The point that poverty is a normal state is missing the obligatory Heinlein quote:
'Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
Great post. Another puzzle I’d add is why we care about distant abstract things at all. It’s not obvious why we should have *any* beliefs about such things, given their lack of relevance to everyday decisions. Why do we even care? Why do we form beliefs about them at all? I genuinely don’t know the answer, but I suspect it has something to do with the social functions such beliefs serve, and the need to segregate these social functions from the epistemic functions of our normal beliefs.
Yes I agree is this really puzzling. My inclination is to say there was no positive selection for such caring - it is a difficult-to-avoid by-product of the evolution of our more sophisticated cognitive and communicative capacities, which then gets co-opted by our evolved social goals. But it's something I need and want to think a lot more about.
Yea agreed there was likely no positive selection for such caring, but it’s still pretty puzzling why there was no negative selection against it, given its attentional opportunity costs. It’s possible there is a mismatch story to tell, in that we are confronted with a far greater amount of information about distant matters than our ancestors ever were, and we never evolved sufficient defenses against it, as Dan Maruschak suggested above. Or maybe we simultaneously evaluate the social value and epistemic value of any particular piece of info, and there’s usually a trade-off between them, but distant info allows us to escape the trade-off and harvest larger amounts of social value than we otherwise could. Maybe science works by forcing us to reconsider the epistemic value of such distant beliefs via the demand for empirical tests, and by creating novel sources of social value when the beliefs pass such tests.
Hmm yeah the point about attentional costs is a good one. This is a deep issue. I don’t know what to think. A very good illustration of how an evo psych perspective drives you to ask good questions most wouldn’t even consider.
You really don't think there would be negative selection?? It seems to me that once humans formed sufficiently large groups, such that personal and familial bonds could no longer govern them, it would be absolutely necessary to have some capability for emotional attachment to abstract beliefs. If not, there's no coordinating principle, and you're going to get taken over/killed/conquered by a different large group that DOES have the abstract belief as a coordinating principle. If not for common belief in and attachment to a god/gods or nation/state or king or something similar, how would you ever get large numbers of people who are otherwise strangers to cooperate and coordinate in warfare? It takes an enormous overriding motivation of SOME sort to get over the much more salient and immediately critical risk of death that would be right in front of you.
Before mass media, etc., perhaps the quantity of "distant" information people were exposed to was just very low compared to important local information so there may not have been much advantage to deprioritizing this rare category of information.
Which distant abstract things do you mean - questions like "why poverty" and "why believe so many false things," or were you thinking of something else? I assume those two questions are compelling because they are coded ways of approaching more personally relevant questions like "Why do I have to deal with those annoying drug addicts and panhandlers every time I walk home" or "Why do so many people I encounter online have to be so #$@# stupid?" It's an expression of dissatisfaction with the way the world is, with an implicit belief that we could and should do better. (Whether or not this is realistic).
So our interest in distant abstract questions is in part our rejection of the answers to more concrete ones.
Nuclear power is a case in point. Whether or not it is a good thing is a balance of risk, costs and benefits that very few people have the knowledge to make an evaluation. But many people have very strong views.
You know, of course, that GDP (and GDP/cap) are extremely poor estimators for poverty, and you know as well that GDP estimates before modernity are effectively useless. But if we take the graph at face value, I think the question "why is there poverty in the world in light of such remarkable productive capacity" is a very interesting and important one.
(also: the question was "Why is there poverty in the world?", not "why is there poverty in affluent societies", and millions and millions of people world-wide live in crushing poverty, far worse than elites or even artisans of times past)
And I find your answer for poverty reduction: "robust property rights, a culture that rewards science and innovation, the impartial rule of law, and free, competitive, and open markets" highly suspect because on the way to those institutions, numerous actions - enclosures (which created "robust property rights" to previously common land in the first place), automation in textile production, exports to world markets causing famines, the destruction of subsistence farming in many regions outside Europe etc - caused immense poverty increases.
And incidentally, the entire system was brought about by the state ensuring that markets were not free, competitive and open, via tariffs, state-backed enterprises etc.
And the reductions in poverty didn't happen automatically but was brought about by organized labor, social democrat and socialist policies, and states breaking patent law, protecting their developing industries against competition etc. Hickel and Sullivan in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493 point out that extreme poverty in socialist China was very low and *increases* when free market reforms were implemented, similar to how poverty rates jumped and life expectancy dropped in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union. They also argue that we could provide decent living standards for 8,5 billion people using 40% of the current energy and materials consumption (so again: why poverty when there's so much productive capacity?)
