and all these aspects can conflict. Both logic and emotions are needed and are good…in their own place. I used to tell my daughter that part of maturity is knowning what part to listen to. Sometimes hard logic is needed, and at other times we need to let emotions have the upper hand, and true maturity comes from knowing which to listen to at different times and situations and in the correct proportion.
I see people - family! - do really dumb things, and they would still be dumb even if I could see things from their perspective. I do the same. And of course, they do things that appear dumb, but really aren’t once all facts are known. We are all a mixture of many parts to varying degrees.
Whether it was good incentives or good intentions, the world has gotten measurably much better over the last 150 years or so. So whatever we were doing right then in terms of incentives or intentions or both, we should do everything possible to keep doing that. And anything that undermines those incentives or intentions, we should oppose.
I definitely lean more toward the Pinsof line of thinking than the way Dan Williams approaches the issue. But my biggest problem is the way Evolutionary Psychology thinkers approach the way humans behave today. Think of it this way. At the dawn of Homo sapiens (~70,000 years ago) all of humanity (not counting Neanderthals, etc.) numbered a few hundred, maybe. Now there are 8 billion humans. That points to the likelihood of human psychological traits becoming more diverse, not some path of weeding out maladaptive traits.
Look at the way humans are today. Some people are hyper-aggressive, not content until they have a big chunk of humanity under their thumb. Other people are "love thy neighbor" types. Some people are afraid of everything, some fear almost nothing. Some people are jealous of just about anyone, others don't feel jealous at all. Evidence of human diversity suggest a divergence of psychological traits rather than evolutionary selection for the "best" traits. As long as any group of humans are successful at multiplying (and humans overall have been very successful at that), then the traits they pass on will persist as well.
I don't think Evolutionary Psychology should be focused very much on Cave Man days, rather it should focus on mammal relatives as stand-ins for our very-long-time-ago ancestors.
It’s a good point that human variation is very huge and important. But it’s increasingly something that evolutionary psychologists are studying, whether in terms of fitness trade-offs and balancing selection, frequency-dependent selection, mutation-selection balance, the filling of social niches, facultative responses to environmental conditions, or variable parameters to universal cognitive systems. And it seems to be the case that we tend to vary on traits that it wouldn’t be too costly to vary on. I see little variation in willingness to eat feces, sleep with one’s biological sibling, become a social pariah, murder one’s offspring, violate the rules of grammar, etc. etc.
Actually humans seem to be quite diverse on thing that matter a lot. Of course some parents neglect/kill their own offspring, some people become extremely socially isolated, and some will eat almost anything (there is a TV show about that on now). Then there are things like cystic fibrosis, inherited near-sightedness, and finding members of your own gender sexually attractive. All of these seem to persist in spite of being very costly to survival and reproductive success.
The way I see it, the human brain (and the reproductive success that comes with being smart) is able to compensate for many shortcomings. This does not mean I think evolutionary forces have not influenced human behavior of today. Of course it has! But in broad human tendencies rather than specific traits. For example, empathy (what I call the "care for another being" instinct) and a desire for social acceptance are strong, evolutionarily guided tendencies in humans. They are also hugely variable with the human population. What I would like to see, in either philosophical or scientific terms, is a greater understanding of the variability of these two tendencies.
The terms "maladapted" and "stupid" imply that the topic is an evaluation of a design (without regard to whether the design is by a person, a group of people, a statistical process like natural selection, or an artificial process like AI). The purpose of any evaluation of a design is to support decisions or at least predictions, both of which are about the future. Is the future grim? Should we bother get out of bed and philosophize and write to effect political decisions or build scientific knowledge or shape changes to culture? Is so, which of the alternatives are better or optimal.
Any evaluation of a design must distinguish between (1) the thing being evaluated, (2) the design parameters of that thing, and (3) the exogenous or environmental factors that are to be taken as "given." Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, to evaluate a design, one must clarify the design objectives and if there are multiple objectives, some function relating and combining them.
Reading through David's thoughtful piece, I struggled to figure out which factors David was considering design parameters and which were the design objectives. For example, David says "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. " It seems to me that the instinctive and cultural programming that leads individuals to care about such things as capturing each other's attention are actually design parameters, even though the term "rationality" implies it is being treated as a design objective. That seems like an intellectual switcheroo -- as if the evaluation is concluding that humans are well adapted because they exhibit the adaptations.
What curious minds want to know: when evaluating the design, what are you considering the design objectives? Population growth over a ten year or billion year horizon? Probability of extinction? Tribal domination over other tribes? Some pleasure or utility metric for all living beings on Earth? If you tell me that, I can be sure to repeat it at a cocktail party so I can achieve my objective of convincing prestige-granting people to grant me some.
