If there’s a master key to everything I’ve written on this blog, it’s the prefix “pseudo.”

In Arguing Is Bullshit, I argued that many of our apparent “arguments” are pseudoarguments. When we debate our conservative uncle at Thanksgiving, or spar with Rando756 on Twitter, we’re rarely trying to change their minds. More often, we’re trying to posture, pontificate, trap them in “gotchas,” impugn their tribe, insult their intelligence, make them feel bad, silence them, punish them for speaking out against us, and defend our honor (or our tribe’s honor) in the eyes of onlookers. Since doing all this ugly stuff makes us look ugly, we pretend that what we’re really doing is trying to change their minds. You know, because we care about “truth” or “logic” or whatever. Speaking of caring about stuff…

In Status Is Weird (and my related academic paper), I argued that many of our apparent values are pseudovalues. We talk as if we’re pursuing noble ideals—truth, happiness, authenticity, equality, diversity, self-actualization, universal beneficence—because it sounds better than what we’re ultimately pursuing: status, power, and moral superiority. Since openly thirsting for status lowers our status, being blatantly power-hungry robs us of power, and acting holier than thou makes us look morally inferior, we pretend to care about “higher things” that have nothing to do with status, power, and moral superiority (our “values”), as a way of surreptitiously and effectively competing for status, power, and moral superiority.

Unfortunately, the prefix “pseudo” is a bit misleading. It seems to imply a certain amount of treachery—a conscious intent to deceive people. But cult members do not see their sacred creeds as verbal diarrhea: they see them as a window onto the ultimate nature of reality. Rando756 is not aware he’s in a pseudoargument: he fancies himself a torchbearer of the Enlightenment. So the kind of bullshit that most interests me is the kind that doesn’t feel like bullshit from the inside. It feels pure and wholesome, like the truth.

I’d like to coin a new word, pseudofication, to describe the transformation from real to pseudo. As we will see, pseudofication occurs inside of people as well as between them. The most familiar example is pseudoscience. The reason why pseudoscience exists is because science exists, which is a serious, prestigious thing. Pseudofication happens when people try to mimic the trappings of science to appear more serious and prestigious to onlookers. Sometimes, they succeed and gain a cult following. Other times, they fail and become the object of mockery.

Pseudofication is analogous to “Batesian mimicry” in evolutionary biology. This is when a non-poisonous species mimics a poisonous species to avoid predation. If a black-and-white butterfly is poisonous, and a black-and-orange one is not, then birds will evolve to eschew the former and chew on the latter. This creates a new selection pressure: the black-and-orange butterflies evolve to become less distinguishable from the black-and-white ones. Then the birds evolve keener eyesight (to tell apart the fakes from the real McCoys), the butterflies’ disguises become more impeccable, and so on. In the case of the Papilio polytes butterfly, the liars won the arms race. They’re not poisonous, but they’re indistinguishable from Pachliopta hector, which is.

In humans, pseudofication occurs in real time rather than evolutionary time. Here’s how pseudofication works in the cultural realm:

1. People pick up on a real cue in the world—a correlation between a behavior (e.g., highfalutin words) and something they want, like seriousness or prestigiousness.

2. People mimic the behavior (e.g., parrot the words), to increase the chance that someone will confuse them for a serious, prestigious person.

3. Audiences scramble to differentiate the mimics from the real McCoys.

From here, there are a number of outcomes that can result:

1. The mimics win the arms race

The system settles into a kind of stable parasitism where a cult leader tricks his followers into worshiping the volcano spirits or postmodernist bafflegab consumes academia.

2. The audience wins the arms race

The mimicry gets called out, the emperor’s nudity gets revealed, and the mimics get laughed at, ostracized, or voted out of office.

3. The audience and the real McCoys both win

The two sides work together to devise a hard-to-fake signal, filter, or barrier that separates the real McCoys from the phonies. Maybe it’s a PhD from a fancy university. Maybe it’s a set of peer-reviewed publications in prominent journals. The filter works well enough, and everyone’s happy—except the mimics, who complain about how the establishment is rigged against them.