So your answer to the contextualized question: "Why is there poverty in the world in light of such remarkable productive capacity" is only partially right. Indeed, cooperation and solidarity are relatively fragile but at least as importantly capitalism is a system that rewards attacks on cooperation and rewards poverty creation via union busting, paying poverty wages, employing children, privatising health care, education, housing etc. Without a system that rewards undermining cooperation, who knows how those "competitive apes" would act?
And the answer to "why is there less poverty than at the beginning of the industrial revolution, or the beginning of the twentieth century, or the immediate post-war years" is "because those affected by poverty banded together and worked to reduce it". So even living in a system that rewards undermining cooperation, they cooperated long enough to make things significantly better for many. (until their living standards became high enough that they felt that they were safe, with the results of the last forty years)
Which makes me think that you underestimate human's willingness and ability to cooperate.
I got more out of it than I can properly process, to be honest: the piece is as dense with insight as a uranium isotope (in a good way!). So I have saved it to dig into properly and think about the implications. I very much hope you have a book in the offing. I can't think of anyone who is thinking, and writing clearly about the thinking, the way you do.
"I am currently writing two books: Why it’s OK to be Cynical (under contract with Routledge); and Delusions in the Social Mind (co-authored with Sam Wilkinson and Kengo Miyazono; under contract with Oxford University Press)."
There may be several types of inversion, one of which might be useful in response to this particular:
"As imperfect as such institutions might be, their flaws should not detract from the amazing fact that they often succeed in generating and distributing broadly reliable information in society."
I naturally infer a rhetorical hedging that looks something like:
"To the degree that someone is motivated by some alternative agenda to detract from scientific contribution, it is better not to detract at all."
I would concur to such a degree, but I would then also add that it is otherwise appropriate and even necessary to allow for some detraction, even though we might acknowledge we have little idea what the magnitude of detraction should be. Without good faith mea culpa, some demand may be generated for alternative agendas.
I think of this as being a "dialectical" inversion opposite the "distributive" conception on offer. Scientific conformity above the magnitude required to dampen some pernicious form of confirmation bias may naturally be perceived as a kind of "conformation bias" against which confirmation bias will naturally be leveraged. I do not mean to equivocate the errors, but a science that does not actively address inherent biases, and does little more than pay them lip service when close to home, might naturally converge toward classic corruptibility. To hedge again, lest agenda be heard, boo pseudoscience, yay science!
Even a brief familiarity with what you've written would be sufficient to not hold you to such an implication. On the contrary, a good faith reading serves to make explicit some of the dialectical influences that are no less navigated by scientific discourse that makes no mention of them.
Keep em comin'. I'm always learning something from your posts.
The preliminary warning you begin with seems bizarre in light of such stimulating and clear thinking. Maybe the reason why this article is so engaging is that you’ve brought the reader with you as you’ve thought, as opposed to filling them in thereafter.
I do hope the reception of this piece spurs you to write more articles from this place of uncertainty.
It’s said that believing useful things (rather believing true things) was naturally selected for in our ancestral environment — but wasn’t it often very useful to believe the truth when it presented itself?
For example, if one party had some superstitious belief about where animals would be, but evidence showed that they’d be in another place, then the party who accepted the evidence would be the ones to survive.
It is unsurprising that our default state is to lack knowledge. It is unsurprising that our default state is to believe false things due to a lack of knowledge. But to continue believing false things when knowledge to the contrary presents itself — why would that be our default situation?
Yes, I agree, but only in cases where holding false beliefs hurts our practical interests. When it comes to “public opinion” about complex, distant truths, the practical penalty for believing false things is much weaker (sometimes non-existent), and evidence concerning truth is much more uncertain and ambiguous.
I can't begin to address all of this (beyond disliking snarky while recognizing that thought errors are a universal, not party-based phenomenon.) But I have wondered how much curiosity fits into the scheme you describe.
This came up when all sorts of people did the "I saw it with my own eyes" bit about the debate. My first reaction was --what did I just see? I was curious--what explanations could there be?
Way too many people jumped to an immediate conclusion. What they saw with their own eyes was "reality." In fact, what they saw was beams of light (mediated for pretty much everyone by pixels) that triggered electronic impulses into the brain. What the brain DOES with those impulses is what matters. And as you point out, what it DOES with those impulses incorporates all sorts of expectations, many unconscious, about what the world "must" be.