I don’t think there is one design objective for human nature but many different design objectives for many different adaptations. E.g., the design objectives for food choice are different than the ones for mate choice, and it would be disastrous to mix them up. When I evaluate good design, I tend to think about whether the underlying motivational systems, e.g., for prestige or tribal competition, are responding to conditions in ways that generally facilitate prestige and tribal competition under the given constraints, or whether they are self-sabotaging or hallucinatory. You could use the same logic for assessing whether a predation or anti-predation mechanism is well-designed for capturing or avoiding prey within the constraints of the environment. So good design is relevant to a specific adaptation, not to the organism or to society as a whole. Or at least that’s how I think of it.
Clearly, when evaluating the design of a thing, it is necessary to clarify the scope of the thing, as well as the scope of the design objectives. As illustrated in your examples, one can evaluate a "motivational framework" for a specific type of individual behavior with a design objective regarding an outcome accruing to that individual, such as being able and motivated to run fast to avoid getting eaten or to deceive as needed to win prestige while avoiding self-sabotage. But, I think when Dan talks about ape-like maladaptations such as zero-sum thinking, the implied thing being evaluated is a more general type of thing and the implied scope of the design objective operates beyond the level of the individual -- designs emerging from group selection or "multi-level" selection processes that are logically evaluated based on design objectives that relate to outcomes that play out at a group or societal or planetary level over longer time horizons. I think this difference in perspective regarding the default scope of the thing being evaluated and the associated design objective might be at the heart of the interesting differences you are discussing with Dan for the benefit of us gentle readers.
Very interesting back and forth. I find myself clearly closer to the Pinsofian view on this. It feels like even if the disagreement is small, the implications are quite large for what we should expect from institutions and intellectual culture. Since the podcast with Daniel Nettle I’ve been wondering how much room is really left for maladaptive explanations.
The work of Aaron Sell on formidability cues is intriguing. The idea that upper body strength calibrates anger and even attitudes toward redistribution seems plausible in small scale settings. But today strength is not a meaningful proxy for power considering modern weapons while seemingly still affecting our judgement. This is likely not a large effect size on its own toward affecting a political stance and you would have to look longer at the evidence to even determine if this replicates (probably not enough out there to be confident either way). Yet at least this would be clearly maladaptive if true I think.
Thanks, Thomas. Yea if the formidability —> political views link turns out to replicate and is causal then that would be a counterexample to my view that mismatch is overrated. I believe there’s evidence of a small link between strength and inegalitarian views (michael bang Petersen has work on this), but no evidence that it interacts with wealth (such that stronger people are more economically self-interested), and no evidence that it is causal. My suspicion is that it is just a cultural difference between the two ideologies, with right-wing culture valuing more of a macho identity and masculinity, such that men work out more in those cultures, but I’m not sure.
Well it can still be true to an extent but overrated.
I think the findings from Peterson (2013) are actually pointing toward self interest and NOT inegalitarian views: "Among men of lower socioeconomic status (SES), strength predicted increased support for redistribution; among men of higher SES, strength predicted increased opposition to redistribution".
The Sell 2012 paper tries to account for some cultural effects by looking at variations within Hollywood actors, but that’s not fully convincing since causation could still be reversed as you say. What I find interesting is their use of height as a proxy where they also found a correlation with the perceived utility of war. Less direct than upper-body strength but still linked to formidability and importantly, not something that can be changed through behavior. So reverse causation is unlikely. Just to clarify their arguments and why I find them convincing. But their is largely enough room for skepticism still.
Yea I was referring to more recent work by Petersen that failed to replicate the interaction with SES. I can try to dig up the paper if you want. The stuff with war is interesting but yea I’m a bit skeptical, not just of the empirics but also the logic, as even ancestrally I doubt individual strength mattered much to success in coalitional warfare, as compared to stuff like group size, cohesion, power asymmetry, element of surprise, weaponry, etc.
My bad, I wasn't aware of the failed replication on this.
For the logic, I would frame it as stronger people favoring cost infliction on others as a preferred strategy for adjusting tradeoff ratios as it is the most effective strategy for them in most interpersonal situations. Perceived utility of war is a generalisation of this.
The fact that it is a mistaken generalisation to coalitional conflict today is were the maladaptive aspect comes in. But your saying it might never have scaled logically even when weapons were all upper-strength-powered. I could see it being mostly true.