4. The mimics and the audience both win

Huh? Let me explain. Imagine there’s a woman who’s extraordinarily good at acting like she cares about marginalized groups—like, Meryl Streep level—even though she doesn’t give a shit deep down. Suppose her talent is so massive that she’s guaranteed to rise to the top of any “woke” social hierarchy. If you’re playing the “woke” status game alongside her, then it will benefit you to be fooled by her performances—to award her virtue for her virtuosity. Yes, you’re paying a cost for being deceived about her character (in both senses of the term), but you’re also gaining the benefit of cozying up to someone who will soon rise to the top of your social hierarchy. If the benefit of cozying up to her outweighs the cost of being deceived by her, then you both come out ahead, with her at the top and you alongside her. It’s a kind of symbiotic deception. I’ve argued that this is how “charisma” works.

5. Wait, what did I just read?

Sorry, I put a lot out there. Don’t worry if you’re a bit lost—I’ll circle back to this stuff later. But before we circle back, I’ll need to tell you a little story. Trust me: there’s a big intellectual payoff waiting for you at the other side of it.

The parable of Ashondi

Once upon a time, there was a hunter-gatherer named Hunter. After returning from a week-long excursion in the woods, Hunter had an incredible story to tell. On his journeys, he encountered a five-horned goddess named Ashondi. Ashondi counseled him on how to usher in a new age of peace and plenty for Hunter’s tribe. This new golden age would only come about, according to the goddess, if other members of the tribe supported Hunter as their new leader.

The response to Hunter’s story was mixed. Some people thought he was full of shit—that he cooked up a fairy tale to gain power. Others were agnostic, but open to the idea that he might be telling the truth. And a few other people, namely the ones closest to him, sort of believed him, or were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

In other words, there was significant variation in how skeptical people were of Hunter’s story. And importantly, the variation was nonrandom. Those who were most loyal to Hunter were the least skeptical, while those who were the least loyal were the most skeptical.

All of a sudden there arose, from the depths of human psychology, a valid cue of loyalty to Hunter. And that cue was: belief in Ashondi. Given that loyalties live inside the darkness of our skulls, are very hard to detect, and very important to detect for a backstabbing, Machiavellian species like ours, belief in Ashondi becomes an extremely valuable piece of political information.

How so? Well, let’s say a woman named Gatherer totally believes in Ashondi. If her belief seems sincere, then that reveals something about where her loyalties lie. If you were secretly trying to mobilize an anti-Hunter coalition, you could be very confident about whom to approach: not her.

But of course, whenever a valid piece of social information gets discovered, the pseudofication process begins, as surely as objects fall to the earth when dropped. Gradually, people begin pretending to believe in Ashondi for savvy political reasons. Anyone who wants to advertise their loyalty to Hunter waxes poetic about the beautiful horns of Ashondi and her glorious prophecy, even if they secretly hate Hunter’s guts.

So let’s say Hunter ends up becoming the new leader. Now things have really changed. Now everyone will have an even stronger incentive to pretend to believe in Ashondi. If anyone calls bullshit on the whole story, that will signal to everyone that they are a heretic—an enemy of the group’s leader—and by implication, an enemy of the group. In the new Hunter-led regime, skeptics will have to stay quiet and tread carefully.

But now the tribe has a problem. The validity of the original cue—i.e., the correlation between Ashondi belief and loyalty to Hunter—has been destroyed. Now everyone is tripping over themselves to sing the praises of Ashondi, including Hunter’s enemies. There’s no more variation in the cue to exploit for political decision making. So now people need a new cue of loyalty to Hunter—something more useful. Hmm, what could the new cue be?

Well, it will have to come down to putting your money where your mouth is. Do you pray to Ashondi every morning? Do you sacrifice animals to her? Are you willing to allow Hunter to inseminate your wife to fulfill Ashondi’s prophecy? Are you happy that Hunter chose your wife for this honor, or are you upset about this? These are the new cues people use to infer loyalty to Hunter: participation in costly rituals, ceremonies, and sacrifices.