I chose alternate explanations--the cold, the exhaustion--after reading the transcript and looking at later fiery speeches. I'm not saying I got to Truth. Biden did seem unduly tired in his Oval Office explanation, I'm guessing from the constant barrage about his competence, and I hypothesize that the tiredness from all that, perhaps even causing the lowered resistance to Covid, was part of his own evaluation of whether he really was up to continued barrages during a new term. (There are lots of other explanations for his stepping down, including a pretty savvy plan simply drum up enthusiasm, a plan if it existed that has worked spectacularly. And that can be combined with my hypothesis of course. I am very into most things being very multi-causal)
I am a big fan of the "predictive brain" theory propounded by Andy Clark and Anil Seth. It does check a lot of boxes on why all of us can misperceive. And that brings me back to curiosity. It can make you AWARE of traps in our perception of reality; then you can use the enlightenment focus on evidence to wade through your various explanations.
I haven't seen much about the role of curiosity or its place in our evolutionary makeup. Are some people naturally more curious than others? Is its growth dependent on cultural factors--being told not to question or on the other side, reading imaginative works so we can learn to see so many alternatives that we start to look for them in our own lives? No idea. What I have noticed after years of both teaching and working with "uneducated" folks in my law practice, it isn't connected with educational level. It's part of what I call "bright" which is a very different thing from "intelligence."
Basically, I do believe reality exists. I just don't think either we or our dogs have a straightforward path to knowing "what" it is. The more we recognize that, the more we may be able to find out whatever truth is out there and detectable.
Dig deeper here! This ties in to trust in culture which appears to be empirically important for outcomes. There are also practical implications for successful work cultures, the role of dissent in truth finding and role of myth.
“Why is there poverty in the world?” Poverty exists only because the abundance of wealth also exists. Poverty is a concept that makes sense only in relation to abundance. Consequently, the above question is equivalent to “why is there abundance in the world?” Poverty is evidently not a function of natural resources, since in the past there were few people and more resources, and nearly everyone lived in relative poverty compared to the population of today with fewer resources to share. Abundance is therefore not a natural state but a kind of ‘technology’ that was progressively developed.
Putting "inchoate ideas floating around my consciousness" out there "to figure out what I think" is a good demonstration of starting with the question, and not the explanation. So I approve!
Explanatory inversion is clearly a powerful route to understanding. But it's also possible to fundamentally disagree about which question is truly puzzling, and which criteria should apply for determining this - especially if each alternative entails a different logic. When Camus says the interesting question is not why people commit suicide but rather why most do not, this doesn't obviate the possibility that the first is still interesting (especially if it was your friend), nor that the second could still be seen as obvious (killing yourself is hard). I like to think he has expanded the field of possibilities for kinds of interestingness; in this case, to the existential question of meaning. So no matter what question you decide is interesting, this rests on a second question of how restricted the domain should be. Are poverty and believing false things only psychological and evolutionary matters, or are we also interested in the philosophical and sociological levels of that question? Is the reference class all of humanity throughout history and human nature in general, or our particular society with its cultural institutions, norms and technological affordances? And are we only interested in the epistemic dimension, or the normative as well? There is also the ethical demand of "Why?!", as in: where can we try harder; what exactly lies within our responsibility?
In the case of "Why believe so many false things?," at one level of proximate, naturalistic explanation it makes total sense to invert. You are right to point out that there should be a sense of wonder at the opposite question. But I'm not sure it's so automatically obvious which direction of approach is more legitimate, because this depends on what you're inclined to regard as puzzling in the first place - and these things may be puzzling for different kinds of reasons.
Great point(s) - I agree, in a way. Which question one seeks to answer will depend on one’s explanatory interests, which can reasonably vary between people and research programmes.
The point that poverty is a normal state is missing the obligatory Heinlein quote:
'Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck.”'
Thank you for this addition.
Great post. Another puzzle I’d add is why we care about distant abstract things at all. It’s not obvious why we should have *any* beliefs about such things, given their lack of relevance to everyday decisions. Why do we even care? Why do we form beliefs about them at all? I genuinely don’t know the answer, but I suspect it has something to do with the social functions such beliefs serve, and the need to segregate these social functions from the epistemic functions of our normal beliefs.
Yes I agree is this really puzzling. My inclination is to say there was no positive selection for such caring - it is a difficult-to-avoid by-product of the evolution of our more sophisticated cognitive and communicative capacities, which then gets co-opted by our evolved social goals. But it's something I need and want to think a lot more about.