Am I correct in sensing that your default assumptions is that our systems are adaptive enough to make different decision for political/large scale and individual ? That someone who is more anger prone and aggressive in personal interactions would not simply project that same strategy into political or large scale conflict, but might instead recognize that physical strength is no longer a significant asset and shift tactics accordingly ? I think maladaptiveness in general and in Dan essay mostly refer to our supposed inability to avoid applying sound small scale logic to large scale cases. The Stronger --> more inclined to war not-so-supported link being a specific instance.
In any case thanks for the replies, this exchange helped me think through it some.
Yea I have personally found, as someone who studies politics from an evolutionary perspective, that I get more mileage and insight from assuming that people in politics are acting rationally and strategically. There’s just more variance to explain if you focus on the obvious things like identities, grievances, conflicts, and political alliance structures. Formidability is going to be a weak predictor at best. And re anger-based bargaining, I would expect people to make strategic calculations about when cost infliction is a good strategy and when it’s not, rather than having a one-size-fits-all approach to the social world. In general I like to err on the side of assuming that evolution and human nature are smarter than me.
I tend to find myself so much in agreement with Pinsof it is starting to worry me, as from past negative experiences, I have an inclination to putting brutal bounds on how much reliability I grant to even the most persuasive and convincing of narrations on how societies and individuals work.
I agree with the thrust of your argument in this debate. But I want to push on the evo mismatch critique. I’m currently taking a graduate course on mismatch with Dan Fessler, and I think you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I wonder what you make of modern diseases whose underlying causal mechanisms are well understood and are unambiguously either exasperated by or entirely a byproduct of novel inputs, e.g., myopia, allergies and auto-immune disorders (see the old friends hypothesis), or malocclusion.
I suppose these can be framed as adaptive byproducts or evolutionary trade-offs, in which case we could dispel with the notion of mismatch entirely, but I’m not sure.
No opinion on those cases; I don’t know enough about them. My point was more directed at evolutionary psychology than evolutionary medicine. I find it plausible that the case for mismatch is stronger in medicine than in psychology.
As a self-hating intellectual & hardcore Darwinian, I'm certainly receptive to the Pinsofian case here. But I think the most interesting point of contact with Dan's view is something you say at the end of your "incentives are bullshit" piece: "the more we all become aware of our incentive structures, the more incentivized we will be to choose them wisely".
I agree that most historical intellectual work on liberalism, markets, democracy, etc. was post facto descriptions of incentive structures that emerged without deliberate planning. But the possibility exists for some intellectual — economist, political scientist, "mechanism design" expert, Substacker — to propose an incentive structure (the easy part), then lobby to get it tested as a policy somewhere (the hard part).
Maybe this already happened a few times in the second half of the twentieth century and in the twenty-first. Who knows? Maybe there was some economic policy, somewhere, that actually worked in a way that was theorised before hand. If this is true, it might be the case that this can become more common with increasing knowledge of incentive structures (starting from a very low base). In which case, it might be that something like a world-improving, intellectual-led Enlightenment is possible, but it's happening 300 years later than when we thought.
Note: I'm also sceptical of this; but I have to concede it doesn't break any laws of physics or biology for an economist to prove a theorem and then build something that works based on it.
Yes, great point. I agree this is a point of contact between Dan and me. Like you, I’m somewhat pessimistic that things will work out this way, given all the great ideas that economists have already had that have been ignored by policymakers (e.g., Pigouvian taxes, the counterproductiveness of price controls), but I agree this sort of thing is possible and am hopeful it can happen at the margins.
The hawk’s highly evolved eye doesn’t prevent him from flying into a glass wall. This is a very different problem than occasionally or even frequently failing to catch a pigeon. A highly evolved ability to automatically adapt to novel contexts is not necessarily the ability to automatically adapt to novel context above a certain level of complexity. My highly evolved ability to pursue my self interest (or the good of all mankind) may not work so well in a world whose increasing complexity is beyond my ability to understand. And my success at navigating within a social system may not be worth much if that social system is headed over a cliff.
On the bright side, I have met very smart people working on the problem of how to make things better in a complex and changing world who are not motivated money or esteem.
1) Intellectuals pursue prestige and status while pretending to pursue some noble abstractions
2) Turchin's "Great Holocene Transformation" is pretty authoritative as far as arguing for multilevel cultural evolution as the driving force of the leap in social complexity. He also notes that the process is nonlinear, with a saw-tooth pattern of gradual growth followed by sharp declines in complexity.
And so the prestige and status games that are most effective in a particular polity's thriving and success are the ones that get selected for.
Mercantile societies are the ones most capable of rapid projection of expeditionary military force, and thus control shipping routes, since most of the Earth is water. But mercantile societies also like markets, and so the geopolitical dominance of Anglo-American-Dutch culture is pretty grand!
