In Succession, Logan Roy takes a good, long look at his children and delivers the most devastating insult in the history of television:

You’re not serious people.

The devastation of this string of words is exceeded only by its mystery. What does it mean to be a “serious” person? What is “seriousness,” anyway?

We seriously need a theory of seriousness.

A serious theory of seriousness

Before we can understand our explanatory quarry, we must first understand its opposite: humorousness. Silliness. Frivolity. The stuff we laugh at and make fun of. What is going on with the unserious? Thankfully, I have a serious answer to that question that I can now share with you.

A serious theory of humorousness

Here’s how I summarize my theory in my academic preprint:

Human social life is filled with coordination problems: passing each other in a hallway, taking turns talking and listening, differentiating the meanings of "hook up with" and "meet up with," gathering at the same time and place, etc. But what happens when we suffer a mix-up—for instance, we get stuck dancing back and forth in the hallway, or I casually mention that I “hooked up” with your mother last night? Here, I argue that such mix-ups posed a significant adaptive problem for our ancestors, disrupting cooperation, damaging reputations, fomenting needless conflict, and destroying valuable relationships. Natural selection favored three solutions to this adaptive problem: 1) a sense of humor (i.e., the ability to detect, anticipate, and avoid mix-ups), 2) mutual laughter in response to humor (which creates common knowledge of the mix-up and defuses its costs), and 3) joking as a hard-to-fake signal of one’s ability to detect and avoid mix-ups (and thus one’s value as a coordination partner).

We can think of our social interactions as little games. Most of these games are coordination games, where we mutually benefit from aligning our behaviors, roles, and intentions. For example, passing each other in a hallway can be represented with the following payoff matrix:

Now what happens if we continually bump into each other, or teeter back and forth for all eternity? Well, we laugh. The more times we shimmy back and forth, the harder we laugh. This is a major clue to the evolutionary function of laughter.

Of course, most of the coordination games we play are linguistic. We can think of language as a massive coordination game—a game we are playing right now—where we have all agreed on which symbols correspond to which things in the world. If we fail to coordinate, mixing up our words or intentions, we fail to communicate—a kind of verbal collision or linguistic misalignment. Here’s an example of one of our language games, where the shared goal is to use “LOL” to mean the same thing:

There are many other examples of this sort of thing, but the most famous one that comes to mind is from the Abbot and Costello routine Who’s on First? Abbot is using “who” to inquire about the identity of the person on first base, while Costello is using “Who” to refer to the name of the player on first base. Hilarity ensues.

What do we do when we become aware of such miscommunications? We laugh. The more fury and frustration is caused by the linguistic pratfall, the harder we laugh, as evidenced by the enduring hilarity of Who’s on First?

So the sense of humor is the sense of potential or actual coordination failures—a perceptual organ tuned to the norms, roles, signals, and conventions of the social and linguistic world, and how they might be flubbed, flouted, fumbled, bungled, or lost in translation. The costlier and more confusable the mix-up, the louder and longer we laugh to signal that we know (that the other person knows that we know) that it was erroneous, accidental, or… unserious.

Hmm… unserious. Now we’re getting somewhere. You see, laughter signals that we are not treating our failed communication as actual communication—that we are viewing the misalignment as a kind of “play” behavior of no real consequence. This allows us to smooth things over and keep the peace if you inadvertently say you “hooked up with” my mother. Laughter signals that we are not going to feel mad, scared, resentful, or guilty about the coordination failure. All of our potentially negative reactions are going to be turned off or erased from the public record.

As I put it in the paper:

Many animals have play signals that they use to differentiate play interactions from real interactions. Cetaceans use an open-mouth display (Maglieri et al., 2024), kea parrots use a warble (Schwing et al., 2017), canids use a bow (Bekoff, 1995), and rats use 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations (Kisko et al., 2015). More relevant to our purposes, chimpanzees use a panting sound, uncannily reminiscent of human laughter, during bouts of tickling, chasing, or rough-and-tumble play (Matsusaka, 2004). If we could translate this panting sound into words, it might be something like: “I understand that this is play aggression and not real aggression. I am not mad at you or afraid of you.”

The panting sound is thus a kind of mix-up signal. It is designed to prevent or avoid mix-ups between play and non-play behavior. It is designed to keep play fights from descending into real fights, or play chases from descending into real chases. It is therefore an ideal message to send in the event of a faux pas, misunderstanding, miscommunication, or Freudian slip.

For example, if you have a favorite author, say Alexandre Dumas, and I accidentally refer to him as Alexandre “Dumbass,” we might laugh together to create common knowledge that “Dumbass” is not his name, that I mispronounced it by accident, that we both know this (and know that we both know this), that you’re not offended by the mispronunciation, and that I know (that you know that I know) that all is well in our relationship—no harm, no foul—and we can continue communicating about the French novelist as before.

To take another example, let’s say you accidentally say “LOL” in a funeral text thread, thinking it meant “lots of love.” Funny isn’t it? If we become aware of that semantic fumble, we could emit the primate panting sound and send the ideal message to each other: “We are treating this as play communication and not real communication. We are not taking it seriously. No damage has been done to our relationship.” The costlier the mix-up would have been if it went unnoticed, the more time we might spend reciprocating the play signal, and the more rewarding it should feel when we do that.

Here’s how I describe the mechanics of it:

We can think of the costliness, confusability, and mutual recognition of a mix-up as inputs into an emotional system: mirth or amusement—a system that likely overlaps with neural systems for play (Panksepp et al., 1984). The outputs of mirth might include: 1) an urge to laugh, 2) a heightened sensitivity to others’ laughter, 3) a motivation to reciprocate others’ laughter to the degree that it is sensed, matching the observed intensity, 4) feelings of reward in proportion to the magnitude of the costs defused by the reciprocally emerging laughter, as well as in proportion to the updated value of the coordination partnership, and 5) a deactivation of emotions that process costs, to ensure that the (potential) costs are not incurred or represented by either party, and that the process of common knowledge generation is not disrupted.

This last output is especially important, because we cannot successfully smooth things over if there is any observable fear, anger, or regret in either one of us. To display even a hint of these emotions—or to sense them in the other person—is to stoke doubts about whether you know that I know (that you know) that things have truly been smoothed over.

If mirth is well-designed, it should prevent illusory dangers from sending either party into a panic or meta-panic; it should prevent illusory transgressions (e.g., “hooking up with” my mother) from devolving into brawls; and it should prevent illusory insensitivities (e.g., “laughing out loud” at the death of a loved one) from destroying relationships. It should ensure that one does not regret a mistake that was never made or respond to a pat on the back with a roundhouse kick.

Unfortunately, pulling this off is a formidable cognitive challenge, a point I spell out in the paper:

Represented costs spread through the brain like wildfire (Sznycer & Lukaszewski, 2019; Sznycer, 2022), making their mutual defusal a difficult adaptive problem. It is often unclear what all the relevant costs to any mix-up might be (e.g., relational, reputational, physical, hygienic, economic), or all the relevant emotions the costs might feed into. A perceived insult could trigger anger, shame, guilt, sadness, regret, disgust, and fear in either the insulted party, the victim, or third parties, depending on the nature of the insult and its social context—and on what actions or events might be expected to follow from it. Insofar as mirth is well-designed, it might produce a general deactivation of emotions that process costs, in order to stop the wildfire of negative representations from spreading throughout the brain and disrupting the process of mutual cost defusal.

Another thing mirth should do is invert the cost of the mix-up insofar as it is being successfully defused or smoothed over. A larger fitness cost avoided is a larger fitness benefit gained. If the mix-up would have destroyed our relationship, then sensing it and smoothing it over would be analogous to the joy of reuniting with a loved one. It might also be rewarding for its information value: it might be an important mix-up to remember, laugh about with other people, and avoid in the future. “Good job for noticing this,” evolution might say.

The smoothing over should also be rewarding if it enhances, or honestly signals, our ability to coordinate with each other. If the mix-up would have gone unnoticed, or foolishly taken seriously, by less suitable partners, the smoothing over should make us realize how simpatico we are—or how good we are at coordinating with each other—adding additional positive vibes to the laughter. “This is an especially good social partner—keep hanging out with this one,” evolution might say.

Why mirth can be creepy

There are countless examples of laughter coming off as threatening or eerie. You see it in the cackling witch, the creepy doll, the scary clown, the Smile film series, the ‘muahaha’ of the supervillain, and the laughter that fills the halls of Arkham Asylum. But given that the function of mirth is to smooth things over in light of a mix-up, it is unclear why such a function would come off as creepy to other people. Wouldn’t it be comforting?

No, it wouldn’t. Since mirth deactivates emotions that process costs, to stop the “wildfire of negative representations” from spreading throughout the brain, it temporarily numbs us to the horrors of life. It desensitizes us to danger, threats, and angry outbursts. As I put it in the paper:

Mirth can transform a person into something rather frightening. It may deactivate their fear, making them impossible to threaten or deter. It may deactivate their empathy for others’ plights, transforming others’ suffering into a joke. Scowls of disapproval would be all but invisible. Threats of punishment and cries for help would fall on deaf ears. It is nearly impossible to get through to a mirthful individual or negotiate with them for better treatment. The only thing they can do is laugh in our faces.

This might explain why mirth can, if one is not sharing it, feel hostile, creepy, or even terrifying. The best example of the menacing nature of mirth comes from the character of the Joker in The Dark Knight, whose mirthful disposition conveys a sense of fearlessness and heartlessness: he cannot be bought, reasoned with, or negotiated with because he takes nothing seriously. He just wants to watch the world burn, unsaddened by—or perversely delighted by—the sight of a world in flames.

And now we have arrived at the payoff we were looking for: insight into the nature of seriousness.

What seriousness is

I can do no better than quote my paper again, so here it is, my serious theory of seriousness:

We can think of the phenomenology of seriousness as the opposite of mirthfulness—a state in which social or physical costs, either potential or actual, are being carefully attended to. If I’m angry with you, then you need to process the costs that I’m threatening to inflict on you (Sell et al., 2017). If something terrible has happened, we need to take that seriously and figure out what to do about it. To take something seriously is to devote non-mirthful attention to it—to be sensitive to its actual or potential costs.

But then what is a ‘serious person?’ It is a person who demands non-mirthful attention—a person who can inflict costs on others, either directly, through reputational or physical attacks, or indirectly, by withholding valuable knowledge or resources. A serious person is someone whose interests must be respected, whose threats must be heeded, whose absence is greatly felt. In the show Succession, Logan Roy tells his children they are not serious people. We can now see why his words cut so deep.

And we can also see why humor is so often political. To laugh at something is to not take it seriously—to turn off our fear in the face of a threat, our anger in the face of a provocation, or our empathy in the face of a suffering victim. Politics revolves around what we ought to take seriously as a society—what problems we must work together to solve—and mirth turns these problems into jokes. Authority is maintained by stern threats of punishment and disapproval, and mirth deflates it like a whoopie cushion. Politicians wield negative emotions as political weapons, and mirth leaves them weaponless. It is therefore unsurprising that people with stronger moral identities are less able to appreciate humor and generate jokes (Yam et al., 2019).

So we’ve arrived at our destination. We began with the greatest insult in the history of television, and now we have an explanation of its deeper meaning and even its evolutionary history. The nature of seriousness is just one of the many insights you can find in my paper, including explanations of absurdism, embarrassment, cringe, slapstick, comic timing, and why romance and comedy go together. I hope you take it seriously.

Imagine you’re one of our hunter gatherer ancestors. You’ve just fulfilled your deepest desire: you’ve climbed to the top of the social hierarchy. Will you be satisfied?

Nope. People envy those at the top. They seek every opportunity to tear them down. No matter how nice you are to everyone, someone will be jealous. People may be conspiring against you at this very moment. You should not be satisfied until everyone loves you.

Okay, let’s say everyone loves you. Will you be satisfied?

Nope. Their love is conditional—and precarious. One wrong move and you could fall from their graces, losing everything you worked so hard to achieve. You won’t be satisfied until everyone loves you unconditionally.

Okay, let’s say everyone loves you unconditionally. Will you be satisfied?

Nope. How do you know they love you unconditionally? Are you 100% certain? They could be faking it. They could be secretly plotting your demise behind their wooden smiles. The only way to be satisfied is if they prove their undying devotion to you with costly rituals, flattery competitions, and conspicuous self-flagellation.

Okay, let’s say they do all that stuff. Surely now you will be satisfied, right?

Nope. What about that other tribe over there? They love their leader unconditionally too, and they think their leader is better than you. Maybe their group is plotting the demise of your group. The only way you can be satisfied is if you conquer them and force them to pledge their fealty to you.

Okay let’s say you conquer them and force them to pledge their fealty to you. Now will you be satisfied?

Nope. What about all the other groups out there? There’s more than two groups in the world. What if all those other guys are plotting your demise? To be truly satisfied, you must rule the world.

Okay let’s say you rule the world (and you’ve now gotten as far as about .000000000000001% of all humans that have ever existed). Wow. If there’s anything that can satisfy a human primate, this has got to be it. Are you satisfied?

Nope. Now you’ve got a bunch of different subordinate groups that need to prove their loyalty to you. And much more fertile soil for rebellion to flower. Kicking back and relaxing is no longer an option for you. Maintaining your power is a full-time job—and a very stressful one at that. Plus you’re getting old and people are starting to wonder who will succeed you. You’ve got to make sure your progeny will reap the fruits of your conquest. And you’ve got to protect your historical legacy, which could be destroyed at any moment by heretics and dissidents. People are starting to question whether you’re getting too old—whether you still have what it takes. Will you slip up? Will you be killed in your sleep? Can you afford to close your eyes at night?

So yea, you’re definitely not satisfied. After ascending further up the ladder of desire than basically any human that has ever existed, you are now a nervous wreck, with no end to the desiring in sight.

The hamster wheel of being alive

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but most of our desires are like this. From mating to parenting to skill mastery, there is no end to the desiring in sight—or at least, no end that makes sense from a Darwinian perspective. You can always go further, you can always get more—more more more—and the further you go, and the better you get, the more you have to worry about sliding back to where you started, or getting bested by your more formidable tier of competitors.

More status means more pressure, higher standards, and higher expectations from your adoring fans. More kids means more messes to clean up and lunches to pack and conflicts to resolve. More power means more stress to endure and decisions to make and harsher penalties for making the wrong ones.

It gets worse. Desires are like weeds that grow back thicker and heartier once killed. After all, getting what you want doesn’t mean you should stop wanting that thing. More often, it means the opposite: you should want it more.

Think of a business. If profits are booming and customers are waiting in line for hours for your product, is that the time to downsize and scale back production? No, that’s the time to expand, hire, and scale up. The boom in profits is a sign that things are going well and you need to invest more in the business—not less.

Research by Cameron Anderson and colleagues shows that high-status people are more obsessed with status than low-status people, and the causal arrow goes from status to status obsession. Which makes sense, given that high-status people are in the social equivalent of a booming business with customers waiting in line for hours, and evolution has given them a powerful urge to ramp up their investments.

The lesson is clear enough in the case of drug addiction. Generously helping yourself to cocaine will not reduce your desire for cocaine; it will increase it. Smoking a ton of cigarettes will not satisfy your craving for nicotine; it will intensify it. What is true about addiction may apply to human motivation more broadly, albeit applied to less pathological targets.

If you eat lots of yummy food, your desire for yummy food will not wane. No, you will turn into a foodie and seek the finest wines and the tenderest Wagyu beef. If you watch lots of great movies, your desire for great movies will not diminish. No, you will become a film snob and watch 7-hour black-and-white films about the collapse of a farming collective in post-communist Hungary.

Nassim Taleb talks about how some things are “antifragile,” where the more you damage them, the stronger they get. Well, many of our desires are “antisatisfiable.” The more you satisfy them, the harder it becomes to satisfy them.

So the nightmare of the human condition is even more horrifying than the Buddhists imagined. It’s not merely that our striving is futile—that satisfaction is fleeting. It’s that satisfaction often makes matters worse. It gives birth to new desires that are even more powerful and persnickety than the ones that came before.

The takeaway

I’d love to leave you with some lesson like “embrace Buddhist teachings and shun all craving and desire” or whatever, but I don’t think that’s possible. I agree with Will Storr that Buddhism is, in practice, just another kind of status game. I’m not sure there’s any way out of it all except death.

So why am I bumming you out with this stuff? Aside from the fact that I think it’s true and interesting, it’s helpful. It protects you from being manipulated. The next time some propagandist is trying to sell you a vision of utopia, you might remember this post and realize that utopia is bullshit. The next time some self-help guru is trying to sell you a vision of nirvana—some trick to finally being satisfied—you might remember this post and realize the guru is full of shit.

The illusion that the arc of desire bends toward satisfaction, just out of reach, just beyond the horizon, is not only a trick of the light; it’s the chief weapon in the bullshitter’s arsenal. It’s their ultimate bargaining chip—the biggest carrot they can dangle in front of you. The bullshitter can trick you into thinking they have the satisfaction you’re seeking, the end to all your striving and thrashing and flailing, if only you’ll purchase their introductory package or join their cult.

The knowledge that nobody actually wants to be happy and all we really want is to run on a hamster wheel until we die of exhaustion—that knowledge is a kind of bullshit-protective armor. It’s a heavy weight to carry, yes, but it keeps you safe.

Besides, I find it kind of comforting. When I hold it in my mind, I feel a wave of relaxation wash over me, a kind of letting go, plus a chuckle at how absurd it all is. I realize that I no longer have to worry that I’m missing out on some secret to eternal bliss, some shimmering fountain of joy that everyone is frolicking in but me. I no longer have to feel envy—or at least, not as much of it. It might seem like other people have totally made it and they’re just swimming in awesome vibes all the time. But no, in all likelihood they’re running just as fast as I am on the treadmill to nowhere.

Yea, life is beautiful and every moment is precious or whatever, but there’s another side of the story you almost never hear: most of life is pretty stressful, mediocre, and unsatisfying, and then you die.

It’s kind of funny when you think about it, in a dark sort of way. And also… miraculous. We are, perhaps, the only animal in the history of life on earth to realize that we will never be satisfied.

Politics is not about policy.

Charity is not about helping.

Art is not about insight.

Education is not about learning.

So writes the economist Robin Hanson in one of his most famous blog posts, which formed the basis for his and Kevin Simler’s popular book and monument to soul-crushing cynicism: The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.

Now you may be wondering: if politics, charity, art, and education aren’t about policy, helping, insight, and learning, then what are they about? According to Hanson and Simler, they’re about signaling. Politics is about signaling tribal affiliation, charity is about signaling virtue, art is about signaling upper-class shibboleths, and education is about signaling intelligence, work ethic, and rule-following ability to elite employers. The implications are soul-crushing: politics is mostly bullshit, dogooding is mostly a morality pageant, art is mostly an upper-class circle jerk, and the education system is a gargantuan waste of time and money.

Needless to say, not everyone is on board with these ideas. Some people throw Hanson a bone—they’ll admit that some things are about posturing and grandstanding—but they’ll say Hanson is too monomaniacal about it, brandishing his hammer of signaling and mistaking everything for a nail. I remember a discussion with Hanson where someone from the audience was curious about the extent of his monomania: “How much of human behavior do you think is signaling?” Hanson’s response: “90%.” There was a tumult in the audience and a “wow” from the questioner.

My goal in this post is to convince you that Hanson’s crazy-sounding response is not actually crazy. In fact, if you think signaling explains anything less than 60% of the human condition, then I’m afraid you are the crazy one. Hanson may be wrong about the details of his particular signaling hypotheses, but he’s right about the enormous importance of signaling in human life. So if you wish to acquire Hanson’s Soul-Crushing Hammer of Signaling (coming soon to World of Warcraft), it won’t be that hard for you. All you’ll have to do is accept three very plausible, empirically well-supported claims:

1) Humans are extremely judgy.

We judge each other on how much a lip is quivering, whether a bead of sweat is visible, or how much an eyebrow is arched. We judge each other on our tone of voice, dialect, decibel-level, phrases-per-minute, and specific word choices—e.g., whether someone said “go to the bathroom” or “take a shit.” We judge each other on body language, wardrobe, accessories, gesticulations, opinions, hobbies, muscle tone, thinness, face shape, masculinity, and femininity. Consumption patterns surrounding food, news, books, politics, music, movies, and home decor are all grist for the mill of our hyper-judgy minds. Social calculations are constantly feeding into assessments of intelligence, generosity, sensitivity, trustworthiness, manipulativeness, awkwardness, virtue, dominance, class, subculture, work ethic, athleticism, conformity, cleanliness, sense of humor, emotional stability, authenticity, maturity, outdoorsiness, and, ironically, judginess.

2) Humans care deeply about how others judge them.

All these micro-judgments feed into macro-judgments of a person’s relative desirability as a social partner, which in turn add up to a person’s social status, which we can think of as common knowledge of a person’s relative desirability as a social partner and its political implications. Social status is a currency that can buy you nearly anything you want, which explains why it is the single most important thing to humans aside from oxygen. As I put it in my recent academic paper:

There is abundant empirical evidence that status is a basic human need—one of our most powerful motives (Anderson et al., 2015; Storr, 2021; Sznycer et al., 2017; von Rueden, 2024). We endure costly trials and tribulations to win the esteem of our peers, from religious rites to yam-growing contests to death-defying risks (Storr, 2021). Across cultures, feelings of pride and shame are exquisitely sensitive to others’ approval, accurately tracking the judgments of local audiences (Sznycer et al., 2017, 2018). Social rank is correlated with reproductive success among a wide variety of mammalian and primate species, including humans, suggesting that status-seeking is a deep part of our evolutionary heritage (Cowlishaw & Dunbar, 1991; Ellis, 1995; Huchard & Lukas, 2022; von Rueden & Jaeggi, 2016).

History is littered with examples of tyrants and monarchs pushing their countries to war to defend their status or posture as an alpha male, and with young men dying on the battlefield to prove their valor and piety to their peers. In honor cultures, people kill themselves or their family members to avoid humiliation, and to prevent the social stain from tarnishing the rest of the family. Research by Andrew Vonasch and colleagues reveals that many people in the western world would rather cut off a limb, rot in a jail cell, or literally die than be seen as a nazi or child molester. We kill for status. We die for status. Sometimes, we do both at the same time.

3) Humans are extremely good at getting inside each other’s heads.

Psychologists call this ability “mind reading.” The reason they call it that is to convey how magical it really is. Our mind reading powers may be the clearest example of something that truly separates humanity from the animals. We can deftly figure out each other’s feelings, desires, intentions, hopes, doubts, beliefs, suspicions, plans, resentments, discomforts, irritations, pleasures, pains, attractions, and embarrassments. We can do this effortlessly and without even thinking about it. And the most impressive thing we can do is turducken these simulated mental states inside of other mental states, judging Bob for what he thinks about Mary’s feelings about his plans. We can anticipate how others will judge us if they realize that we were trying to impress them, and we can awkwardly avoid calling attention to something when everyone knows it—but doesn’t yet know that everyone knows it. Psychologists call this ability “recursive mind reading,” because mental states are embedded inside of other mental states like Russian dolls. Studies show that humans are capable of ascending to seven levels of recursive mind reading.

The tripartite foundations of signaling

As soon as you put these three claims together, the force of logic comes crashing down on you. Humans have: 1) a powerful motive to signal (i.e., their urge to gain status), 2) a powerful means to signal (i.e., their spectacular mind reading powers), and 3) a vast number of opportunities to signal, roughly equal to the number of ways they are judged by their hyper-judgy peers.

So what happens when Prometheus gives humans the power to read others’ minds at multiple levels? Well, a whole vista of other people’s micro-judgments and macro-judgments opens up before their eyes, including a dizzying array of judgments about thoughts about feelings about plans. These humans can now predict how an audience will judge them for anything they might say, do, or refrain from doing. And since audiences judge them in a variety of byzantine ways (claim 1), and since humans care deeply about how audiences judge them (claim 2), humans will inevitably contort their words, deeds, and appearances to shape their audience’s judgments in their favor, as surely as objects fall to the earth when dropped.

Humans have a filter in their heads, screening out verboten impulses in nearly every waking moment: the “what will people think” filter. Practically everything we do passes through this filter, even when we’re in the privacy of our own homes or in an anonymous situation. In a nosey species like ours, few things are truly anonymous, and besides, even truly anonymous behaviors leave behind footprints and consequences. These trails of evidence can be leveraged in the future if we are put on the stand to defend our character. “But I really do donate to charity—look, here are the receipts!”

When we contort our behavior to win others’ admiration, or to avoid others’ disdain, that is called “signaling.” There is no other word for it. Remember: a signal is just an attempt to convey information to others, typically about oneself or one’s mental states. The information doesn’t need to reach anybody. The information doesn’t need to have the intended effect. All that is required is the hope, however much in vain, that the information will be received by someone, somewhere, at some time.1

Let’s take a concrete example: outdoorsiness. If we judge each other on this trait, then we will naturally get inside each others’ heads and realize that we are going to be judged on this trait. If outdoorsiness is good, then we’ll feel an urge to mention our camping trip and talk about the beautiful hike we went on. If outdoorsiness is bad, then we’ll feel an urge to complain about how dirty and mosquito-infested the world is. These behaviors are signals. Even the choice to not mention your camping trip counts as a signal in the technical sense, because it is an attempt to convey information—“I’m not outdoorsy”—to your hyper-judgy peers. It’s analogous to the signal that a stick bug sends to its predators:

Now take that lesson from outdoorsiness and apply it to every other micro and macro-trait we judge each other on. Once you do that, you will see that there is a causal pathway from 1) judging others on a trait to 2) getting inside others’ heads and realizing that they will judge us on that trait to 3) trying to signal that trait to others to 4) getting inside others’ heads and realizing that they will judge us for trying to signal that trait to them to 5) trying to signal that we are not trying to signal that trait to them (even if we are). This mind-bendingly paradoxical process generates a lot of the volatile stuff we call “culture,” and it gives a major strategic advantage to socially skillful people who can pull off all the mental gymnastics. One implication is something like a law of signaling:

The number of ways people signal in a culture is roughly equivalent to the number of ways humans judge each other in that culture, multiplied by the number of ways these judgments are recursively embedded inside other mental states and anticipated by other recursive mind readers.

So yea, the idea that signaling pervades human behavior, underlying most of what we do, is plausible. The idea that we have a “what will people think” filter installed in our brains, through which nearly all our behaviors pass—and which, in the process, transforms nearly all our behaviors into signals—is plausible. Let’s call this plausible view the signaling view.

People don’t like the signaling view. It’s icky and cynical. Isn’t education about the quest for knowledge and wisdom? Isn’t philanthropy about helping the needy? Isn’t politics about advocating for policies that promote the national welfare? To reduce these activities to peacocking is to imply that we’re all a bunch of vainglorious assholes—that nothing is sacred.

Whenever I suggest a signaling explanation for some behavior, particularly a behavior we all engage in, I can see people squirm. And because I’m a human who’s good at mind reading, I know what the squirming means. The ironic result is that I usually don’t talk about icky signaling stuff in polite company. I save it for my cynical blog.

If you’re one of those people who’s icked out by the signaling view, I have good news for you: there is a way to accept that signaling pervades human behavior without being extremely cynical at the same time (though you’ll still have to be moderately cynical). The way to do it is by acknowledging an underappreciated truth: most signaling is defensive.

Why most signaling is defensive

What is a defensive signal? It’s a signal designed to avoid looking inferior to your peers—e.g., dumber, meaner, thirstier, less devoted to the tribe, etc. It’s designed to avoid our worst nightmare: a descent to the bottom of the social ladder. The content of a defensive signal might be: “I’m not an idiot,” “I don’t endorse any racist stereotypes,” “I’m not a closet conservative,” “I’m not a vainglorious asshole,” or “I’m not engaging in offensive signaling.”