Yea agreed there was likely no positive selection for such caring, but it’s still pretty puzzling why there was no negative selection against it, given its attentional opportunity costs. It’s possible there is a mismatch story to tell, in that we are confronted with a far greater amount of information about distant matters than our ancestors ever were, and we never evolved sufficient defenses against it, as Dan Maruschak suggested above. Or maybe we simultaneously evaluate the social value and epistemic value of any particular piece of info, and there’s usually a trade-off between them, but distant info allows us to escape the trade-off and harvest larger amounts of social value than we otherwise could. Maybe science works by forcing us to reconsider the epistemic value of such distant beliefs via the demand for empirical tests, and by creating novel sources of social value when the beliefs pass such tests.
Hmm yeah the point about attentional costs is a good one. This is a deep issue. I don’t know what to think. A very good illustration of how an evo psych perspective drives you to ask good questions most wouldn’t even consider.
You really don't think there would be negative selection?? It seems to me that once humans formed sufficiently large groups, such that personal and familial bonds could no longer govern them, it would be absolutely necessary to have some capability for emotional attachment to abstract beliefs. If not, there's no coordinating principle, and you're going to get taken over/killed/conquered by a different large group that DOES have the abstract belief as a coordinating principle. If not for common belief in and attachment to a god/gods or nation/state or king or something similar, how would you ever get large numbers of people who are otherwise strangers to cooperate and coordinate in warfare? It takes an enormous overriding motivation of SOME sort to get over the much more salient and immediately critical risk of death that would be right in front of you.
Before mass media, etc., perhaps the quantity of "distant" information people were exposed to was just very low compared to important local information so there may not have been much advantage to deprioritizing this rare category of information.
Which distant abstract things do you mean - questions like "why poverty" and "why believe so many false things," or were you thinking of something else? I assume those two questions are compelling because they are coded ways of approaching more personally relevant questions like "Why do I have to deal with those annoying drug addicts and panhandlers every time I walk home" or "Why do so many people I encounter online have to be so #$@# stupid?" It's an expression of dissatisfaction with the way the world is, with an implicit belief that we could and should do better. (Whether or not this is realistic).
So our interest in distant abstract questions is in part our rejection of the answers to more concrete ones.
> Which distant abstract things do you mean
"Does the Earth go around the Sun?"
"Did existing species evolve from earlier species?"
Oh I see. I guess what we consider "abstract" is kind of subjective.
Nuclear power is a case in point. Whether or not it is a good thing is a balance of risk, costs and benefits that very few people have the knowledge to make an evaluation. But many people have very strong views.
You write wonderfully and clearly. Thank you for changing my thinking!
Thank you!
You know, of course, that GDP (and GDP/cap) are extremely poor estimators for poverty, and you know as well that GDP estimates before modernity are effectively useless. But if we take the graph at face value, I think the question "why is there poverty in the world in light of such remarkable productive capacity" is a very interesting and important one.
(also: the question was "Why is there poverty in the world?", not "why is there poverty in affluent societies", and millions and millions of people world-wide live in crushing poverty, far worse than elites or even artisans of times past)
And I find your answer for poverty reduction: "robust property rights, a culture that rewards science and innovation, the impartial rule of law, and free, competitive, and open markets" highly suspect because on the way to those institutions, numerous actions - enclosures (which created "robust property rights" to previously common land in the first place), automation in textile production, exports to world markets causing famines, the destruction of subsistence farming in many regions outside Europe etc - caused immense poverty increases.
And incidentally, the entire system was brought about by the state ensuring that markets were not free, competitive and open, via tariffs, state-backed enterprises etc.
And the reductions in poverty didn't happen automatically but was brought about by organized labor, social democrat and socialist policies, and states breaking patent law, protecting their developing industries against competition etc. Hickel and Sullivan in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493 point out that extreme poverty in socialist China was very low and *increases* when free market reforms were implemented, similar to how poverty rates jumped and life expectancy dropped in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union. They also argue that we could provide decent living standards for 8,5 billion people using 40% of the current energy and materials consumption (so again: why poverty when there's so much productive capacity?)
So your answer to the contextualized question: "Why is there poverty in the world in light of such remarkable productive capacity" is only partially right. Indeed, cooperation and solidarity are relatively fragile but at least as importantly capitalism is a system that rewards attacks on cooperation and rewards poverty creation via union busting, paying poverty wages, employing children, privatising health care, education, housing etc. Without a system that rewards undermining cooperation, who knows how those "competitive apes" would act?
