#27: Robin Hanson, Hidden Motives, and The Elephant in the Brain

Episode • Mar 9, 2021 • 1h 15m

“At every single stage [of processing information]—from its biased arrival, to its biased encoding, to organizing it around false logic, to misremembering and then misrepresenting it to others—the mind continually acts to distort information flow in favor of the usual goal of appearing better than one really is.” —Robert Trivers

In this episode, I speak with author and intellectual Robin Hanson. Robin is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. Robin has a bachelor's and a master's degree in physics, a Ph.D. in social science, and he has also researched artificial intelligence at Lockheed and NASA.

The topic of conversation for this episode centered around a recent book of his, one which he co-authored with Kevin Simler, titled The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.

What is the Elephant in the Brain?

Basically, it is a blindspot about how our minds work. As social creatures, we are wired to greatly care about what others think of us. And like all primates, our complex social behavior involves the politics of coalitions and norm enforcement—although grooming does serve a hygienic purpose, primates like chimpanzees use grooming for political purposes as well.

Human beings don't groom each other this obviously, but we are constantly judging each other. We are watching each other to make sure that our social norms are being followed and to judge whether people will be good allies. And we are worried about them judging us the same way. So in this desire to look good, we often downplay our more selfish motives and amplify our more altruistic ones. And the disturbing thing is that our brain does this unconsciously, keeping “us” in the dark.

To quote from the book:

"We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others."

When it comes to choosing who we want in our social circles, we tend to want teammates who value the group over their selfish desires. And we rely on social signals to get this information and to make sure the signals are honest. But lying is a cheap signal—a strategy that allows one to reap the benefits without paying the price. And this setup created an evolutionary arms race between lying and lie detection.

George Costanza's Lying

While we may think that the contents of our minds are private, we signal much more than we realize. And people monitor each other closely. So it turns out that the best way to lie is to follow George Costanza's advice: "Remember—it's not a lie if you believe it."

Because of this, our selfish motives remain hidden away in our subconscious so that our conscious minds can believe—and thus convincingly communicate to others—our nicer sounding and more group-oriented motives.

And the same goes for our institutions, which are often acting out secret agendas alongside the accepted and better sounding official agendas. Another quote from the book:

“And they aren’t mere mouse-sized motives, scurrying around discreetly in the back recesses of our minds. These are elephant-sized motives large enough to leave footprints in national economic data."

Red Pill or Blue Pill?

It can be disturbing to get into the workings of the mind like this—it is a brutally honest view of human beings and our institutions. It means you have to get rid of the nicer and more prosocial explanations for human behavior and replace it with the hidden selfish motives that actually drive us. And while this might be easy to do on other people, it's quite difficult to do on yourself.

In this way, it is sort of like the choice of taking the red pill or the blue pill in The Matrix. The red pill will wake you up to some of the uglier aspects of human behavior and the blue pill will keep you happily playing along with the social games around you.

I personally tend to prefer honesty over feeling good, which is a challenge because evolution did not design us to be totally honest with ourselves. But even if you take the red pill, it doesn't mean that human beings become selfish liars, end of story. Human beings are complicated and we have many motives for our actions. And many of these motives are altruistic and fueled by love.

This is not necessarily a dark view of humans, just a brutally honest one. But as Robin says in the podcast, we might all have an honesty budget and can only afford to take on some of the red pill. So perhaps you can just dig deeper into the human motives that are relevant to you and your institutions and leave the rest for someone else.

**Click here to watch the Youtube video for this episode**

Timestamps:

[06:36] Origin story of The Elephant in the Brain
[12:36] Why you're not the president or CEO of your mind, but instead the Press Secretary
[14:36] Norms, motives, and cheating
[18:40] The evolutionary arms race between lying and lie detection (Robert Trivers: "Self-deception—hiding the truth from the conscious mind—evolves the better to fool others."
[21:02] Why we collectively look the other way with certain norm violations
[23:36] Signaling, counter signaling, and group bonding exercises like initiation rituals
[32:31] Body language, implicit status moves, and the kayfabe layers of dishonest signals during conversation
[38:14] Can learning about your hidden motives help with self-improvement?
[42:51] Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David, and the anonymous donor
[45:18] The hidden motives behind charity
[50:05] The hidden motives behind our political behavior (the "Do-Right" vs the "Apparatchik")
[55:05] Covid-19 and the politicization of mask-wearing
[59:52] Why institutions secretly support our faults
[01:02:02] What do we do about the elephant in the brain and the elephant in the institutional design?
[01:08:50] Why it's important to have an honesty budget

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