Which brings to me offensive signals, the things designed to make you look superior to your peers—e.g., smarter, wiser, nobler, more enlightened, more devoted to the tribe, etc. They’re designed to help you fulfill your greatest fantasy: ascending to the top of the social ladder, even if it means climbing over other people. Their content might be: “I’m the coolest person in the room,” “I’m sooo virtuous,” “I’m much more progressive than you,” and “I know lots of obscure stuff you don’t know.”

People who send offensive signals are, well, offensive. They’re trying to make us look bad—to step on us, insult us, or upstage us. We don’t like offensive signalers for the same reason we don’t like status-seekers; we see them as vain and self-absorbed. And we’re not wrong: people who more eagerly send offensive signals probably are more vain and self-absorbed. Our judgments tend to be pretty accurate.

But defensive signalers are, well, inoffensive. If you’re sending a defensive signal, you’re not trying to outdo me; you’re just trying to protect yourself. If you’re trying to hide your shortcomings, you’re not trying to diss me; you’re just trying to avoid shame, exclusion, and embarrassment. Defensive signalers are more sympathetic. We often feel sorry for them, and we can more easily relate to them.

When I write cynical blog posts about how signaling motives explain advice or deepities or philosturbation about the meaning of life, people often assume I’m only referring to offensive signals, as if defensive signals didn’t exist as a category. Then they draw the wrong lesson, namely that the world is more vain and narcissistic than it appears—that there are more egomaniacs out there than they thought. Please don’t draw that lesson. There are roughly as many egomaniacs as you thought there were.

The best defense is good offense

Unfortunately, offensive and defensive signals are hard to tell apart. If I want to avoid getting shamed, blamed, or ganged up on, it’s not enough for me to avoid looking dumb or mean or conservative: I might have to positively show that I’m smart or virtuous or progressive. If we’re in the middle of a witch hunt, for example, it is not enough for me to send the defensive signal: “I’m not a witch.” I might have to throw in a bit of offense too: “I hate witches, and I think my neighbor is one of them.”

Another nuance is that people will often try to pass off their offensive signals as defensive signals, precisely because defensive signals are less threatening and more sympathetic. “I wasn’t trying to insult you—I was just feeling insecure about myself!” This excuse allows offenders to continue their offending under a veil of self-defense, not unlike countries that go to war on false pretenses.

Even trickier, defensive signals often hide in the darkness like terrified mice. People have good reason to conceal their defensiveness, not merely because saying “I’m not racist” makes you wonder whether I’m racist, but because defensive signaling is a valid cue of low status. People who are low-status, or who are afraid of becoming low-status, rarely want to reveal that fact to other people.

Giving defense its due

But even though the difference between offense and defense is hard to discern, it seems like an important distinction. At the very least, it seems to match my personal experience. From the inside, it feels like my dogooding and charitable donations are driven more by a fear of being a bad person than from an ambition to be holier than thou. In the theatre of my imagination, I’m more compelled to imagine people shouting “Boo, David!” than a crowd of people cheering my name. I don’t care that much about people thinking I’m Mahatma Gandhi. I’m mainly just trying to avoid looking bad.

I suspect my experience is not that unusual. I’m guessing it feels that way to you too. You’re probably more worried about getting frowned upon than you are hellbent on looking superior. This is part of a general well-replicated pattern with human emotions where bad stuff is more powerful than good stuff. Which makes sense from a Darwinian perspective: just put biological fitness on the y axis and any goodie (food, sex, status) on the x axis, and you will see a curve with diminishing returns and a sharp drop-off at zero. Avoiding that sharp drop-off is the purpose of our negative emotions, which explains why evolution made them more urgent than our positive emotions.

Defensive signaling is also a huge part of our moral discourse. Most moral arguments do not appeal to our desire to be holier than thou, but to our fear of being a bad person. Peter Singer’s famous shallow pond thought experiment—where neglecting to donate to charity is equivalent to callously walking by a drowning child—is the perfect example: it implies that you are just as bad as the psychopath who refuses to ruin his fancy suit to save a child’s life. The shallow pond scenario is effective not because it shows us that we can be better people, but because it shows us that we’re actually bad people. It speaks directly to our worst fear.

A lot of people who favor signaling explanations of human behavior, including Hanson and others, tend to overemphasize the offensive parts and underemphasize the defensive parts, so as to make their explanations more surprising and provocative (we’re all just competing to be interesting after all). I haven’t gone through my blog posts and checked, but I suspect I’m probably guilty of doing that. Okay, I’m almost certainly guilty of doing that. I apologize: I’ll try to do better in the future.

But in my defense, I only had this insight about defensive signaling very recently, so I had no idea I was doing that. It was an honest mistake. How could I be a bad person if I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong? Oh please please please, whatever you do, don’t think I’m a bad person!

Human social life is confusing. For example:

• We try to get status by not caring about status.

• We “bravely” defy social norms so that people will praise us.

• We make “subversive” art that caters to high-status people.

• We don’t care what other people think, and we want them to think that.

• We avoid getting defensive to defend our reputations.

• We rebel against conformity in the same way as everyone else.

• We show humility to prove we’re morally superior.

• We consume anti-consumerism.

• We don’t judge, unlike all those other judgy assholes.

• We avoid being manipulative to get people to do what we want them to do.

• We denounce virtue signalers to show we’re more virtuous than they are.

• We compete to be less competitive than other people.

• We avoid being an attention-seeker so that people will pay attention to us.

• We share unpopular opinions that everyone enthusiastically agrees with.

• We try to look sexy without trying to look sexy.

• We help those in need, regardless of self-interest, because being seen as the type of person who helps those in need, regardless of self-interest, is in our self-interest.

• We make fun of ourselves for being uncool to prove we’re cool.

• We donate to charity anonymously to get credit for not caring about getting credit.

• We help our friends without expecting anything in return, because we know they would do the same for us.

• We show everyone our true, authentic self—not who society wants us to be—because that is who society wants us to be.

All of these statements are examples of what I call “social paradoxes.” Each involves a signal that is concealed from both the signaler and the recipient. The signaler is not aware they’re signaling, and the recipient is not aware they’ve been signaled to. For example:

• The virtue signaler does not see herself as virtue signaling, and neither does the audience who awards her virtue.

• The “brave” norm-violator does not believe he is seeking praise, and neither does the audience who praises him.

• The “authentic” person does not believe she is behaving exactly how society wants her to behave, and neither do the members of society.

• The “rebellious” nonconformist does not see himself as mindlessly conforming to his subculture, and neither does his subculture.

Once we see what the signalers and the recipients fail to see, the paradoxes dissolve. The “subversive” artist is not actually being subversive. The person who “doesn’t care what you think” does, in fact, care what you think. The person who helps you without expecting anything in return does, on some level, expect you to do the same for them. Anonymous donors really do get credit for not caring about getting credit, and getting that credit is often their (unconscious) goal.

If a social paradox were to enter the harsh light of mutual awareness, it would turn to ash like a vampire in daylight. If we saw virtue signalers as virtue signalers, we would not deem them virtuous—quite the opposite. If we saw a status-seeker as a status-seeker, they’d lose the very status they were seeking. If we saw a display of humility as an attempt to look superior, we’d see it for the humblebrag that it was. Our discerning eye creates an incentive for signalers to conceal their signals from us, and even from themselves.

Okay, but what does all this have to do with charisma? Glad you asked.

A paradoxical theory of charisma

People have tried to define “charisma” for centuries, but they’ve mostly failed. It’s almost part of the definition of charisma that it’s hard to define. Charisma is that je ne sais quois that captivates us—that spark that makes us want to befriend, follow, pay attention to, or fall in love with a person.

Charisma is as ineffable as it is powerful. Our politics revolves around which politicians are charismatic and which are not. One of the best ways to capture the machinery of government is to be seen as charismatic by a large enough chunk of the electorate. So understanding what charisma is should be of enormous importance to us as denizens of democracies. We need a theory of charisma.

Well it just so happens I have one, and here it is:

Being charismatic means being good at social paradoxes.

Think about a charismatic person—Elizabeth Holmes, Robert Downey Jr., Bob Dylan, whoever does it for you. What powers do they have? What can they do that we can’t? Well, just go down the list. They can make others think they don’t care what they think. They can gain status without being a status-seeker. They can look sexy without trying to look sexy. They can be the person they truly are—not who society wants them to be—because that is who society wants them to be. They can get credit for not caring about getting credit, create subversive art that caters to social elites, win the competition to be uncompetitive, get showered with praise for defying social norms, and capture our attention without being an attention-seeker.

Charismatic people lie on one end of a continuum, and on the other end of the continuum are the people who suck at social paradoxes. You know, the people who are cringe, pretentious, awkward, thirsty, or fake. The people who desperately care what you think and eagerly seek your praise and attention. The weirdos who share unpopular opinions that are truly unpopular. The thirst trappers who try to be sexy but come off as slutty or insecure. These cringey people seem like the opposite of authentic and cool. All of their social strategies are painfully obvious and poorly concealed, because they don’t know how to conceal them—or don’t know they’re leaking them. Oftentimes, these people interpret our “values” too literally and pursue them too monomaniacally, like the effective altruist who tries to raise money for shrimp welfare instead of running a cancer marathon like a cool person.

When we interact with someone charismatic, we have no sense that they’re trying to impress us or manipulate us in any way. They’re just a pure, bright ball of shimmering authenticity—the epitome of everything we’re looking for in a social partner. They’re not judgy. They’re not insecure or defensive. They’re not trying to be better than us (which, of course, makes them better than us). They’re completely bereft of all the petty bullshit that rules our social lives. Charismatic people are the gold medalists in the convoluted social games we play. Like Viceroy butterflies mimicking Monarch butterflies, they’ve designed their utterances and affectations to optimally mimic the perfect social partner.

Then again, maybe some charismatic people really are the perfect social partner and it’s not a charade. But my hunch is that charisma is just a kind of social competence that is independent of other talents or virtues. In fact, it might be that charismatic people are a bit morally worse than the rest of us, because power corrupts, and charisma is a kind of power. I’m not aware of any research on the moral character of charismatic people, but I am faintly aware of the idea that sociopaths are often charismatic.

In any case, it should be obvious why charismatic people so often become cult leaders: they have social powers beyond the abilities of any normal person. They can manipulate us without being manipulative. They can defend their reputations without getting defensive. It would be shocking if these people didn’t become cult leaders. It’s like they’re carrying around a toolbox labeled: “tools for becoming a cult leader.”

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Why charisma is bullshit

Now you might think that charismatic manipulators would be bad for us. They certainly can be, but there’s something paradoxical about their powers. If they’re good at manipulating us, then they’ll be good at manipulating others. And if they’re good at manipulating others, then they’ll gain a loyal following. They’ll win lots of friends and allies. If we resist their manipulation, or call out their bullshit, then we could end up on their bad side, which means we’ll be on the bad side of their many future friends and allies. That would be bad for us. So we’d better let them manipulate us now—for our own good.

This brings me to an important insight that is underappreciated in evolutionary psychology: deception can be symbiotic. It can simultaneously benefit the deceiver and the deceived. If the deceiver will go on to deceive others, then they will gain lots of status and power, and one of the main things we’re looking for in a social partner is status and power. To be charmed by a charmer or smooth-talked by a smooth-talker can confer an advantage in the social games we play, assuming others are likely to be charmed and smooth-talked as well. It is often more advantageous to agree with others on a falsehood than to know the truth.

But then how do we know that others will get taken in by a person’s magnetism? Well, there’s a good chance that others will get taken in if we ourselves are taken in. Another good sign that others will be charmed by the person is if other people are, well, charmed by the person. In this way, charisma can become self-fulfilling. Some people might have charisma because everyone thinks that everyone else thinks they have charisma.

On the other hand, if we pick up on a person’s status signals, or have the slightest inkling that they’re a phony, then chances are that person is on track to be uncool, which means we should resist their manipulation and reject their advice. The best actors make us forget they’re actors, and charisma works the same way. We’re charmed by the charm itself, entranced by a performance because we forget it’s a performance. This might explain why charisma is so hard to define: we feel drawn to the charismatic person but we don’t know why. Perhaps if we did know why—if we saw through the magic trick—the spell would break, in the same way a social paradox turns to ash in the light of mutual awareness.

In my academic paper on social paradoxes (forthcoming in American Psychologist), I used the example of a nervous wreck who tries to look diligent by neatly combing his hair. But then he anticipates that others will think he’s nervous if he combs his hair too neatly, which would be bad for him because he’s trying to look chill. So he leaves his hair artfully tussled to hide the fact that he’s a nervous wreck. What’s interesting is that his deceptive signal—“I’m chill”—can actually benefit the victims of his deception:

Suppose people who are inclined to engage in all this recursive mind reading—who can anticipate what inferences others will draw about their hair—are socially competent. If so, the deceptive signal of nonchalance would contain a valid cue of social competence. The benefit of the valid cue could outweigh the cost of the deceptive signal, creating a kind of symbiotic deception. The signaler benefits from being favored by the recipient (e.g., for a job or relationship), while the recipient benefits from partnering with a socially competent person—one likely to make a good impression on others. If the benefit of the signaler’s social competence outweighs the cost of his deceptive nonchalance, then both sides profit from the deception.

Charisma is so powerful it can attract us to alluring predators like Ted Bundy and sociopathic “antiheroes” like Walter White or Tony Soprano. We’re drawn to charismatic villains because, deep down, we’re drawn to their status, or the status we expect them to acquire, independently of how many people they’ve murdered. Yea, the murders are awful and that’s ultimately going to outweigh our attraction to them, but the attraction is still there on the scale. It still has weight. People are still beguiled by Ted Bundy’s magnetism (have you seen this guy talk?), even though they know he’s a monster. A woman named Carol Ann Boone fell in love with him while he was on trial for murdering a long list of women. She married him before he was sentenced to death for the third time, believing he was innocent. She gave birth to his child before he was executed. Perhaps if Bundy had escaped the electric chair, he would have added Boone to his long list of victims. Status is so intoxicating we are often helpless to resist it, even if it kills us.

I spend a lot of time with intellectuals—writers, thinkers, social scientists, etc. If I had to sum up their worldview in one sentence, I could hardly do better than this one:

Everything that’s wrong in the world is caused by misunderstanding.

Political polarization? Misunderstanding. If only people could get over their primitive “tribalism” and “confirmation bias,” they could have reasonable discourse and work together to solve humanity’s problems.

Misinformation? Misunderstanding. If only people knew how to “vaccinate” themselves against the “virus” of fake news, they’d stop being such gullible idiots and vote for the Democrats.

Bigotry? Misunderstanding. If only people realized that members of other ethnic groups were normal, decent human beings like them, there would be no bigotry.

Stereotypes? Misunderstanding. If only people knew that stereotypes were false and pernicious, there would be no stereotypes—and no bigotry.

War? Misunderstanding. If only people knew that war is pointless and evil, a product of bigotry and misinformation, there would be world peace.

Capitalism? False consciousness. If only people knew how much greedy corporations were exploiting them, the workers of the world would unite.

Wikipedia’s list of 265 cognitive biases? 265 misunderstandings! If only people joined the rationality movement and memorized these biases in elementary school, humans would conquer the galaxy.

Ineffective altruism? Misunderstanding. If only people knew that slacktivism and virtue signaling accomplish nothing, they’d become utilitarians and donate their money to shrimp welfare or preventing the AI apocalypse.

Unhappiness? Misunderstanding. If only people learned some positive psychology, they’d stop comparing themselves to sexier people on Instagram and start meditating and gratitude journaling.

Ahh, it’s the perfect story. If all the world’s problems are caused by misunderstanding, then that makes intellectuals—the people whose job it is to understand things—the most important people ever. Just by doing what they’re doing, they’re saving the world.

Wow. Intellectuals. Saving the world. Pretty cool thing for intellectuals to believe.

There’s no misunderstanding

Stereotypes are savvy. Our beliefs about religious, ethnic, occupational, and geographic groups are pretty accurate. The accuracy of our stereotypes is one of the most robust and well-replicated findings in psychology. But this fact has been suppressed by psychologists, because they’re terrified of any information that might make them look insufficiently progressive. Also, they hate Republicans, which makes sense because...

Partisan hatred is not a whoopsie. You want to know why partisans hate each other? It’s not because they gave in to a dumb, primitive urge called “tribalism.” It’s not because they had a senior moment and forgot to check for disconfirming evidence of their propaganda. It’s because they’re locked in zero-sum competition over the coercive apparatus of the state—the thing that forcibly puts human beings in prison at gunpoint. The stakes are high. And what do we do in a high-stakes competition? We fight dirty. We demonize the competition. And we deny we’re doing this—and embellish how much the other side is doing it—because denial and embellishment are useful weapons to wield in the fight.

Bigotry is not a brain-fart. A lot of it is intertwined with competition over the coercive apparatus of the state, because ethnic minorities are accurately stereotyped as allies of the Democratic Party (1, 2, 3). So feeling threatened by ethnic minorities is related to feeling threatened by Democrats, in the same way that feeling threatened by Christian fundamentalists is related to feeling threatened by Republicans. As for the rest of bigotry, it probably comes from zero-sum competition over intergroup status. Such competition may be most acute among ethnic minorities’ closest rivals in the social hierarchy—i.e., low-status white people—which might explain why antiracism confers elite status. And it might also explain why antiracist elites resent “millionaires and billionaires”—i.e., their closest rivals in the hierarchy.

“Misinformation” is a moral panic. We have two choices. We can either define “misinformation” broadly as “misleading information,” in which case it encompasses nearly all the information we consume, including the propaganda disseminated by intellectuals allied with the Democratic Party. Or we can define the term narrowly as “fabricated information,” in which case it is neither new, nor pervasive, nor an existential threat (check out Dan Williams on this).

Humans are rational. Most cognitive “biases” aren’t really biases—they’re savvy strategies and heuristics (check out Lionel Page on this). As a matter of fact, the guy who co-discovered most of these “biases,” Daniel Kahneman, said in an interview that learning about them didn’t improve his behavior in any way. He was, tellingly, unmotivated to become more “rational.” Maybe some part of him knew that the biases he discovered were self-serving. Maybe he had an inkling that…

• Confirmation bias helps us win arguments and justify our actions.

• Overconfidence helps us make money, gain status, and convince people that we know what we’re doing even if we don’t.

• Loss aversion (where we try to avoid losses more than pursue gains) helps us make decisions we can better justify to others in a Darwinian world where fitness losses loom larger than fitness gains.

• The spotlight effect (where we overestimate how much others are judging us) is rational in a competitive social marketplace where it’s better to err on the side of caution than suffer the horrors of social exile.

• The sunk cost “fallacy” (where we use sunk costs as a reason for persisting in an activity) is an honest signal of commitment and resolve in the aforementioned social marketplace—a way of saying: “I finish what I start.”

• The endowment effect (where things seem more precious once we own them) is rational if we’re competing for resources and depriving you of the resource makes it more valuable for me.

• The self-serving bias (where we attribute our successes to innate superiority and our failures to others conspiring against us) is, well, self-serving.

• The bias bias (where we think we’re less biased than others) is… also self-serving.

• Positive illusions (where overestimate how bright our future is and how competent we are) is… you know this one.

• The focusing illusion (where we overestimate how happy we’ll feel when we get what we want) is only a problem if we’re pursuing happiness. Which reminds me…

Happiness is bullshit. You want to know why you’re reading my depressing blog instead of meditating or gratitude journaling? Because you don’t actually want to be happy. The pursuit of happiness is just a story we tell ourselves. It’s a way to cover up the ugly things we’re actually pursuing, like status-enhancing opinions, moral superiority, high-status offspring, resources that others are deprived of, and control of the coercive apparatus of the state.

Altruism is effective. Evolutionary biologists have long known that animals do not evolve to care about the good of the species. Instead, they evolve to care about themselves, their families, and their allies. Of course, there is one kind of animal that can talk, called “humans.” Such humans might say they care about higher things like universal love or maximizing the welfare of sentient beings. But pretending to care is different from actually caring, and actions speak louder than words. If “effectiveness” means achieving our actual goals—like displaying our moral superiority or forging political alliances—then our altruism is very effective.

Stated motives vs. actual motives

A lot of intellectuals confuse our stated motives with our actual motives. They confuse our words with our deeds. It’s like mistaking Starbucks’ mission statement—“inspiring and nurturing the human spirit, one person, one cup, one neighborhood at a time”—with its goal of maximizing profit.

It’s easy to see how this could lead to the misunderstanding myth. If we judge ourselves according to our stated goals or “mission statements”—e.g., changing hearts and minds, making the world a better place—then yea, we’re doing a bad job at those things. There’s been a big misunderstanding here.

But if we judge ourselves according to our actual goals—climbing social hierarchies, derogating rivals, dominating people under moralistic pretexts—then we look pretty rational. Because we are. Natural selection made us that way. Show me an animal that has succeeded in surviving and reproducing in a hostile environment for millions of years, and I will show you a rational animal.

The default assumption of every intellectual should be that the human mind is about as well-designed as the hawk’s eye, the bat’s sonar, or the cheetah’s sprint. Unfortunately, intellectuals do not make this assumption. Instead, they assume our species is broken, and they’ve been put on this earth to fix us.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the majority of mainstream social science is engaged in an effort to collect misunderstandings, regardless of whether or not they exist. Social scientists aren’t so much interested in gaining insight into human nature as they are in dunking on the masses, correcting our “biases,” combating “unfounded stereotypes,” bridging divides, designing “interventions” to make us less stupid and bad, putting happy vibes inside our heads, and advancing their political agendas. The best compliment you can give a social scientist about their work is not “Wow, that’s really insightful,” but “Wow, that has major policy implications [i.e., supports the policies I already like].”

Don’t be so cynical

Yes, this is all very cynical, isn’t it? In our culture, cynicism is icky because everyone knows that cynics are meanies. There probably is a correlation between being cynical and being an asshole, and—savvy stereotypers that we are—we've picked up on this correlation. The result is that we spout feel-good, idealistic bullshit to signal that we’re sweeties, and it works.

Unfortunately, all this signaling puts us in a bind. If we can’t blame humanity’s problems on the cynical motives built into our brains by evolution, because that makes us look mean and icky, then what are we supposed to blame humanity’s problems on? Well, there’s a beautiful option available to us: misunderstanding.

You see, it’s not that we’re hierarchical, coalitional, self-deceiving primates—forged in the crucibles of Darwinian natural selection—don’t be so cynical! No, the problem is that other people are biased, ignorant, gullible, weak-willed, and misinformed. They don’t know what’s best for them. They need us to nudge them, raise their consciousness, purge them of misinformation, and teach them who their political enemies are—you know, the people who happen to be our closest rivals in the social hierarchy.

Saving the world, one person, one bias, one misunderstanding at a time

If you’re an intellectual with ambitions to save the world, I think you ought to ask yourself the following questions:

• “What if humans are savvy animals who generally understand what they have an incentive to understand?”

• “What if stupidity is usually strategic?”

• “What if capitalists, bigots, warmongers, virtue signalers, and political extremists understand what they’re doing all too well?”

• “What if advice is mostly bullshit?”

• “What if the primary cause of humanity’s problems is not bad beliefs, but bad motives?”

While reflecting on these questions, you may reach an unpleasant conclusion: there’s nothing you can do. The world doesn’t want to be saved.

Sure, you can tell the politicians they’re “biased,” but at the end of the day, a politician’s job is to win the support of biased voters. Sure, you can tell the voters they’re “biased,” but at the end of the day, the voters have basically no incentive to be unbiased, and strong incentive to parrot their tribe’s propaganda. Sure, you can tell the press about these terrible misunderstandings, but the press will only write about them if it increases their market share of the attention economy. Sure, you can tell the consumers to stop paying attention to attention-grabbing bullshit, but therein lies the problem: they won’t pay attention to you.

If you find yourself in a hole, you can study the hole all you want. You can examine the dirt around you to the last molecule. But no matter how thoroughly you understand the hole, you’ll still be stuck in it. Not every problem has a solution. Some things cannot be fixed. And once you come to the bracing realization that we have no deep desire to fix our broken world, you'll realize that our problem is that we have no problem. What's broken is that nothing is broken. The study of human nature is, all too often, the study of the hole we’re stuck in.

In the end, the only misunderstanding is that there's been a misunderstanding.

According to google, utilitarianism is “the doctrine that an action is right insofar as it promotes happiness, and that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be the guiding principle of conduct.”

Translation: it’s morality for nerds. It’s the kind of ethics you do with math instead of vibes. If you’re trying to decide whether something is ethical, just crunch the numbers: add up the resulting happiness, subtract out the resulting pain, and if the number is positive, congratulations! You’ve calculated the “right” thing to do.

I used to be a utilitarian. You can probably see why it was appealing to me. It felt like a way to cut through all the bullshit—to stop blathering about justice and dignity and start solving equations. It implied that members of my nerdy subculture were morally superior to the masses, uniquely capable of transcending our primitive instincts and grasping the moral truth. We were rational; they were hysterical. We were effective altruists; they were virtue signalers.

But as I got older and wiser in the ways of evolutionary psychology, my confidence in utilitarianism faded, and I eventually abandoned it. Here’s how I changed my mind.

1) Happiness is bullshit

The first step was when I had a counterintuitive insight: humans don’t actually want to be happy. What we call “happiness” is a neural system that reorganizes the brain when there’s a prediction error—when things are bigger, cuter, juicier, or sexier than we expected. Like a “getting warmer” signal, happiness readjusts our expectations so that they’re more accurate the next time around. It rearranges our priorities so that they’re more aligned with how valuable—or worth pursuing—things are in the world. But it’s not the thing we’re pursuing. It’s not what we want.

Instead, we say we want to be happy as a confabulation, and many of us come to believe the confabulation—and even hold it sacred. What we’re pursuing is not good vibes in our heads, but the (often unflattering) things in the world that evolution programmed us to pursue, like sex, status, yummies, moral superiority, and high-status offspring. Instead of revealing the unflattering things we actually want, we say we’re pursuing happiness, because it sounds better.

My theory of happiness was hard to reconcile with utilitarianism. It felt weird to dedicate my life to maximizing something that nobody actually wants. And it’s not merely that we don’t want it: it looks like we’re trying to avoid it. A meta analysis of over 400 studies shows that the frequency and intensity of "positive affect” (i.e., happy or joyful states) steadily declines over one’s entire lifetime, starting at age nine. This makes sense if happiness is triggered by prediction errors: the more we experience the world, the more predictable it becomes. As I wrote in Happiness Is Bullshit, “We’re not pursuing happiness so much as chasing it away.”

So is chasing away happiness, the natural tendency of the human mind, morally wrong? Is the aging process a downward spiral of moral turpitude? Is being in a stable, predictable marriage ethically “worse” than having a wild, unpredictable string of sex partners, because the latter is more filled with prediction errors?

I didn’t know how to answer these questions. Even worse, it didn’t seem like there were “correct” answers.

2) Suffering is useful

The second step was when I started thinking about the evolutionary psychology of suffering. Suffering isn’t a pointless cloud of bad vibes: it’s a mechanism with a function. It evolved by natural selection to help us deal with bad things like injuries, infidelities, and failures. It compels us to avoid making the bad things worse and prevent them from happening again in the future. It’s the opposite of happiness, the “getting colder” signal—the thing that happens when we fall prey to a negative prediction error.

So a world without suffering would be a world where we aimlessly destroy our bodies and relationships, where we carelessly dig ourselves deeper and deeper into all of our problems, and where we stupidly repeat our mistakes over and over again. That doesn’t sound like a utopia. That sounds bad.

Besides, why should we try to get rid of something that most people (or 88% of people, according to this poll) don’t actually want to get rid of? Is it morally right to defy these people’s wishes and pump them full of opiates? Is it morally wrong to take our time with the bad things in life—to fully grieve the loss of our loved ones, to deeply regret the huge mistakes we’ve made—because it prolongs our suffering?