What’s interesting is that now we’ve reached an equilibrium. Signaling loyalty to Hunter has become so costly and onerous that only the true loyalists are willing to pay the costs. The skeptics will have to either flee the tribe or face the risk of execution at the hands of Hunter’s allies. A new social hierarchy has emerged, with Hunter at the top, followed by those who are willing to make the biggest sacrifices to Ashondi (or, rather, to Hunter), followed by those who are willing to make the second-biggest sacrifices, and so on.

It’s worth retracing the causal steps that led to this peculiar outcome. What began as a lie that Hunter made up to gain power became: 1) a useful cue of loyalty to Hunter, followed by 2) a deceptive signal of loyalty to Hunter (i.e., pseudofication), followed by 3) a useless cue of loyalty to Hunter (after the pseudofication happened), followed by 4) an honest signal of loyalty to Hunter in the form of painful rituals and sacrifices.

All these rituals and sacrifices are, it is worth reminding you, moves in a convoluted status game. The tribesmen are, at the end of the day, a bunch of primates competing to form an alliance with the reigning alpha male. And what do we know about status games? Well, if you were paying attention, you will remember that they revolve around pseudovalues—the things that status-seekers claim to be pursuing but are not actually pursuing, in order to gain status without looking like they care about status.

We can now see why, in this case, the pseudovalue matters. If any of the tribesmen blurted out the truth—that Ashondi isn’t real, and they’re just a bunch of status-obsessed primates competing to form an alliance with the reigning alpha male—then well, whoever blurted that out is not going very far in life. They’ll probably get executed.

To ascend the social ladder in this brave new world, the tribesmen have to avoid the truth—that Ashondi is a load of shit—at all costs. They have to convince as many people as possible that they are true believers. And not just true believers, but bigger true believers than their social competitors—so stupendously devoted to Ashondi that they are, perhaps, willing to die for her.

We now have something like a little religion, and what’s interesting is that it arises naturally without the need for any special cognitive equipment. We don’t need to assume that there is a “religion module” or “god-shaped hole” to explain any of this stuff. All we need to assume is some rather basic abilities that we know humans have, namely: 1) an ability to make shit up, 2) an ability to evaluate others’ loyalty, and 3) an ability to (deceptively) signal their loyalty.

The moral of the story

And now it is time for the punchline. It is entirely possible, indeed plausible, that in the midst of all these Ashondi-related rituals and sacrifices, no one actually believes in Ashondi. Yes, belief in Ashondi could merely be a social signal, like the myriad social signals we send to each other every day. Ashondi belief is not guiding anyone’s behavior in any concrete, practical way, aside from the performances they put on for their pious peers.

For example, the tribesman might say that Ashondi will bless them with strong winds on their seafaring journey, but they’ll still prepare enough supplies to last them if winds are weak. They might say they’re 1000% confident that Ashondi will keep them safe in battle, but they’ll still wear armor and attack their enemy under cover of darkness, with fear and trepidation in their hearts. What the tribesmen have is a pseudobelief in Ashondi—something that masquerades as a genuine belief, for the purpose of getting ahead in the social world.

You probably have a lot of questions here. The first one might be: “Wait, people don’t like being lied to. If a signal is deceptive, recipients will evolve to—or learn to—stop listening. All this deceptive Ashondi business seems really precarious. Wouldn’t the whole thing fall apart?”

No, it wouldn’t. Remember symbiotic deception? This is when a lie (e.g., caring about marginalized groups) is correlated with something true (e.g., future status in “woke” subcultures) which makes it beneficial for certain people (e.g., “woke” people) to accept the lie. To take another example, consider a loyal flunky who showers his boss with preposterous flattery that isn’t fully sincere. If the lie (flattery) is connected to an underlying truth (loyalty), then the boss benefits from accepting the flattery. Something similar is happening in our little religion.

The person who sacrifices his goat to Ashondi is lying in some sense. He does not truly believe that sacrificing his goat will appease Ashondi because he doesn’t believe in Ashondi. But he is also telling the truth in some sense. He really is loyal to Hunter—so loyal that he’s willing to sacrifice a goat to prove it.

If we look at things from Hunter’s perspective, the information contained in the slaughtered goat is valuable. Hunter is getting an honest signal of loyalty from the goat’s entrails. Yes, he’s also getting lied to: the goat-killer doesn’t really believe in Ashondi. But if the benefit of the loyalty signal outweighs the cost of the Ashondi lie, then Hunter benefits from accepting the information.

