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.

David Pinsof writes: Here’s a list of problems with the idea that humans are primarily interested in useful truth:

1. Most of the stuff that interests us is false and useless. And we know it. We freely admit it. We call this stuff “fiction.”

2. We’re not only interested in fiction; we’re more interested in fiction than reality. Novels sell better than textbooks. Movies sell better than documentaries. Tabloids are about a thousand times more interesting than scholarly journals.

3. We’re interested in celebrities, even though we we’ll never meet them. Useless.

4. We’re interested in sports, even though we can’t control the athletes. Useless.

5. We’re interested in sweeping generalizations, even though reality is complicated.

6. We’re interested in eloquence—enthralling speakers and stylish prose. But eloquence has nothing to do with truth or usefulness. Ditto for charisma, humor, whimsy, wit, passion, irony, and quirkiness.

7. We’re interested in new information (i.e. the “news”), even though the vast majority of useful truths are old.

8. We’re interested in spiritual flimflam about the “meaning of life,” even though it’s too vague to be useful.

9. We’re interested in self-help gurus who confidently tell us all that we can be the best, even though that is logically impossible.

10. We’re interested in contrarian hot takes, even though the conventional wisdom is usually truer and more useful.

11. We’re interested in simplistic partisan rants, and we’re bored by nuanced policy analysis. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

12. We’re interested in stuff that confirms our preconceptions. But that is the least useful information to focus on, because it just results in us doing what we were going to do anyways.

13. You know what’s actually useful? The tax code. Home repair. How cars work. Retirement planning. Noncollateralized loans. The actual policies going through Congress. The actual words in the contracts we DocuSign. Booooooooring!

14. Here’s a weird fact: modern humans have been around for roughly two hundred thousand years. Yet we only discovered how to find useful truths (i.e. science and free inquiry) a few hundred years ago—about 1% of our history. And plenty of countries still haven’t gotten the memo: heretics and dissidents are getting killed all the time. Humans really suck at seeking useful truth.

“But David,” you say, “it doesn’t make any sense. Why our brains so interested in bullshit? If our brains evolved by natural selection, then why do they function so poorly?”

They don’t. They work just fine. They just don’t work in the way you think they do.

People like to think that humans are the smart ones in the animal kingdom. We alone evolved to learn stuff, figure things out, and use tools. But that’s only a small part of the story of human brain evolution. The bigger part of the story is social. Our brains weren’t designed for solitary contemplation; they were designed for arguing, rationalizing, politicking, rule-following, covert rule-breaking, and excuse-making. We are homo hypocritus.

It’s actually pretty obvious when you think about it. How much of your brainpower is devoted to office politics and social life, as compared to, say, auto parts? How much of your conversations are devoted to gossip and people-stuff, as compared to, say, home repair? If we naturally use 90% of our brainpower for dealing with people, it’s hard to argue that our brains evolved primarily for tools.

Once we realize that the human brain is a fundamentally social brain, we can see the logic behind the subtle urges that goad us to click on this or skim through that. These urges are not designed for practical truth-seeking—or at least, that’s not their primary function. They’re designed to fulfill our social goals.

So what makes stuff interesting? Any information that helps us get what we want from the people around us, including the ugly things we can’t admit we want.

Below are some of the ugly things I’m talking about. These are the things that generally determine what humans find interesting:

We want to fit in. We often find stuff interesting because others find it interesting. Just as people can become famous for being famous, things can become interesting for being interesting. That’s why we’re interested in sports, celebrities, and the news, even though they’re mostly useless. Everyone talks about these things, and we don’t want to be left out of the conversation.

We want attention. When people listen to us, that’s a sign that we’re high status. We like that. So we’re interested in whatever grabs people’s attention, from the titillating to the gory to the gossipy to the paradoxical…

We want to form cliques. We’re constantly on the lookout for shareable tidbits we can use to signal membership in our special subculture, like historical esoterica or highfalutin theories. For example, if we casually mention the book “Capital in the 21st Century,” some people will look confused, but cool smart likeminded people will nod their heads. This allows us to covertly figure out who’s smart and cool like us and who’s not, so we can connect with fellow members of the cognoscente, while subtly excluding dumb-dumbs who aren’t as cool as us. To pull off this strategy, though, we need to find nerd chic interesting in the first place. Not because it’s especially useful or accurate, but because it helps us hobnob with other smart, high-status people.

