The following are some notes, followed by a lot of highlights, from the book Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson [Amazon].
The book is about, in a word, signals. Everything we do is – in small and often large part – a signal to others:
We talk to seem smart and build alliances.
We make art to attract mates.
We donate to charity to impress neighbors.
We laugh to let people know that we’re ok, it’s just a game.
We pray to belong to a group.
We vote to show our loyalty.
Even this blog is a massive signal :P
Signals, signals, signals. Oh, and sex. Signals and sex.
In fact, this quote buried in the book’s footnotes might be the underlying reason behind all of the seemingly complicated but ultimately simple reasons behind why we do what we do:
As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about sexual love: “It is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort… . It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts”.
The below are all highlights copied verbatim from the book, which I highly recommend. Very much in the Yuval Harari “things are both more complicated and more simple than they seem” vein.
GENERAL HIGHLIGHTS
To understand the competitive side of human nature, we would do well to turn Matthew 7: 1 on its head: “Judge freely, and accept that you too will be judged.”
The essence of a norm, then, lies not in the words we use to describe it, but in which behaviors get punished and what form the punishment takes.
Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. This is what enables the egalitarian political order so characteristic of the forager lifestyle.
Our ancestors did a lot of cheating. How do we know? One source of evidence is the fact that our brains have special-purpose adaptations for detecting cheaters. When abstract logic puzzles are framed as cheating scenarios, for example, we’re a lot better at solving them.
We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together working at cross purposes.
There are dozens of schemes for how to divide up the mind. The Bible identifies the head and the heart. Freud gives us the id, ego, and superego. Iain McGilchrist differentiates the analytical left brain from the holistic right brain, while Douglas Kenrick gives us seven “subselves”: Night Watchman, Compulsive Hypochondriac, Team Player, Go-Getter, Swinging Single, Good Spouse, and Nurturing Parent.
What this means for self-deception is that it’s possible for our brains to maintain a relatively accurate set of beliefs in systems tasked with evaluating potential actions, while keeping those accurate beliefs hidden from the systems (like consciousness) involved in managing social impressions.
Or as Venkatesh Rao says, “We ‘shop around’ for careers. We look for prestigious brands to work for. We look for ‘fulfillment’ at work. Sometimes we even accept pay cuts to be associated with famous names. This is work as fashion accessory and conversation fodder”
All ads effectively have two audiences: potential product buyers, and potential product viewers who will credit the product owners with various desirable traits”
HUMOR AND LAUGHTER
The most important observation is that we laugh far more often in social settings than when we’re alone—30 times more often
When Provine studied 1,200 episodes of laughter overheard in public settings, his biggest surprise was finding that speakers laugh more than listeners—about 50 percent more, in fact.
“We’re just playing” is such an important message, it turns out, that many species have developed their own vocabulary for it. Dogs, for example, have a “play bow”—forearms extended, head down, hindquarters in the air—which they use to initiate a bout of play. Chimps use an open-mouthed “play face,” similar to a human smile, or double over and peer between their legs at their play partners.
We don’t laugh continuously throughout a play session, only when there’s something potentially unpleasant to react to.
In any given comedic situation, humor precedes and causes laughter, but when we step back and take a broader perspective, the order is reversed. Our propensity to laugh comes first and provides the necessary goal for humor to achieve.
First you need to get two or more people together. Then you must set the mood dial to “play.” Then you need to jostle things, carefully, so that the dial feints in the direction of “serious,” but quickly falls back to “play.” And only then will the safe come open, releasing the precious laugher locked inside.
what laughter illustrates is precisely the fact that our norms and other social boundaries aren’t etched in stone with black-and-white precision, but ebb and shift through shades of gray, depending on context.
If exchanging information were the be-all and end-all of conversation, then we would expect people to be greedy listeners and stingy speakers. Instead, we typically find ourselves with the opposite attitude
Our hearing apparatus remains evolutionarily conservative, very similar to that of other apes, while our speaking apparatus has been dramatically re-engineered. The burden of adaptation has fallen on speaking rather than listening.
you’re looking for a backpack full of tools that are both new to you and useful to the things you care about. If Henry can consistently delight you with new, useful artifacts, it speaks to the quality of his backpack and therefore his value as an ally.
In casual conversation, listeners have a mixture of these two motives. To some extent we care about the text, the information itself, but we also care about the subtext, the speaker’s value as a potential ally.
The competition to show off as a potential lover or leader also helps explain why language often seems more elaborate than necessary to communicate ideas—what the linguist John Locke calls “verbal plumage.”
listeners generally prefer speakers who can impress them wherever a conversation happens to lead, rather than speakers who steer conversations to specific topics where they already know what to say.
If conversation were primarily about reciprocal exchange, we’d be tempted to habitually deprecate what our partners were offering, in order to “owe” less in return
We find a similar regulatory function of laughter when a father throws his three-year-old daughter into the air and catches her. If the toddler laughs, dad knows she’s enjoying the game and wants it to continue. If instead she gives a yelp or an alarmed cry, dad knows to stop at once.