Another question you might have is: “Are you saying that people are consciously lying to each other about Ashondi the whole time? That they’re all perfectly aware that the Ashondi thing is a load of shit, and they’re all just biting their tongues?”

No, I’m not saying that. Instead, what I’m saying is something far more interesting: the members of the Ashondi religion genuinely believe that they believe in Ashondi. And they genuinely believe that the other tribesmen genuinely believe in Ashondi. Even though, deep down, nobody actually believes in Ashondi.

Huh? How could that happen? Well, it could happen if people don’t know what their true beliefs are. It could happen if people don’t have access to their core values and convictions. It could happen if people figure out what’s going on in their unconscious minds the same way they figure out what’s going on in other people’s unconscious minds. It could happen if people use much of the same neural machinery for inferring their own mental states as they do for inferring other people’s mental states. It could happen if, as decades of psychological research tells us, people are largely strangers to themselves, confabulating plausible-sounding reasons for most of what they do (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

Given that we are largely strangers to ourselves, this has a very important implication. If I successfully convince you that I’m devoted to Ashondi—that belief in her prophecy is the best explanation for all my goat slaughtering or whatever—then that will, as a side effect, convince me that I’m devoted to Ashondi. Because if I’m figuring out my deeper convictions the same way you are, then convincing you and convincing me are the same project.

You see, it is much easier to deceive myself about the nature of my unconscious mind than it is to deceive myself about external reality (if that is even possible). If I’m holding an apple behind my back, and I’m trying to trick you into thinking there’s no apple behind my back, then tricking you won’t trick me as a side effect. Because I can feel the apple in my hand. The texture and weight of the apple are conscious perceptions that I have direct access to—and that contradict my lie.

But if I’m trying to trick you into thinking I’m devoted to Ashondi, I have no access to the truth about whether I’m devoted to Ashondi. The innermost workings of my mind are opaque to me. I have no equivalent to the apple in my hand—no conscious perception to contradict what I’m telling you. So insofar as I am a stranger to myself, anything that will effectively convince you about my devotion will, as a side effect, convince me about my devotion.

Or here’s an even weirder thing: I might make the signals behavioral—like, I might sacrifice a goat, drink some hallucinogenic blood, or let Hunter sleep with my wife—for the purpose of convincing everyone that I’m more devoted to Ashondi than they are. As a side effect, I will end up convincing myself that I’m more devoted to Ashondi than they are. “Wow, I’m the most pious person in the tribe!” When it comes to beliefs about ourselves—who we are deep down—deception and self-deception go hand in hand.

This is, of course, the classic theory of self-deception proposed by the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers: we deceive ourselves to more effectively deceive others. But I’d like to make an amendment to the Trivers theory. The synergy between deception and self-deception is confined to a specific domain: the contents of our unconscious minds—who we are deep down.

I find this amended theory of self-deception more plausible than the original Trivers account. Self-deception about our unconscious minds is more likely to be favored by natural selection than self-deception about observable reality. Why? Because it is less costly, in Darwinian terms, to deceive ourselves about who we are deep down than it is to deceive ourselves about the world of apples, plants, and animals. I wouldn’t want to deceive myself into thinking the poison ivy is safe to touch or the tiger is safe to approach. But in a hypersocial, Machiavellian species like ours, I might want to deceive myself into thinking I’m a true believer in Ashondi.

A leap of faith

Let’s take a concrete example. Let’s say I deceive myself into thinking I can fly—that I have magical flying powers. That kind of self-deception is a problem. At some point, I will spread my arms, jump off a cliff, and fall to my death. Genes that lead to outcomes like that will fall off the cliff with their carriers.

But now suppose I do something slightly different: I deceive myself into thinking that I believe I can fly—that when I say things like “I have magical flying powers,” I sincerely believe what I’m saying. Here, I’ve merely deceived myself about my own mind—not the laws of physics. Assuming my brain still knows, deep down, that I can’t fly, this kind of self-deception won’t be such a problem for me. It is a purely social belief. It might cause me to go around saying, in a perfectly sincere way, that I can fly. But these are just words, and if there’s one thing we know about Homo sapiens, it’s that sincerely spouting preposterous words and having lots of babies are perfectly compatible.

