Luke Ford

UCLA psychologist David Pinsof writes: See if you can spot the pattern:

1. We don’t just want to make money; we want to make more money than our neighbors.

2. We don’t just want a job; want to have a more prestigious job than our peers.

3. We don’t just want people to like us; we want people to like us more than they like other people.

4. We don’t just want to be educated; we want to have better educational credentials than our competitors on the job market.

5. We don’t just want to belong to a group; we want our group to be better than other groups.

6. We don’t just want to have opinions; we want to have more interesting opinions than other people.

7. We don’t just want to be attractive; we want to be more attractive than our rivals.

8. We don’t just want to be a good person; we want to be holier than thou.

9. We don’t just want to help the environment; we want to be greener than thou.

10. We don’t just want a house; we want to a prettier house, with a nicer view, in a better school district, than other people have.

Did you spot the pattern? Of course you did. It’s the unflattering way our desires work. We’re constantly comparing ourselves to the people around us, and we’re never quite satisfied until we’re just a little bit better than, or better off than, they are. This isn’t true of all our desires (sometimes, we’re just thirsty and want a glass of water), but it’s true of a large percentage of them—dare I say most of them. The majority of our time and energy is consumed by small-minded social competition, and we really hate to admit this. Our need to cover it up is, perhaps, the greatest source of human bullshit.

Why are our desires secretly like this? Because natural selection, the thing that made our desires, is an icky, competitive process. Animals compete with members of their species for genetic representation in future generations. They do this by competing for physical stuff (like food and territory), social stuff (like friends and mates), and the capacity to get social and physical stuff (like status and power). The competition rages over thousands of generations, and the winners leave more descendants than the losers. We are descendants of the winners, and we have inherited their winning characteristics, including their desire to win—and to conceal that desire from themselves and others (in order to win).

There aren’t many beliefs I’ve held for decades but this is one — you can’t improve the world without embracing truth first.

I think I got that from Dennis Prager’s radio show in 1988.

There’s a statement in the Talmud that I love — “The signature of God is truth.”

David Pinsof writes: “We’re tribal, factional, nepotistic, moralistic, short-sighted, close-minded, superstitious, self-deluded, and surreptitiously selfish. We aren’t naturally motivated to make the world a better place, nor are we naturally motivated to see ourselves as mediocre humans, saddled with the same flaws as every other human. We consume “interesting” information—not useful or true information—which prevents us from understanding our predicament. We defend the status games we’re winning—not the ones that improve the world—which worsens the world. We’re in thrall to bullshit political beliefs, including the belief that we’re morally and intellectually superior to our outgroup, which is exactly what our outgroup thinks of us, and what every ingroup has wrongly believed about their outgroup since the dawn of humanity. We should be troubled about this, but we’re not. We’d rather point the finger at the baddies, and cast ourselves as the heroes, than fix our broken incentives. You might have expected psychologists to help us out here, but they’re too busy doing the same bullshit.”

David Pinsof writes:

“Behavior is determined by incentives.”

…Incentive determinism is obvious. It’s just a bunch of tautologies: we are who we are, we want what we want, and we do what we’re caused to do. And yet, barely anybody thinks this way. It’s a cold, alien way of thinking.

Instead, we prefer to think in stories. We see the world as revolving around a colorful cast of characters—often representing warring tribes—whom we either like or dislike.

We infer people’s character traits by the words they use and in what order they use them. When everyone uses this shortcut to identify the baddies, the result is what Robin Hanson calls “righttalkism,” the view that all it takes to improve the world is to change how people talk. The logic is straightforward:

Bad things are caused by bad people.

Good things are caused by good people.

Bad people are bad because they talk the wrong way.

Good people are good because they talk the right way.

Therefore, if everybody talks the right way and nobody talks the wrong way, then everything will be good.

This is essentially what modern discourse is all about. We’re trying to get people to talk the right way and prevent them from talking the wrong way. We spend very little time discussing which incentive structures are the best, and tons of time talking about which sets of words are the right words and which sets of people are the right people. It’s why we write words at all: we think we’re the right people with the right words, and if we just say those words loudly enough, we’ll improve the world.