Elephant In the Brain

Robin Hanson, Kevin Simmler

Chapter 2

• Two broad feedback mechanisms are highlighted for the development of our big brains.
  • Ecological challenges: warding off predators, hunting game, domesticating fire, finding food etc. incentivise cooperation.
  • Social challenges: competition for mates and social status, coalition politics, deception. Pitting ourselves against eachother essentially. A competitive, at times destructive feedback.
• Social Brain Hypothesis.
• The parable of the Redwood is used to describe how humans look like Redwoods in a big open field.
  • A forest is an intensely competitive place, and sunlight a scarce but important resource.
  • And even if you’re a redwood, the tallest of all tree species, you still have to worry about getting enough sun because you’re in a forest of other redwoods.
  • source: https://meltingasphalt.com/parable-of-the-redwoods
• There are ‘games’ we play that generate this sense of competition, mainly around sex, or the need to reproduce.

Social Status

• Generally where you rank in society.
• Determines how people in your group treat you.
• Two main types:
  • Dominance: governed by avoidance and fear.
  • Prestige: governed by admiration.
• Prestige is much less competitive, much more subtle.
• Can also think of prestige as your “price” on the market for friendship and association. Driven by supply and demand.

Chapter 3

• ”Unlike the rest of nature, we can sometimes see ahead and coordinate to avoid unnecessary competition."
• "We’re occasionally able to turn wasteful competition into productive cooperation.”
• This is where the example of the freeloading with the fisher tribe is used. Hanson makes a good point that the same way we might shout at the villagers: “just say no! ”, why don’t we just let it go when someone cuts you in line?
• “norms are rules or standards about how members of a community should behave. They range from loose, informal guidelines, like what to wear to a cocktail party, all the way to explicit, strictly enforced laws”

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• There is a detail of what ‘foragers’ are and how they lived. One of the major characteristics of the forager life was it’s “fierce egalitarianism”.
• This led foragers to be vigilant of those trying to establish a hierarchy, or dominate a group.

• ”Many of the norms that were common among our forager ancestors are by now deeply embedded in human nature. But these aren’t our only norms. Most societies also teach their children norms specific to their society. This ability of societies to adopt differing norms is part of what has let humans spread across the Earth, by adopting norms better suited to each local environment.”

• It’s argued that most animals in not doing something is normally worried about saving their own skin. But in human societies, we’re worried about repercussions from third parties. This is normally the rest of the local group. By breaking a norm, you may not only face the wrath of who you’re being aggressive to, but also everyone else.
• Collective enforcement is considered the essence of maintaining norms.
• This is similar to what Richard Wrangham talks about with coalitions of beta males being key to the development of human societies.

Weapons

• Considered the key factor in driving this coalition aspect to human development.
• They reduce the physical strength gap, but also, with ranged weapons, make it more feasible to gang up and have to take less risk.

Intentions

• Whether you break norms or not is often dictated by your intentions in what you’re doing.
• These are considered norms that are subtle because we’ve kind of created a blind spot about how we explicitly break them.
• These include:
  • Bragging: We need this to show our fitness as a mate, but we discourage very explicit forms of it. More subtle bragging is done through things like charitable donations, sport, art or political correctness.
  • Sucking up: Because it ruins the association signal for people when we don’t know if people actually endorsed that product, or worked hard for that thing.
  • Selfish motives.

There’s an interesting point at the end of this chapter. If norms stifle these fitness displays and overt signalling, how do they help us, help the group? This is where breaking these norms in subtle ways come into play.

Chapter 4

• The notion of ‘common knowledge’, it’s not enough that I know something about something but I need to know everyone else knows that thing about that person too.
• Example of Emperor with no clothes used. The villagers didn’t know that everyone else knew. They were unsure that you ‘knew what I know’.

Discretion

• That for norms to be broken, some element of discretion should be used. Innuendo’s on a date is used as an example.
• The idea being, that you don’t make something explicitly common knowledge.

On these notions of cheating and deception to skirt norms, we also deceive ourselves. Hanson argues that this is not in the old school sense of preserving self-esteem because it doesn’t make sense in terms of the evolutionary reasoning (in that, the map isn’t the territory).

Hanson takes a more game theoretic view. That if ‘ignorance’ or self deception is common knowledge between concerned parties in some game, it can be advantageous. The example used is a game of ‘chicken’ that if one driver takes away his steering wheel, it may be self-defeating but it signals that all other options are closed, the other driver must take the same option (which they most likely will not want to do).

This is from the work of Schelling who writes on mixed motive games. Where agents have some common incentives to cooperate but they also diverge. The self-deception is a winning strategy here when it’s common knowledge between all players.

This jibes with the ‘Slippery Slopes’ stuff from Scott Alexander

This is similar to how I might put my phone on airplane mode from a certain time. The options become slimmer if you can keep that pact. A more extreme version being turning off your phone.

• Why we deceive ourselves, that it’s just more efficient? To just wear the mask long enough that it becomes reality?
• They also put forward this notion that the self preservation systems within us can co-exist in a conflicting way with our consciousness. That you can believe in heaven but still have a fear of death. That we can know and remain ignorant. p.87
• Then we have this notion of rationalising things we do and lying, the examples of getting a coke. Not too sure if these are worth remembering for some larger point.

Just as a general model for looking at most chapters although it’s stated here from the start of the chapter on consumption:

We’re stuck in a rat race. Or to put it in the terms we’ve been using throughout the book, we’re locked in a game of competitive signaling. No matter how fact the economy grows, there remains a limited supply of sex and social status”

I wonder if it’s a notion of reasoning on these general things, how do we falsify these claims? what do we do with the knowledge of them.

More generally, I think it’s looking at things like ‘politics’ and trying to see how you’re contributing to the problem in a sense.