And the answer to "why is there less poverty than at the beginning of the industrial revolution, or the beginning of the twentieth century, or the immediate post-war years" is "because those affected by poverty banded together and worked to reduce it". So even living in a system that rewards undermining cooperation, they cooperated long enough to make things significantly better for many. (until their living standards became high enough that they felt that they were safe, with the results of the last forty years)
Which makes me think that you underestimate human's willingness and ability to cooperate.
Another precise and urgent piece of thoughtful writing. Thank you.
'Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent' - 'Believe those who seek the truth; mistrust those who find it.' André Gide
Thank you Christopher- I'm glad you got something out of it.
I got more out of it than I can properly process, to be honest: the piece is as dense with insight as a uranium isotope (in a good way!). So I have saved it to dig into properly and think about the implications. I very much hope you have a book in the offing. I can't think of anyone who is thinking, and writing clearly about the thinking, the way you do.
"I am currently writing two books: Why it’s OK to be Cynical (under contract with Routledge); and Delusions in the Social Mind (co-authored with Sam Wilkinson and Kengo Miyazono; under contract with Oxford University Press)."
Source: Dan Williams at https://danwilliamsphilosophy.com/
Very handy! Thank you
Great stuff, Dan.
There may be several types of inversion, one of which might be useful in response to this particular:
"As imperfect as such institutions might be, their flaws should not detract from the amazing fact that they often succeed in generating and distributing broadly reliable information in society."
I naturally infer a rhetorical hedging that looks something like:
"To the degree that someone is motivated by some alternative agenda to detract from scientific contribution, it is better not to detract at all."
I would concur to such a degree, but I would then also add that it is otherwise appropriate and even necessary to allow for some detraction, even though we might acknowledge we have little idea what the magnitude of detraction should be. Without good faith mea culpa, some demand may be generated for alternative agendas.
I think of this as being a "dialectical" inversion opposite the "distributive" conception on offer. Scientific conformity above the magnitude required to dampen some pernicious form of confirmation bias may naturally be perceived as a kind of "conformation bias" against which confirmation bias will naturally be leveraged. I do not mean to equivocate the errors, but a science that does not actively address inherent biases, and does little more than pay them lip service when close to home, might naturally converge toward classic corruptibility. To hedge again, lest agenda be heard, boo pseudoscience, yay science!
Cheers!
Great point - I agree. I didn't mean to imply that no detraction - no critique - of these institutions is necessary or desirable.
Even a brief familiarity with what you've written would be sufficient to not hold you to such an implication. On the contrary, a good faith reading serves to make explicit some of the dialectical influences that are no less navigated by scientific discourse that makes no mention of them.
Keep em comin'. I'm always learning something from your posts.
Thanks - greatly appreciated
The preliminary warning you begin with seems bizarre in light of such stimulating and clear thinking. Maybe the reason why this article is so engaging is that you’ve brought the reader with you as you’ve thought, as opposed to filling them in thereafter.
I do hope the reception of this piece spurs you to write more articles from this place of uncertainty.
Thanks!
I agree completely with Austin. Please keep writing pieces like this, Dan.
It’s said that believing useful things (rather believing true things) was naturally selected for in our ancestral environment — but wasn’t it often very useful to believe the truth when it presented itself?
For example, if one party had some superstitious belief about where animals would be, but evidence showed that they’d be in another place, then the party who accepted the evidence would be the ones to survive.
It is unsurprising that our default state is to lack knowledge. It is unsurprising that our default state is to believe false things due to a lack of knowledge. But to continue believing false things when knowledge to the contrary presents itself — why would that be our default situation?
Yes, I agree, but only in cases where holding false beliefs hurts our practical interests. When it comes to “public opinion” about complex, distant truths, the practical penalty for believing false things is much weaker (sometimes non-existent), and evidence concerning truth is much more uncertain and ambiguous.
Fantastic piece! I love having my conclusions turned on their head by, as I see it, superior reasoning.
I can't begin to address all of this (beyond disliking snarky while recognizing that thought errors are a universal, not party-based phenomenon.) But I have wondered how much curiosity fits into the scheme you describe.
This came up when all sorts of people did the "I saw it with my own eyes" bit about the debate. My first reaction was --what did I just see? I was curious--what explanations could there be?
Way too many people jumped to an immediate conclusion. What they saw with their own eyes was "reality." In fact, what they saw was beams of light (mediated for pretty much everyone by pixels) that triggered electronic impulses into the brain. What the brain DOES with those impulses is what matters. And as you point out, what it DOES with those impulses incorporates all sorts of expectations, many unconscious, about what the world "must" be.