ART
Ellen Dissanayake’s characterization of art as anything “made special,” that is, not for some functional or practical purpose but for human attention and enjoyment
“During the breeding season,” writes Miller, “males spend virtually all day, every day, building and maintaining their bowers.” The reward for all this effort is more mating opportunities. A successful male bowerbird can mate with as many as 30 females in a single mating season.
human art is more than just a courtship display, that is, an advertisement of the artist’s value as a potential mate. It also functions as a general-purpose fitness display, that is, an advertisement of the artist’s health, energy, vigor, coordination, and overall fitness. Fitness displays can be used to woo mates, of course, but they also serve other purposes like attracting allies or intimidating rivals. And humans use art for all of these things.
Consider Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, celebrated for its beautiful detail, the surreal backdrop, and of course the subject’s enigmatic smile. More visitors have seen the Mona Lisa in person—on display behind bulletproof glass at the Louvre—than any other painting on the planet. But when researchers Jesse Prinz and Angelika Seidel asked subjects to consider a hypothetical scenario in which the Mona Lisa burned to a crisp, 80 percent of them said they’d prefer to see the ashes of the original rather than an indistinguishable replica.
The advent of photography wreaked similar havoc on the realist aesthetic in painting. Painters could no longer hope to impress viewers by depicting scenes as accurately as possible, as they had strived to do for millennia. “In response,” writes Miller, “painters invented new genres based on new, non-representational aesthetics: impressionism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, abstraction. Signs of handmade authenticity became more important than representational skill. The brush-stroke became an end in itself.”
Fashion often distinguishes itself from mere clothing by being conspicuously impractical, non-functional, and sometimes even uncomfortable.
We’re eager to evaluate art, reflect on it, criticize it, calibrate our criticisms with others, and push ourselves to new frontiers of discernment. And we do this even in art forms we have no intention of practicing ourselves. For every novelist, there are 100 readers who care passionately about fiction, but have no plans ever to write a novel.
Miller’s observation that “sexually mature males have produced almost all of the publicly displayed art throughout human history”
CHARITY
Anonymous donation, for example, is extremely rare. Only around 1 percent of donations to public charities are anonymous.
People seldom initiate donations on their own; up to 95 percent of all donations are given in response to a solicitation.
In 2011, Americans donated $ 298 billion to charity, of which only an estimated 13 percent ($ 39 billion) went to help foreigners.
Many studies have found that people, especially men, are more likely to give money when the solicitor is an attractive member of the opposite sex. Men also give more to charity when nearby observers are female rather than male.
As early as the 12th century, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides distinguished various “levels of charity” in part based on how anonymous the donor was. Acts of charity in which the donor is known to the recipient were considered less noble than anonymous acts.
EDUCATION
Each of the first three years of high school or college (the years that don’t finish a degree) are worth on average only about a 4 percent salary bump. But the last year of high school and the last year of college, where students complete a degree, are each worth on average about a 30 percent higher salary.
In a North Carolina school district, a one-hour delay in school start time—for example, from 7: 30 a.m. to 8: 30 a.m.—resulted in a 2 percentile gain in student performance.
a lot of the value of education lies in giving students a chance to advertise the attractive qualities they already have.
Caplan, for example, estimates that signaling is responsible for up to 80 percent of the total value of education.
This suggests that public K–12 schools were originally designed as part of nation-building projects, with an eye toward indoctrinating citizens and cultivating patriotic fervor. In this regard, they serve as a potent form of propaganda. We can see this function especially clearly in history and civics curricula, which tend to emphasize the rosier aspects of national issues.
Children are expected to sit still for hours upon hours; to control their impulses; to focus on boring, repetitive tasks; to move from place to place when a bell rings; and even to ask permission before going to the bathroom (think about that for a second). Teachers systematically reward children for being docile and punish them for “acting out,” that is, for acting as their own masters. In fact, teachers reward discipline independent of its influence on learning, and in ways that tamp down on student creativity. Children are also trained to accept being measured, graded, and ranked, often in front of others. This enterprise, which typically lasts well over a decade, serves as a systematic exercise in human domestication.
One recent study (Bruze 2015) suggests that, in Denmark, people are earning “on the order of half of their returns to schooling through improved marital outcomes.”
John Gatto said what many teachers surely recognize, but few are willing to state so baldly. “Schools and schooling,” he said, “are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders”
HEALTHCARE
Patients in higher-spending regions, who get more treatment for their conditions, don’t end up healthier, on average, than patients in lower-spending regions who get fewer treatments.
Today, it’s a better drug for reducing blood pressure. Tomorrow, a new and improved surgical technique. Why don’t these individual improvements add up to large gains in our aggregate studies? There’s a simple and surprisingly well-accepted answer to this question: most published medical research is wrong. (Or at least overstated.)