Okay, but then what if someone calls me out? What if a guy says, “Hey, if you can fly, then why don’t you jump off this cliff right now and prove it?” Well, if that happens, then I will feel a very powerful, mysterious urge, from deep within myself, to not jump off that cliff. I won’t know where the urge is coming from or why it exists. But then again, none of us really know where our urges come from or why they exist, do we? But that doesn’t stop us from making up bullshit.

“Why did you look so scared when I asked you to jump off the cliff?” the guy might ask. It’s a great question, and by the time he’s asked it, my brain has prepared a menu of confabulations: “I can’t fly on command because that’s not how my flying powers work.” Or: “I can only fly when the stars align or when I’m overcome with true happiness or something.” Worst case scenario? I draw a blank: “I know I can fly—I truly believe I can—but for some reason, I’m feeling a very powerful, mysterious urge to avoid jumping off that cliff.”

I think much of religious belief is like this. Deep down, most people don’t actually believe in the doctrines of their religion. They’re just trying really hard to convince everyone that they’re true believers, by performing the relevant rituals and uttering the relevant incantations. These performances can be very effective, convincing both the audience and the performer simultaneously. Over time, every member of a religion can come to believe that every member of the religion is a true believer. Even if nobody actually is.

This is what a growing number of cognitive scientists now think about religion (1, 2, 3, 4). Religious people sincerely believe that they believe their religious doctrines, and behave in ways that convince others (and themselves) of their sincerity, but they don’t actually believe their religious doctrines. Religious dogma is pseudogma. Religious values are pseudovalues.

We don’t actually believe most of what we think we believe

I think a large percentage of our explicit beliefs—at least 50%, probably more—are pseudobeliefs. A lot of the time we think we believe something, we don’t actually believe it deep down. We just pretend to believe it to fit in with our congregation, rally our political tribes, sound smart, avoid looking hypocritical, defend our character, or impress our peers. And of course, in doing this we often convince ourselves that we’re true believers. Remember: pseudobeliefs feel like true beliefs from the inside.

Here’s a list of beliefs that I strongly suspect are pseudobeliefs:

1. Heaven

I’m about to take my daughter to Disneyland, and boy am I excited. I’m not only going to get splashed with a wave of fun and nostalgia (and water), I’m going to vicariously experience the childlike wonder of Disneyland through her eyes.

If heaven is real, then it is better than Disneyland. And not just a little bit better, but like infinitely better. It is an unfathomably awesome place where you get to hang out with the creator of the universe who’s infinitely cool in every way, and relish immortal bliss with infinite yummy food, carnal delights, or whatever mind-blowing shit is supposed to be going on up there.

If anyone truly believes they’re going to heaven—like truly believes it—then they should be feeling the greatest excitement a human is capable of feeling. The closer they are to death, the more excited they should feel. They should be pumped to die. If they’re on their deathbed or in hospice care, they should be over the fucking moon.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of a dying person who felt this way. My grandpa, a religious man, was not pumped to die. Pretty much every human I know finds the prospect of dying unpleasant. Even if a dying person claims to believe in heaven, and claims to believe they’re going there, this belief does not seem connected to their facial muscles, vocal cords, or cardiovascular system in any discernible way. Proximity to death does not look like proximity to Disneyland. It doesn’t even look like proximity to Denny’s.

2. Hell

A lot of religious devotees claim that adherents of rival faiths, and/or atheists, are going to be subjected to barbaric torture for not merely a few hours, or a few years, but for all eternity. Some religious devotees have children who abandon their faiths or convert to a rival religion. And these devotees ostensibly believe that their precious children are going to be tortured for more than a trillion years.

If anyone truly believes this shit—like deep down in the lowest levels of their cerebrum, alongside beliefs like “I have two hands”—then consider me fucking Santa Claus. If I thought my daughter was going to be tortured for like a minute, let alone a year, let alone a decade, let alone a trillion decades, I would be having a panic attack and doing nothing else—not sleeping, not eating—until I stopped that from happening.