We want to display our superiority. The hotter the take, the fewer people believe it. So if we can convince people that the hot take is correct, then we get to look smarter than everyone else. The same thing goes for moral claims. If we can convince people that some widespread behavior is morally wrong—or some weird behavior is morally right—then we get to look holier than thou.

We want to display our group’s superiority. The more a piece of information disparages an enemy group (e.g., Republicans, “woke” people), the more we’re captivated by it. Spreading the disparaging information rallies our tribe and boosts solidarity. That’s why we’re more interested in simplistic partisan rants than nuanced policy analysis.

We want to persuade people. We want to justify our behavior, tell self-flattering stories, win debates, and rally people to our side. That’s why we’re interested in stuff that supports what we already believe or want to believe. The goal isn’t to learn anything new or better understand reality; it’s to gather ammunition for arguments.

We want to signal. Talking about scary stuff makes us look competent. Talking about complicated stuff makes us look smart. Talking about feel-good stuff makes us seem warm and cuddly. But in order to signal these traits, we have to be interested in scary, complicated, or feel-good stuff in the first place. So we’re interested in whatever helps us signal the kind of person we are—or want to be.

We want to be flattered. That’s why self-help is such a popular genre: it always involves praising the reader and telling them what wonderful people they are. The same thing applies to the groups we belong to. Any information that flatters our group, that “inspires” us and tells us how brave and virtuous we are—that’s interesting.

We want to oneup everyone else. That’s why we like cynical bullshit, including this very substack: it gives us all an opportunity to dunk on other people. If everyone else is a hypocrite, and everything else is bullshit, then guess who comes out looking good? You and me!

We want to show we’re on the same page. Working together requires coordinating our movements, which is why dancing and chanting feel good: it makes us feel like we’re a single unit (plus it strikes fear into the hearts of our enemies). But working together also requires coordinating our thinking. That’s why we like sweeping generalizations: it’s easier to mentally coordinate on false simplicity than real complexity. The ultimate mental dance is to converge on the same banal interpretation of a deepity, paradox, or jargon-laden word salad.

We want to be associated with high status people. That’s why “eloquence” is so interesting. It signals all sorts of cool characteristics in the speaker (wit, creativity, social skills), which means that the person must have lots of status or be well on their way to getting it. We want to listen to high status people, and we want to parrot whatever eloquent bullshit they’re saying, because that raises our status by association.

David Pinsof writes:

ICT resolves a lot of puzzling findings in the literature on life satisfaction and economic development. It explains why historically wealthier countries have higher life satisfaction than poorer countries, even though rapid increases in national wealth do not make citizens more satisfied with their lives. That is, if everyone gets rich all of a sudden at the same time, then nobody is satisfied, because everybody still has the same wealth and status as their rivals. But if the economy grows gradually over multiple generations, with each generation getting richer and higher status than the previous generation, then people get satisfied, and society becomes more peaceful and stable.^[1] Declining respect for elders, it seems, goes hand in hand with declining violence, corruption, and societal decay.

ICT might also explain why working-class white people, around a decade ago, suffered a huge increase in “deaths of despair” and later embraced a “burn it all down” Trumpian populism. It’s not that they were poor or disadvantaged per se. Nonwhite people were (and still are) significantly poorer and more disadvantaged, yet they weren’t dying of despair. Why the difference? Nonwhite people thought they were better off than their parents’ generation, likely because prior generations were more overtly discriminatory. Working class white people, on the other hand, thought they were worse off than their parents’ generation, likely due to rising urbanization, educational credentialism, and declining low-skilled manufacturing work. Some working-class white people even thought they were worse off than African Americans, due to the zero-sum nature of social status: as one group rises, another must fall. The result was a white populist backlash that nearly destroyed American democracy (and still might).^[2]

There is an important lesson here. In order to collectively satisfy our icky, competitive desires, we must ensure that everybody outcompetes their parents and grandparents in the game of life. Old people must never be cool. This ongoing upstaging of the elderly is crucial to the long-term wellbeing of our species, and it must continue for all demographic groups—or else we’re fucked. The moment any segment of society stops outcompeting their elders is the moment society starts to unravel. We must keep trouncing our elders, generation after generation, or else the fundamental tragedy of the human condition will catch up to us, and we will literally die of sadness.

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).