Luke Ford

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.

David Pinsof writes: I believe people are motivated purely by self-interest, family-interest, and group-interest. No other motives exist because no other motives can survive the Darwinian process…

A gene for nepotism causes its carriers to lavish resources on genetic relatives, who are especially likely to share a copy of the gene for nepotism. Such a gene will spread when the benefit to the nepotist’s kin, multiplied by the probability of them sharing the nepotistic gene, outweighs the cost to the nepotist. It’s a kind of Darwinian accounting.

Then there’s group-interest. A gene for loyalty causes its carriers to selectively help specific people—i.e., allies—who can be trusted to help the carrier in return. Such a gene will spread when the expected benefit of getting helped outweighs the cost of helping. The benefit of having allies back you up in conflicts, for example, outweighs the cost of occasionally backing up your allies. More Darwinian accounting.

But not everyone can be an ally of everyone. Being loyal to one side means spurning the other. And resources are limited, so when you and I get more stuff (like power and status), we’re taking it away from someone else. And fitness is relative—it’s about who’s out-reproducing whom—so when our fitness goes up, someone else’s goes down. Which means hurting our rivals and helping our allies go hand in hand. Ergo, tribalism.

So we have arrived at the unholy trinity of human nature: self-interest, family-interest, and group-interest.

David Pinsof writes: We love to be interesting. It captures people’s attention. It makes us feel smart and important. Psychologists compete to generate the most surprising, gee-whiz findings—which are the ones most likely to be false—so they can appear "interesting" to their peers. The stranger the finding, the less likely other plebeians are to believe it, which helps psychologists distinguish themselves from the plebeians.

Then there are the positive psychologists, who study how to be happy, even though nobody wants to be happy. These scholars aren’t so much interested in dunking on people or showing off how interesting they are; instead, they want to signal how nice they are. Happy people are friendly and easy to get along with, and we’ve picked up on this association. So people study happiness as a way of saying, “Hey look at me, I’m such a nice person.”

Then there are the political psychologists, who are mostly liberal, who study all the ways in which liberals are morally and intellectually superior to conservatives, despite the fact that liberals and conservatives have the same human nature, which includes the tendency to view outgroup competitors as morally and intellectually inferior.

None of this should surprise us. Like all humans, psychologists’ motives are more unflattering than they let on. They’re not noble seekers of wisdom and virtue, but normal, flawed humans, just like the rest of us.

If we want to improve social science, we must come to terms with this fact. The people studying humans are also humans, and that’s a problem. Zebras don’t study other zebras, and if they did, they would be very biased. For the same reason, humans are pretty bad candidates for studying humans. What to do?

Part of the solution is having more rigorous theories—ideally ones that leverage insights from evolutionary biology—that give psychologists less wiggle room to bullshit in their theorizing. Part of the solution is having better incentives for uncovering true information, rather than “interesting” information, like prediction markets, adversarial collaborations, pre-registration of hypotheses, and greater funding and support for replications. And part of the solution, of course, is psychologizing psychologists, so we know what they’re up to.

Which reminds me: what about me? Shouldn’t I psychologize the person who’s psychologizing the psychologists? I should, and I will. My motives are just as unflattering. I’m human too. Making other psychologists look bad makes me look good by comparison. It would be surprising if that fact did not tickle my dopaminergic neurons, vainglorious primate that I am.