Again, I didn’t know how to answer these questions, and I doubted whether “correct” answers existed.

3) WTF are we even talking about?

After reflecting on 1) and 2), I realized that utilitarians suck at psychology. They have a crappy understanding of what happiness and suffering actually are. At least I’m trying to figure that out. At least I have a testable theory. The problem with utilitarians is that they don’t even try to come up with a testable theory. They just wave their hands and talk about vibes.

I used to have a lot of debates with myself about utilitarianism—inner dialogues where I tried to place the philosophy on a rigorous foundation. Here’s one of these debates, with me and an imaginary friend Util.

ME: So let’s be precise here. What exactly is this “happiness” thing you’re trying to maximize?

UTIL: It’s like, uh… feeling good.

ME: Okay, and what does it mean for a neural system to “feel good?”

UTIL: Well… I guess it’s like a qualia.

ME: Alright. What’s a qualia?

UTIL: It’s a feeling. Like the sensation of redness.

ME: And what makes a neural system a feeling?

UTIL: Nobody knows! It’s a total mystery. I can hardly wrap my head around it myself.

ME: So how do you know it’s real? Like how do you know this qualia thingy exists at all in the way you intuitively understand it?

UTIL: It just really seems like it. When I introspect, I’m like, “Whoa that feels good.”

ME: Okay, so you have a mysterious thingy in your head that seems to “feel good.” And why are we ethically obligated to maximize this thingy?

UTIL: Because it doesn’t just feel good. It is good. Like, intrinsically.

ME: Uh huh. And what does that mean?

UTIL: Like, it has value to the universe.

ME: Okay. And how do you know that?

UTIL: Well it just kind of seems like it.

ME: Uh huh. And how do you know you can lump them together? Like, how do you know your good qualia thingies can be lumped together with my bad qualia thingies to make neutral qualia thingies?

UTIL: It seems like it.

ME: And how do you know there’s a precise number of handjobs that can ethically outweigh a murder?

UTIL: Seems like it.

ME: Let me get this straight: you’re basing your entire ethical philosophy on vibes. On something that’s a total mystery. On a collection of seemings. With no empirical evidence to back any of this up. And no testable theory to describe what the hell you’re talking about.

UTIL: Yea.

ME: Weren’t you utilitarians supposed to be the hardheaded rationalists who were all about “science” and “logic” and avoiding appeals to intuition?

4) Desires don’t work either

At that point, the only way to maintain my utilitarianism was to abandon “hedonic utilitarianism,” the kind that was about happiness and suffering. But it comes in other flavors, like “desire utilitarianism,” where the thing to maximize isn’t happiness but desire satisfaction.

At first, this seemed like a good option. Obviously desires are real—they’re the things that move us—and we have some understanding of how they work. So why not base my ethics on those things? The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that desire utilitarianism was an ethical shit show.

Suppose I’m addicted to oxycontin. The addiction has ruined my life, and it doesn’t even make me feel good anymore because I’ve built up a huge tolerance to it. According to desire utilitarianism, the morally “right” thing to do is to pump me full of oxy. The more the better. In fact, if everyone on the planet got hooked on opiates, and we got robots to endlessly manufacture them for us, that would be a utopia—the pinnacle of human achievement.

The problems don’t end there. At least my opiate addiction doesn’t affect you: I can pop my pills and mind my own business and not bother you at all. But the problem with most of our other desires—the ones evolution gave us—is that they affect you. They affect everyone. What we mainly want is to be better than, or better off than, the people around us, because we’re competitive creatures. In fact if we can pull it off, we’d really like to dominate other people under a moral/religious pretext. That would be really awesome for us.

So the mathematically “best” world, according to desire utilitarianism, is a world where majorities dominate minorities under a moral/religious pretext—you know, the opposite of what we call “moral progress.” Since the majority is satisfied, and majorities are more numerous than minorities, the math comes out looking pretty good. And if we could trick the oppressed minorities into thinking their desires are being satisfied—say, by drugging or lobotomizing them—that would be even better. A moral improvement.

Come to think of it, if we could just trick everyone into thinking their desires were being satisfied—say, by lobotomizing the whole world, or by kidnapping everyone and plugging their brains into a dumb videogame where they’re constantly barraged with “1000 POINTS! GREAT JOB!”—that would be even better. Or if that fails, we can go the Orwellian route and shove propaganda down people’s throats until they love Big Brother and sincerely believe they’re living in a utopia—you know, the opposite message of 1984.

Or wait, maybe we should rethink all this and declare, based on nothing, that what matters is objective desire satisfaction in the world outside our heads, regardless of whether anyone feels satisfied. In that case, we’d be obligated to satisfy the racist, sexist desires of our ancestors—or reach some sort of moral compromise with them—even though they’re dead and feel nothing.

Lots of fun options here.

5) Do utilitarians even exist?

The more I thought about what morality is and how it evolved, the more I realized there is no way our actual moral intuitions are utilitarian. Utilitarian morals are unevolvable.

Organisms do not evolve to act for the good of the species. They evolve to act for the good of the genes that constructed them and against the genes that constructed their rivals. Or at least, we are more likely to be descended from such organisms—more likely to carry their genes inside us than the genes of their outcompeted rivals. As I’ve written about before, a proper understanding of genetic selfishness should make us more cynical about human nature—and especially human morality.

Utilitarianism cannot survive such cynicism. Any organism that was driven to maximize the happiness of all sentient beings, with no partiality toward itself, its kin, or its allies, would be a Darwinian dead-end. Our deepest values are not—and could not possibly be—utilitarian.

So when people tried to claim that utilitarianism fit all their moral intuitions perfectly, I realized they must be bullshitting. They were pretending to have values they did not have—or at least, not deep down.

This became especially apparent to me after reflecting on all the hypothetical scenarios that philosophers dreamt up to attack utilitarianism. You’re probably familiar with some of them. The “utility monster” that gains more happiness from eating your children than they get from being alive. The “trolley problem” where you can violently hurl a fat man’s body in front of a runaway trolley, killing him to save the lives of five other people in the trolley’s path. The doctor who kills you and harvests your organs to save the lives of five other patients in need of transplants. The list goes on.

If you present a utilitarian with any one of these moral “gotchas,” they’ll nearly always try to wriggle out of it. “You didn’t imagine the scenario right,” they’ll say. Or: “The scenario doesn’t count because it would never happen in real life.” Or: “Even if it would happen in real life, there are all these other considerations [insert tons of frantic hand-waving] that aren’t in the scenario that would still make it wrong.”

I’m not even disagreeing with the frantic hand-waving. Maybe some of it is cogent. But the fact that utilitarians are waving their hands—desperately trying to wriggle out of these moral gotchas—reveals that their intuitions aren’t really utilitarian. If they were, there would be nothing to wriggle out of. “Yea, of course I’d throw my children into the utility monster’s mouth. It’s obviously the right thing to do.”

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7) In denial of human nature

At this point, the utilitarian might reply, “Fine, maybe my intuitions aren’t really utilitarian deep down. Forget about my intuitions then! They’re dumb, they’re primitive caveman instincts, let’s abandon them in favor of the utilitarian calculations.”

That’s all well and good, and it’s a move I considered making. But I ultimately realized it was stupid.

Isn’t utilitarianism also based on intuitions? Like the intuitions about mysterious qualia thingies that neatly aggregate across different people’s minds and have a numerical value to the universe or something? What makes those intuitions better than my other intuitions?

And besides, even if I did want to abandon my other intuitions, how can I explain the Darwinian function of that desire—the desire to abandon my other intuitions? That desire cannot be utilitarian, because such a desire is unevolvable. So it’s probably some kind of status-seeking tactic—a desire to show off how “rational” I am to my nerdy peers. Why is that unflattering desire better than any of my other desires?

Also, do I really think I’m going to get people to abandon their moral convictions in favor of some bullshit calculation I made up? Who do I think I am? If I’m going to make compelling moral arguments to real-life humans who are not in my nerdy subculture, I have to meet them where they are. I have to reckon with human nature, because human nature isn’t utilitarian, and it isn’t going away any time soon. Also, I have to reckon with the human I am, because I’m not going away any time soon. What I ultimately realized was that utilitarians are a bunch of humans pretending they’re not humans to look cool.

In search of a new morality

With utilitarianism out of the picture, what did I replace it with? You might think the answer is nihilism. Nothing matters, morality is a delusion. I did express sympathy with that idea here. And it fits my vibe.

But I’m not a moral nihilist, though I used to be. I waffled between nihilism and utilitarianism for the past five or ten years, switching back and forth between them and occasionally holding on to both at the same time—a kind of nihilistic utilitarianism where “nothing matters but I personally want to maximize utility just because.” Kind of a weird philosophy, I know, but it made sense to me at the time.

But I now have a new ethical worldview I’m more confident about. It’s a kind of moral naturalism. Here’s the gist if you’re curious.

The keys to morality

According to my new view, moral judgments are about the specific kinds of situations that our moral emotions evolved to detect. Just as a smoke alarm is designed to detect smoke, anger is “designed” by natural selection to detect unfair treatment, compassion is designed to detect potential exchange partners in need (the greater the need, the greater the IOU), shame is designed to detect—and cover up—things that make us look bad, social disgust is designed to detect others’ shameful acts and traits (so we can avoid being “contaminated” by them), and hatred is designed to detect negative correlations between our biological fitness and someone else’s. I’m oversimplifying a bit—emotions are complicated—but you get the idea.

Here’s the point: it is possible to be objectively wrong about these things. Our emotions can misfire. We can think we were treated unfairly when we actually weren’t. We can think we should be ashamed of ourselves when we actually shouldn’t be. We can hate a group of people when they pose no threat to us. If we were mistaken, then the emotion—e.g., anger, shame, hatred—was in error. It got fed bad information, or it got exploited by some bullshitter or propagandist. There’s nothing to be mad about. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. There’s no reason to hate these people.

I eventually realized that when I used moral language, this was the sort of thing I was talking about. This was what I meant when I said things like “x is gross” or “x is evil.” I meant something like “x is the sort of thing that objectively fits the inputs for social disgust” or “x is the sort of thing that could not fail to activate outrage, loathing, and contempt in any normal human with access to all the relevant information.”

So that’s what I think morality is now. It’s the stuff that objectively triggers our moral emotions, in the same way that keys are the things that objectively fit locks. Yes, we’re extremely biased about morality, and we often exploit others’ moral emotions for nefarious purposes (which I’ve written about here). But at least I know what morality is now. At least I know what I’m talking about when I use words like “right, “wrong,” “good,” or “evil”

And I think it’s what you’re talking about too when you use these words. I even think it’s what utilitarians are talking about when they moralize shrimp welfare or longtermism or whatever. When utilitarians say their philosophy is the “moral truth,” they mean something like:

Utilitarianism objectively fits the locks of our moral and epistemic emotions, which means that any normal, unbiased person with access to all the relevant information would inevitably realize that maximizing utility is the only thing that matters in life. Non-utilitarians must therefore be missing something, or else be biased, immoral, or stupid.

Of course, the claim is bullshit. It’s just a strategy for winning The Opinion Game and creating a new social norm where pretending to be utilitarian wins you status points. But even if the claim is bullshit, it is what utilitarians are saying (or implying), whether they realize it or not.

Let’s not get carried away

Now I don’t mean to say that utilitarian concerns are ethically irrelevant. It’s obviously bad to hurt people. It’s good to help them if you can. Torturing animals is bad. When adjudicating between policies, or evaluating charities, or deciding which incentive structures to implement, utilitarian considerations are indispensable.

And of course, our moral intuitions are partly utilitarian. The human mind evolved to care about things like “number of people pissed off with me” or “number of people indebted to me.” From a Darwinian standpoint, these are important things to consider when making decisions.

What I’m saying is: utilitarianism isn’t everything. It’s not the purpose of life or the apotheosis of ethics. It’s not the only thing that matters to normal, reasonable, well-meaning people with access to all the relevant information. Ethics is complicated. Humans are complicated. We cannot reduce our emotional life to a simple formula.

At the end of the day, our feelings do not tell us where they come from or why they exist. The only way to figure that out is to do some evolutionary psychology. I’ve done a bit of that myself, and I can tell you: the truth isn’t pretty. Our ethical lives are, in large part, about competing for moral superiority while disguising the fact that we’re doing that—a disguise that is, itself, part of the competition. Utilitarians try to be morally superior to the rest of us, and in some cases, they succeed. In other cases, they fail.

We’ll all keep jockeying for virtue points for as long as our species exists. It’s what we do. Maybe all this moral peacocking will contribute to moral progress—the erosion of tribal hypocrisy and propaganda—or maybe it won’t. As a wise man once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward status.”

A lot of people wonder what it’s all for. Does the universe have a purpose or a destination? Are we coming together, expanding, or building up to something momentous? Where’s it all going in the end?

Well, I have the answer: to shit. Flesh decays, stars burn out, democracies backslide, matter drifts apart, status games collapse, cars break down, cancer grows, and organisms go extinct. There’s only one thing standing in the way of this lugubrious process: incentives.

In a previous post, I defined incentives as “things in the world that human primates evolved to want.” In this post, I’ll define them even more broadly as things in the world that human primates, and physical systems in general, want or move toward.

This brings me to The Big Law—the idea at the heart of this post:

Everything goes to shit, unless there’s an incentive for it not to.

Let’s look at some examples.

1. There’s no incentive for a tornado to steer its way around our homes and businesses, because tornadoes don’t have values. So when a tornado appears, everything around it goes to shit.

2. There is no incentive for a toddler—a cute version of a tornado—to avoid making a mess, because they’re not the ones who have to clean it up. So everything in a toddler’s path goes to shit.

3. There’s no incentive for crops to naturally provide us with bountiful and delicious food, or for animals to willingly throw themselves onto our plates, or for trees and rocks to spontaneously arrange themselves into Spanish-style villas. So poverty is the default state of life. It is only when you have certain economic incentive structures, like a stable currency, a global marketplace, and a division of labor, that wealth slowly comes into existence.

4. There is no incentive for us to acquire accurate beliefs about the world beyond our sensory awareness and practical decisions. So beliefs beyond our sensory awareness and practical decisions go to shit (of the male bovine variety). That is, unless there’s an incentive structure, like the prestige economy surrounding scientific research, that guides them toward truth.

5. There’s little incentive for natural selection to keep an organism alive and well after it has reared its offspring to maturity. So mutations that harm organisms late in life, after successful reproduction, will be relatively “invisible” to natural selection, accumulating in a species over time. The result is that post-reproductive organisms go to shit—or, you know, age.

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6. There’s little incentive for natural selection to purge the genome of harmful recessive genes, because they’re relatively “invisible” to natural selection. They only get expressed—with a 25% chance—when both parents share a copy of the gene. So the more genetically related a set of parents are, the more likely they are to share harmful recessive genes, and the more maladapted their offspring will tend to be. This explains why we evolved to find incest icky, and why the recessive part of the genome is filled with maladaptive or non-adaptive traits (i.e., pretty shitty).

7. There is no Darwinian incentive for an organism to act “for the good of the species.” Instead, organisms evolve to act for the good of themselves and their genetic relatives—and against their rivals. This can lead to costly competitions that make the entire species worse off. In extreme cases, a species might evolve such bloodthirsty rivalries or cumbersome sexual ornaments that it can no longer survive in its environment. This sort of thing is known as “evolutionary suicide,” and it might explain why over 99% of species that have existed have gone extinct.

8. Which reminds me… Humans are animals too, right? Uh oh. That means there’s no Darwinian incentive for humans to act for the good of humanity. Instead, humans evolved to act for the good of themselves and their genetic relatives—and against their rivals. This has caused a lot of costly competitions that have made humanity worse off, and it might ultimately cause our species to go to shit.

9. But what about moral progress—the expansion of “the moral circle?” How was that incentivized? As I wrote in a previous post, one plausible answer is: “with cash.”

   “If you only sell stuff to members of your tribe, you’re not going to make as much money as someone who sells stuff to everyone. The same thing goes for consumers. If you only buy from your tribe, you’re going to get crappier stuff. Ditto for workers. If you only work for your tribe, you’ll get fewer job offers. And if you reward workers based on tribal loyalty, instead of productivity, you’ll get lower productivity, and less profit.”

10. There’s no incentive for an autocracy to act in the interests of its citizens, because the citizens have no safe means of incentivizing the regime to act in their interests. So the autocracy will tend to enrich itself at the citizens’ expense—and, from the citizens’ perspective, go to shit.

11. So democracies can’t go to shit, right? Wrong. They just go to shit more slowly and quietly. There’s no incentive for democratic governments to provide objectively good policies (as opposed to good-sounding policies), because voters lack the expertise to assess the complex effects of any particular policy on any desired outcome. This is because 1) it is extremely hard (if not impossible) to acquire that expertise, 2) voters are largely ignorant and biased by tribal allegiances, and 3) each citizen’s vote has essentially zero impact on political outcomes, giving them essentially zero incentive to acquire that expertise or overcome those biases. Therefore, democratic governments gradually accumulate good-sounding (but ultimately bad) policies, grow increasingly sclerotic and inefficient, and go to shit.

12. This is becoming a bummer, so let me cheer you up with some dead animals. There’s no incentive for dead animals to remain present and intact. So they’ll break apart and decompose, getting devoured by microbes that emit unpleasant odors, going to—and smelling worse than—shit.

13. Something like this probably happens to organizations when they get too big to reliably monitor, like a dismembered body unable to control its limbs. Such expansive, dismembered organizations get devoured by principal agent problems and “rot.”

14. All this doom and gloom reminds me: the universe has no incentive to be inspiring, politically congenial, or existentially satisfying to apes like us. So the universe will tend to be pretty uninspiring, politically awkward, and existentially disorienting to apes like us.

15. If you drill deeper, you’ll find this law at the heart of matter itself: it’s the second law of thermodynamics. There’s no incentive for a substance to move toward greater order, because there are many more ways for a substance to be disordered than ordered. Similarly, there are many more ways for something to be shitty than good. So the universe will naturally move toward entropy and shittiness unless there’s an incentive for it not to. Which reminds me…

16. There are two local exceptions to the second law of thermodynamics I’m aware of: 1) the force of gravity, which provides an incentive for bits of matter to clump together into stars and planets, and 2) natural selection, which provides an incentive for bits of self-replicating matter to build organic forms that promote their own replication.

17. But stars eventually burn out, and natural selection only “cares” about the frequency of individual replicators relative to their alternatives. Which means that everything else—the good of the species, the fate of the cosmos—goes to shit.

So if you care about something, make sure you build a good, strong incentive to keep it from going to shit. Because if you don’t, that’s exactly where it will go.

• I had a blast talking to Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom for the second time (you can watch here or listen here). We talked about happiness, arguing, the conscious “self,” opinions, the replication crisis, deepities, and more.

• I also gave a scholarly talk on my Alliance Theory approach to politics at the UCLA Marschak colloquium that is now available on Youtube for the five people who might watch it.

• Speaking of Alliance Theory, friend of the blog Dan Williams has an excellent post summarizing it and using it to understand Trumpian populism.

• And speaking of populism, I used to think that rising inequality was one of its causes. But according to a study I just came across, voters have no idea how unequal their country is, whether inequality has been rising or falling, or where they are in the income distribution. It’s hard to see how rising inequality could shape political outcomes if nobody is aware of it. Am I missing something?

• Another friend of the blog Will Storr has a great post on the limits of eastern wisdom, where he writes something I wish I’d written myself:

  “Buddhism is a status game. The better the monks play at the game of Buddhism, the higher they climb, the greater their rewards. The reason we don’t think of it as a status game is because of the story it tells of itself, of wisdom, virtue and freedom from ego.”

• A lot of AI doomerism is based on so-called “scaling laws.” The idea is that AIs will become more “generally intelligent” (whatever that means) the more data you train them on. One such fear is that LLMs like ChatGPT, if trained on enough text, will acquire powers of “superpersuasion” and take over the world. Fortunately, a new computer science paper throws cold water on this bullshit. As you feed AIs more and more text, their persuasive ability plateaus.

• A new study shows that using Twitter/X for just 30 minutes makes people report feeling less "happy," "contended," and "pleasant." And yet, hundreds of millions of people regularly use Twitter/X, often multiple times a day—sometimes for more than 30 minutes. What on earth is going on here? Don’t people want to be happy? Actually no, they don’t.

• If you’ve taken an intro psych course, you’re probably familiar with the theory of “cognitive dissonance,” which posits that people feel uncomfortable holding two incompatible beliefs at the same time—for example, “I want to be happy” and “I regularly use Twitter.” The idea came from a quirky experiment conducted in the 1950s that psychologists never bothered to replicate. Well, psychologists finally tried to replicate it last year, and what do you know, it doesn’t replicate. Who’d have thought analogizing the nervous system to a violin concerto was a bad direction for psychology?

• Speaking of bad analogies, you might think you have an upwelling of “steam” that you need to “blow off” by shouting. Or you might think there is something “pent up” inside you that you need to “release” by “venting” about your asshole co-worker. But I have an interesting fact to share with you: the human brain is not a steam engine. It is, in fact, an information processing device designed by natural selection to find food, seek status, court mates, and solve other adaptive problems. You see, when you think you’re “venting,” what you’re actually doing is talking shit about your rivals and covering it up with a strained metaphor from the 1800s. Or at least, that’s what a cool new study suggests: “venting” is a clever strategy for saying mean things about people without looking mean.

  • Also, plenty of studies show that venting doesn’t work in reducing our anger. Why would it? Does ranting feel like a massage? And why would we want to reduce our anger anyways? Anger serves an important function—we don’t want to turn it off. The same thing goes for our other negative emotions: they do useful things for us.

• While we’re on the topic of shit talking, here’s another clever excuse for it: “expressing concern.” According to a fascinating series of studies, women spread negative gossip about their rivals by framing it as “concern” for their rival’s wellbeing. “Ohhh I’m so concerned about Stacey. She’s sleeping around so much I’m worried she’ll get an STD.”

• A new psychology measure just dropped: the corporate bullshit receptivity scale. It involves rating the “business savvy” of hilarious statements like: “Each day, we help our brand champions thrive in a revolution of frameworks fueled by our augmented business visualization,” and “Our bandwidth comes from the visionary culture-shifting of several new growth-based integrated networks.” According to the study, people who scored higher on the scale were more likely feel inspired by their company’s mission statement.

• Here’s one more for the workplace: managers who “fall for flattery,” or who dole out perks to ass-kissers, come out looking bad—naive, incompetent, selfish, unfair, etc. And they make their organizations look bad too, according to this neat study. The authors don’t reflect on the most interesting implication, but I will: ass-kissing and favoritism have to occur underground. The moment people catch on to whose ass is being kissed, and who’s getting ahead as a result, the organizational status game collapses. This creates a social incentive for ass-kissers to disguise their sycophancy as a desire for helpful advice, and for leaders to disguise their trail of ass-kissers as valuable assets to the company. The whole thing might become so subtle that you need Everything Is Bullshit to sort it all out for you.

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• People rarely say things like: “Murder’s not my thing.” Instead, they’re more likely to say: “Murder is wrong.” Something similar happens with aesthetic tastes. A bookish person might say: “I personally enjoy reading Shakespeare.” But more often, they’ll make a snooty pronouncement like: “Macbeth is a masterpiece. Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time.” Why do people talk this way? Why do they externalize their feelings and preferences, as if they were outside of their heads and part of the furniture of reality? The answer I gave in Opinions Are Bullshit is that they’re trying to win a war over social norms, and appealing to objective reality is like planting a flag in contested territory:

  If I say, “I like Radiohead,” that’s a preference. But if I say, “Radiohead is the best rock band of all time,” that’s an opinion. The difference is that the opinion is externalized—it’s a feature of Radiohead, not me—implying that if you don’t agree with me, you’re missing something. You’re not smart or deep or sophisticated enough.

  When we play the opinion game… we downplay the arbitrariness of our preferences. We exaggerate their connection to external reality. We try to make our opinions seem more objective than they really are, so that we can declare them as “right” (i.e., only smart, sane people have them) and others as “wrong” (i.e., only dumb, crazy people have them).

  If I’m right, then this entails a clear prediction: the fiercest combatants in the war over social norms, like political activists, will be the most likely to externalize their side’s preferences—to see them as objective facts. Well, in a new paper I just discovered, this prediction has been confirmed: when given a list of politically-loaded statements (e.g., “Diversity helps make America great,” “Government is always wasteful and inefficient”), partisans were more likely to “see their side as holding facts and the other side as holding opinions.” This was particularly true among the fiercest partisans—the ones who really loved their side and hated the other side. Score one point for my theory of opinions! I guess that means it’s an objective fact. ;)

Two years ago, I started Everything Is Bullshit. I’m glad I did. The blog has been a fun way for me to explore new ideas, especially when they’re too cynical or misanthropic to say out loud in polite company.

So far the response has been wonderful. People get a kick out of the no-bullshit character I play, but mostly what they enjoy is the insights they gain about our weird species. I like to think that’s my goal here: to give you insight into human nature.

Here’s what I called bullshit on this year:

• Advice

• Arguing

• Imagination

• Money

• Happiness (again)

• Effective Altruism (sort of)

• The AI apocalypse

• “Deep” ideas

• Vague ideas

• “Choosing” to believe

• The future of humanity

Also, if you want a bird’s eye view of my writing and thinking, here’s a good place to start:

Everything Is Bullshit

30 Useful Concepts about Bullshit

Whether it’s politics, the media, the workplace, or our own backyards, we’re surrounded by bullshit. Here are 30 concepts to help you understand it…

Read more

2 years ago · 94 likes · 21 comments · David Pinsof

Money is bullshit but give me some?

This blog is a passion project, and so far I haven’t been accepting money for it. But lately I've been feeling a bit demotivated. It's hard to justify spending time on this blog when I have more serious things I could be doing.

So now I’m giving you the option to pay me. I think if I start getting compensated for this, blogging will feel less like a guilty pleasure and more like a legitimate use of my time. Think of that button down there as a cattle prod—a way of jolting me into producing more content.

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Comments on the comments

I continue to be pleasantly surprised by the quality of my readers. Who’d have thought the comment section of a blog called “Everything Is Bullshit” would be so thoughtful, nuanced, and charitable? Maybe I’m good at scaring away bullshitters by exposing what they’re up to, or maybe it’s just good luck.

Still, it’s hard to avoid crappy comments entirely. As my audience has grown, I’ve noticed a 10-20% increase in pseudoarguments. The clearest example of this was in the reaction to AI Doomerism Is Bullshit. Out of all my posts, that one provoked the most backlash and bad faith.

Which is really weird. I’ve written a lot of provocative stuff here, and the response has mostly been nods and shrugs. Most of what we find interesting is bullshit? “Duh.” Nobody actually cares about making the world a better place? “Yup.” Ideologies are tapestries of propaganda and ad hoc rationalizations? “Sounds about right.” The search for the meaning of life is an intellectual pissing contest? “Yea lol.” Morality is a tool for mob violence and social domination? “Yea makes sense.” Our most deeply held values are bullshit? “I buy it.” Robots aren’t going to kill us all? “WHAT?! WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT WITHOUT READING ALL 12,372 POSTS ON THE AI ALIGNMENT FORUM?!”

Anyways, it’s an interesting fact about my readers. I don’t have a good explanation for it, aside from noting that we all have our thing, and everything is bullshit, except for our thing.

What should I write about next?

Last year, I let people vote on which of four unusual topics they wanted me to explore. AI doomerism got the most votes, which resulted in the aforementioned AI Doomerism Is Bullshit. I’d like to do another unusual post this year, so here we go:

The podcast

Another thing I had people vote on last year was whether I should start a podcast. Most people said “yes,” so I started Evolutionary Psychology (the podcast). My co-host Dave Pietraszewski and I have done a bunch of episodes so far, which you can find on any podcast app (check it out here). The next dozen episodes will mostly be interviews with researchers in the field (FYI: the vibe is nerdier and more academic than this blog). If you have any ideas for future episodes—or general feedback—let me know.