Patients and their families are often dismissive of simple cheap remedies, like “relax, eat better, and get more sleep and exercise.” Instead they prefer expensive, technically complicated medical care—gadgets, rare substances, and complex procedures, ideally provided by “the best doctor in town.” Patients feel better when given what they think is a medical pill, even when it is just a placebo that does nothing. And patients feel even better if they think the pill is more expensive.
Roughly 11 percent of all medical spending in the United States, for example, goes toward patients in their final year of life. And yet it’s one of the least effective (therapeutic) kinds of medicine.
As Alex Tabarrok puts it, “More people die from medical mistakes each year than from highway accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS and yet physicians still resist and the public does not demand even simple reforms.”
Investigators reported that people who reside in rural areas lived an average of 6 years longer than city dwellers, nonsmokers lived 3 years longer than smokers, and those who exercised a lot lived 15 years longer than those who exercised only a little.
Doctors, having witnessed the futility of heroic end-of-life care, are famously keen on avoiding it for themselves, when they become terminally ill.
RELIGION
They walk seven times counterclockwise around the Kaaba—the black, cube-shaped building at the center of the world’s largest mosque. (See Figure 5.) They also shave their heads; run back and forth between two hills; stand vigil from noon until sunset; drink water from the Zamzam well; camp overnight on the plain of Muzdalifa; sacrifice a lamb, goat, cow, or camel; and cast stones at three pillars in a symbolic stoning of the devil.
Many Jews, for example, consider themselves atheists, and yet continue practicing Judaism—going to temple, keeping kosher, and celebrating the high holidays.
Compared to their secular counterparts, religious people tend to smoke less, donate and volunteer more, have more social connections, get and stay married more, and have more kids. They also live longer, earn more money, experience less depression, and report greater happiness and fulfillment in their lives.
A religion, therefore, isn’t just a set of propositional beliefs about God and the afterlife; it’s an entire social system.
So whenever people make a sacrifice to your god, they’re implicitly showing loyalty to you—and to everyone else who worships at the same altar.
It’s easy to say, “I’m a Muslim,” but to get full credit, you also have to act like a Muslim—by answering the daily calls to prayer, for example, or undertaking the Hajj.
Yes, you probably have “better things to do” than listen to a sermon, which is precisely why you get loyalty points for listening patiently. In other words, the boredom of sermons may be a feature rather than a bug.
Note that positions of greater trust and authority require larger sacrifices; if the Pope had children, for example, his loyalty would be split between his family and his faith, and Catholics would have a harder time trusting him to lead the Church.
Note, however, that a community’s supply of social rewards is limited, so we’re often competing to show more loyalty than others—to engage in a “holier than thou” arms race.
All these sacrifices work to maintain high levels of commitment and trust among community members, which ultimately reduces the need to monitor everyone’s behavior. The net result is the ability to sustain cooperative groups at larger scales and over longer periods of time.
A 2012 Gallup poll, for instance, found that atheists came in dead last in electability, well behind other marginalized groups like Hispanics and gay people. In fact, Americans would sooner see a Muslim than an atheist in the Oval Office.
As Jason Weeden and colleagues have pointed out, religions can be understood, in part, as community-enforced mating strategies.
Our species, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, is wired to form social bonds when we move in lockstep with each other. This can mean marching together, singing or chanting in unison, clapping hands to a beat, or even just wearing the same clothes.
The particular strangeness of Mormon beliefs, for example, testifies to the exceptional strength of the Mormon moral community. To maintain such stigmatizing beliefs in the modern era, in the face of science, the news media, and the Internet, is quite the feat of solidarity.
Haidt: “To resolve [the puzzle of religious participation], either you have to grant that religiosity is (or at least, used to be) beneficial or you have to construct a complicated, multi-step explanation of how humans in all known cultures came to swim against the tide of adaptation and do so much self-destructive religious stuff”
POLITICS
the literature on voting makes it clear that people mostly don’t vote for their material self-interest, that is, for the candidates and policies that would make them personally better off.
Real voters, however, show remarkably little concern for whether their votes are likely to make a difference. Swing states see only a modest uptick in turnout, somewhere between one and four percentage
When people are asked the same policy question a few months apart, they frequently give different answers—not because they’ve changed their minds, but because they’re making up answers on the spot, without remembering what they said last time.
The kicker? Stalin himself wasn’t even in the room. His cult of personality was strong enough to sustain 11 minutes of applause even in his absence. At least 600,000 people were killed in these ways during Stalin’s purges.
This helps explain why voters feel little pressure to be informed. As long as we adopt the “right” beliefs—those of our main coalitions—we get full credit for loyalty.
Within nations, our most devoted activists are plausibly those who see themselves as political “soldiers” fighting for a cause, but whom opponents see as political “terrorists,” since their actions risk hurting both themselves and others.
I just finished reading about half of The Untold History of Ramen by George Solt [Amazon]. I skipped most of the middle, where he explains ramen’s evolution in Japan through the 19th and 20th centuries, and focused instead on the bookends, where he talks about how ramen was brought to Japan by Chinese laborers, and how ramen eventually migrated to America and became a global phenomenon.