On May 21, 2025, David Pinsof wrote a blog post that changed me forever.
A lot of people ask me how I write blog posts—where I get my ideas from. They’re often surprised when I give them a precise, step-by-step answer. Here’s my patented ® formula for writing Everything Is Bullshit content:
I look at a story we tell ourselves. Maybe it’s the pursuit of happiness or the meaning of life. Maybe it’s our desire to change people’s minds or make the world a better place. Maybe it’s the idea that we don’t care what others think.
I ask myself if the story makes any evolutionary sense.
If the answer is no, I think about what might be going on beneath the surface—something that would make evolutionary sense.
I call the story we tell ourselves “bullshit.”
I write about what’s likely going on beneath the surface.
I link to a lot of technical papers in evolutionary psychology that nobody clicks on.
The most important part of this formula is step 3—the part about what does or doesn’t “make evolutionary sense.” This step is rarely taken by anyone who thinks about humans. It’s as if the human psyche emerged from a bolt of lightning and not from millions of years of natural selection. When people talk about why Bob voted for Trump or Jane can’t find a date or Otto is depressed, they rarely reflect on the fact that Bob, Jane, and Otto are animals, and so are they. Whenever people do reflect on their evolutionary origins, they usually aren’t very reflective about it. They think about cavemen hitting each other with clubs or David Attenborough doing a voiceover while a bird performs a mating display.
I do not believe that evolution is the only legitimate framework for evaluating stories, but it is often a useful one, even if it has limitations.
If I were to tell an intellectual that his signature framework makes no evolutionary sense, how might he process that? What would be his most likely responses?
This is a question about the psychology of intellectual threat, and the evolutionary literature on self-deception and coalition maintenance gives clear answers.
The first thing to note is that the response will almost certainly not be straightforward engagement with the argument. Robert Trivers’s work on self-deception predicts that the organism most threatened by a true claim will be the least able to perceive it as such. The academic has spent years developing this theory, has staked professional reputation on it, has trained students in it, and has organized a coalition of allies around it. The threat is not merely intellectual but existential in the Beckerian sense — the theory is part of his hero system, his bid for symbolic immortality. A clean refutation is not just an argument lost. It is a self that is partially destroyed.
The most likely immediate responses, roughly in order of probability.
He will question your standing. The first move is almost always jurisdictional. Who are you to make this claim? What is your training in evolutionary theory? What have you published? Credentialism does track something real about expertise — but in this context it functions primarily to defer engagement with the substance. If you lack the right credentials, the argument can be dismissed without being answered.
He will reframe the challenge as a misunderstanding. You have not understood the theory correctly, or you are applying evolutionary logic in a naive way, or you are working from an outdated version of evolutionary theory. This move is available because evolutionary reasoning is genuinely complex and because almost any theory can be reformulated slightly to evade a specific objection. The reformulation will feel to him like clarification rather than retreat.
He will invoke the complexity of human behavior. Human evolution involved gene-culture coexistence, niche construction, extended phenotypes, multilevel selection — any of which can be recruited to explain why the simple evolutionary logic you are applying does not straightforwardly apply. This move has genuine intellectual content, which makes it particularly useful as a defensive maneuver. It is hard to distinguish from legitimate theoretical sophistication.
He will compartmentalize. His theory operates at a different level of analysis from evolutionary explanation. It is a social or psychological or cultural theory that does not require evolutionary grounding to be valid. The evolutionary objection is therefore a category error. This move severs the connection between the two levels precisely when that connection becomes inconvenient, even if he has previously invoked evolutionary support for the theory when it was convenient.
He will seek coalition reassurance. Shortly after the encounter he will recount it to sympathetic colleagues, framing it in ways that make your objection seem naive or politically motivated. The coalition will validate his framing. This will feel to him like legitimate peer consultation — but its function is to restore the social equilibrium that the challenge disturbed. Pinsof’s alliance theory predicts that the coalition will close around him because his theory is part of their shared moral vocabulary, and a threat to it is a threat to them.
He will experience what Trivers calls the downstream effects of self-deception. Having convinced himself that the objection was confused or poorly motivated, he will not remember it as a serious challenge. If you raise it again he may recall the conversation differently from how it occurred. This is the organism protecting its functional self-model from information that would destabilize it.
The least likely response is the one that would be most intellectually admirable: sitting with the objection, taking it seriously, and either refuting it on the merits or acknowledging that it represents a genuine problem for the theory. This response is rare not because academics are unusually dishonest but because the conditions of academic life — the investment in published positions, the coalition structure of departments and subdisciplines, the reputational economy of citation and recognition — make it structurally costly in ways that have nothing to do with individual character.
The one variable that shifts these probabilities is whether you are a peer whose standing he cannot dismiss, whether the conversation is private rather than public, and whether you frame the objection as a puzzle you are working through together rather than as a refutation you are delivering. All three conditions lower the threat level and make engagement marginally more likely. None of them guarantees it.
The deepest irony, which Trivers would appreciate, is that a theorist who accepts evolutionary psychology as explanatory of human behavior should in principle be the most prepared to recognize these defensive responses in himself. The theory predicts exactly the self-serving cognition he is exhibiting. But self-deception works precisely by making that recognition unavailable at the moment it would be most useful.