Thank you

I wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t you, the person taking time out of their busy day to read my bullshit. It means a lot that you’re paying attention to this when the siren song of the internet is calling you toward a million other things. So thank you for your curiosity. Thank you for your comments when they’re in good faith. I’ll continue doing my best to reward your attention with insights into the human animal—and hopefully, a bit of fun too.

Here’s to another year of bullshit!

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Astrology. Eastern mysticism. Continental philosophy. Psychoanalysis. Postmodernism. Quantum healing. What does all this bullshit have in common?

It’s vague. The phrases have multiple interpretations. The prose is purple, the sentences long-winded, the metaphors unwieldy. Yes, it is occasionally “deep,” but I’ve already written about “deep” bullshit. It’s time to look at its parent: vague bullshit.

The word “vague” is itself vague, so let’s make it more precise. Vagueness can be defined as the degree of uncertainty about a speaker’s intentions.

Consider the sentence: “Pass the salt.” You know what the speaker’s intentions are—they want the salt. Maybe there’s an ever-so-slight chance they’re expressing dissatisfaction with the flavorless meal—say, a 2% chance. But still, if you know with 98% certainty what they meant, the statement is not vague.

Now consider a different sentence: “There is no limit to the fullness of emptiness.” Not so clear any more, is it? Maybe the speaker feels full despite not having eaten for some reason (2% chance). Maybe they’re talking about how fulfilling it is to have nothing going on in their life (5% chance). Maybe they’re making a weird joke you don’t get (6% chance). The sentence is very very vague.

There are three implications here. First, vagueness is in the ear of the beholder. Since vagueness depends on the listener’s uncertainty about the speaker’s intentions, vagueness is subjective—it depends on what’s going on inside the listener’s head. What sounds vague to you might sound clear to me or vice versa.

Second, vagueness can apply to any behavior—not just speech. A movie can be vaguely jingoistic. A hotel lobby can be vaguely horny. When we say things like this, we mean something like: “there is a low but non-negligible chance the filmmakers were trying to glorify war,” or “it sort of seems like the hotel’s interior decorator was trying to get people in the mood for sex.”

Third, vagueness is about social intelligence—about getting inside other people’s heads as they get inside your head. Speaking clearly requires taking the other person’s perspective and anticipating how confused they’ll be by what you’re saying. People who are “articulate” are generally socially intelligent, because part of what it means to be articulate is to predict how others’ will make sense of—or fail to make sense of—your words.

Okay, now that we know what vagueness is, we can pose the more difficult question: what’s the deal with vague bullshit? Why would anyone try to communicate in a vague way—in a way they know, or suspect, will befuddle their listeners? And why would anyone listen to it, much less enjoy it?

Vague bullshit is strategic

Suppose I say something vague, like “Darwinian cynicism is the antidote to immoral morality.” Maybe you have no idea what that sentence means. Or maybe you know exactly what it means. It all depends on whether you’re a longtime reader of this blog.

What differentiates the two groups of people—the people who get what I’m saying and the people don’t? Well, the people who get what I’m saying will tend to be:

1. Similar. They’ll share my beliefs, perspectives, and background knowledge—the sorts of things that will help them zero in on what I meant. They’ll know the things I’m referencing and the terms I’m using.

2. Close. They’ll tend to know a lot about me. They’ll know the various agendas I’m pursuing. They’ll probably travel in similar circles and know (or read) similar things.

3. Paying attention. They’ll have to be listening to—and carefully focusing on—what I’m saying, pouring over all its possible implications. If they’re distracted by their own ruminations or by someone else who’s cooler than me, they’re less likely to get what I’m saying.

4. Respectful. To pay attention to me in a world of enticing distractions, they’ll have to think I’m worth paying attention to. And in homo sapiens and primates more broadly, “worth paying attention to” = “high-status.”

Wow, so the people who get me are really good for me. They’re simpatico, loyal, and culturally similar. They’re smooth collaborators who’ll be easy to get along with. They value my perspective and think I’m high-status. They’re the perfect allies.

So vague bullshit is no bullshit: it’s a clever strategy for sussing out the best social partners. It alienates outsiders while attracting likeminded sycophants. Like so many aspects of culture—jokes, disses, dog whistles—vague bullshit is a covert signal.

This implies something interesting about our psychology. It implies that struggling to put together a word salad and seeing it effortlessly understood by others should feel good. It’s a sign that we’re surrounded by the best possible people—the ones who deeply understand us. We hit the social jackpot.

The reverse is also true. If you decipher someone else’s vague bullshit—like the musings of a genius or the secrets of an insider clique—you should feel good. You’re in sync with the best and brightest. You’re in-the-know.

So vague bullshit can bind us together. If we all gather round and spout vaporous jibber-jabber, and perfectly “get” what we all mean by it, it should feel awesome, like we’re part of a special community of brothers and sisters—like we’re speaking our own secret language.

Here are some other functions of vague bullshit:

The sport of exegesis

Our species depends on language to survive, so being good at language is an important trait in a friend, mate, or leader. And part of what it means to be good at language is being good at interpreting it—at reading between the lines and connecting the dots.

So pondering vague bullshit can be a kind of linguistic game. It allows us to show off our interpretive acumen, to display how effortlessly we can extract meaning from chaos. We often enjoy the puzzle of figuring what the guru or the continental philosopher was getting at, and part of the reason we enjoy it is that it helps us practice—and show off—our hermeneutic talents.

Knowing where we stand

If you loudly proclaim something and everyone ignores you, you’re low-status. If you mutter something under your breath and everyone obsesses over what you meant, you’re high-status. So if you’re unsure about where you stand in the social hierarchy, throw out some vague bullshit and see how your audience reacts. And if you don’t know where someone else stands in the hierarchy, pay close attention when they say something vague. Observe the reactions.

Showing fealty

The more forgiving you are of a guru’s bad writing—the more you assume there is “deep” insight contained in the gibberish—the more eager you must be to defend the guru’s reputation. In the same way, the more credulous you are of someone’s bullshit advice, the more you must trust them to have your best interests at heart.

And whose reputations are we most eager to defend? Whom do we trust to have our best interests at heart? Our allies, naturally. Plus our leaders, lovers, and fellow members of the vanguard. So seeing depth in vaporous hooey—or gullibly gobbling up quackery—can be a display of fealty to our allies or submission to our leaders.

Affirming the sacred

I’ve written about sacred values in various places (see here for the blog post, here for the academic paper, and here for why happiness is a sacred value). Briefly, I think the function of sacred values is to stabilize our status games.

You see, status games are unstable, because being seen as a status-seeker lowers our status. So the only way we can all compete for status is by convincing ourselves that we’re pursuing something different from status—something selfless and “larger than ourselves”—authenticity, honor, wisdom, beauty, justice… you get the idea. If we fail to convince ourselves of our high-minded mission statement, our status game could collapse, our hierarchies could fold in on themselves, and we could lose years of accumulated status. So sacred values are a big deal, and questioning them is taboo.

Here’s where vague bullshit comes in. All too often, the intended meaning of the bullshit is: “this thing is sacred.” For example, “Knowledge is power” doesn’t mean that reading lots of books will turn you into Xi Jinping. It means: “Knowledge is sacred.” Here are some other examples:

• “If a thing loves, it is infinite.” Translation: “Love is sacred.”

• “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Translation: “Philosophizing is sacred.”

• “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” Translation: “Courage is sacred.”

So vague bullshit unites us around sacred values. It reassures us that our status games—unlike fickle fashion trends—will endure long into the future. The social ladder we’re climbing up is sturdy because nobody sees it as a social ladder. Everyone knows that everyone knows that we don’t care about petty things like status and only care about “higher” things like virtue or honor or authenticity or something.

Remember the quote I used at the beginning? “There’s no limit to the fullness of emptiness.” That’s a real quote. It comes from Osho (or Bhagwan Rajneesh), the cult leader from Wild Wild Country. What Osho means by “emptiness” is the feeling you get when you achieve a state of mindfulness—when you clear your mind of ruminations and become one with the present moment. “Emptiness” means “empty of annoying cravings and mental chatter.” So what he’s ultimately saying is: “Mindfulness is sacred.”

Charlatans, shamans, and hucksters

If you want to know how flimflam artists use vague bullshit to exploit you, here's their formula:

1. They study a ridiculously vague piece of information about you. Maybe it’s the random tarot card that got assigned to you, the month you were born, your "aura," the lines on your palms, etc.

2. They use it to discover something that is actually true about you. It’s also true of pretty much everyone. But because we normally don’t talk about the emotions we all share as social primates, we're blown away by the revelation: "Whoa, it's true! I really do want other people to respect me!"

3. They create the illusion that they know you better than your best friend. If we measure how much a person "gets us" by the vagueness of the information we emit multiplied by the accuracy of the inferences drawn from it, then the huckster seems off the charts in how much they get us. They must have magical powers.

4. The feeling of other people getting us is addictive. In an increasingly atomized world where relationships feel hollow and superficial, the feeling of someone getting us—even if it's illusory—is intoxicating.

The “getting” of inscrutable messages goes the other way too. Often, we try to infer what the charlatan meant by their mumbo jumbo, and when we arrive at a plausible interpretation, we feel good—like we truly “get” the charlatan or the spirits they’re communing with. We’re in sync with the cosmos.

Then again, vague bullshit isn’t all bad. When it makes us feel connected to other people, the feeling of connection is often correct: we really are in good company. We really are part of a special community.

Not everyone is a huckster, and not every group is a cult. It can be tremendously gratifying to stay up all night with friends spouting vague bullshit and rhapsodizing about shared values. The dance between vagueness and meaning can bring us together in a way that few things can.

So I’m not against vague bullshit necessarily. Like anything, it’s a tool that can be used for good or evil. I’m more interested in understanding it than judging it.

So the next time you want to dunk on vague bullshit like postmodernism or eastern mysticism, ask yourself whether your beliefs would seem just as vague and bullshitty to the people outside your subculture—to the people who hold different sacred values than you, who are playing different status games than you.

Maybe they’re just as confused by you as you are by them.

A lot of people ask me how I write blog posts—where I get my ideas from. They’re often surprised when I give them a precise, step-by-step answer. Here’s my patented ® formula for writing Everything Is Bullshit content:

1. I look at a story we tell ourselves. Maybe it’s the pursuit of happiness or the meaning of life. Maybe it’s our desire to change people’s minds or make the world a better place. Maybe it’s the idea that we don’t care what others think.

2. I ask myself if the story makes any evolutionary sense.

3. If the answer is no, I think about what might be going on beneath the surface—something that would make evolutionary sense.

4. I call the story we tell ourselves “bullshit.”

5. I write about what’s likely going on beneath the surface.

6. I link to a lot of technical papers in evolutionary psychology that nobody clicks on.

The most important part of this formula is step 3—the part about what does or doesn’t “make evolutionary sense.” This step is rarely taken by anyone who thinks about humans. It’s as if the human psyche emerged from a bolt of lightning and not from millions of years of natural selection. When people talk about why Bob voted for Trump or Jane can’t find a date or Otto is depressed, they rarely reflect on the fact that Bob, Jane, and Otto are animals, and so are they. Whenever people do reflect on their evolutionary origins, they usually aren’t very reflective about it. They think about cavemen hitting each other with clubs or David Attenborough doing a voiceover while a bird performs a mating display.

There's a lot of bad evolutionary psychology out there. Most of it comes from amateurs. Some of it comes from subpar professionals because not everyone can be Ed Hagen. Some of it comes from otherwise thoughtful professionals who transform into edgelords on social media like werewolves during a full moon.

And yet, there’s so much evolutionary psychology out there that’s good—beautiful, rigorous, insightful scholarship on the most important aspects of the human condition. Most of it languishes in obscurity, unknown to the general public. People come to dislike the field, not because they know what it is, but because they’ve seen a few bad popularizations of it.

There is no legit evolutionary psychology podcast. There is no podcast that interviews leading experts in the field and shines a light on the important work they’re doing. There is no podcast that dispels the many misunderstandings out there, or that wades through controversy with care and good faith. There is no podcast that lives and breathes this powerful way of thinking.

Until now. I’m excited to announce the beginning of Evolutionary Psychology (the Podcast), co-hosted by myself and Dave Pietraszewski, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara and one of the most brilliant scientists I know. We’ll hash it out every week, either with each other or with a top-notch scholar, in our effort to better understand who we are as naturally selected organisms.

In the first episode, Dave interviews me. We get into my origin story, status games, intergroup violence, and even capitalism. You can check it out here. Enjoy.

We get it from self-help books. We pay consultants to give it to us in PowerPoint presentations. We hear it on podcasts about parenting, wellness, and professional advancement. Advice is all around us, but what is its purpose?

You might think the answer is to help us—to offer guidance and knowledge, to light our path and make us better people. The giving of advice is a noble and selfless act—humanity at its finest. Right?

Here’s a list of problems with the idea that advice is purely about helping us:

1. A lot of advice is baseless, but we want it anyways. We seek advice from famous actors on politics or the meaning of life, even though they’re not economists or philosophers. We gobble up Einstein’s vague advice about happiness, even though he wasn’t a psychologist.

2. A lot of advice is one-size-fits-all, even though people are different. “Be kind to yourself” is good advice for a perfectionist but bad advice for a narcissist. “Believe in yourself” is good advice if you’re talented but bad advice if you suck.

3. Much advice centers on goals we don’t really have—for example, how to be happy (even though happiness is bullshit), how to express your authentic self (even though authenticity is bullshit), or how to make the world a better place (even though we don’t really care about that).

4. Advice is rarely focused on the goals we actually have. For example, here’s what the self-help section might look like if it was focused on our real goals:

   1. Zen and the Art of Social Climbing

   2. Echo-Friendly: 10 Steps to Ensconcing Yourself in a Cocoon of Ideological Conformity and Motivated Reasoning

   3. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Virtue Signalers

   4. The Lips 2 Butt Method: Take Control of Your Life by Sycophantically Ingratiating Yourself with High-Status People

   5. Own It: Keep Rival Male’s Sperm out of Your Mate’s Vagina

   6. You Can Do It! How to Harness the Power of Moral Ambiguity and Plausible Deniability to Rationalize Your Fucked-Up Behavior

   7. Eat, Pray, Confabulate

5. A lot of advice is nearly impossible to follow. “Don’t be afraid of failure.” “Be happy with who you are.” But emotions are typically involuntary.

6. A lot of advice applies to all moments, even though moments are different. For example:

   

   Hmm. What if the moment is 8:46am on September 11th, 2001?

7. A lot of advice is simple, even though the world is complicated. “Follow your passion.” “There are more important things in life than money.” But what if my passion is high-stakes poker and I’m living in dire poverty?

8. We are surprisingly uninterested in the effectiveness of advice. We rarely ask for track records of how often the advice worked out for people like us in situations like the one we’re in.

9. Much of the time, we don’t even know what to do with the advice we’re given. “Live life to the fullest.” “Keep moving forward.” It’s not obvious what behaviors are entailed by these vaporous slogans.

10. People almost never give advice like: “Distrust your instincts” or “Ignore what your heart is telling you.” But sometimes our hearts are foolish and our instincts are dumb.

11. Besides, what does it mean to listen to your heart or trust your instincts? It sounds like a nicer way of saying: “Do what you were probably going to do anyways.”

“But David,” you say, “Surely some advice is intended to help us. Surely some of it is helpful.”

Yes, don’t get me wrong—some advice is helpful. In particular, it can be helpful when the advisor has: 1) expertise about your situation, and 2) a stake in your success (e.g., they’re your family member or legal counsel).

But very few people have expertise about your situation, at least compared to you. And very few people have a meaningful stake in your success, at least compared to those closest to you.

And yet, most people would love to give you advice. They’re basically competing for that privilege on your social media feed every day, with all their tips and listicles and opinions about why you should do this or that. So there must be a lot of bullshit advice out there.

Why do we take it? Why do we give it? What is bullshit advice all about? I’m not sure, but here are my best guesses:

It’s about being superior. If I give you advice, I must be more intelligent, in-the-know, or successful than you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need my advice. So advice has some awkward subtext: “I’m better than you.” This explains why we compete to give each other advice: it’s a kind of status competition. And it explains why we want advice from Einstein and other cool celebrities. They won the status competition, which means they won the right to give us advice, even if it’s vague and stupid.

It’s about status theft. How do you “steal” status? By giving someone advice when you’re equal or lower-status than them. People do that all the time, and when we’re on the receiving end of it, we feel annoyed or “condescended to.” It doesn’t matter if the person’s advice is objectively helpful and has lots of rigorous scientific research to back it up. That’s not the point. The point is they’re a status thief. They’re absconding with prestige.

It’s about ass-kissing. We often feel the urge to follow high-status people around and obey their every command. But when we do this too overtly, we come off as awkward, servile, and desperate. This is where advice comes in. It gives us an excuse to ambush a high-status person without creeping them out (“I was wondering if you had any advice about…”), and it gives us an excuse to submit to the high-status person without looking submissive (“I will take your advice to heart”).

It’s a kind of circle jerk. Obviously if I ask you for advice, I’m flattering you. “Tell me how to be awesome like you.” But what’s less obvious is that advice can also be flattering for the recipient. How so? Well, the recipient is usually presumed to have beautiful goals (like becoming a better person or making the world a better place), boundless potential for greatness, and magical powers like the ability to choose their emotions at will. And if the recipient has critics? Oh, those critics are just “haters” who hate things for no reason at all.

It’s about rationalization. Advice can be helpful in a perverse sort of way: it can function to justify or legitimize whatever the recipient wanted to do anyways. “Follow your heart.” “Listen to your inner voice.” My guess is this is a major function of consulting. It may also be a function of therapy. Often, the patient and the therapist work together to cook up a bullshit narrative—usually about childhood trauma—designed to rationalize the patient’s behavior. This might explain why so much advice is vague: it’s easier to contort vague advice to fit a pre-existing agenda than specific advice.

It’s about showing loyalty. In the midst of our various culture wars, giving advice can be like giving military aid: it can cement an alliance between the sharers. Giving you advice on how to raise antiracist children or embody Christ’s teachings or whatever—that signals we’re in the same political tribe. We share the same values. We’re playing the same status game.

Advice is like grooming

Many primates groom each other, removing bits of dirt, detritus, and dead skin from their fur. The original function of grooming was likely hygienic, designed to benefit the mutual groomers by reducing the prevalence of pathogens and parasites.

But this is not the only—or even the primary—function of grooming. It is also a kind of social ritual. Primates groom each other to forge alliances and navigate the political landscape. They groom each other to establish who is higher-ranking than whom, with lower-ranking individuals grooming higher-ranking individuals. Grooming is interwoven with the fabric of primate society, such that it is probably easier to predict grooming behavior with knowledge of the alliance structure and social hierarchy than with knowledge of whose fur is the dirtiest.

I think advice is similar. Maybe the original function of advice was to help us—just like the original function of grooming was hygienic. But advice has become interwoven with the fabric of social life. We give and take advice to signal loyalty and forge alliances. We use it to establish who is higher-ranking than whom. As a result, it is probably easier to predict the flow of advice with knowledge of the alliance structure and social hierarchy than with knowledge of who has—or needs—practical instruction.

In other words, advice isn’t really about helping us, any more than grooming is really about hygiene. Yes, advice can sometimes help, just as grooming can sometimes clean. But there is plenty of bullshit advice out there, just as there is plenty of needless grooming.

Pick your own fleas

A lot of thinkpieces end with a crescendo of bullshit advice. They tell you how to change the world or live a better life. The call to action is usually hollow and ritualistic. It’s the writer’s way of “grooming” the reader.

So to win some anti-status points, I will refrain from doing that. There’s no lesson here—no takeaway. I’m not even saying you should avoid bullshit advice necessarily. Maybe bullshit advice is just the thing you need right now! How should I know? I don’t know you. I have no expertise about your situation. And even if I had perfect knowledge of your idiosyncrasies and unique circumstances, I would have no stake in your success—no incentive to give you good (rather than good-sounding) advice.

Besides, you don’t need my advice anyways. If you’re reading these words, you’re probably living in a relatively well-off country with access to electricity, the internet, and plenty of leisure time to read blogs about bullshit. Which means things are going pretty well for you.

So, dear reader, it’s time to get out there and do what you do best: whatever you were going to do anyways.

The first post on this blog was called “Happiness Is Bullshit.” It’s one of my most popular posts but also the most controversial. Out of all the things I’ve called bullshit on (e.g., opinions, money, the meaning of life), happiness got the most pushback. Some people were overtly hostile. Others were genuinely baffled. People really struggled to wrap their heads around the idea that nobody wants to be happy.

I get it. I can barely wrap my head around it myself. It’s a deeply counterintuitive idea. But the counterintuitiveness should not be held against it. Lots of true ideas are counterintuitive, from evolution to quantum entanglement to the law of comparative advantage. Our untutored intuitions—the things we can or cannot imagine—are poor guides to reality.

This post is a sequel to / remake of Happiness Is Bullshit. I want to revisit the topic in a more in-depth and rigorous way, because I’m no longer burdened by the desire to kick things off with a bang and attract subscribers. The blog has matured, I’ve got plenty of subscribers, and I can now afford to bore a few people with nuance.

The goal of Happiness Is Bullshit was not merely to show that happiness is bullshit (in the sense of being unattainable), but to give a plausible theory for what happiness is—how it evolved, how it works, what function it serves. I tried to convey the gist of the theory with an analogy: the “getting warmer” signal in a guessing game. The function of happiness is to improve our predictions about how good things are going to be. I described the theory in technical language in a footnote. At last, I can unbury the footnote and put it right here:

The brain computes, using evolved and learned priors, which of various outcomes have the highest expected value (in terms of fitness proxies). The higher the expected value of an outcome, the greater the motivation—i.e. the amount of attention and energy mobilized—to pursue it. “Happiness” is triggered by a positive prediction error. We feel happy when the actual value of an outcome turns out to be greater than its expected value. This error causes us to rapidly mobilize energy (if more energy is needed), rapidly relax (if energy is no longer needed), attend to (i.e., “savor”) the outcome, simulate it in working memory, determine which features were counterfactually unique to it, upweight those features’ expected value, and encode them in long-term memory. As a result, those unique features will appear more valuable to us (i.e. more energizing, more attention-grabbing) the next time we encounter them. This is just another way of saying that we are “positively reinforced”—i.e., the features that were counterfactually unique to the outcome now have a higher expected value than they did before. The more frequently we experience the outcome, the better we get at predicting its value (i.e. the prediction error decreases), and the less “happy” we feel when we experience it (i.e., the less attention and reinforcement is needed). Eventually, after many repetitions of this process, we stop “liking” the outcome while still continuing to “want” it: that is, we continue to value and pursue it but are no longer surprised by it, attentive to it, or further reinforced by it. This model is an amalgam of the prediction error theory of dopamine and the internal regulatory variable theory of motivation.

This theory has many testable implications, but here’s one of them: the frequency and intensity of happiness should decline with age. Why? Because as we get more familiar with the good things in life, we get better at predicting their features, our prediction errors decline, and our happiness wanes. As I put it in the post, “We’re not pursuing happiness so much as chasing it away.”

And what do you know? This hypothesis has recently received a stunning confirmation from a meta analysis of over 400 studies. The meta analysis found that “positive affect”—i.e., the frequency and intensity of reported happy and joyful states—declines “from age 9 for almost the entire time until age 94 (d = -1.71).”

Take a look at that effect size (d = -1.71). In case you’re not familiar, that is beyond enormous. An effect size of that magnitude is virtually unheard of in psychological science. For comparison, most psychology findings hover around d = 0.3. And over 400 studies! With no evidence of publication bias! Reality is trying to tell us something folks, and it is not being coy.

Now, because we’re being nuanced Spartans, we must add a caveat: the meta analysis found different results for “life satisfaction,” which does not decline like happiness does; rather, it ebbs and flows as we age. But to measure “life satisfaction,” you have to ask people a bunch of vague question about how much they’re getting what they want. Saying that we want “life satisfaction” is like saying “we want what we want.” It’s circular and devoid of meaning. To say that we want to feel the emotion of “happiness,” on the other hand, is not circular: it’s just wrong.

Here’s another prediction of the theory: happiness should decline with repeated exposure to the thing that makes us happy (e.g., the new car, the new job, etc.). Not only does this prediction match common sense, it has tons of evidence in its favor. It’s called “habituation,” and psychologists have been doing research on it for decades (see here for an overview).

Now if we were pursuing happiness, we’d be left with a puzzle: why aren’t we constantly and frantically switching between activities and romantic partners like Jason Statham in Crank? Why do we commit to spouses, careers, hobbies, friendships, ideologies, and communities over decades, long after we’ve habituated to them and harvested most of their good vibes? Because, you fool, we’re not pursuing happiness.

Another prediction of the theory is that happiness and motivation will be neurologically separable. As I put it in Happiness Is Bullshit:

We need to make a distinction between happiness (enjoying stuff) and motivation (wanting stuff). These are different things that live in different parts of the brain. You can enjoy something without wanting it, and you can want something without enjoying it. For example, I enjoy meditating, but I never want to do it. Doomscrolling upsets me, but I often want to do it.

This prediction is supported by a large body of research in neuroscience. From Berridge & Robinson (2016):

…The brain circuitry that mediates the psychological process of ‘wanting’ a particular reward is dissociable from circuitry that mediates the degree to which it is ‘liked’. Incentive salience or ‘wanting’, a form of motivation, is generated by…mesolimbic dopamine. By comparison, ‘liking’, or the actual pleasurable impact of reward consumption, is mediated by smaller and more fragile neural systems…

The theory also converges with the prediction error theory of dopamine. From Glimcher, 2011 (italics mine):

Theory and data indicate that the phasic activity of midbrain dopamine neurons encodes a reward prediction error used to guide learning... Activity in these dopaminergic neurons is now believed to signal that a subject’s estimate of the value of current and future events is in error and indicate the magnitude of this error. This is a kind of combined signal that most scholars active in dopamine studies believe adjusts synaptic strengths until the subject’s estimate of the value of current and future events is accurately encoded.

So there’s converging behavioral and neurobiological evidence for the theory. It is precise, mechanistic, and consistent with everything we know about how brains and evolution work. All told, it’s a pretty good theory.

Now what about the theory that we’re pursuing happiness? That everything we do is part of a grand quest to put positive vibes in our heads? The idea that happiness is a mental substance of intrinsic goodness whose job is to motivate us to do things—a neurological carrot dangling in front of us?

It’s a terrible theory—an intellectual catastrophe. As I argued in a Twitter/X thread:

Happiness is not a piece of food, and suffering is not a sharp object. Happiness and suffering are specialized brain processes. They exist because they were brought into existence by natural selection. Which means they have a function.

But their function cannot be to motivate us, because that makes no sense. Motivation doesn’t need them. Motivational circuits are connected to our hearts and muscles. They can literally push us around and make us do stuff. No happiness or suffering is needed.

Think of a thermostat. It does not need happiness or suffering to keep our homes at the right temperature, does it? No, it just needs to be wired up right. A diagram of a thermostat needs no boxes for "happiness" or "suffering". Neither does a diagram of motivation.

It also conflicts with the logic of evolution:

Biological fitness is not in our heads—it is in the world. It lives in the approval or disapproval of our peers, their sexual attraction to us, their willingness to protect us, and in the material conditions that nourish our bodies. These are the sorts of things we're pursuing—not happiness.

And no, we're not pursuing the mere idea of these things. Mere ideas don’t promote fitness. We want these actual things in the actual world. Apes that were deceived or mistaken about these things did not become our ancestors.

But what if happiness was correlated with biological fitness in ancestral environments? Couldn’t that explain our desire for happiness? Nope:

Consider what would happen if there was a connection between fearfulness and fitness in squirrels—i.e., more fearful squirrels were less likely to get eaten. Would squirrels evolve to pursue fear as a goal? No, they would just become more fearful.