Modern civilization may be coming to a close...but creative destruction works at multiple levels. Just as economically an economic crash frees capital to invest in new technology, after the Bronze Age Collapse there was a vacuum filled by Phoenicia which then contributed to Archaic and Classical Greece!
Maybe the feeling of cynicism is the unpredictable time lag of selection effects, and everyone would feel better about all this if polities invested more into intellectuals working in STEM rather than the social sciences and humanities so that ideas are more rapidly reality-tested? Let's try to all encourage this so that the tortured intellectuals feel better and everyone has better self-esteem about our human world! ;P
Thanks for fine article, and kudos to you and especially Dan, in this case of publishing disagreement, for such reasonable, tho clearly quite vague disagreement.
My own biggest disagreement with Dan is about his downplaying of the Obama lies & Russia Hoax, with 2 years of Fake News / misinformation coming from the deep state & publicized by Dem media 2017-2019.
According to many polls, large numbers of Democrats still believe that Trump's 2016 election victory was heavily influenced by Russians. Many high IQ intellectuals joined in with anti-Trump attributions. Trump's exaggerations & bluster might well be called lies, but he seems to work on fulfilling his stated promises far more than Biden, HR Clinton, or Obama.
Dan seems to want to have a good place in that Marketplace of Ideas, which he identified so accurately.
In light of research that indicates how the highly educated and highly credentialed tend to cling to their opinions in defiance of evidence (more than the less educated and less credentialed do), I'm skeptical of about intellectuals, especially when not taking critics seriously and respectfully.
I'm more inclined to resonate with the idea of our basic socio-biological programming doing what it does in response to the environment. This process has been going on long before we humans and our bigger brains came on the scene.
I appreciate the respectful and open-minded tone of this post. I see this as more of an exception to the main trend in the research cited above than as an illustration of it. But then again, I just may be automatically defending something I'm already inclined to agree with.
On mismatch, what do people say about something like contraception? This seems like such a clear, pure, and simple case of mismatch that I can't really imagine denying it. That is, something was selected for in the ancestral environment--very roughly, a certain sort of genital friction occurring in the presence of attractive members of the opposite sex--that was reliably correlated with reproduction in that environment, but now that contraception exists, there's a mismatch between the behavior that was selected for and the reproductive benefit it once conferred.
Once we accept that, are we just haggling over details about whether big macs etc. are like condoms? Or is there a way to explain why my 40-year old buddy has worn condoms all his life, and will likely never reproduce, in a way that doesn't amount to a version of mismatch?
Yea, I think contraception is the strongest case for mismatch. It would be hard to explain the structure of sexual arousal or sexual jealousy without using mismatch as part of the explanation. But even here the story is much more complicated than one might think. It’s not that we’re flabbergasted or dumbfounded by the concept of contraception; we clearly understand how it works and can intelligently factor it into our planning and decision making. We can use it or refrain from using it if we want to have kids with someone. And clearly other emotions are using it as a relevant input: we can feel fear about contraceptive failure, regret for not having used it, anger if a partner failed to tell us they weren’t using it, or excitement when we decide to stop using it for the purpose of having a kid with someone we love. So in some sense contraception is affecting our emotions in a sensible way, despite it being an unprecedented tool in the history of life on earth. Some evolutionary scientists even think we evolved to make smart family planning decisions, whether with contraception or with abstaining from sex. These scholars think fertility has declined because of increased status competition, increased pressure to accumulate a certain amount of status before having kids, and greater resources required to ensure one’s kids are relatively high-status (due to increases in education and housing costs, for example). If that story is right, the mismatch wouldn’t be contraception per se but rather the connection between status, offspring status, and fitness. Perhaps we are sensitive to a trade-off between quantity and quality of offspring that no longer holds in the modern world. Then there are the scholars who think sex has additional functions beyond reproduction, like strengthening a pairbond, explaining why humans evolved to have sex outside the ovulatory window. So yea, I find it plausible that there is a mismatch story to be told about contraceptive sex, but it is going to be a very very nuanced story. And in general I think the best way to think about mismatch is in terms of specific adaptations being mismatched in specific ways, rather than humans in general being mismatched in general.
Thanks!
Great piece! This also connects with hagioptasia - our evolved tendency to perceive certain people, places, objects, institutions, and ideas as inherently charged with a sense of extraordinary 'specialness'.
Once that perceptual glow is triggered, the stimulus doesn’t just seem high-status - it starts to feel deeply meaningful, even profound, as if it contains some higher truth.
Status-seeking then disguises itself as wisdom, moral seriousness, or insight.