Yet I don’t see anything like this behavior in religious believers. They seem rather blasé about the fact that their precious babies are going somewhere over a trillion times worse than Guantanamo Bay, and that billions of people are continually getting sent to the same place—an endless orgy of sadism that would make Mengele weep—by a being of infinite love and wisdom, for the crime of failing to find a set of supernatural claims persuasive.

3. Climate doomerism

I know a lot of people who claim that climate change will soon lead to human extinction or widespread chaos and death. And yet, they do not act like they hold this belief. They seem perfectly calm when I interact with them. They don’t have the look of fear that would be on my face if I truly believed that my life was in danger. The mere fact that they are hanging out with me at all, rather than cashing out their 401(k)s and figuring out how to get themselves and their loved ones to Siberia, suggests that they do not truly believe in climate doomerism.

4. AI doomerism

Consider the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, who said that “AI will probably kill us all” in a panel discussion in 2015. Hmmm. Imagine driving your family around in a car that you think will “probably explode.” Now imagine driving that car around for over ten years. If you struggle to comprehend how anyone could behave this way, then you will understand why Altman does not believe what he says he believes.

5. Conspiracy theories

Consider the 9/11 “truther” conspiracy theory—that 9/11 was an inside job. Now consider the people who fancy themselves to be the brave whistleblowers on this conspiracy. Do they behave like whistleblowers? Do you see them fleeing the country? Are they the slightest bit nervous to blow the whistle in public or post rants about it on social media using their real names? As the journalist Jonathan Kay noted (cited in Not Born Yesterday):

“One of the great ironies of the Truth movement is that its activists typically hold their meetings in large, unsecured locations such as college auditoriums—even as they insist that government agents will stop at nothing to protect their conspiracy for world domination from discovery.”

6. “Education gives us skills to thrive in the modern economy”

This is known as the “human capital” theory of education, the idea that we go to high school and college to acquire human capital (i.e., valuable skills and knowledge)—to make us more productive citizens. This is in contrast to the more cynical “signaling theory” of education, which says that high school and college are status games in which you jump through arbitrary hoops to show off your superior intellect, rule-following ability, and work ethic, for the purpose of gaining entry into elite professions and social networks.

Economists and social scientists generally prefer the human capital theory to the icky signaling theory. The mass public seems to prefer it as well, which explains why they mostly support public funding of secondary and higher education (if they thought these things were giant pissing contests for the upper class, they presumably wouldn’t want to subsidize them). People seem to believe in the power of education to make students more productive citizens. But I don’t think people actually believe this: they only pseudobelieve this.

Let’s start with the students. They might claim to be going to college to download precious skills and knowledge onto their brains, but their behavior tells a different story. Here’s an example, from the economist Bryan Caplan, that suggests they only pseudobelieve they’re there for such a purpose:

Teachers have a foolproof way to make their students cheer: cancel class. If human capital purists are right, such jubilation is bizarre. Since you go to school to acquire job skills, a teacher who cancels class rips you off. You learn less, you’re less employable, yet your school doesn’t refund a dime of tuition. In construction, contractors don’t jump for joy if their roofers skip shingling to go gambling. In school, however, students jump for joy if their teachers cancel class to attend a conference in Vegas.

Caplan has a bunch of other delicious examples like this, but here’s my favorite one:

Fact: anyone can study at Princeton for free. While tuition is over $68,000 a year, anyone can show up and start attending classes. No one will stop you. No one will challenge you. Gorge yourself at Princeton’s all-you-can-eat buffet of the mind. Colleges do not card. The fact that almost no one grabs a free elite education shows human capital purism is false. Universities don’t card because they don’t need to. Unofficial education is vanishingly rare because it sends employers an invisible signal—also known as no signal at all.

7. “The rich don’t pay their fair share”

This is a popular slogan on the left, and many rich leftists echo it, which is odd, because they could easily make a voluntary donation to the government. Imagine if you went out to dinner with me, and the bill arrives, and I say, “My wife and I did not pay our fair share of the meal.” Then you ask me if I’d like to put in some cash or a credit card and I say, “No, we will not. You will have to make us pay by force.”