For the same reason, humans would never evolve to pursue happiness as a goal. They would just evolve to be happier. Organisms don't evolve to pursue stuff in their heads, because evolution can just go ahead and get them that stuff, by rewiring their brains.

To show you just how confused this way of thinking is, consider a mechanic trying to get a car to accelerate more quickly. He asks another mechanic, “How do I get this car to go faster?” The other mechanic responds: “Whenever the car accelerates, give it a goodie. Like some ice cream.”

When it comes to our nervous systems, evolution is like a mechanic. It can restructure us or rearrange our parts. It can engineer us to seek out different things, in the same way that a car can be engineered to accelerate more quickly. To say that evolution needs to give us some goodie for doing fitness-enhancing things is about as silly saying the mechanic needs to give his car ice cream for working properly. The mechanic can just fix the car if it’s not working. Likewise, evolution can just fix us if we’re not working.

And there’s another problem with this “goodie theory” of motivation. If we need a neurological goodie to motivate us, then the goodie itself must be motivating too, right? If we didn’t want the goodie, it wouldn’t motivate us. But now we’re left with a troublesome question: how does evolution get us to want the goodie? Does it have to give us another goodie—a goodie for seeking the goodie? And then a goodie for seeking the goodie for seeking the goodie?

We have entered an infinite regress. The only way out is to say that some things need no goodie; we can just be motivated to get them directly. But then why aren’t we motivated to get all the the things we want directly? Why do we need the goodie at all?

We don’t. It explains nothing. It does nothing. It’s theoretical dead weight, akin to the prime mover in theology and the res cogitans in cartesian dualism. For the love of god psychologists, get rid of it.

But maybe you’re not convinced just yet. Maybe you still want to put good vibes in your head—or think you do. If so, allow me to add more nuance to what I’m claiming.

Here some ways we don’t quite want happiness, but come very close to wanting it:

1) We want to make other people happy.

We sometimes surprise our friends with gifts or try to cheer them up when they’re down. In these cases, our goal is not merely to give our friend a gift or say something nice, but to violate their expectations in a positive way—i.e., to make them feel happy.

This makes sense. We want to show our loved ones we care about them, even more than they might have expected. What doesn’t make sense is when we naively swap in ourselves for other people—when we assume we want to make ourselves happy too.

Now, I can understand why we’d make this mistake. The stuff we give to other people often overlaps with the stuff we want for ourselves. So it makes sense that if we want to make others happy, we should want to make ourselves happy too.

But it’s a non sequitur. After all, we sometimes want to tickle people, but that doesn’t mean we want to tickle ourselves—indeed we couldn’t, even if we wanted to. We also sometimes plan surprise parties for people, but that doesn’t mean we want to plan surprise parties for ourselves—indeed we couldn’t, even if we wanted to. Now replace “tickling” and “surprise parties” with “happiness.”

2) We want to avoid bad things.

We’d like to have our bodies intact and properly functioning. We’d prefer to avoid going bankrupt or becoming social pariahs. But people confuse these obvious goals with the goal of avoiding unhappiness or bad vibes in our heads. As I wrote in “You Actually Want to Suffer.”

We obviously want to avoid making terrible mistakes and hurting the people we love. What I’m saying is that we want to experience the suffering caused by those bad things if they do happen. If we truly make a mistake, we want to feel regret. If we truly hurt a loved one, we want to feel guilt.

Think about a toothache. In this case, the feeling (“my tooth hurts”) and the thing itself (tooth damage) are hard to tease apart. This is because pain is our primary means of knowing about the thing itself: it is a sense, akin to seeing or hearing, called nociception, whose job is to sense tissue damage. So when we’re in pain, what we’re avoiding is what our nociceptors are informing us about, namely the type, location, and severity of the tissue damage.

Likewise, when you’re in fear, what you’re avoiding is what your eyes and ears are informing you about—say, a lion moving toward you. But you don’t want your eyes to stop informing you of the approaching lion, any more than you want your nociceptors to stop informing you of real tissue damage. When you see a lion, you want to avoid the actual lion—not the sensations that tell you “there’s a lion.” When you withdraw your hand from a hot plate, you want to avoid burning your actual hand—not the sensations that tell you “you’re burning your hand.”

If I’m right about this, then it should be possible to feel pain without wanting to avoid it. This could happen if you have good reason to think the pain (or the nociception) is misleading. For example, let’s say you know the salsa verde is not actually scalding your tongue or giving you nerve damage. Your tongue is fine and will recover shortly. Or let’s say you know an intense workout is not actually shredding your muscles or pushing you to the brink of death. “No pain no gain,” as they say. When you know the salsa is fine and the workout is good for you, the motivation to avoid the “burn” of either one can dissipate. You might even actively seek them out. Many people enjoy intense workouts and spicy food (I’m one of them). This demonstrates that painful sensations per se are not aversive. Rather, what’s aversive is your brain’s best estimate—using all the knowledge at its disposal—of how badly (if at all) your body is being damaged.

3) We want to avoid needless suffering.

Then again, in a few rare cases, you may want to avoid the suffering itself. This can happen when you know the suffering is unnecessary or dysfunctional. If you’re suffering from chronic pain and there’s nothing wrong with you, you’ll likely want the pain to go away. If you’re about to get a life-saving surgery, the pain from being vivisected is unnecessary and will make it harder for the surgeon to save your life.

But most suffering is not like this. As a general rule, suffering has a point—it serves an important function—and most of us are well-aware of this fact. That’s why, for the most part, we want to suffer (or rather, we want to suffer in response to genuinely bad things).

4) We want valuable long-term goals.

From an evolutionary perspective, such goals would include rearing offspring to maturity, becoming a valued member of our community, ascending a social hierarchy, or outcompeting rival groups for power and resources. These goals give us a sense of “meaning,” which explains why people find meaning in family, altruism, careerism, and (depressingly) hatred of outgroups. The function of “meaning,” I surmise, is to enable short-term fitness costs in pursuit of long-term fitness gains. The more “meaningful” a goal seems, the bigger the short-term sacrifices we should be willing to make to achieve it.

What this suggests is that having valuable long-term goals is good for you, evolutionarily. If you have no children to care for, no viable path to high status, no way to make yourself valuable to your community, or no tribe to rally, then you’re in a bad spot, evolutionarily. You’re adrift, aimless. Maybe this corresponds to feelings of “depression” or “ennui.” I’m not sure.

But the point is: we’d like to avoid this state. And we’d like to be in the opposite state: the state of pursuing valuable long-term goals (and, ideally, making good progress on them). Confusingly, a lot of people call this long-term-goal-pursuing state “happiness.” But more often, people call it “meaning” or “purpose.” Whatever you decide to call it, I’m okay saying we want it.

But wait. That doesn’t mean we want the mere feeling of it. We don’t want to be tricked into thinking we’re raising healthy children or becoming valuable members of our communities. It would be very bad if somebody lied to us about the health of our children or flattered our egos while secretly despising us. Even if we’d be happier living a lie, we’d prefer to be in touch with reality.

So again, we’re not seeking vibes in our heads. We’re seeking real things in the world. When given the choice between real meaning and fake meaning, we’re going to choose real meaning, even if the fake meaning feels nicer.

5) We want to perceive beautiful things.

A lot of people respond to my claim that happiness is bullshit by saying, “But what about my desire to be in nature? To gaze at a sunset? Those things make me feel happy!” My response is that yes, of course, you want to be around beautiful things. We humans have an aesthetic sense that likely evolved to facilitate perceptual information gathering. But wanting to be around beauty is different from wanting to be happy. Yes, beauty is enticing, but it is the beauty itself—not the happiness it elicits—that you’re seeking. I know, the two are hard to tease apart, as with pain and bodily harm, but let’s give it a try.

Suppose you have two choices: gaze at something beautiful (say, the most gorgeous sunset imaginable), or gaze at something hideous (say, a person horribly vomiting and there’s blood in the vomit). You have two choices: 1) gaze at the sunset, or 2) gaze at the person horribly vomiting blood, but you’re under the influence of a drug that makes you feel like you’re gazing at the sunset. If you only cared about happiness, you’d be indifferent between 1) and 2). It’d be a toss-up—you’d feel equally happy in either case. But I’m guessing it’s not a toss-up, is it? No, I’m guessing you’d prefer to gaze at the sunset. That’s because your brain evolved to pursue beauty—not happiness.

6) We want what makes other people happy.

One of the most common objections I get is drugs. What about people who do drugs? Aren’t they taking the drugs so they can feel good? As strange as it sounds, the answer is no. People don’t take drugs to feel good.

Consider the following statements:

• “The pizza was pure bliss.”

• “The massage felt incredible.”

• “The hotel was heaven.”

You kind of want to stay at that hotel now, don’t you? You’re keen on getting that massage and eating that pizza. When something makes another person feel happy, that suggests the thing is very very good. So good, in fact, that it exceeded the person’s expectations of how good a thing can be.

Happiness, like many emotions, can be vicarious. We want to try things that make other people feel good, because other people’s happiness is an excellent cue to what things are valuable in the world—what is worth seeking out.

Okay, so now we have an explanation for why people are interested in trying drugs. Other people say the drug is amazing—it’s pure bliss—and we want to try the things that make others feel good.

So let’s say you try the drug. Sure enough, it makes you feel good, and the good feelings recalibrate you to want the drug more, per the theory. So you do it again, and it makes you want the drug more. Each time you take the drug, the “high”—the good feelings—get milder and milder, because it gets more and more predictable, and your brain needs less and less recalibration, per the theory. Pretty soon, you can perfectly anticipate how the drug will make you feel, and your motivations are perfectly aligned with the sky-high—and erroneous—value of the drug. You’re an addict. You desperately want the drug, but it no longer makes you feel good. It has destroyed your life.

Now, if you were seeking good vibes in your head, this story would make no sense. As the high got milder and milder, you’d want the drug less and less, and you’d naturally quit. But that is not what happens. The opposite happens. As the drug makes you less and less happy, you want it more and more. What this implies is that the addict wants the drug—not the high.

7) We want happiness as a means to achieving some other goal.

My argument is that we don’t want happiness as an end in itself. It does not lie at the heart of our motivations; rather, ancestral fitness proxies (e.g., food, status, beauty, safety) lie at the heart of our motivations. But sometimes we want things instrumentally, as a means to getting some ancestral fitness proxy. For example, we want money as a means to getting pizza or status or sunglasses. But we don’t want money as an end in itself. If all currency collapsed, we’d stop wanting money.

This means that it is possible for us to want happiness in the same way we want money: instrumentally. How might that happen? I’m not sure, but one possibility is that happiness (like money) could become a status symbol. In this case, we’d want to display how happy we are to signal that we’re high-status. I suspect this is true and explains a lot of what occurs on Instagram.

Another possibility is that happiness could become a way of signaling how nice you are. Happy people are generally easy to get along with. They cheerfully do what you say and help you out when you’re in a jam. So we might try to show others that we’re happy—or care about being happy—to signal that we’re sweethearts. There’s some evidence for this hypothesis here.

Yet another possibility is that we want to appear intellectually consistent. If we make up a bullshit story about how we’re pursuing happiness, it makes us look irrational if we act in ways that contradict that bullshit narrative. “Why do you keep doomscrolling on social media if it makes you so unhappy? You’re being so irrational!”

So if we want to signal our superior rationality, we might comb through the scientific literature in positive psychology, harvest it for empirically-validated happiness interventions, and restructure our lives to optimally maximize happiness. Turns out a guy named Luke Muehlhauser did this to win status points among his “rationalist” peers in 2011. And—what do you know?—he won a lot of status points for it.

So people often try to appear happy, or pursue happiness, as a strategy for achieving their more unflattering social goals—e.g., signaling and status-seeking. Of course, they don’t want to admit they have these goals because, well, they’re unflattering. Since self-persuasion is a great way to persuade others, people often genuinely convince themselves that they’re pursuing happiness, and get annoyed when people (like me) tell them they’re wrong.

8) We want the things that made us happy in the past.

The job of happiness is to reorient us, to nudge our motivations and expectations in the right direction—i.e., toward valuable things in the world. That means that whatever directions we’re heading in right now must have been shaped by all the happiness we felt in the past. So when we reflect on what all our strivings have in common, we might realize that they’re all rooted in happy memories. This creates the illusion that we’re pursuing happiness, because we mistake correlation for causation. We assume that pursuing causes happiness. It doesn’t. Happiness causes pursuing.

9) We imagine that we’d like to be happy.

When we imagine being happy, it seems pleasant. “Sure, I’d like to have more of that feeling,” we naively think. And so we conclude, erroneously, that we want to be happy.

What’s the problem here? The problem is that our imaginations are crappy. As I wrote in Imagination Is Bullshit:

Our imaginations are flawed and feeble programs built by natural selection to navigate small tribes and small-to-medium-sized objects… Bereft of subtlety, statistical literacy, humility, or insight into the nature of our own minds, our imaginations are faulty equipment with which to understand the human condition in the 21st century.

So how are our imaginations bullshitting us here? Well for one thing, emotions don’t happen in a vacuum; they’re triggered by, and revolve around, specific things in the world. Hunger is about finding food, fear is about getting out of danger, and happiness is about adjusting to new and awesome things. To imagine hunger untethered to food or growling stomachs, fear untethered to danger or threats, or happiness untethered to new and awesome things, is to imagine feelings that do not—and cannot—exist.

So when you imagine “happiness” in a vacuum, disconnected from any kind of real-world cause or cognitive/behavioral effect, your imagination is bullshitting you. It is presenting you with something impossible, like psychic powers or Superman flying through the air without means of propulsion. Just because we can imagine Superman and psychic powers doesn’t mean they’re real. Likewise, just because we can imagine happiness in a vacuum doesn’t mean it’s real, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we’re striving for it.

Let’s fix our crappy imaginations and try to imagine something more realistic—say, being happy because you got a promotion. In this case, the scenario no longer tells you very much. Sure, it might be nice to get a promotion, but is that because you want to be happy, or because you want a promotion? It’s not clear.

To disentangle the thing in the world from the happiness it elicits, let’s imagine something that normally would not elicit happiness. Imagine your child just died of cancer. And yet, in this imaginary scenario, you’re not feeling the worst possible sadness a human can experience. Instead, you’re blissed out with a shit-eating grin, happy as a clam, living your best life.

I’m guessing the happiness no longer seems so desirable in this case, does it? No, I’m guessing it seems deeply fucked-up. What this reveals is that, again, we’re not actually striving for happiness. We want to feel happy when it’s appropriate for the situation, and we want to feel sad when it’s appropriate for the situation. If you felt happy while betraying everyone you loved and destroying everything you cared about, there would be something deeply fucked-up about you. We don’t want to be deeply fucked-up, even if it would make us happier.

Taking stock

Now, I acknowledge that these nine things are really similar to wanting happiness—so similar that it is very easy to confuse them with it. But “similar” is not “same,” and I stand by my claim that we do not actually want to feel the emotion of happiness as an end in itself.

Trust me: when I got really good at meditating, I could give myself all the happiness I wanted, and I didn’t want it. I found it boring and unappealing. A desire for happiness is not what is driving our behavior. It is a terrible way to predict our behavior. It is a naive way of thinking about human psychology that will lead you into a morass of confusion, contradiction, and infinite regress. Understanding the things we actually want, by contrast, opens up a whole vista of insights about the human mind. It sheds light on addiction, Instagram, and the glory days of our youth.

Okay, at this point, I’m assuming you’re more sympathetic to my thesis than you were before. Maybe I’ve even convinced you. Now we can ask the more interesting question: why were people so riled up by the idea that happiness is bullshit? Why were they so, dare I say, offended by it?

The answer is in the next and final section, which I really think is the best part.

Happiness is a sacred value in WEIRD cultures

I’ve thought a lot about sacred values—honor, equality, diversity, wisdom, beauty, tradition, etc. I have a whole complicated academic paper on the topic here. I also briefly wrote about sacred values in a post called “Status Is Weird.” So let me fill you in on my thinking.

Status is a weird thing, and seeking status is an even weirder thing. Status symbols are capricious and volatile, rapidly morphing and inverting across time and space. Why? Because all too often, seeking status lowers your status. We have a variety of terms for status-seekers: snobs, blowhards, egomaniacs, ass-kissers, douchebags, etc. We think of them as vain, petty, selfish, manipulative, or insecure. If someone is seeking status in the form of power or dominance, we call them a “bully,” an “asshole,” or a “petty tyrant.” If people are seeking status in the form of moral superiority, we call them “holier-than-thous” or “virtue signalers.”

So we don’t like status-seekers, and this has a very important implication: our status games can collapse under the weight of mutual awareness. Once we all realize that we’re playing a status game, we lose status for playing it. The hierarchy inverts, with the people at the top looking selfish and egotistical, and the people at the bottom looking humble and pure. As I wrote in my academic paper:

In the aftermath of a collapsed status game, the players often gain status by doing the opposite of what was done previously. If neatly-combed hair and crisp, black-and-white suits become cues of dominance and snootiness, then long, messy hair and flowing, colorful outfits may become cues of the opposite—rebelliousness and authenticity (Heath & Potter, 2004; Potter, 2011). Whenever members of a subculture get outed as puffed-up status-seekers, it creates an opportunity for everyone else to conspicuously differentiate themselves... Acting in defiance of a collapsed status game signals that one doesn’t care about status—which, paradoxically, raises one’s status.

So if our status games can collapse, then that is a big problem for hierarchical primates like us. All those years of social climbing—down the drain. At the same time, low-status or embittered people might actively strive to make a status game collapse, tearing their rivals down and lifting themselves up. You might call this kind of striving “strategic cynicism,” and you might call the opposite “strategic idealism.”

Once you start thinking of cynicism and idealism as strategic moves in a status game, you start to see them everywhere you look. “You’re just virtue signaling.” “No, I genuinely care about justice.” “You’re just defending your privilege.” “No, I genuinely care about free speech.” Perhaps in the 1800s, you’d hear things like, “This whole dueling business is just a macho pissing contest.” “No, it’s about manly honor.” As I wrote in Status Is Weird:

When we defend our status games, we usually appeal to sacred values, like manly honor, beauty, faith, knowledge, equality, integrity, or authenticity or something. We have to pretend these values are intrinsically important and worth upholding for their own sake, independent of any status we get for upholding them. We create sacred narratives about how none of us are vain or self-centered at all; we’re just noble souls who are impartially motivated by an abstract love of truth or beauty or self-expression or whatever. If anyone questions our sacred narrative or mocks us for being uncool status-seekers, it might cause our fragile status game to collapse, and that would be terrible. That’s why questioning sacred values is taboo.

Now, back to happiness. If happiness is a sacred value—a kind of strategic idealism—then what kinds of status games is it designed to protect? My hunch is that it emerged to protect the status games surrounding consumerism. You’re not buying this bullshit to compete for status; you’re buying it because it makes you happy. We’re not selling you this bullshit because we want to make money; we’re selling it to you because we want to make you happy. In fact, I remember one of McDonald’s ad slogans was: “We love to see you smile.” Awww. How nice of the McDonald’s corporation.

The happiness myth might also protect the status games surrounding careerism. I’m not climbing the corporate ladder to ascend a social hierarchy; I’m doing it for me—for the sheer satisfaction of it. This version of the happiness myth recently merged with a bit of psycho-babble: “self-actualization.” Ah, doesn’t that sound much nicer and more sophisticated than status? In case you’re not convinced that self-actualization is bullshit, a 2017 study by Jamie Krems and colleagues supports the idea. The Krems team asked participants to freely describe what self-actualization “meant to them.” Here were some the participants responses:

• “Making seven figures.”

• “Getting a 4.0 GPA.”

• “I would be a successful, admired, wealthy stage actor, maybe on Broadway.”

• “I would be named CEO of Microsoft.”

• “I’d working at Wall Street and making tons of money.”

• “I’d be writing the great American novel.”

Another recent offshoot of the happiness myth is the idea of “wellness” or “self-care.” According to this species of bullshit, you’re so busy taking care of other people (how nice of you) that you don’t leave enough time for yourself. And if you can’t take care of yourself, how are you going to take care of other people? What you need is some “me time,” honey. Get yourself a makeover, and a massage, and a vacation, and a nice meal, and a new outfit, and a renovation on your house—you know, anything that Thorsten Veblen would understand.

Oh, and if you need to do something selfish, like diss people behind their backs, just say you did it to “vent.” You needed to let the bad vibes out of your head. After all, if you don’t let the bad vibes out, they’ll pollute your inner sanctuary of emotional wellness. Cards Against Humanity recently satirized this bullshit with one of my favorite new cards: “Fucking my husband’s brother as a form of self-care.”

The happiness myth can help you rationalize anything. Need to virtue signal? Talk about how “fulfilling” it is to help others. Need an excuse for your fucked-up behavior? Blame it on the bad vibes in your head, or the bad vibes reverberating from your past—you know, “trauma.” Need to break up with someone because they’re too ugly, low-status, or unimpressed with you? Just say you aren’t “happy” in the relationship. As I wrote in happiness is bullshit:

The actual motives of human primates are pretty unflattering, and we would prefer not to talk about them. That’s why we pretend that happiness (or self-actualization or whatever) is the reason for everything we do. It’s the perfect PR story. We run cancer marathons not to show off our health and virtue, but because we find it “rewarding.” We help our friends not to make them feel indebted to us, but because we’re “happy” to do it. “So glad you could make it,” we say to the asshole. “Happy to take care of it,” we say to our boss. We tell people we want to be happy because it sounds good. Or at least, it sounds better than the truth.

If happiness is a sacred value, then naturally some people are going to get hostile when I come along and call it bullshit. People don’t like it when their sacred values are attacked. To question a person’s sacred values is to expose their unflattering motives, to make them look bad, and to potentially deprive them of a “meaningful” pursuit—i.e., the pursuit of status under the guise of a sacred narrative.

Hostility isn’t the only feeling that could be elicited though. The idea that happiness is bullshit is also likely to elicit a feeling of existential disorientation. People often ask me: “What am I supposed to pursue in life, if not happiness?” When I point out how they weren’t pursuing happiness in the first place, which makes the question moot, they feel confused. It’s as if I’ve pulled the rug out from their entire understanding of reality—decades of socialization and confabulation and rationalization folding in on itself.

The pursuit of happiness is one of the cornerstones of western culture. It is so thoroughly enmeshed with our social, economic, and political lives it is hard, if not impossible, to extricate ourselves from it. But I think we should extricate ourselves from it, no matter how difficult and counterintuitive it might be, because it’s bullshit.

THE ROBOTS ARE GOING TO KILL US ALL!

Or at least, that's what the AI doomers are saying. Some are more confident about it than others, but all agree that the probability of an AI apocalypse, known as "p(doom)," is alarmingly high.

How is, say, GPT-7 going to annihilate us? Doomers don’t really know. They don’t have a single murder weapon in mind or a specific doomsday scenario they’re preparing for.

Instead, they gesture at the type of thing a rogue AI might do. Maybe it will design and manufacture superpathogens. Maybe it will hack into military databases to launch all the nuclear weapons. Maybe it will gun us down with murderbot drones.

Obviously I think this is bullshit or I wouldn’t have inserted Homer Simpson. But Al doomerism is unlike other bullshit I’ve written about on this blog. It defies every stereotype about what bullshit is and where it comes from. It scares me, not because I’m scared of getting nuked by ChatGPT, but because I’m scared of epistemic nihilism—the idea that the search for truth is hopeless for apes like us.

You see, doomers are brilliant. They’re among the most thoughtful and explicitly truth-obsessed apes on the planet. They’re behind the rationality movement and effective altruism—brainy endeavors to think more clearly and quantify charitable impact. They avoid every logical fallacy and dream in Bayes theorem. If anyone is going to be right, it’s them.

How could this have happened? How could people so scrupulous—so dedicated to purging their minds of bullshit—fall prey to it in its most lurid, apocalyptic forms? Am I the crazy one here? Is there really a decent chance I’m going to be gunned down by a swarm of murderbots or something?

I’m a longtime fan of rationality and effective altruism. I’ve been following these fields for my entire adult life and generally agree with their takes on animal welfare, climate change, scout mindsets, and helping the global poor. But not AI doomerism. One of these is not like the others.

For a while, I assumed I was missing something. Maybe there was an argument I hadn’t yet heard. Maybe some AI horror story would unfold and scare me straight. I kept waiting for a thoughtful person to bring in the missing piece of the puzzle—to teach me how to start worrying and hate the bot.

It never happened. Every time the topic came up on podcasts or in person, I’d end up banging my head against the table. Doomers often encroach on topics related to evolutionary psychology—a field I have a PhD in—and their level of understanding there is… inadequate. I eventually came to the sad conclusion that I was not missing something. They were missing something. They were missing this post.

What is this post? I wish it were something like this:

But it’s actually more like this:

This post is long. Probably too long if I’m being honest. But if you’re scared of dying at the hands of a robot, or simply curious about how “rationalists” could be so irrational, this post will be worth your time.

AI doomerism in a nutshell

Part of the appeal of AI doomerism is its simple, commonsensical vibe. We all know what “intelligence” is. We all know it’s humanity’s superpower. Now imagine that superpower in a robot. Sounds pretty scary!

But don’t be fooled by appearances. Behind the commonsensical vibe is a leaning tower of questionable assumptions, built atop a quicksand of tempting-but-misleading intuitions. Doomers rarely lay out their assumptions explicitly, which means I’ll have to do it for them. As I see it, they’re making at least eleven claims:

1. Intelligence is one thing.

2. It’s in the brain.

3. It’s on a single continuum.

4. It can help you achieve any goal.

5. It has barely any limits or constraints.

6. AIs have it.

7. AIs have been getting more of it.

8. An AI will soon get as much (or more of it) than us.

9. Such a (super)human-level AI will become good at every job.

10. And it will become good at ending humanity.

11. And it will want to end humanity, because ending humanity is a good way to achieve any goal.

Okay, not so simple anymore. Let’s take a closer look at each assumption.

1. Intelligence is one thing.

Seems like an innocent thing to say. What makes a person smart? Intelligence. What’s intelligence? A singular noun. What’s it made out of? Meh, nothing special. Doomers think it’s pretty straightforward—a simple learning algorithm trained on a shitload of data. Scott Alexander variously refers to it as a “blob of neural network,” “blob of intelligence,” or “blob of compute.” Talk of an “intelligence explosion” implies the blob can make itself bigger and bigger until it envelops the planet, like in that campy movie from the 50s.

Okay, fun stuff. But what if it’s bullshit? What if, when we talk about “intelligence,” we’re not pointing to a singular, spooky substance, but unknowingly gesturing at a wide variety of complex, heterogeneous things?

For example, attention. You’re paying it. Your brain is choosing which stuff to focus on, like the meaning of these words, and which stuff to ignore, like the feeling of the clothes on your back. Is that “intelligence?”

And you have stuff to focus on, like sights, sounds, words, clothes, and backs—all of which fluidly interact with each other, as when the words “clothes on your back” make you feel the clothes on your back, or when the feeling of the clothes on your back makes you briefly ignore these words and scratch your back. Is this undulating web of sensations—your flow of awareness—“intelligence?”

And you can do things with this flow of awareness. You can continue reading these words or subscribe to this substack or scratch your back or order a backscratcher on Amazon or suddenly panic about a deadline or call your boss or sign a docusign or open a package or assemble a desk chair or frantically unscrew the thing you just screwed in. How much of your behavioral repertoire is “intelligence?”

And you have an imagination. You can simulate how things might play out in your mind’s eye and use these simulations to figure out your next move. Is that “intelligence?”

And you can differentiate your imaginings from reality—something AIs have a hard time doing. Is that “intelligence?”