In this sense, much of modern intellectual culture becomes less about truth, and more about managing aura.
You make me think of Kahlil Ghibran's The Prophet and Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. "it starts to feel deeply meaningful, even profound, as if it contains some higher truth."
Absolutely - both evoke that sense of depth.
What fascinates me is how that feeling of "this contains a higher truth" gets generated, and how it can attach to very different kinds of things.
Agreed that many of us academics deceive ourselves about our lofty motives, but I think many of us have also experienced being in the grip of a problem and exerting all our resources to solve it (at least to our satisfaction) without the hope of external rewards of any kind. Have you ever had such experiences?
Yes I have these experiences all the time. But I've learned not to trust my introspection about the loftiness or purity of my motives.
The entire “A Real Fixer Upper” section can be made into a whole article on its own, but I want to focus on one particular sentence.
“Because what gets a person prestige, and what fixes the world, are two very different things.”
My question is why does those two things are very different things? Is it because “fixing the world” are inherently less prestigious? Like being a mechanic or a farmer in a rural area, cause a lot of time “fixing the world” is a maintenance job that is not high status in the workforce.
Can’t we, in theory, make “fixing the world” a more prestigious thing? Or is it because we can’t know what someone requires to “fix the world”?
Funny enough, what makes religion particularly attractive to people is that it tries to bridge the two, in the sense that so those who tries to “fix the world” will be viewed more “prestigious” in the “Lord’s eyes”.
Yea the issue is that it is very hard for us to know, and we are very politically biased about, what fixes the world. Though I guess this point has an implication that is more friendly to Dan’s view, namely that if we know more and become less politically biased, then prestige and world fixing will come closer together, which is an indirect argument for the kind of enlightenment Dan talks about. But there are likely other reasons why prestige and world fixing come apart. Prestige is ultimately about how desirable of a social partner someone is, and if they can show they are a desirable partner without fixing the world, then they will gain prestige for it. In this way, ineffective but conspicuous and in-style dogooding will likely win you more prestige more than quietly effective altruism, even though the latter fixes the world more. And if you can fix the world in a more colorful and impressive way, or in a way that is harder for less brilliant or less adept people to pull off, then you will get extra status points. So the impressiveness dimension is also orthogonal to the effective world fixing dimension. In any case, yea you’re beginning to make me think this warrants its own post.
Hell yeah, I think one question that is interesting in the post is that: “Is the divergence between prestige and world-fixing behavior an evolutionary constraint, or a coordination failure?” If it’s the latter, then I do believe that religion can become an effective method to organize “Darwinian apes”, cause it can help realign what people count as “socially desirable partner”by redefining the metrics, rewarding sacrifices (costly signaling) and moralize status hierarchies itself. In fact, they even punish “those who only try to look good” instead of being good itself (I think the last section of We Have Never Been Woke talk about this).
I agree with a lot of what you wrote, but we have to remember that humans are also very irrational at times - and this is why all utopias will fail. We are driven by both logic and emotion and selfishness and a host of other things - no Spocks here - and all these aspects can conflict. Both logic and emotions are needed and are good…in their own place. I used to tell my daughter that part of maturity is knowning what part to listen to. Sometimes hard logic is needed, and at other times we need to let emotions have the upper hand, and true maturity comes from knowing which to listen to at different times and situations and in the correct proportion.
I see people - family! - do really dumb things, and they would still be dumb even if I could see things from their perspective. I do the same. And of course, they do things that appear dumb, but really aren’t once all facts are known. We are all a mixture of many parts to varying degrees.
Whether it was good incentives or good intentions, the world has gotten measurably much better over the last 150 years or so. So whatever we were doing right then in terms of incentives or intentions or both, we should do everything possible to keep doing that. And anything that undermines those incentives or intentions, we should oppose.
I definitely lean more toward the Pinsof line of thinking than the way Dan Williams approaches the issue. But my biggest problem is the way Evolutionary Psychology thinkers approach the way humans behave today. Think of it this way. At the dawn of Homo sapiens (~70,000 years ago) all of humanity (not counting Neanderthals, etc.) numbered a few hundred, maybe. Now there are 8 billion humans. That points to the likelihood of human psychological traits becoming more diverse, not some path of weeding out maladaptive traits.
Look at the way humans are today. Some people are hyper-aggressive, not content until they have a big chunk of humanity under their thumb. Other people are "love thy neighbor" types. Some people are afraid of everything, some fear almost nothing. Some people are jealous of just about anyone, others don't feel jealous at all. Evidence of human diversity suggest a divergence of psychological traits rather than evolutionary selection for the "best" traits. As long as any group of humans are successful at multiplying (and humans overall have been very successful at that), then the traits they pass on will persist as well.