I chose alternate explanations--the cold, the exhaustion--after reading the transcript and looking at later fiery speeches. I'm not saying I got to Truth. Biden did seem unduly tired in his Oval Office explanation, I'm guessing from the constant barrage about his competence, and I hypothesize that the tiredness from all that, perhaps even causing the lowered resistance to Covid, was part of his own evaluation of whether he really was up to continued barrages during a new term. (There are lots of other explanations for his stepping down, including a pretty savvy plan simply drum up enthusiasm, a plan if it existed that has worked spectacularly. And that can be combined with my hypothesis of course. I am very into most things being very multi-causal)
I am a big fan of the "predictive brain" theory propounded by Andy Clark and Anil Seth. It does check a lot of boxes on why all of us can misperceive. And that brings me back to curiosity. It can make you AWARE of traps in our perception of reality; then you can use the enlightenment focus on evidence to wade through your various explanations.
I haven't seen much about the role of curiosity or its place in our evolutionary makeup. Are some people naturally more curious than others? Is its growth dependent on cultural factors--being told not to question or on the other side, reading imaginative works so we can learn to see so many alternatives that we start to look for them in our own lives? No idea. What I have noticed after years of both teaching and working with "uneducated" folks in my law practice, it isn't connected with educational level. It's part of what I call "bright" which is a very different thing from "intelligence."
Basically, I do believe reality exists. I just don't think either we or our dogs have a straightforward path to knowing "what" it is. The more we recognize that, the more we may be able to find out whatever truth is out there and detectable.
Since human conclusions are commonly incomplete or incorrect, I appreciate your 'curiosity over conclusion'.
I also share your astonishment at the intellectually lazy lack of curiosity common in our species.
'Judge a person by their questions, more than their answers.'
- paraphrase Voltaire
Very powerful and enlightening, to coin a phrase. Thank you! Subscribed!
Thanks!
Have you ever read Foucault on truth regimes and truth discourses?
Not much!
Dig deeper here! This ties in to trust in culture which appears to be empirically important for outcomes. There are also practical implications for successful work cultures, the role of dissent in truth finding and role of myth.
“Why is there poverty in the world?” Poverty exists only because the abundance of wealth also exists. Poverty is a concept that makes sense only in relation to abundance. Consequently, the above question is equivalent to “why is there abundance in the world?” Poverty is evidently not a function of natural resources, since in the past there were few people and more resources, and nearly everyone lived in relative poverty compared to the population of today with fewer resources to share. Abundance is therefore not a natural state but a kind of ‘technology’ that was progressively developed.
Material abundance, we could say. On the backs of resource extraction and wildlife destruction.
Putting "inchoate ideas floating around my consciousness" out there "to figure out what I think" is a good demonstration of starting with the question, and not the explanation. So I approve!
Explanatory inversion is clearly a powerful route to understanding. But it's also possible to fundamentally disagree about which question is truly puzzling, and which criteria should apply for determining this - especially if each alternative entails a different logic. When Camus says the interesting question is not why people commit suicide but rather why most do not, this doesn't obviate the possibility that the first is still interesting (especially if it was your friend), nor that the second could still be seen as obvious (killing yourself is hard). I like to think he has expanded the field of possibilities for kinds of interestingness; in this case, to the existential question of meaning. So no matter what question you decide is interesting, this rests on a second question of how restricted the domain should be. Are poverty and believing false things only psychological and evolutionary matters, or are we also interested in the philosophical and sociological levels of that question? Is the reference class all of humanity throughout history and human nature in general, or our particular society with its cultural institutions, norms and technological affordances? And are we only interested in the epistemic dimension, or the normative as well? There is also the ethical demand of "Why?!", as in: where can we try harder; what exactly lies within our responsibility?
In the case of "Why believe so many false things?," at one level of proximate, naturalistic explanation it makes total sense to invert. You are right to point out that there should be a sense of wonder at the opposite question. But I'm not sure it's so automatically obvious which direction of approach is more legitimate, because this depends on what you're inclined to regard as puzzling in the first place - and these things may be puzzling for different kinds of reasons.
Great point(s) - I agree, in a way. Which question one seeks to answer will depend on one’s explanatory interests, which can reasonably vary between people and research programmes.
> but you are not a disinterested truth seeker
Ouch. You can be nicer about this!