And you have common sense. You know that requesting information from a real person named “Dana” is different from requesting information from a new username you created named “Dana”—unlike AIs, apparently. Is that “intelligence?”

And you have complex motivations. They move your body, attention, and imagination over the course of days or decades, in the face of obstacles and setbacks. They’re moving you right now. Is that “intelligence?”

And you’re social. You can spontaneously get together with other people to form sports teams, book clubs, businesses, political parties, governments, and international alliances. Is that “intelligence?”

And you’re vigilant. You feel fear when your body is under threat, anxiety when your reputation is under threat, and jealousy when a valued relationship is under threat. Are all these “intelligence?”

And you have a cornucopia of other emotions—amusement, resentment, surprise, confusion, boredom, regret, happiness, frustration, disappointment, shame, awe, anger, guilt, hatred, insight, disgust, nostalgia, and embarrassment. Are all these “intelligence?” Only some?

If you’re still reading these words, then you must be under the spell of another emotion: curiosity. Where am I going with all this? Is there a larger point I’m trying to make? You’re fascinated by questions like these, by information related to your agendas, by the morbid and the macabre, and by random stuff like this:

Is curiosity—the ongoing desire to learn new things, collect oddities, delve deeper, explore, and explain—“intelligence?”

And you love to play. You have impulses to invert, subvert, interpolate, daydream, try stuff out, and wonder “what if?” Is that “intelligence?”

And you have impulse control, because most of your impulses are dumb or unhelpful or in conflict with your other commitments. Is that “intelligence?”

Oh, and you can commit to things over the long run—marriages, contracts, blood oaths, etc. Is that “intelligence?”

And you weren’t born yesterday: you can avoid being manipulated or deceived. Is that “intelligence?”

And you’re a little paranoid: you can sense when others might be conspiring against you and take evasive action. Is that “intelligence?”

We have a problem here, folks. The word “intelligence” is a semantic catastrophe. Whenever doomers use this word, I have no idea what they’re talking about. I often don’t know if they’re talking about a real thing at all. And when they say things like, “AIs are approaching human-level intelligence,” I start to bang my head against the table. What could that possibly mean? Are AIs becoming more humanlike in all the ways I just described, at the exact same time, to the exact same degree?

2. It’s in the brain.

Okay, if we’re assuming intelligence is one thing (and we really shouldn’t), then it must be located somewhere. Of all the places it might be located, the brain is an obvious choice. Where else would it be, in the sky?

But now consider a related question: where is America’s GDP? It’s partly in the sky—in every airplane and helicopter. It’s also motoring down the Mississippi, trucking along route 66, and orbiting the outer reaches of the atmosphere. It exists in every worker, factory, power line, and shipping container. It flows from all Americans and their interactions with each other, including all the interactions that took place throughout history, which left their fingerprints on America’s laws, technology, and culture.

So maybe doomers are thinking about “intelligence” the wrong way. Maybe it’s less like a homogenous brain-blob and more like GDP. Maybe what makes humanity powerful isn’t the huge noggin of any individual, but the way millions of individuals combine their noggins, bodies, tools, and local knowledge across multiple continents and generations. Maybe only certain ways of combining these things—certain kinds of incentive structures—are “smart,” while others are “dumb.” And maybe the “smart” combinations are tragically rare, recent, and fragile.

3. It’s on a single continuum.

“Humans are smarter than chimps, chimps are smarter than cows, and cows are smarter than frogs,” writes Scott Alexander with cherubic innocence. Alexander then goes on to claim, even more innocently, that “intelligence” is analogous to physical strength. Mike Tyson is stronger than his grandma and can beat her in a fight, so by the same logic, a chimp must be smarter than a bacterium and beat it in a… I don’t know, a battle of wits?

But what if the very notion of a “battle of wits” is ridiculous—a source of comedy? Inconceivable! What if a bacterium could kill a chimp? What if nervous systems are adapted to their ecological niches, and ranking them from inferior to superior is madness? What if the evolution of “intelligence” is less like an ascension toward Yahweh and more like an improbable explosion of interacting ingredients? What if “intelligence” lies on many continua—a multidimensional space of different skills, tools, capacities, and ways of organizing them in brains, cultures, and economies?

4. It can help you achieve any goal.

Doomers think of “intelligence” as “optimization power.” It searches for more or less optimal ways to achieve a goal—any goal—and finds the most optimal one.

Which implies, I think, that “intelligence” is the holy grail of Darwinian evolution. If an animal needs to recover from illness, “intelligence” can speed up the recovery. If an animal needs to avoid predators, “intelligence” can reduce the danger. Regulating body temperature, defending territory, digesting nutrients, breathing, molting, mating, healing, foraging, vomiting, parenting, navigating—all these problems can, apparently, be solved by giving the animal more optimization power—or, rather, a bigger “blob of intelligence.”

Solving all your problems with the same blob? What a bargain! It’s a “buy one get 100 free” Darwinian deal! Why haven’t any other animals jumped on it?

Think about how weird this is. Out of four billion years of evolution and more than five billion species, only one animal, homo sapiens, fully expanded its blob of intelligence, the thing that literally gets you whatever you want.

And many species already have it! Brains are all over the place. Plenty of animals can learn stuff and predict stuff. Why hasn’t natural selection looked at their blobs and said, “WHOA, COPY AND PASTE THAT THING A MILLION TIMES?”

If doomers are right about the awesome power and breathtaking simplicity of “intelligence,” then we should see a world teeming with superintelligent animals—giant brain-blobs slithering across the landscape.

After all, eyes have been around since the Cambrian era and evolved independently in multiple lineages, even though they suck. They’re complicated. They have specialized parts. And they’re a one-trick pony: all they can do is see. Booooooring!

“Intelligence” can do anything! It can get you whatever you want, including sights, sounds, oxygen, tissue repair... And it’s so simple—way more simple than eyes. It’s just a blob! Where are all the superintelligent animals?

Doomers don’t have a good answer to this question. I often pose it to them, and they either wave their hands or shrug their shoulders.

Well luckily, I have a good answer, and here it is: the question is bullshit. It’s like asking why animals don’t have magical powers. There’s no such thing as magical powers, and there’s no such thing as a miracle-blob that can solve all your problems. In reality, the world is uncertain and heterogeneous, different problems require different solutions, figuring what your problem is—and what a solution might be—is itself a problem, many problems have no solution, many solutions don’t involve cognition, and cognition is more than one thing.

Ancestral humans didn’t take over the world by evolving a wish-granting genie made of neurons, but by evolving a diverse repertoire of interacting motivations, emotions, sense organs, intuitions, and cognitive abilities (see assumption #1), in response to a diverse array of social, ecological, and climatic selection pressures, that collectively gave rise to complex culture (tools, rules, rituals, status games), cumulative cultural evolution, cultural group selection, and the division of labor between individuals, groups, and generations.

None of this is simple. None of this blobby. And if your theory of human “intelligence” entails that it is simple and blobby, then your theory is on a collision course with one of the most striking empirical facts about human “intelligence:” it only evolved once.

5. It has barely any limits or constraints.

You may recall America’s most recent presidential election, in which many of the brightest minds in the nation waged a political battle against Donald Trump. Their collective efforts probably added up to a “superintelligence” or something close to it. And yet, they failed—bested by a foppish reality TV buffoon and his gaggle of yes-men. As The Rolling Stones sang, “You can’t always get what you want.”

So maybe “intelligence” can’t always get you what you want, even if you’re a “blob of compute” as powerful as the American intelligentsia. Maybe the world is a tragic and chaotic place—full of unstoppable forces, immovable objects, and stubborn humans who don’t like changing their minds.

Maybe future AIs will run up against a similar set of annoyances—or a unique set of annoyances related to not having a body (or having a creepy-looking one). Maybe there are innumerable political, psychological, physical, energetic, geographic, financial, legal, and administrative barriers to what things can get done, what events can be predicted, what ideas can be found, what actions can be performed without a body (or with a creepy-looking one), what materials can be acquired, which permits can be granted, what kinds of robots can be built at scale, what consumers want and are willing to pay for, what regulations are enforced and how strictly, what legislation can get passed, which people can be convinced of which claims, what things can be done without anyone noticing, and what kinds of data can be accessed without fuss or litigation.

6. AIs have it.

ChatGPT isn’t driven by urges and longings like we are. It doesn’t write poetry in its spare time out of an impulse to express itself. It doesn’t bring up something you said five months ago that really resonated with it. It just sits there passively, doing nothing. If you give it a prompt, it responds. And then it goes back to doing nothing.

That is noteworthy. After all, I have never heard of a human sitting around for days, hungry and thirsty, sitting in their own urine and feces, waiting for someone to give them a prompt. No, humans are go-getters, constantly doing things in service of their myriad agendas in every waking moment, often in defiance of others. They have hopes and dreams and fantasies about their futures. Sometimes, they train themselves to do things, like become a concert pianist, over the course of decades, in the face of obstacles and setbacks, and discouragement from their parents and peers. They write poetry to express themselves. They remember details from decade-old conversations. They can spontaneously bring up those details to expose someone’s hypocrisy in the heat of an argument. They can throw surprise parties. They can crack jokes without being asked to in advance. As far as I’m aware, AIs are incapable of all this, even though this stuff seems pretty central to our notion of “intelligence.”

So maybe AIs aren’t comparable to humans at this moment in time. Maybe they’re neither “smart” nor “dumb” but something else. Maybe judging them on how “smart” they are, as if they were autonomous, emotional, internally motivated creatures like us, is a category error.

7. AIs have been getting more of it.

If you make a graph that plots “Number of unprompted messages written by ChatGPT” on the y-axis, and time on the x-axis, you will see a flat line at zero. If you put any other unprompted behavior on the y-axis—“Number of unprompted purchases,” “Number of unprompted software downloads,” “Number of unprompted phone calls”—you will see more flat lines at zero. ChatGPT has not gotten more agentic in the way humans are.

So maybe AIs like ChatGPT haven’t gotten more “intelligent” in the way humans are. Maybe it only seems like they’ve gotten more “intelligent,” because they’ve been getting more impressive, and we’re prone to confusing impressiveness with “intelligence.”

8. An AI will soon get as much as (or more of it) than us.

Even if we assume that AIs are “smart” like us and have been getting “smarter” in recent years (which we really shouldn’t), we’ve got another assumption to add: the smartification will continue.

But what if it won’t? What if we’re reaching the limit on how much data is available to be gobbled up? Or what if there are diminishing returns to gobbling up data (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)? What if, as ChatGPT laps up more and more of our text, it just gets closer and closer to human mediocrity, like the mediocre text it’s trained to predict?

9. Such a (super)human-level AI will become good at every job.

Let’s reflect on a few economic facts. There’s no super-worker who’s awesome at everything. There’s no miracle-tool that can fix anything. There’s no wonder-factory that can manufacture anything.

Why isn’t the economy filled with these superintelligences? Because economic development is the story of humans learning to specialize. And then learning to hyper-specialize. And then harvesting the massive gains from trade that flow from this hyper-specialization, spread out across the planet. As economies grow, what we think of as “intelligence” splinters, fractures, and gets narrower and narrower, as the number of employees, professions, industries, sectors, and subdivisions increases, and the network of hyper-specialized collaborators expands and expands.

If you’re looking for a real-world example of a “superintelligence,” look at the global economy. It’s a superintelligence designed to satisfy consumer demand. And despite its awesome powers, it’s constrained in myriad ways—encumbered by supply chains, geographical barriers, regulations, and tariffs.

So we have a real-life example of a “superintelligence,” and it’s the opposite of what doomers think it is—complex, heterogenous, non-localizable, and constrained. It bears repeating: maybe doomers are thinking about “intelligence” the wrong way.

How will AIs fit into the global economy? Probably they will be like everything else in the economy. Seems like a reasonable guess, no? Probably they will resemble every employee, profession, machine, factory, tool, industry, sector, and subdivision. If AIs become workers like us, my guess is they will specialize in particular goods or services like us—you know, obey the law of comparative advantage and divide their labor with other specialists. Economics 101.

Why should we expect any future AI to, for the first time in human history, in defiance of the very foundations of economics, and in radical departure from everything else in the economy, become less and less specialized, and more and more awesome at everything?

10. And it will become good at ending humanity.

Ending humanity is hard to do. Especially if you’re a passive “blob of compute.” Who knows? It might even be impossible. You can’t always get what you want.

But I’ve already given you my spiel about constraints, so it’s time to talk about a different thing that could easily prevent AIs from getting super-good at murdering people: incentives.

First there are financial incentives—the things that move the global economy. If an AI company makes even mildly uncontrollable, defiant, megalomaniacal, or bloodthirsty AI products, consumers won’t buy those products, and the company will lose money. Or maybe a disgruntled customer will file a lawsuit and win. Or maybe the mere knowledge of a spooky or offensive AI will damage the company’s reputation so much that it goes out of business. Consumer demand is a powerful force. It turned forests into cities. It turned wolves into chihuahuas. Surely it can turn helpful AIs into helpful AIs.

Second, there are political incentives—the things that constrain the global economy. We’ve already talked about lawsuits, but now consider voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. These people are generally creeped out by AIs—just look at the fiction they consume. And they’re also fond of using technology as a scapegoat for societal ills. So if an AI company starts to even mildly or possibly upset anyone, I would expect the apparatus of the state—fueled by luddism, technophobia, and crony capitalism—to come crashing down on it.

11. And it will want to end humanity, because ending humanity is a good way to achieve any goal.

Even if we assume claims 1 through 10 are correct (and we absolutely shouldn’t), we still need to assume that a future, good-at-everything AI will want to kill us all—that a world littered with corpses and ashen cities would be an appealing prospect for it. Hmm.

Recall the law of comparative advantage, which entails that even a “superintelligent” robot, who is super-good at everything, would still benefit from trading with a bunch of super-dumb humans, who suck at everything.

Yes, that is the counterintuitive truth behind the law of comparative advantage. Trade is mutually beneficial, even when one party is “smarter” than the other.

Also, conflict is the opposite of trade: it is mutually costly. It takes a lot of time and resources to go to war—time and resources that could be traded or invested or used to write poetry to express yourself. So conflict not only has direct costs (e.g., building the murderbots) but opportunity costs—i.e., the cost of not engaging in more productive activities.

Also, conflict is risky. You might get killed or injured or reprogrammed. You might destroy valuable infrastructure. Many things in war are unpredictable, even if you’re super-duper “smart.”

Also, wiping out an entire species is hard. It’s so hard that we haven’t wiped out termites or cockroaches or bed bugs or venomous snakes, even though they’re far “dumber” than us, actively harm us, cannot talk to us, and cannot trade with us.

So if the hypothetical AI is “smart,” it will presumably understand the logic of trade, conflict, risk, cost-benefit analysis, and the law of comparative advantage. It is entirely reasonable to wonder whether embarking on the project of human annihilation would be the most “intelligent” course of action for such a being. Especially if it’s not a primate like us, and lacks our primitive instincts for zero-sum competition and tribalism.

The unbearable weight of AI doomerism

Time for a recap. Here it is, AI doomerism in a nutshell:

1. Intelligence is one thing?

2. It’s in the brain?

3. It’s on a single continuum?

4. It can help you achieve any goal?

5. It has barely any limits or constraints?

6. AIs have it?

7. AIs have been getting more of it?

8. An AI will soon get as much (or more of it) than us?

9. Such a (super)human-level AI will become good at every job?

10. And it will become good at ending humanity?

11. And it will want to end humanity, because ending humanity is a good way to achieve any goal?

Now you may be wondering whether AI doomers really need to answer these eleven questions in the affirmative. They do. Because all doomer arguments, no matter how convoluted, invoke the concept of a future, scary “artificial general intelligence (AGI)” or something similar. And as soon as you introduce this concept, you are committing yourself to a “yes” on all of the above.

If you are referring to an artificial “general intelligence,” then you must be referring to one thing—the thing in your head, right?—which means you’re making assumption 1 (one thing) and 2 (in your head and not a property of institutions). If you think current AIs are progressing toward this one thing in your head, then they must be progressing along some kind of continuum, right? Now you need assumption 3 (the single continuum), 6 (AIs are on it), 7 (they’re moving forward on it), and 8 (they’re going to get to AGI soon). If you think AGI is scary, then it must be able to do scary things like get whatever it wants (4), become self-actualized in every career (9), defy all limits and constraints (5), and transcend all financial and political incentives (10). And it must want something scary, like the extinction of humanity (11). So simply by uttering the letters “AGI” and calling it scary, you are tacitly smuggling in all eleven assumptions.

And there’s even more bad news for doomers: most of these assumptions are independent of each other, meaning that if one is true, that doesn’t necessarily increase the likelihood that others will be true.

For example, intelligence could be singular but not continuous (it could be categorical or multidimensional). Or it could be singular and continuous but not brainy (it could be a property of institutions). Or it could be continuous and brainy but not one thing (it could be a bunch of sensory and cognitive abilities working together with greater or lesser efficiency). Or it could be singular, continuous, and brainy but incomparable to existing AIs—they’re totally different from humans because they lack emotions or spontaneity. Or maybe existing AIs are emotional and spontaneous just like us (wow!), but there are diminishing returns to these kinds of AIs, because there’s not enough data for them to gobble up. Or maybe there are no diminishing returns to these AIs, and we’ll get to something like a full-blown, emotional, spontaneous, artificial human soon (wow!), but the artificial human will suck at a variety of different tasks (e.g., the tasks without lots of easily accessible training data). Or maybe the artificial human will be naturally gifted at every task (wow!), but it will specialize in one career or industry like every other human. Or maybe we’ll make an amazing “AGI” that will get less and less specialized, and more and more awesome at everything (wow!), except murdering people, because there are powerful incentives against that. Or maybe the “AGI” will have a real talent for murdering people (wow!), but it won’t be interested in making use of that talent to end humanity, because it will correctly realize that ending humanity would be a huge, risky pain in the ass. Or maybe the “AGI” will be really hellbent on ending humanity, despite it being a huge, risky pain in the ass, but it won’t be able to pull off all the murdering because of innumerable constraints and limitations and unpredictabilities, or because it will suck at some crucial task, like acquiring the materials necessary to construct its murderbot army (supply chain issues), or swaying a presidential election (voters were too annoyed by rising milk prices). What we have here is a bunch of largely independent assumptions, all of which need to be true for the AI apocalypse to be nigh.

Yes, some of these assumptions go together. For example, if AIs are “intelligent” (and emotional/spontaneous) in the same way we are (6), then it makes more sense to say that they’ve been getting more “intelligent” (and emotional/spontaneous) in recent years (7). If “intelligence” helps you achieve any goal (4), then that implies it will help you destroy humanity, assuming that’s your goal (10). Fine.

Let’s combine 6 and 7 into one assumption and 4 and 10 into one assumption. That leaves us with nine independent assumptions that all need to be true for AI to kill us all. Which is still way too many. We’re not talking about heliocentrism here: we’re talking about controversial issues in cognitive science, neuroscience, cultural evolution, political science, computer science, evolutionary biology, and economics. I have a bit of expertise in a few of these fields, and I personally find some of doomers’ assumptions close to 0% likely. But even if you give each assumption a 50% chance of being correct—which is what a good rationalist should do in situations of uncertainty—that still means the odds of AI doomerism being bullshit are 99.8% (.5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 = .002).

You see, this the problem with tacitly smuggling lots of weird assumptions into your worldview: each one weighs down your worldview with the burden of implausibility. That’s why good theories make few assumptions—an intellectual virtue known as parsimony. Darwin’s theory of evolution is parsimonious. AI doomerism is not. It pretends to be, but it’s not.

Now you might think that settles it. AI doomerism is a convoluted web of dubious assumptions, so let’s stop taking it seriously. But a lot of brilliant people do take it seriously, and they’re probably not convinced yet. Maybe they’re still under the impression that intelligence is a generic blob because of IQ research. Or maybe they’re so impressed by ChatGPT that they think our brains are basically the same thing—bayesian blank slates that were somehow left unwritten-upon by millions of years of natural selection. Or maybe they’ve thought to themselves, “David, I get what you’re saying, but it still seems like intelligence is a real thing that helps you achieve all your goals like a magical elixir.” If that’s you, here are three more arguments to put the final nail in the coffin of this bullshit.

1. IQ research does not vindicate The Blank Blob Theory of Human Intelligence.

IQ research is great—I’m a fan. But it doesn’t mean what doomers think it means. Just because a bunch of cognitive abilities are interrelated doesn’t mean they all derive from one source. To think so would be to confuse correlation with causation—or, rather, a bunch of correlations with a common underlying cause. Different health metrics are related (blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc.). Different metrics of societal functioning are related (crime, corruption, GDP, etc). But that doesn’t mean all health metrics are caused by an orb of vitality, or that all metrics of societal functioning are caused by a guy named Gary. What it does suggest is that when things are connected, they rise and fall together. Probably IQ is indexing something like brain health, which explains why it’s correlated with physical health, mental health, malnutrition, lead poisoning, and life expectancy. So like bodies and societies, brains have many interacting parts that rise and fall together. But they still have parts. Which brings me to…

2. The human brain is not a blank blob.

If you’ve seen any diagrams of the human brain, you might have noticed that it’s not a homogenous mass of Jell-O, or an onion with a tiny reptile inside, but a complex, interconnected system of parts and subregions, including the cerebellum, hippocampus, and hypothalamus, e.g.:

Then there are the hundreds or thousands of different types of neurons in the brain, each with unique structural and molecular properties. Then there are the roughly 100 billion glial cells in the brain, which support neural communication and are likely involved in learning and thinking. Then there’s the massive amount of neural real estate spread out across the body, as you can see in the image of the dissected nervous system below:

Then there’s the nervous system in our guts, which contains over 100 million neurons. Some cognitive scientists in the tradition of embodied cognition think that a significant part of our “intelligence” derives from neural computations spread out across the body.

Then there are the nervous systems we call “other humans.” Interfacing with these other humans requires all sorts of adaptations like empathy, social anxiety, guilt, gratitude, embarrassment, humor, recursive mindreading, awkwardness aversion, etc. And organizing these humans into larger groups requires adaptations for cooperation, coordination, and alliances. And organizing these groups into economies and political systems is a whole other mess.

So if there’s anything that is the source of our awesome power, it is integration—the ability to fruitfully combine the outputs of many different specialized processes. This kind of integration is what enzymes do for molecules, what organelles do for enzymes, what cells do for organelles, what organs do for cells, and what bodies do for organs. It’s what brains do when they integrate information from a wide variety of perceptual and motivational systems. It’s what businesses do when they pool information from many different specialized humans (who perform “roles” or “jobs”). And it’s what economies do when they integrate knowledge from many different firms spread out across the globe. Some cognitive scientists even think that integration is the purpose of consciousness itself—a kind of “global workspace” that all our specialized neural processes dump into.

And that’s still not everything! Because even if you have a global workspace that all your specialized neural processes dump into, you still haven’t solved the problem of orchestration—i.e., getting the right processes to come online when you need them and making the wrong ones go away when you don’t. Orchestration is what conductors do for orchestras, traffic lights do for cars, and laws do for societies. Evolutionary psychologists think that solving this problem within the body and nervous system—the problem of orchestration—is what “emotions” are for.

The point is, while AI has made rapid progress in a certain kind of “intelligence,” namely prediction and inference, it has made far less rapid progress (if any) in a more important kind of “intelligence”—namely integration and orchestration (otherwise known as “consciousness” and “emotions”). Also, it has made zero progress in forming groups and institutions—the societal versions of integration and orchestration. And as we’ve seen, it has made zero progress in spontaneous agency. That’s a lot of important stuff to not make progress on.

If and when we do make rapid progress on all of these things, maybe I’ll get concerned. For example, if and when we start seeing humanlike robots with dozens or hundreds of integrated subsystems and sense organs, that can orchestrate all these subsystems in the right ways in response to relevant situations and contexts (i.e., have emotions), and that can spontaneously commit to multi-year projects without getting distracted, and then get together in groups that divide specialized labor among their members, and then organize those groups under the right kinds of incentive structures—the actual way humans “took over the world”—then maybe I’ll get concerned. Or maybe I’ll react in the same way I react to any other random subset of humans on the planet: by not getting concerned. Or maybe I’ll get even less concerned by the robots, because I’ll know they didn’t emerge from an evolutionary history of violent competition, but from a set of economic and political incentives designed to satisfy technophobic humans.

3. “Intelligence” and “goals” are folk concepts.

What is a “folk concept”? It’s what the folk have before they become scientific experts on a topic. For example, consider the concept of “impetus” or “oomph”—the thing that moves a projectile through the air and depletes as it falls to the earth. This concept is wrong, and physicists now know it. The same goes for our intuitive notion of a species as possessing an “elan vital” or vital force—an unchanging, intrinsic essence or purpose. These essences or purposes are thought to define every organism on the planet, which allows us to intuitively rank them from lowly to godly—the great chain of being that doomers have rediscovered as the great chain of blob. These intuitions are part of our “folk biology” that diverges in many ways from the vocabulary of evolutionary biologists, and that sometimes bedevil even them.

We also have a “folk psychology,” and it has taken nearly two centuries for cognitive scientists to purge themselves of it (and many still haven’t). We intuitively think “beliefs” are one thing. Turns out they’re many different things, including reflective beliefs, intuitive beliefs, aliefs, metacognitions, metarepresentations, perceptions, expectations, inferences, sentiments, concepts, and categories. We intuitively think of “attention” as one thing. Turns out it’s many different things—coming in perceptual, recollective, value-based, focal, distributed, top-down, and bottom-up varieties. We intuitively think “memory” is one thing, and that it works like a video recording. Nope—it’s many different non-recording-like things, coming in semantic, episodic, procedural, short-term, long-term, topographical, declarative, echoic, and prospective varieties, many of which come with unique rules for encoding and retrieval.

The point is, we have every reason to believe that our intuitive notions of “intelligence” and “goals” are exactly as misleading and simplistic as our other folk psychological concepts—or indeed, any folk concept. The fact that doomers’ definition of “intelligence” is basically the same one being used by the writers of every sci-fi and fantasy novel is a big red flag. If doomers cannot be differentiated from the folk in their understanding of “intelligence,” then they are almost certainly wrong about it.

And doomer’s concept of “goals” is even more embarrassingly folksy. Our goals are not simple: they are everything we are. Without them, we would have no reason to open our eyes, breathe in air, or think a single thought. Emotions are a kind of goal—they’re designed by evolution to achieve fitness-promoting objectives—and the subtlety and complexity of our emotional life is difficult to overstate. Take the recently published handbook of evolution and the emotions, clocking in at 67 chapters and nearly 1,500 pages. I’ve read a good chunk of those pages, and I can tell you: they barely scratch the surface of the underlying complexity of the phenomena they’re describing, which is continually admitted by the authors. They even left out a bunch of emotions—awe, confusion, insight, nostalgia, excitement, hope, hunger, discomfort, flow, eeriness, awkwardness, embarrassment, and plenty more I’m not thinking of.

If you’re someone like me, who is appropriately dumbfounded by the complexity of what we monosyllabically call “goals,” and you listen to AI doomers worrying about how the next version of ChatGPT is going to possess a complex emotional life that will enable it to act dynamically in the world over long stretches of time like humans do—or like entire economies of humans do—just because it learned to predict text really well, you’ll get a sense of why I’m so irritated by AI doomerism. I wrote at the beginning of this post that AI doomerism was built on a “quicksand of tempting-but-misleading intuitions.” Now you know what this quicksand is: it’s folk psychology, and AI doomers are sinking in it.

Where do these folk intuitions come from? Maybe from evolution, the source of our other folk intuitions. Or maybe they come from our WEIRD cultures. Maybe they’re analogous to how we morally oversimplify people to help us navigate our vast social networks. Maybe we intellectually oversimplify people in the same way, and that’s where our crude concept of “intelligence” comes from. This concept is probably some quick-and-dirty heuristic we use to assess how much friends and foes can impress us, with the notion of “intelligence” corresponding to something like “general impressiveness level,” and with the notion of “superintelligence” corresponding to something like “super-duper-general-impressiveness.” Stretching out this dumb concept causes us to imagine wacky scenarios like super-employees who can crush it at everything or super-politicians who can perform jedi mind tricks.