I don't think Evolutionary Psychology should be focused very much on Cave Man days, rather it should focus on mammal relatives as stand-ins for our very-long-time-ago ancestors.
It’s a good point that human variation is very huge and important. But it’s increasingly something that evolutionary psychologists are studying, whether in terms of fitness trade-offs and balancing selection, frequency-dependent selection, mutation-selection balance, the filling of social niches, facultative responses to environmental conditions, or variable parameters to universal cognitive systems. And it seems to be the case that we tend to vary on traits that it wouldn’t be too costly to vary on. I see little variation in willingness to eat feces, sleep with one’s biological sibling, become a social pariah, murder one’s offspring, violate the rules of grammar, etc. etc.
Actually humans seem to be quite diverse on thing that matter a lot. Of course some parents neglect/kill their own offspring, some people become extremely socially isolated, and some will eat almost anything (there is a TV show about that on now). Then there are things like cystic fibrosis, inherited near-sightedness, and finding members of your own gender sexually attractive. All of these seem to persist in spite of being very costly to survival and reproductive success.
The way I see it, the human brain (and the reproductive success that comes with being smart) is able to compensate for many shortcomings. This does not mean I think evolutionary forces have not influenced human behavior of today. Of course it has! But in broad human tendencies rather than specific traits. For example, empathy (what I call the "care for another being" instinct) and a desire for social acceptance are strong, evolutionarily guided tendencies in humans. They are also hugely variable with the human population. What I would like to see, in either philosophical or scientific terms, is a greater understanding of the variability of these two tendencies.
The terms "maladapted" and "stupid" imply that the topic is an evaluation of a design (without regard to whether the design is by a person, a group of people, a statistical process like natural selection, or an artificial process like AI). The purpose of any evaluation of a design is to support decisions or at least predictions, both of which are about the future. Is the future grim? Should we bother get out of bed and philosophize and write to effect political decisions or build scientific knowledge or shape changes to culture? Is so, which of the alternatives are better or optimal.
Any evaluation of a design must distinguish between (1) the thing being evaluated, (2) the design parameters of that thing, and (3) the exogenous or environmental factors that are to be taken as "given." Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, to evaluate a design, one must clarify the design objectives and if there are multiple objectives, some function relating and combining them.
Reading through David's thoughtful piece, I struggled to figure out which factors David was considering design parameters and which were the design objectives. For example, David says "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. " It seems to me that the instinctive and cultural programming that leads individuals to care about such things as capturing each other's attention are actually design parameters, even though the term "rationality" implies it is being treated as a design objective. That seems like an intellectual switcheroo -- as if the evaluation is concluding that humans are well adapted because they exhibit the adaptations.
What curious minds want to know: when evaluating the design, what are you considering the design objectives? Population growth over a ten year or billion year horizon? Probability of extinction? Tribal domination over other tribes? Some pleasure or utility metric for all living beings on Earth? If you tell me that, I can be sure to repeat it at a cocktail party so I can achieve my objective of convincing prestige-granting people to grant me some.
I don’t think there is one design objective for human nature but many different design objectives for many different adaptations. E.g., the design objectives for food choice are different than the ones for mate choice, and it would be disastrous to mix them up. When I evaluate good design, I tend to think about whether the underlying motivational systems, e.g., for prestige or tribal competition, are responding to conditions in ways that generally facilitate prestige and tribal competition under the given constraints, or whether they are self-sabotaging or hallucinatory. You could use the same logic for assessing whether a predation or anti-predation mechanism is well-designed for capturing or avoiding prey within the constraints of the environment. So good design is relevant to a specific adaptation, not to the organism or to society as a whole. Or at least that’s how I think of it.
Clearly, when evaluating the design of a thing, it is necessary to clarify the scope of the thing, as well as the scope of the design objectives. As illustrated in your examples, one can evaluate a "motivational framework" for a specific type of individual behavior with a design objective regarding an outcome accruing to that individual, such as being able and motivated to run fast to avoid getting eaten or to deceive as needed to win prestige while avoiding self-sabotage. But, I think when Dan talks about ape-like maladaptations such as zero-sum thinking, the implied thing being evaluated is a more general type of thing and the implied scope of the design objective operates beyond the level of the individual -- designs emerging from group selection or "multi-level" selection processes that are logically evaluated based on design objectives that relate to outcomes that play out at a group or societal or planetary level over longer time horizons. I think this difference in perspective regarding the default scope of the thing being evaluated and the associated design objective might be at the heart of the interesting differences you are discussing with Dan for the benefit of us gentle readers.