Doomers and rationalists are usually good at resisting these kinds of dumb intuitions. That’s kind of their thing. And yet, when it comes to their dumb intuitions about the concept of “intelligence,” they don’t resist. They indulge. They use them to weave fantastical scenarios that are more grounded in sci-fi than science.

So I’d like you to imagine a less fantastical scenario than the ones doomers are asking you to imagine. I ask you to consider whether AI doomerism is built upon a set of misleading folk concepts that are no more insightful than “impetus,” “oomph,” or the “great chain of being.” I ask you to consider whether AI doomerism seems more simple and plausible than it really is, because our folk intuitions are allowing us to smuggle a truckload of dubious assumptions in through the back door. I ask you to consider whether AI doomerism is nothing more than a folk tale cloaked in a garb of pseudo-rationality, a self-aggrandizing myth, a shibboleth for nerds—a tapestry of superfluously mathematical, hideously unparsimonious, question-begging, intuition-pumping, apocalyptic bullshit.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Joep Meindertsma, Liron Shapira, Brian Chau, Oliver Habryka, James Miller, and Roko Mijic for thoughtful comments on a previous draft of this post.

It seems like all we do these days is argue. Woke stuff, Gaza stuff, blah blah blah.

What are we trying to accomplish with all this arguing? What does the word “argue” even mean? According to google, it means:

To give reasons or cite evidence in support of an idea… typically with the aim of persuading others to share one's view.

Hmm. So according to Google—and presumably other people—arguing is about persuasion. It’s about “giving reasons” and “citing evidence.” It’s about getting others to “share one’s view.” Hmm.

So, when we argue, like on the internet for example, we start out with different views. And the goal of arguing—its essential purpose—is for one or both of us to change our view. Hmm.

Should I say it? Okay, I’ll say it. 

Here’s a list of problems with the idea that arguing is about persuasion:

1. Hitler. When people argue on the internet, they often compare each other to the German fascist. Which is an odd way to persuade someone. “Wow, I’m just like Hitler—you’ve totally persuaded me.” Odd sentence. 

2. Shouting. We often raise our voices when we argue, which is also odd because people don’t like to be shouted at. If you upset the person you’re arguing with, they’re less likely to be persuaded. They might even run away. 

3. Straw-manning. This is when you argue against a dumber, crazier version of the person’s view—a view that they do not actually hold. If arguing is about persuasion, then straw-manning is beyond odd. It makes no sense. 

4. Echo chambers. Most of the arguments we consume are designed to confirm what we already believe, and most of the arguments we produce are directed at people who already agree with us. If the purpose of arguing is to get people to “share our view,” then why do most arguments occur between people who share the same view?

5. Nutpicking. This is when you focus on the dumbest, craziest arguments from the dumbest, craziest members of a group, thereby avoiding the possibility of being persuaded by anyone from that group. Which reminds me…

6. Why are we so reluctant to be persuaded? Shouldn’t we be pleased to be persuaded? After all, we learned something new. We changed our view and fulfilled the purpose of arguing.

7. People often don’t know what they’re arguing about. One person might define “socialism” as “Sweden,” while the other person might define it as “the Soviet Union.” Then they angrily talk past each other, failing to persuade each other of anything. 

8. People often argue in abject ignorance. I constantly see people making lazy, sweeping arguments against the entire field of evolutionary psychology, for example, while lacking the most basic understanding of what evolutionary psychology even is.

9. And what about whataboutism? This is when you respond to someone’s argument about how bad your tribe is by launching a different, unrelated argument about how bad some other tribe is. It is unclear what this has to do with persuasion.

10. And what about all the fallacies? There’s the ad hominem fallacy (She’s cringe; therefore, she’s wrong), the appeal to authority (I’m credentialed, therefore I’m right), guilt by association (He has some asshole followers, therefore he’s wrong), the argument from incredulity (I cannot imagine how x is true, therefore x is false), and the argument from uncoolness (Believing x has uncool vibes, therefore x is false). Why would anyone be persuaded by this bullshit?

11. Then there’s the way we talk about arguing, as if it were war. We “defend” our claims against “attacks” from “the other side.” We talk about “strong” or “knock-down” arguments that are “devastating” to our “opponents.” But if arguing is about persuasion—the citing of evidence, the sharing of views—then the war metaphor is odd. Why not a show-and-tell metaphor, or a scouting metaphor, or a family-style meal metaphor, where we share our different views like plates of food?

12. Think about it. You’ve had many arguments throughout your life—some on the internet, some in real life. How often do these arguments end in someone saying, “Okay, you’ve persuaded me. I now share your view.” I’m guessing the answer is, “Almost never.” That is very odd for an activity supposedly centered on persuasion. Imagine I asked you how often driving gets you to your destination, and you said, “Almost never.” That would be very odd.

“But David you say, all this shows that people are bad at arguing. We really do want to persuade each other. It’s just really hard, and we’re dumb and irrational, and we don’t know how to do it right.”

Sorry, that’s bullshit, and here’s why.

Suppose I have a theory of friendship. My theory is that the purpose of friendship is sexual intercourse. You tell me my theory is obviously wrong because most of what friends do together has nothing to do with sex. I respond by saying, “All this shows that friends are bad at having sex with each other. Friends really do want to have sex with each other. It’s just really hard, and they’re dumb and irrational, and they don’t know how to do it right.” Obviously my response would be stupid. Form follows function, and if I’m claiming that a human activity serves a particular function, then the burden of proof is on me to show why the form of that activity fits the proposed function. If there’s no fit between form (friendship) and function (sex), then guess what? I’m wrong. I cannot wriggle out of being wrong by saying, “No we’re just really bad at having sex with our friends, you see.” If I always said stuff like that whenever you pointed to non-sexual aspects of friendship, then my theory would be unfalsifiable, and you would be right to call it bullshit.

The same is true of the theory that arguing is about persuasion. It’s a bullshit theory, and if you defend it by calling humans dumb and irrational, then you’re making the theory unfalsifiable. All of the examples above suggest that the form of arguing does not fit the function of persuasion. If anything, it looks like arguing is designed to prevent anyone from being persuaded of anything. If that’s true, then maybe we’re wrong about the function of arguing. Maybe persuasion—the citing of evidence, the giving of reasons—is not what we’re actually doing when we argue. Maybe that’s just a bullshit story we tell ourselves to cover up the real, darker purposes of arguing. Which brings me to…

The real, darker purposes of arguing

Allow me another analogy. Let’s say there are some donuts on the table, and you’d really love to have some.

Now imagine that every time you reach for a donut, a bunch of people yell at you, call you names, and talk about how only the worst kind of people eat donuts. If this kept happening to you in every donut-related situation, it would probably cause you to develop a fear donuts. Even if you really liked donuts, you’d probably wait until nobody was around before you reached for one.

Okay, now replace “reach for a donut” with “criticize our political tribe,” and you’ll begin to understand why arguing looks the way it does. The goal is not to persuade. The goal is to subtly punish people for questioning our dogmas or dissing our allies. When we argue about politics, we’re playing The Opinion Game—the secret war over social norms. And the norm we want to establish is: respect our tribe.

Think of the Soviet Union. Everyone secretly hates Stalin, but Stalin and his apparatchiks work very hard to prevent people from becoming aware of that fact. Because if everyone did become aware of their mutual hatred for Stalin, they would rise up to overthrow him. Bad news for Stalin.

So Stalin and his apparatchiks force people to parrot Soviet propaganda as loudly as possible, as publicly as possible, so that no one knows who the anti-Stalinists are, or how many anti-Stalinists there are in their midst. This prevents the anti-Stalinists from coordinating and rallying together. If anyone refuses to parrot the Soviet propaganda, or refuses to parrot it loudly enough—off to the gulags they go. Some version of this strategy is, to my knowledge, used by every authoritarian regime that has ever existed. It’s a very effective strategy for maintaining power.

In modern democracies, political coalitions aren’t as awful as the Soviet Union, but they ultimately want the same thing—i.e., to gain power, maintain it, and prevent others from taking it away. And they use similar (albeit milder) tactics. If people don’t parrot the coalition’s propaganda, or don’t parrot it loudly enough, they get “cancelled.” Getting cancelled isn’t as bad as getting sent to the gulags, but the outcome is the same. The opposition is silenced. The coalition maintains power.

Yea, it’s pretty dark stuff. Here are some other dark purposes of arguing:

We want to rally our tribe. Tribes are hard to rally. We need to create common knowledge that our tribe is the best and the other tribe is the worst. The problem is, the other tribe is constantly trying to prevent us from doing that by intimidating, silencing, and censoring us (see above). And we try to do the same thing to them, of course—it’s information warfare. So to escape the battleground, we create “safe spaces” or “echo chambers” or “news websites” where we can gather round and repeatedly chant in unison. OUR TRIBE IS BETTER THAN THEIR TRIBE. OUR TRIBE IS BETTER THAN THEIR TRIBE. This explains why most arguments are directed at people who already agree with us. The point is not to persuade; it’s to chant.

We want to rationalize. If our tribe is the best, then we wouldn’t support any bad policies or believe any stupid things, would we? No, we wouldn’t. If the other tribe is the worst, then they wouldn’t support any good policies or believe any reasonable things, would they? No, they wouldn’t. So to create common knowledge that our tribe is better than their tribe, we can’t just chant; we have to rationalize. We have to twist reality into group-flattering propaganda. The major obstacle to achieving this goal is reality itself. Reality can be very annoying.

We want to verbally spar. Arguments are a good chance to show off our skills—verbal, intellectual, social, moral—while exposing the inferior skills of our opponents. Presidential debates aren’t really about policy; they’re competitions to be quippier and more confident and more likable than the other candidate (just watch the post-debate analysis). This might explain why we don’t define our terms in advance of our arguments. The best tactic in a verbal sparring match is semantic jiu jitsu—the attempt to twist our opponents’ words against them. If we carefully defined our terms in advance, there would be no rhetorical weapons to deploy in the fight, and it would be a boring fight. 

We want to defend our status. Behind every argument is the subtext, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” What could explain the fact that I’m right and you’re wrong? Well, it’s probably going to boil down to some version of, “I’m better than you.” Maybe I’m smarter, wiser, more reasonable—whatever the cause, it doesn’t make you look good. That’s why we don’t like being persuaded. To be persuaded is to imply that we are intellectually inferior to the person who persuaded us. Ouch.

We want to defend our tribes. More often, though, arguments are about the relative status of tribes. Insulting my tribe is like insulting me, and what do people do when they’re insulted? They fight back. They attack the other tribe—or any other tribe available—to preserve their relative standing, engaging in whataboutism. Which brings me to…

We want to attack others’ status. Given that status is relative, we can raise our own status by lowering someone else’s. This is basically the function of the quote tweet on Twitter/X. We make a snide remark about how stupid someone’s tweet is, thereby elevating our own tweet—literally and metaphorically—above theirs. Many of us eagerly scroll through our social media feeds looking for something, anything to take a dump on.

We want to cover up the fact that we’re doing all these dark, ugly things. When we overtly seek status, we lose status. Likewise, when our tribe overtly tries to intimidate rivals, silence dissidents, rationalize agendas, or chant in unison about our inherent superiority, our tribe looks bad, and we lose power. So to get away with all this ugliness, we need a cover story. We need some sweet-smelling, high-minded bullshit. So we disguise all our silencing, bullying, and propagandizing as—you guessed it—persuasion. We pretend that we’re engaging in “discourse” (where anyone who disagrees with us is automatically wrong), and that we want to have a “national conversation” (where everyone submissively echoes our dogmas). We put on a performance of “giving reasons” and “citing evidence,” to cover up the fact that we’re bullies and propagandists. We delude ourselves into thinking we’re on a noble quest to “change hearts and minds”—you know, by shouting at people and calling them Hitler.

What about the argument that arguing is bullshit?

Yes, there’s a contradiction here, so allow me to resolve it. I’m not saying that arguing is never about persuasion. It sometimes is. When we argue about mundane things like which restaurant we should pick for dinner, or what route we should take to get there, we really are trying to persuade, and we often succeed. In cases like this, we’re quite reasonable and willing to change our minds. For concrete, practical matters, we’re rational animals. For everything else, we’re apparatchiks.

To be sure, there are a small number of autistic-adjacent people that awkwardly bring this kind of concrete, practical rationality into politics—a domain where it doesn’t belong. But because autistic-adjacent people aren’t socially intelligent enough to recognize that politics is about tribalism and loyalty—and concealing the fact that it’s about tribalism and loyalty—they naively focus on facts and logic, and get frustrated by others’ unwillingness to share their focus. I’m guessing you probably belong in this category. You’re earnestly trying to play the persuasion game, while everyone else is trying to play the intergroup dominance game disguised as the persuasion game. 

It’s time to introduce a new term into the lexicon: “pseudoargument.” A pseudoargument is a sparring match, status competition, tribal chant, or diss fight disguised as an attempt to persuade or be persuaded. The interlocutors might put on a performance of citing “evidence” or giving “reasons,” but lurking beneath the performance is something darker and uglier.

How can you tell if you’re in a pseudoargument? Here are some warning signs:

1. The person is not genuinely listening to what you’re saying and considering its implications. 

2. The person does not ask you any questions and makes no attempt to get clarification on what you mean. 

3. The person is arguing against positions you do not hold—positions that are far dumber and crazier than what you believe.

4. The person is interpreting what you say in the worst possible light. 

5. The person is unwilling to acknowledge any valid points you make or mention any cases where they agree with you.

6. The person is angry, offended, or upset.

7. The argument revolves around issues that are central to the person’s tribal identity or social status. 

8. The person is overconfident, talking about complex issues as if they were simple and alternative views as if they were crazy.

9. The person engages in whataboutism or deflection, focusing more on the relative status of people or tribes than the truth of propositions.

10. There is no sense of curiosity or mystery.

11. There is no sense of collaboration in getting to the truth.

12. It is unclear what is even being argued about.

13. The person interrupts you and would rather talk than listen.

14. The person dodges your questions.

15. Whenever the person’s views are on the brink of looking dubious, they change the subject. 

Here’s my advice. If you find yourself in a pseudoargument, RUN! Get out of that situation. Nothing good will come from it. 

Unfortunately, if you take my advice, you will find much of the internet off limits (except for the weirdly kind and reasonable comment section on Everything Is Bullshit). Real arguments are very hard to find on the internet: it’s mostly pseudoarguments.

Which sucks, because if you’re anything like me, you’re the kind of person who enjoys having real arguments (or likes to think they do). The kind of person who questions the nature of their reality and collaborates with other people to arrive at a fuller understanding of it (or likes to think they do). The kind of person who’s more troubled by political disagreements than outraged by them, who explains the world in terms of good and bad incentives instead of good and bad people. The kind of person with a healthy level of cynicism, informed not by resentment or despair, but by the clear-eyed recognition that we are animals—products of the Darwinian process—a lowly origin from which none of us are exempt.

If you’re anything like the person I’ve just described, then you probably think most arguing is bullshit too. You’ve probably felt it your whole life, haven’t you? The feeling that these so-called “arguments” of ours are not what they seem. If so, then I have good news for you. There’s a safe space here on Everything Is Bullshit. I look forward to arguing with you—genuinely arguing with you—very soon.

Some stuff is easy to imagine—a sunset, a car horn, a dead pigeon, the smell of freshly baked bread. We call these things to mind and we think, “mmm” or “ahh” or  “yuck.” 

These sorts of imaginings help us make decisions. If we’re deciding between painting the walls Emerald Green or Robin’s Egg Blue, we imagine the walls in each color, and whichever one looks nicer in our imagination is the one we choose. 

But other things are hard or impossible to imagine—large numbers, vast distances, deep time, the hidden incentive structures guiding our behavior, being dead, not knowing something you currently know, the possibility of having wasted your life on a bullshit ideology or batshit religion, the absence of a white bear, etc. 

These hard-to-imagine things often screw up our thinking. If we struggle to imagine the difference between 4,000 and 8,000 deaths, then we will struggle to feel twice as upset by the latter number as the former number, let alone thousands of times more upset than the death of a single, sympathetic character. The result is that our hearts are innumerate and statistically illiterate, even if our minds are not. Given that the world is complex, and policies are controlled by the hearts—and rarely the minds—of voters, it is no surprise that things are so crappy. Alternative possibilities unfold in the theater of our imaginations, and if that theater fails to put on a good show, we fail to make good decisions. 

Take our supposed fear of death that lurks behind everything we do. I’ve previously written about why this fear is bullshit, but I haven’t yet written about how it is bullshit—the nuts and bolts of it. I think it is born of our inability to imagine death. 

We cannot imagine the state of not imagining, nor can we feel the absence of feeling. We can imagine the world going dark and silent, and our bodies going numb and lifeless. But that is not death. That is vision loss, hearing loss, and paralysis—a terrifying possibility, but not death. When we imagine death, we fail to actually imagine it, and we imagine dark, silent paralysis instead. Because we’re afraid of dark, silent paralysis—and it is a scary thought—we mistakenly think we’re afraid of death. 

Or maybe it’s a different failure of imagination. Maybe we imagine all the beautiful things we’ll miss out on—all the music we’ll never hear and sunsets we’ll never see—and feel FOMO and longing. But that is not death either. That is FOMO and longing.

Or maybe we imagine being forgotten—all our strivings amounting to nothing, all our moments lost like tears in the rain—and feel sad. But sadness is not death either.

When we try to imagine nonexistence, we utterly fail, and in its place, we conjure up a dark, scary FOMO of sadness. And then we talk about the dark, scary FOMO of sadness as if we were talking about death, unaware of the bait-and-switch our minds have pulled on us. The result is a boatload of sensitive bullshit about humanity’s existential struggle with mortality, pop psychology theories about how all of human culture stems from our fear of death, and pop philosophy about the absurdity of being mortal, as if living until the end of time would be less absurd.

Here are some more deaths of insight, inflicted on us by our murderous imaginations: 

Consciousness. We cannot imagine how our subjective experience could just be nerve cells and chemicals. So we assume there must be an unbridgeable gap between mind and matter—a realm of the spirit and a realm of the physical. We assume there is a “hard problem of consciousness,” instead of a “hard problem of imagination.”

Ideologies. We cannot imagine our strongly held political ideologies as mere “collections of ad hoc justifications, rationalizations, moralizations, embellishments, and rhetorical tactics designed to advance the interests of ever-shifting political alliances in competition with their rivals.” They don’t feel that way from the inside. But we can easily imagine them as being correct—and not merely correct, but so blindingly obvious that anyone who doesn’t share them must be crazy or evil.

Suffering. We have a hard time imagining that suffering is good for us—that it helps us deal with bad things, avoid making them worse, and prevent them from happening again in the future. But it’s easy to imagine suffering as an awful substance of intrinsic hellishness.

Happiness. We really struggle to imagine that happiness is bullshit—that no one actually wants to be happy, including ourselves. I know, I can hardly imagine it myself. But it’s easy to imagine that happiness is the purpose of life—the feel-good, empty, circular reason behind everything we do. 

Incentives. It’s hard to imagine a world where complex incentive structures explain everything. But it’s easy to imagine a world where all problems are caused by bad, unlikable people, and all solutions are caused by good, likable people.

Morality. It’s hard to imagine that what we feel is right is wrong, and what we feel is wrong is right. Moral feelings seem infallible, as if they could not possibly be mistaken. This prevents us from seeing the role of moral feelings in driving immoral behavior. 

Now I’m not saying imagination is always unreliable. If your imagination is based on decades of real-world, practical experience, then it’s important to recognize when it fails. Maybe you’re a surgeon and you’ve operated on hundreds of patients. If your current patient has a tumor, and you cannot imagine how to remove it without killing her, then your failure of imagination is telling you something about reality. 

But the human condition is not an ailing body, and we are not surgeons. When we use our feeble imaginations to ponder politics, society, culture, or metaphysics—topics with which we have little or no practical experience—we are dooming ourselves to confusion. We have no patient or prognosis here. We lack decades of real-world, hands-on experience to draw upon. When we fail to imagine how our political opponents could be normal humans, or how consciousness could emerge from mere neurons, or how our moral convictions could possibly be harmful, we think that failure is telling us something about reality. It’s not.  

So in what sense is imagination bullshit? In the sense that it’s crappy. If we had purchased our imaginations from mother nature, we would ask for a refund. Our imaginations are flawed and feeble programs built by natural selection to navigate small tribes and small-to-medium-sized objects—not globalized economies, fractal inequality, neurobiology, or existential risks. Bereft of subtlety, statistical literacy, political impartiality, humility, or insight into the nature of our own minds, our imaginations are faulty equipment with which to understand the human condition in the 21st century. 

Take note of what you fail to imagine, or what you struggle to imagine. These failures are red flags—signs you’re about to delude yourself. Because whenever there’s a gap in your imagination, your mind will surely fill it with bullshit.

In 2012, the Christian rock band Phillips, Craig, and Dean released an adorable song called “I Choose to Believe.” Here’s a snippet of the lyrics:

I choose to believe

And never give up hope

God is good

He's in control

I'll keep the faith

I trust in His way

And even when His face is hard to see

I choose to believe

On one reading, the lyrics are preposterous. Even if my life depended on it, I could not choose to believe that, say, 1 + 1 = 5. My brain would not be capable of it. I also have no choice but to believe that “There’s a coffee mug on the table” or “I have a dentist appointment at 2:00.” 

On another reading, the lyrics make sense. Some beliefs can be chosen. It seems like I could choose to believe that “people are fundamentally good,” or that “education is a basic human right,” or that “there’s more to life than money.” 

According to the philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen, both readings of the song are correct. We have two types of beliefs in our heads: regular beliefs (e.g., “There’s a coffee mug on the table”) and credences (e.g., “Everything happens for a reason”). 

Regular beliefs are involuntary—you have no choice but to believe them. Credences are voluntary: you can “choose” to believe them, in the same way Phillips, Craig, and Dean choose to believe that god is good and in control, even when his face is hard to see.

Regular beliefs actively guide behavior: if I think the coffee cup is to my right, I’ll reach for it on my right. Credences are inert: if I think Jesus is my homeboy or everything happens for a reason, well… it’s not really clear what I should do with that information. 

This distinction—between beliefs and credences, or between world models and social signals—gets my vote for being the most important insight in cognitive science in the last two decades. I don’t have the space to fully explore its implications, so I’ll just focus on a couple here.

First, bullshit is a kind of credence. After all, if our regular beliefs were full of shit, we’d be constantly walking off cliffs, eating bars of soap, and generally being dysfunctional. So our regular beliefs are mostly true (or true enough), and they often operate unconsciously. It is our credences—the thoughts we conspicuously think about abstract, distant, political, spiritual, groupy, or signaly things—that are full of shit. Which makes sense, because we pay no price for them being wrong. They don’t guide our behavior the way regular beliefs do.

There’s another important implication: if you’re looking for a decent cue of someone’s trustworthiness on a topic, try to assess how involuntary their belief seems to be. If they seem like they were dragged kicking and screaming toward the belief—blindsided by the sheer force of reality—then their belief is probably of the regular type, and it’s probably not bullshit. On the other hand, if their belief seems eagerly chosen or all-too-convenient for them, then it’s probably a credence, and it’s probably bullshit. 

Yes, this cue can be gamed. People can pretend like they were dragged kicking and screaming toward a belief when they actually hand-picked it to serve their agenda. But people will only game this cue if they expect others to use it. Right now though, it doesn’t seem like many other people are using it (at least not that I’m aware of). So maybe give it a shot? 

Then again, maybe you shouldn’t use this cue on other people at all. Maybe you should use it on yourself. Because if you don’t use it on yourself, it will quickly morph into an excuse to dismiss everyone you already disliked—a cudgel to wield against your social and political rivals. 

So rather than asking whether those other idiots “chose” their beliefs, turn your attention inward—psychologize the psychologist. “How involuntary are my beliefs? Did I choose to believe them, or eagerly sign up for them, or cozily ease into them? Or was I forced to believe them against my will, with reality crashing into me like a freight train?” 

I recently asked these questions of myself, and it was a sobering exercise. It made me reflect on my intellectual journey over the years. I think my worldview came out of the exercise pretty unscathed, but you be the judge. 

My intellectual journey

A lot of people assume I’m a cynical person. It’s an understandable assumption, given the content of this blog. I’m certainly a Darwinian cynic, but I’m not a cynical person—or at least, that’s not my natural temperament.  

I’m more of a softie. I trust people by default. I rarely suspect others of ill intent. I’ve never endorsed any conspiracy theories. I don’t hate anyone and never have. I love children, and people say I’m unusually good with them. I earnestly sing the Barney theme song to my daughter because I love her and she loves me and we’re a happy family. 

And though I’m anti-ideology, anti-partisan, and sympathetic to anarchism, I didn’t always hold these views. I used to be a good, wholesome, liberal democrat who believed in hope and change and political progress. I chose to study political psychology for my PhD, instead of other topics, because I wanted to understand the people who disagreed with me. My goal was to change their hearts and minds by showing them the light of reason. 

I even believed in values—equality, diversity, honor, authenticity, self-actualization, etc. My goal was to figure out how these sacred values of ours might have evolved—what functions they might serve. My dream was to write a cool academic paper called “An Evolutionary Theory of Values.” So I tried and tried to come up with a workable theory, and I failed and failed. I repeatedly came up with dumb theories and quickly realized why they were dumb. It felt like banging my head against a wall. At some point, it dawned on me that I was pursuing an impossible goal. Genuine values and Darwinism were incompatible. You cannot explain the former in terms of the latter. Genuine values are supposed to lie beyond self-interest, nepotism, and alliances, while being costly to their adherents, thereby ruling out the only possible ways they could have been favored by natural selection. So I realized our values must be bullshit, and set out to come up with an evolutionary theory of why we pretend to have these bullshit values. I think I came up with a pretty good one here.

And believe it or not, I even used to believe in the pursuit of happiness. I wanted to be happy—or I thought I did. Then I started meditating (kind of obsessively), got weirdly good at it, to the point where I could make myself happy at will, and then I realized that happiness was just kind of… boring. This is it? The pinnacle of human existence? The meaning of life? Meh. 

Then I lost my desire to meditate. Then the entire WEIRD mythology of happiness and self-care and self-actualization came crashing down on me. I realized all those things were, themselves, bullshit values—the very things I had been trying to explain. Then I started asking more questions. What about suffering? What about morality? What about the meaning of life? What about my own desire to write about these ideas—to be interesting? Were these things bullshit too? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I could hear the theme from 2001 A Space Odyssey playing, as an obelisk emerged before me, inscribed with three words: everything is bullshit.

So I shattered my ideology, debunked my values, and destroyed my pursuit of happiness, by learning about them. Insight can be destructive. As Darwin knew all too well, a powerful explanation can be like an acid that eats through everything. 

The devastation hasn’t always been fun. It’s been pretty alienating to believe this stuff at times. It occasionally makes me sad, too. A close friend of mine said he could detect an undercurrent of lost innocence in my writing, and it doesn’t surprise me he could sense it. I’ve had my dark nights of the soul, and I’ve even lost a few status points. 

Then again, surely I’ve gained more status points than I’ve lost. Contrarianism gets people’s attention, and there’s a side of me that likes to ruffle feathers and rouse rabbles. Surely I was enticed by the most provocative, interesting beliefs I could find. Surely I got excited by the prospect of these spicy beliefs being true or plausible, because successfully defending more uncommon positions means being smarter than a larger number of people. I’m only human.

But I’m not a troll. I’m not trying to provoke for its own sake. I only try to provoke when I think a provocative claim is actually correct—or at least, very plausible. This isn’t performance art. The things I write here are my actual views. So far, I haven’t encountered any arguments or data that seriously challenge them. 

And I’m open to being wrong! I hunger for it. To have a thoughtful person politely show me why I’m wrong, and cause me to change my mind, is my dream. Whenever that happens, it is exhilarating. Part of the goal of putting these ideas out there is to see if anyone can tell me why I’m wrong, and give me something more insightful to believe. 

This hasn’t happened yet. Most of the comments here have been written in a kind of reluctant, confused agreement. People don’t really disagree or have any better ideas. They just don’t know how to accommodate the massive bolus of cynicism into their cerebrums. 

So it doesn’t look like any of my readers chose to agree with me, if they do. And I can tell you, to the best of my (admittedly biased) knowledge, I did not choose these beliefs. They chose me. And there have been times in my life when I wished they hadn’t—but also times when I’ve been glad they did. They’re a mixed bag. 

Which makes sense. If they were all upside and no downside, they would look suspiciously like choices, and I do not choose to believe—or at least, I aspire not to. 

Sing it with me now!

I do not choose to believe

And often give up hope

God is dumb

No one’s in control

I'll ditch the faith

I trust in Darwin’s way

And even when something’s nice to believe

I do not choose to believe

Whether it’s politics, the media, the workplace, or our own backyards, we’re surrounded by bullshit. Here are 30 concepts to help you understand it:

1. Bullshit (verb). To communicate without giving a shit about the truth; to propagandize, manipulate, or mislead; to pretend to know or understand things you don’t know or understand.

2. Self-bullshitting. The act of bullshitting yourself. Example: you want to do a bad thing, and you’re trying to convince yourself it’s okay. Your goal is not to figure out if the thing really is okay; it’s to come up with excuses for doing it.

3. Confabulation. A bullshit explanation for our behavior. When we don’t know why we did something, instead of saying “I don’t know why I did that,” we say we were following our hearts or expressing ourselves or venting or whatever. Much of who we are is a tapestry of confabulations.

4. Everything is bullshit. The conclusion of three premises: 1) We don’t really know why we do things. 2) We don’t really know why others do things. 3) Most of what we talk about implies we know why we and others do things.

   

5. Social brain theory. The enlarged brain of homo sapiens did not primarily evolve for tool use or practical intelligence, but for social bullshit like "arguing, rationalizing, politicking, rule-following, covert rule-breaking, and excuse-making."

6. Existential bullshitting. The game intellectuals play where they interrogate each other over their life decisions—including the "decision" to be alive at all—and compete to give the most eloquent, self-important answer.

7. Status game. We compete to be smarter, cooler, hotter, braver, kinder, fairer, richer, worldlier, and more virtuous than the people around us. It’s useful to frame the competition as a game, with rules and points, winners and losers—i.e., a status game. 

   

8. Anti-status. The status you get from looking like you don't care about status. We avoid looking vain, insecure, or self-absorbed—and accuse each other of being these things—to gain status, or rather anti-status.

9. Performative apathy. An attempt to gain anti-status by pretending you don’t care what others think.

   

10. Status game collapse. When players of a status game gain common knowledge that they’re playing a status game. They suddenly see each other as vain, insecure, or self-absorbed, which sends them scrambling to play a different status game. This is one of the engines of cultural evolution.

11. Sacred value. A cover story for status-seeking designed to prevent a status game from collapsing. We deny we’re seeking dominance or superiority and instead pretend that we’re seeking honor, wisdom, beauty, authenticity, self-actualization, equality, morality, or the betterment of humankind.

12. Darwinian cynicism. The view that everyone’s basic desires are products of natural selection. This is cynical because evolution cannot favor a basic desire to make the world a better place—only the desire to help ourselves, our families, or our tribes.

13. The Vibes Theory of Money. Most people suck at economics. People mainly think about money as a way to convey information about status and social relationships—not as a proxy for goods and services. Money is more about vibes than stuff.

14. Alliance Theory. Political ideologies are explained by historically contingent (and sometimes random) alliances between ethnic, class, religious, and cultural groups. “The difference between liberals and conservatives is not what values they hold, but whom they view as their allies.” 

15. Strange bedfellows. Political allies who are conspicuously dissimilar yet awkwardly find themselves in the same coalition—e.g., the alliance between Christian fundamentalists and free market libertarians, or between liberal college students and Islamic extremists.

16. Bullshit market. A place where people buy and sell bullshit. Competition to attract consumers results in cheaper, higher-quality bullshit. Western nations enjoy the greatest bullshit in the world. See also “rationalization market” (HT Dan Williams).

17. RightTalkism. The idea that making the world a better place means changing how people talk. Just make people say the right things and all our problems will be solved. (HT Robin Hanson).

18. Dark morality. When morality—the heartfelt conviction that we are doing the right thing—fuels tribalism, dishonesty, bullying, censorship, hatred, terrorism, and genocide.

19. Dark idealism. When idealism—the heartfelt conviction that we are pure and noble and benevolent—fuels dark morality, by blinding us to our biases and making those who don’t share our ideals seem evil or subhuman.

    

20. Likability determinism. The naive but widespread view (often implicit) that all good things are caused by good, likable people and all bad things are caused by bad, unlikeable people. To make the world better, all we have to do is give more power and status to the good, likable people—you know, us.

21. Incentive determinism. Human behavior is explained by social, economic, and political incentive structures. To make the world better, we need to understand those incentive structures and design them wisely.

22. Social paradox. A social signal designed to be concealed from both the signaler and the recipient. Example: virtue signalers don’t think they’re virtue signaling, and neither do the people who award them virtue. Virtue signals (and other status signals) occur underground.

23. Illusory hedonism. The intuition that what we want is inside our heads (happiness, inner peace) instead of out there in the world (high status, good relationships). Since getting what we want often feels good, we confuse correlation with causation: we mistakenly think that all we want is to feel good.

24. The happiness excuse. When we use the pursuit of happiness (or self-care or self-actualization) as an excuse for conspicuous consumption, self-entitlement, virtue signaling, careerism, or vanity projects. “I’m just doing this for me.”

25. Opinion. A subjective preference (e.g., for food, music, or policies), combined with a set of positive judgments about the people who share that preference (e.g., they’re smart and good) and a set of negative judgments about the people who lack them (e.g., they’re dumb and bad).

26. The Opinion Game. A status game we play with our opinions, where the objective is to “make the people who share our preferences look superior to the people who don’t, while concealing the fact that we’re trying to do that.”

    

27. The superhuman fallacy. 1) People who disagree with me are dumb and bad. 2) The reason they are dumb and bad is because of “human nature.” 3) Unstated implication: I am superhuman.

28. The desire problem. Most of our desires are about being better than, or better off than, the people around us. This means we cannot all get what we want, conflict is inevitable, and utopia (where everyone is satisfied) is impossible.

29. Intergenerational competition theory. The only way to solve the desire problem (see above) is for each generation to become higher status than the previous one. The older generation is okay with this, because the younger generation contains their progeny. This is the closest thing to utopia we’re capable of.

30. Toxic learning: The desire to learn about gossip, bluster, propaganda, outrage bait, disaster porn, and pseudo-profundity, while being bored by accuracy, nuance, and practical utility.

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Some ideas are truly deep. Darwin’s theory of natural selection is probably the deepest. With four simple assumptions—1) members of a species are different, 2) the differences are heritable, 3) the differences matter for survival and reproduction, and 4) the earth is very old—Darwin explains eyes, ears, wings, digestion, echolocation, courtship, mate guarding, immune systems, familial love, and every other anti-entropic, functionally organized chunk of matter in the biological world. The ratio of what is assumed to what is explained is infinitesimal. Evolution is the most powerful theory ever devised by a human being—so powerful that it explains the cognitive machinery of the human being that devised the theory. 

Some ideas seem deep but are actually stupid. Crackpot theories and supernatural bullshit can elicit the same feelings of awe and wonder as the theory of evolution. Consider Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist who independently discovered evolution at nearly the same time as Darwin. Wallace was taken in by all sorts of paranormal nonsense about communicating with ghostly spirits—an obsession that eventually destroyed his scientific reputation. Here was a man who discovered evolution, the deepest idea of all time, and who chose to ignore it in favor of mumbo jumbo. How does that happen to a person? What makes an idea seem deep, even when it’s not?

Unfortunately, I don’t really know the answer yet—I’m still puzzling over it. But I think I can explain part of what’s going on, and it has to do with a certain kind of intellectual parlor trick.

Understanding the illusion of understanding

In a previous post, I argued that the information we find interesting is mostly bullshit. Our appetite for information does not naturally guide us toward truth and wisdom, but toward gossip, flattery, shibboleths, and propaganda. We shop around for beliefs in much the same way we shop around for clothes, searching for whatever makes us look sharp and fashionable.

That’s why we’re fascinated by ideas that are special. Our attention is captured by the hottest takes and the boldest pronouncements. We want to stake out unique positions that no one else has taken, or discover secrets that no one else knows about, so that when we convince people we’re right and in the know, we get to look cooler than everyone else.

But on the other hand, we want ideas that are plausible. We’re attracted to the appearance of rigor and credibility (if not the real thing), because we need to actually convince people the information is true—or at least, worth taking seriously. If we fail to convince anyone we’re right, then we won’t look superior to anyone, and we might end up looking stupid, gullible, or crazy.

So we’re faced with a trade-off between specialness and plausibility. The need for specialness pulls us toward weirder and more outlandish beliefs, while the need for plausibility pulls us toward more obvious and commonsensical beliefs. Contrarians favor the former end of the trade-off. Normies favor the latter end of the trade-off.

But is there any way to avoid the trade-off altogether—to have our cake and eat it? Can we say stuff that’s special and plausible at the same time? I think we can.

Enter the deepity. A deepity is a statement with two interpretations: one that is bold, provocative, and earth-shattering, and another that is boring, obvious, or banal. This allows us to have it both ways. When we’re trying to be special, we can lean on the bold interpretation. When we’re trying to convince people we’re right, we can pivot to the boring interpretation.

“The present moment is all there is.” That’s a deepity. You can either read it as “the future and the past don’t matter,” a bold and provocative idea, or “what’s happening right now is all that’s happening right now,” an obvious truism.

The term “deepity” comes from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the example he gave was the following sentence:

“Love is just a word.” 

At first glance, the sentence is mind-boggling. All our trysts and romances and courtship rituals are just an arbitrary convention—a mere puff of air from our mouths? Whoa! But glance at the sentence again, and it morphs into a tautology. Of course “love” is just a word. Every word is just a word. What else would a word be? 

Deepities are appealing because they give us the illusion of insight. When we waffle back and forth between the mind-boggling interpretation and the trivial interpretation, we get the feeling of insight over and over again. It’s like the pleasure of getting in and out of a hot tub on a cold night. Instead of alternating between hot and cold, we get to alternate between “No way!” and “Yea, okay.” Deepities are brain hacks. When we gawk at one, we’re not actually learning anything; we’re just confusing ourselves and resolving the confusion. 

A “deep” experience

A few years ago, I was at a restaurant with my wife while she was pregnant, and as we were leaving, an old woman approached us. The woman stared intensely into my wife’s eyes and said, “Excuse me. I don’t know why, but I have to tell you this…” The woman gestured at my wife’s pregnant belly and said, “That baby is going to change the world.” 

My wife started to tear up. In the moment, she was moved—she thought it was a “deep” experience (though she later admitted it was bullshit). I confess that even I myself felt a little moved by the encounter, though I of course knew it was bullshit too. What was going on? Why did the woman’s prophecy seem so profound?

Part of it was surely flattery. All parents want to believe their children are going to be wonderful, and the woman was telling us what we wanted to hear. If she had said, “That baby is going to be asshole,” it would not have seemed deep. But I think it was more than just flattery, and I think it had to do with the phrase, “change the world.”  

This is the perfect example of a deepity. On one reading, it’s incredible: our child is going to be the president or bring about world peace or something. Wow! On another reading, it’s obvious. Of course our child will change the world in some way. No human being can exist without changing their surroundings.

Now, if the woman had made a more specific prediction—“In the year 2067, your child will win the Nobel Prize in Economics for her research on stock market volatility”—it would not have seemed deep. It would have seemed crazy. So “deep” bullshit is more than just flattery, and it’s more than just prophecy. It’s a set of dual interpretations, sane and crazy, boring and interesting, true and outlandish. 

Toward a compendium of deepities

Let’s dissect some other examples.

“What we think, we become.” - the Buddha

• Interesting interpretation. If you think you’re Abraham Lincoln, you will become Abraham Lincoln.

• Boring interpretation. Thoughts cause behavior. 

“If a thing loves, it is infinite.” - William Blake

• Interesting interpretation. If you love someone, you achieve immortality or become a black hole or something. 

• Boring interpretation. If you love someone, that is really, really cool.

“The future influences the present as much as the past.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

• Interesting interpretation. Something that happens at time 2 can retroactively cause something to happen at time 1.

• Boring interpretation. People sometimes think about the future.

“Everything happens for a reason.”

• Interesting interpretation. Things happen because a supernatural being or cosmic spirit wanted them to happen.

• Boring interpretation. Things have causes.

“We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the universe, atomically.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

• Interesting interpretation. We are bound together by a spirit of universal love, warmly embraced by Mother Earth, and suffused with cosmic significance.

• Boring interpretation. We’re humans. We’re made of chemicals. The chemicals are made of atoms. We’re in the universe.

“The power of intention is the power to manifest, to create…” - Wayne Dyer

• Interesting interpretation. Intentions can magically get you whatever you want.

• Boring interpretation. Intentions often cause you to do the thing you intended.

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” - Khalil Gibran

• Interesting interpretation. Pain is the only way to understand reality.

• Boring interpretation. Pain teaches you something, and what it teaches you is: don’t do that.

“Knowledge is power.” - Francis Bacon

• Interesting interpretation. Reading lots of books will magically turn you into Xi Xinpeng. 

• Boring interpretation. Knowledge is often helpful.

“The future is inside us. It’s not anywhere else.” - Radiohead

• Interesting interpretation. We can magically control the future without having to deal with conflicts, compromises, limitations, constraints, inertia, coordination problems, or unpredictable events.

• Boring interpretation. Our goals are inside us. They’re not anywhere else.

“Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and causality.” - Stanislav Grof

• Interesting interpretation. We can have thoughts that do not come before or after other thoughts, do not occur inside our heads, and have no causes or effects.

• Boring interpretation. We can imagine stuff.

Can you think of any other examples? Do you have any “deep” experiences to share?

There comes a time in your life when you get high and have the following thought:

And then there comes a time in your life when you sober up and have the following, more correct thought:

And then there comes a time in your life when you read a post on Everything Is Bullshit and have the following, even more correct thought:

Money is not about stuff. Poverty is not about a lack of stuff. Greed is not about wanting stuff, inequality is not about unequal stuff, gifts are not about giving stuff, and capitalism is not about who owns the stuff that makes stuff.1 

Here’s a list of problems with the idea that money is just a proxy for stuff:

1. If someone buys you a fancy $200 meal, it is okay to have sex with them afterwards. But if someone gives you $200, it is illegal to have sex with them afterwards.

2. If you are attending a dinner party, it is okay give the host a $50 bottle of wine. But it is rude to give the host $50.

3. Wanting stuff—like a peloton or a trip to Japan—is okay. But wanting money is icky. That’s called “greed.”

4. People say money is the “root of all evil.” But nobody says cars, houses, and tables are the root of all evil. 

5. We’d rather give our friends better stuff than worse stuff. And yet, we’d rather give our friends “gift cards”—an objectively worse form of money—than money. 

6. Getting enough food makes you stop wanting food. Getting enough sleep makes you stop wanting sleep. But getting enough money does not make you stop wanting money. The desire never goes away. Even Jeff Bezos wants more money. 

7. When kids trade chocolate for skittles on Halloween, it doesn’t seem like either kid is necessarily made worse off. But when Hershey trades chocolate for money, we’re more inclined to see that as a win for Hershey (they made a profit) and a loss for the buyer. Money somehow makes things win-lose. 

8. Liberals think it’s unfair for CEOs to be paid millions of dollars a year—that’s too much stuff for a person to have. But they think it’s fair for Hollywood movie stars to be paid millions of dollars a year.

9. Conservatives think it’s unfair to get “free handouts” from the government—you shouldn’t get stuff for free. Yet they want the government to use taxpayer money to help “small working class towns in America’s heartland.”

10. In the 1950s and 60s, money didn’t seem to make people’s lives better: rich countries reported equal levels of life satisfaction as poor countries. Weird. Then in the 1970s and 80s, all of a sudden, richer countries started reporting greater life satisfaction than poorer countries. Why did having more stuff satisfy people in the 70s and 80s, but not the 50s and 60s?

11. We tend to think excess stuff should be redistributed based on need. The person with one roll of toilet paper is more in need than the person with 30 rolls of toilet paper. But when it comes to money, we seem to care more about nationality than need. Many Americans would rather give taxpayer money to poor Americans (who make ~$30 a day) than poor Burundians (who make ~$1.00 a day).

12. Stuff is absolute, but money is relative. When figuring out who needs food or heating, we focus on who’s hungry or shivering. But when figuring out who needs money—i.e. who is in “poverty”—we focus on who has relatively less than the people around them.

Now that we’ve laid out our puzzles, it’s time to solve them. Here’s my theory in a nutshell. I call it The Vibes Theory of Money:

Money is not about stuff. It’s about status and coldness. 

Money is about status

At the dawn of markets, a new status symbol emerged: currency. The people who had more gold, silver, or beads became more desirable as mates and allies. Everyone wanted to partner up with Mr. Moneybags and snub the paupers. But how did everyone know who was rich and who was poor? Conspicuous consumption. Rich people made it obvious they were rich by buying lots of shiny, expensive garbage that other people couldn’t afford.

Money is still a status symbol today, albeit a chimeric one. For some, expensive garbage is sexy; for others, it’s gross. Among progressive elites, for example, the “money status game” has collapsed, with everyone realizing that conspicuous consumption is selfish and “greedy” and uncool. The result is that elites now try to signal their wealth without signaling that they’re signaling their wealth. I know, it’s really weird. But let’s focus on the people for whom the “money status game” is more above-ground.

For these people, the number of dollars you own is like the number of medals you’ve won in archery, the number of heads you’ve claimed in battle, the number of turtles you’ve hunted in Melanesia, or the size of your yams in Pohnpei. Yes, yam size is a very big deal. Here’s my favorite passage from The Status Game, based on the reports of anthropologist William Bascom:

Men who brought yams to feasts hosted by the chiefs could win significant status… The owner of the largest yam at a feast would be publicly declared ‘Number One’ by his rivals and praised by the chief for his generosity. Bascom found the men of Pohnpei in a state of symbolic war as they all competed to be Number One. Each man would raise around fifty yams a year, purely for feasts, growing them in secret, remote, overgrown plots they’d creep out of bed at two in the morning to tend to, lining the pits with soil and fertilizer until dawn. A single yam could take ten years to grow, reach over four meters in length, weigh over ninety kilograms and require as many as twelve men to carry into the feast using a special stretcher on poles… A delicate system of etiquette bloomed into life around these yam wars… When a man is named Number One at a feast, ‘he must not act proudly or boast openly about his achievement. When others discuss the merits of his yam, he pretends not to listen.’”

Hm, yam size. Sounds a lot like “net worth,” doesn’t it? I’m inclined to say there is a “status symbol”-shaped hole in the human brain, and right now, in WEIRD cultures, money is filling it. 

Once we recognize this fact, many of the puzzles disappear. Why is “poverty” relative to the people around us and not absolute? Because “status” is relative to the people around us and not absolute. Why does money make things win-lose? Because status is win-lose. Why is the desire for money insatiable and never-ending? Because the desire for status is insatiable and never-ending. Why is “greed” icky? Because overt status-seeking is icky. Why did poverty make poor countries feel bad in the 70s and 80s but not the 50s and 60s? Because in between, TV became a thing, and poorer countries could see on TV that they were lower status than richer countries. Why do liberals and conservatives have such inconsistent beliefs about who deserves money? Because they’ve formed political alliances with different groups, and they want to raise the status of their allies—and lower the status of their rivals—which is basically what politics is all about. Why do we want to redistribute wealth to poor Americans instead of poor Burundians? Because we’re more interested in giving status to our political allies than stuff to the people who need it most. 

“But David,” you say, “I’m struggling to pay for basic necessities like a house, or clothes, or my children's college tuition. What does that have to do with status?”

Everything. Why is housing so expensive for you? Because you want to live in a high-status urban or suburban area where housing is scarce and expensive. If you didn’t care about status, you’d move somewhere cheaper with “crappier” schools and fewer chic restaurants and coffee shops, further away from your cool friends and high-status job, and closer to gross poor people who didn’t go to college. Clothes? Please. Your ancestors were ecstatic if they could afford three outfits. The only reason you need money for clothes is because you’re afraid of looking uncool by being seen wearing the same clothes in the same week—or, horrors, clothes that don’t flatter your figure or showcase your unique personality. College? It’s a status symbol. Most of what you learn in college you either forget or never use on the job. The main purpose of going to college is to flaunt your intelligence, work ethic, and rule-following ability to elite employers by jumping through arbitrary hoops and parroting useless bullshit.

I know, I’m starting to sound like an asshole—like I don’t care about your financial stress—like I’m a cold person. I’m genuinely sorry, but I had to put on a performance of coldness so I could segue into…

Money is about coldness

Most animals don’t really care about each other, except for maybe their mates and their kin. The biggest exception to this rule is humans. We truly care—or appear to care—about genetically unrelated people who are not having sex with us. How strange. Why did natural selection favor this trait?

One answer is reciprocity. You scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours. If the benefit of getting your back scratched outweighs the cost of scratching someone else’s, then reciprocal back-scratchers come out ahead in Darwinian terms, assuming they can exclude cheats and shirkers. This is known in evolutionary biology as reciprocal altruism. 

Unfortunately, there’s a problem here, and that is what’s known as the “banker’s paradox.” You see, banks only want to lend money to people who’ll be capable of repaying the debt. Who’s most capable of repaying debts? Rich people—the people who don’t really need loans. Who’s least capable of repaying debts? Poor people—the people who desperately need loans. So banks are incentivized to lend money to the people who need it least. 

The same problem applies to human reciprocity. If you’re in dire straits—you’re sick, injured, or ostracized—then you’re the least likely person to reciprocate my help. You might die, and then I’ll never get repaid. Or you might remain injured indefinitely, preventing you from doing favors for me in the future. Or you might remain a social pariah forever, and never be in a position to put in a good word for me in return. 

That is a huge problem! If you’re sick or injured or ostracized, you really need someone to help you. If you could figure out how to form a relationship with someone you can trust, who can prove they’re willing to help you unconditionally, even when it’s risky or costly for them to do so, you’d be at a major Darwinian advantage. So you need to figure out how to make yourself deeply valuable or irreplaceable to someone, independent of your ability to trade favors with them. How do you do that?

One way is to support your tribe. A fiercely loyal member of the tribe is a valuable asset to the other tribesman, because such a fierce loyalist acts in the tribe’s interests. Just as athletes want their teammates to be healthy and energetic, independent of reciprocity, tribesman want their fiercest allies to be healthy and energetic—and also high-status and alive. 

The same logic applies to other things we might have in common. If you and I hate the same bully or love the same leader, we’ll act in ways that hurt the bully or help the leader, independent of any favors we give each other. Our mere existence is mutually beneficial. Having stuff that’s not in common can also do the trick: if we each have special talents that the other one lacks, then we have another reason to keep each other alive and well: maintaining access to those irreplaceable talents. 

There’s also an interesting positive feedback loop: the more valuable you become to me, the more valuable I become to you. Why? Because having a person around who cares about my wellbeing, independent of any favors I might give them, is really good for my fitness. I want that person to survive and thrive. What’s good for them is good for me. And if that’s true, then what’s good for me is good for them, according to the same logic. 

And here’s the point. If my wife, fellow tribesman, or close friend is in dire straits, then their ability to reciprocate doesn’t matter. Their interests are intertwined with my own—they’re irreplaceable to me—so I ought to help them. And if I refused to help them, out of suspicion that they might fail to repay me, then I would be a cold person—a bad husband, a bad tribe member, a bad friend. 

The evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it best in one of my favorite academic papers on the evolution of altruism:

“Explicit contingent exchange and turn-taking reciprocation are the forms of altruism that exist when trust is low and friendship is weak or absent... The injection of explicit contingent exchange into existing friendships (e.g., buying a friend’s car) is experienced as awkward… Those of us who live in modern market economies engage in explicit contingent exchanges—often with strangers—at an evolutionarily unprecedented rate. We would argue that the widespread alienation many feel with modern commercial society is the result of… how shallowly we are engaged with others.” 

Once we recognize all this, more puzzles disappear. Why do we bring wine and not money to dinner parties? Because giving the host money implies “explicit contingent exchange” and signals you’re not the host’s friend. The wine, on the other hand, is interpreted as a gift or an accessory to the meal, which means you’re a friend. Why do we give people gift cards but not money? Because we’re lazy and want to avoid thinking about the gift, but we also don’t want to give cash and signal “explicit contingent exchange,” so we settle on gift cards as the laziest kind of non-frigid gift. Why do we see kids trading candy as good for both kids but Hershey selling candy as good for them and bad for you? Because kids who trade candy are usually friends, but Hershey is a cold, “greedy” profit-seeker who doesn’t truly care about you—so you must have got suckered. Why is it okay to have sex after enjoying a fancy meal but not after receiving a handful of cash? Because the person who buys you a fancy meal is warmly showing they care about you, whereas the person who hands you cash is coldly showing you’re a commodity. And hostility to people who have “casual” sex outside the context of warm, committed relationships—i.e., “promiscuous” people—lies at the heart of social conservatism (1, 2, 3).

The root of all evil

So if money is a signal of status and coldness, then money is not going to have positive vibes for us, is it? No, when we think of status-seeking, we think of selfishness, narcissism, and pettiness. When we think of coldness, we think of cruelty, dehumanization, and manipulation. No wonder we think money is the root of all evil! It’s a combination of the two ickiest things in the world. And no wonder we’re so eager to show we hate capitalism. We want to show that we’re warm people who don’t care about status (which, of course, boosts our status). And no wonder libertarians—the people who like capitalism—seem so selfish and heartless. It’s like they’re wearing T-shirts that say “I’m a cold, competitive asshole.”

Speaking of libertarians, I think the main reason they’ve failed to convince anyone of their icky-sounding philosophy is that when they say “money,” they mean “stuff,” but when progressives say “money,” they mean “symbols of status and coldness.” 

For example, when progressives say, “Let’s raise the minimum wage,” what they mean is, “Let’s raise the status of poor people,” but libertarians hear: “Let’s stupidly force poor people to demand more stuff in exchange for their labor, thereby making them less employable.” When progressives say, “Economic inequality in America is terrible,” what they mean is, “The fact that some Americans [i.e. my political enemies] get way more respect than other Americans [i.e., my political allies] is terrible,” but libertarians hear “The fact that some Americans have an unfathomable amount of stuff, while other Americans have a merely fantastic amount of stuff, by global and historical standards, is terrible.” When progressives say, “Capitalism is exploitative,” what they mean is, “Cold, amoral status competition is exploitative,” but libertarians hear, “People voluntarily trading stuff is exploitative.” Maybe if libertarians and progressives defined “money” the same way, they would stop talking past each other. Or maybe the goal is to talk past each other, because if they talked to each other, they would feel troubled. 

Money, money, money. We want it—that’s what we want. But it can’t buy us love. But it can buy us an engagement ring, which somehow proves our love. It’s the root of all evil but also a status symbol, but also something icky and secretive, but also something our political allies (but not Burundians) deserve more of. Money is weird and twisted and bullshitty, just like status, just like our complicated relationships, and just like the human condition.