Very interesting back and forth. I find myself clearly closer to the Pinsofian view on this. It feels like even if the disagreement is small, the implications are quite large for what we should expect from institutions and intellectual culture. Since the podcast with Daniel Nettle I’ve been wondering how much room is really left for maladaptive explanations.
The work of Aaron Sell on formidability cues is intriguing. The idea that upper body strength calibrates anger and even attitudes toward redistribution seems plausible in small scale settings. But today strength is not a meaningful proxy for power considering modern weapons while seemingly still affecting our judgement. This is likely not a large effect size on its own toward affecting a political stance and you would have to look longer at the evidence to even determine if this replicates (probably not enough out there to be confident either way). Yet at least this would be clearly maladaptive if true I think.
Thanks, Thomas. Yea if the formidability —> political views link turns out to replicate and is causal then that would be a counterexample to my view that mismatch is overrated. I believe there’s evidence of a small link between strength and inegalitarian views (michael bang Petersen has work on this), but no evidence that it interacts with wealth (such that stronger people are more economically self-interested), and no evidence that it is causal. My suspicion is that it is just a cultural difference between the two ideologies, with right-wing culture valuing more of a macho identity and masculinity, such that men work out more in those cultures, but I’m not sure.
Well it can still be true to an extent but overrated.
I think the findings from Peterson (2013) are actually pointing toward self interest and NOT inegalitarian views: "Among men of lower socioeconomic status (SES), strength predicted increased support for redistribution; among men of higher SES, strength predicted increased opposition to redistribution".
The Sell 2012 paper tries to account for some cultural effects by looking at variations within Hollywood actors, but that’s not fully convincing since causation could still be reversed as you say. What I find interesting is their use of height as a proxy where they also found a correlation with the perceived utility of war. Less direct than upper-body strength but still linked to formidability and importantly, not something that can be changed through behavior. So reverse causation is unlikely. Just to clarify their arguments and why I find them convincing. But their is largely enough room for skepticism still.
Yea I was referring to more recent work by Petersen that failed to replicate the interaction with SES. I can try to dig up the paper if you want. The stuff with war is interesting but yea I’m a bit skeptical, not just of the empirics but also the logic, as even ancestrally I doubt individual strength mattered much to success in coalitional warfare, as compared to stuff like group size, cohesion, power asymmetry, element of surprise, weaponry, etc.
My bad, I wasn't aware of the failed replication on this.
For the logic, I would frame it as stronger people favoring cost infliction on others as a preferred strategy for adjusting tradeoff ratios as it is the most effective strategy for them in most interpersonal situations. Perceived utility of war is a generalisation of this.
The fact that it is a mistaken generalisation to coalitional conflict today is were the maladaptive aspect comes in. But your saying it might never have scaled logically even when weapons were all upper-strength-powered. I could see it being mostly true.
Am I correct in sensing that your default assumptions is that our systems are adaptive enough to make different decision for political/large scale and individual ? That someone who is more anger prone and aggressive in personal interactions would not simply project that same strategy into political or large scale conflict, but might instead recognize that physical strength is no longer a significant asset and shift tactics accordingly ? I think maladaptiveness in general and in Dan essay mostly refer to our supposed inability to avoid applying sound small scale logic to large scale cases. The Stronger --> more inclined to war not-so-supported link being a specific instance.
In any case thanks for the replies, this exchange helped me think through it some.
Yea I have personally found, as someone who studies politics from an evolutionary perspective, that I get more mileage and insight from assuming that people in politics are acting rationally and strategically. There’s just more variance to explain if you focus on the obvious things like identities, grievances, conflicts, and political alliance structures. Formidability is going to be a weak predictor at best. And re anger-based bargaining, I would expect people to make strategic calculations about when cost infliction is a good strategy and when it’s not, rather than having a one-size-fits-all approach to the social world. In general I like to err on the side of assuming that evolution and human nature are smarter than me.
It makes sense yes. Thanks !
I tend to find myself so much in agreement with Pinsof it is starting to worry me, as from past negative experiences, I have an inclination to putting brutal bounds on how much reliability I grant to even the most persuasive and convincing of narrations on how societies and individuals work.
I get it. I find my own agreement with myself worrying. :)
By virtue of finding it worrying does it not suggest you have higher ideals than zero-sum competition
Yes that’s exactly what I want you to think. :)
Hi David,
I agree with the thrust of your argument in this debate. But I want to push on the evo mismatch critique. I’m currently taking a graduate course on mismatch with Dan Fessler, and I think you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I wonder what you make of modern diseases whose underlying causal mechanisms are well understood and are unambiguously either exasperated by or entirely a byproduct of novel inputs, e.g., myopia, allergies and auto-immune disorders (see the old friends hypothesis), or malocclusion.
I suppose these can be framed as adaptive byproducts or evolutionary trade-offs, in which case we could dispel with the notion of mismatch entirely, but I’m not sure.
No opinion on those cases; I don’t know enough about them. My point was more directed at evolutionary psychology than evolutionary medicine. I find it plausible that the case for mismatch is stronger in medicine than in psychology.
As a self-hating intellectual & hardcore Darwinian, I'm certainly receptive to the Pinsofian case here. But I think the most interesting point of contact with Dan's view is something you say at the end of your "incentives are bullshit" piece: "the more we all become aware of our incentive structures, the more incentivized we will be to choose them wisely".
I agree that most historical intellectual work on liberalism, markets, democracy, etc. was post facto descriptions of incentive structures that emerged without deliberate planning. But the possibility exists for some intellectual — economist, political scientist, "mechanism design" expert, Substacker — to propose an incentive structure (the easy part), then lobby to get it tested as a policy somewhere (the hard part).
Maybe this already happened a few times in the second half of the twentieth century and in the twenty-first. Who knows? Maybe there was some economic policy, somewhere, that actually worked in a way that was theorised before hand. If this is true, it might be the case that this can become more common with increasing knowledge of incentive structures (starting from a very low base). In which case, it might be that something like a world-improving, intellectual-led Enlightenment is possible, but it's happening 300 years later than when we thought.
Note: I'm also sceptical of this; but I have to concede it doesn't break any laws of physics or biology for an economist to prove a theorem and then build something that works based on it.
Yes, great point. I agree this is a point of contact between Dan and me. Like you, I’m somewhat pessimistic that things will work out this way, given all the great ideas that economists have already had that have been ignored by policymakers (e.g., Pigouvian taxes, the counterproductiveness of price controls), but I agree this sort of thing is possible and am hopeful it can happen at the margins.
The hawk’s highly evolved eye doesn’t prevent him from flying into a glass wall. This is a very different problem than occasionally or even frequently failing to catch a pigeon. A highly evolved ability to automatically adapt to novel contexts is not necessarily the ability to automatically adapt to novel context above a certain level of complexity. My highly evolved ability to pursue my self interest (or the good of all mankind) may not work so well in a world whose increasing complexity is beyond my ability to understand. And my success at navigating within a social system may not be worth much if that social system is headed over a cliff.
On the bright side, I have met very smart people working on the problem of how to make things better in a complex and changing world who are not motivated money or esteem.
Why is this "cynicism"?
These two things seem nicely complementary:
1) Intellectuals pursue prestige and status while pretending to pursue some noble abstractions
2) Turchin's "Great Holocene Transformation" is pretty authoritative as far as arguing for multilevel cultural evolution as the driving force of the leap in social complexity. He also notes that the process is nonlinear, with a saw-tooth pattern of gradual growth followed by sharp declines in complexity.
And so the prestige and status games that are most effective in a particular polity's thriving and success are the ones that get selected for.
Mercantile societies are the ones most capable of rapid projection of expeditionary military force, and thus control shipping routes, since most of the Earth is water. But mercantile societies also like markets, and so the geopolitical dominance of Anglo-American-Dutch culture is pretty grand!
Modern civilization may be coming to a close...but creative destruction works at multiple levels. Just as economically an economic crash frees capital to invest in new technology, after the Bronze Age Collapse there was a vacuum filled by Phoenicia which then contributed to Archaic and Classical Greece!
Maybe the feeling of cynicism is the unpredictable time lag of selection effects, and everyone would feel better about all this if polities invested more into intellectuals working in STEM rather than the social sciences and humanities so that ideas are more rapidly reality-tested? Let's try to all encourage this so that the tortured intellectuals feel better and everyone has better self-esteem about our human world! ;P
Thanks for fine article, and kudos to you and especially Dan, in this case of publishing disagreement, for such reasonable, tho clearly quite vague disagreement.
My own biggest disagreement with Dan is about his downplaying of the Obama lies & Russia Hoax, with 2 years of Fake News / misinformation coming from the deep state & publicized by Dem media 2017-2019.
According to many polls, large numbers of Democrats still believe that Trump's 2016 election victory was heavily influenced by Russians. Many high IQ intellectuals joined in with anti-Trump attributions. Trump's exaggerations & bluster might well be called lies, but he seems to work on fulfilling his stated promises far more than Biden, HR Clinton, or Obama.
Dan seems to want to have a good place in that Marketplace of Ideas, which he identified so accurately.