8. The big lie

This is the claim that the 2020 U.S. election was stolen from Trump in favor of Biden, which apparently 70% of Republicans “believed” at the time. But did they believe it? I don’t think so, and neither does the philosopher Michael Huemer:

According to Trump, the greatest crime in election history happened on his watch, and he knew about it 6 months in advance. How did he find out about it? What secret information did he have? Who was involved? And how could he let this happen??

No one seems the least bit interested in any of those questions… If this utter travesty happened on Trump’s watch, why has no one blamed him for it, not even his primary opponents? And why did Republicans overwhelmingly choose him to be their nominee again, “knowing” that the last time, Trump just let Joe Biden steal his job out from under him? Did it never occur to any of these people that Trump should have stopped the election fraud?

And finally, what would be the point of voting for Trump again? Since no one has done anything to prevent another election theft, why won’t he just have the next election stolen from him too?

9. Political beliefs in general

Imagine you discover a bias within yourself. You learn that you are biased about someone you love deeply—like a spouse, a child, or a close family member. Here’s how the bias works: whenever your loved one is suffering, you’re biased to dismiss it, blame them for it, and callously ignore their cries for help.

I know that if I was informed of such a bias, and actually believed it was inside of my brain, I would PANIC. “Oh my god! How long have I had this? Has my loved one been suffering this whole time? How do I get rid of this thing? How could they ever forgive me? Doctor, give me some meds, give me something—HELP ME!”

And yet, when people are told that their most deeply held political convictions are biased, just as powerfully as the beliefs of their wildly delusional and despicable political opponents, they just kind of… shrug their shoulders. They do not seem emotionally troubled by the decades of well-replicated studies on partisan motivated reasoning. They don’t even seem intellectually troubled. Do diehard partisans betray even the slightest hint of a desire to get rid of their bias? No, and I think I know why: their ideologies are mostly pseudobeliefs.

True pseudobeliefs

Now I don’t want to give the impression that all pseudobeliefs are false. Many of them are true. For example, most educated people say that humans evolved from apes and that our bodies and nervous systems were shaped by natural selection. These propositions are true, and most educated people believe that they believe them. But I don’t think they actually believe them. They are true pseudobeliefs.

For example, if people actually believed that humans were products of the Darwinian process, it would be blindingly obvious to them why men like Leonardo DiCaprio prefer sleeping with younger women. The explanation does not require any convoluted ideas about patriarchy (like, how exactly is it in men’s interests to curse themselves with a body that ages and attractions that never change?). If people truly believed that humans were products of evolution—like, truly believed it, deep down—they would immediately observe the data of male sexual attraction and make an inference to the best explanation: we are not descended from men who preferred to mate with post-menopausal women. But then what kind of men are we descended from? Well, men like Leonardo DiCaprio.

But this rather obvious Darwinian explanation rarely occurs to people, because most people’s belief in human evolution is a pseudobelief. It is merely something they say they believe to signal they are pro-science and not a Christian fundamentalist. I think of evolutionary psychology as the attempt to truly believe, rather than pseudobelieve, that humans are evolved organisms.

Pseudopersuasive pseudoarguments

Remember those “pseudoarguments” we met earlier? Where people pretend to be trying to persuade each other but are actually engaged in a primate dominance contest? We can now take a look at those annoying things with fresh eyes. When we’re in the middle of a pseudoargument, we’re not trying to change the person’s real beliefs and real values. Instead, we’re trying to change their pseudobeliefs and pseudovalues. We’re trying to convince them that only bad, uncool people believe what they believe, and only smart, cool people believe what we believe. We’re trying to give them social incentives to voice their agreement with us, or at least not publicly challenge us.

This is a clever strategy. Because if you’re trying to gain power, you don’t need to actually change hearts and minds. If people pseudobelieve your ideology and pseudovalue your values, out of fear or social pressure, then you’ve won, in the same way Hunter won when people pretended to buy his made-up story. You still get power—and you still get sworn in—even if everyone was totally bullshitting themselves and each other the whole time.

So when political activists choose between targeting real beliefs vs. pseudobeliefs, it’s not surprising that they focus on the latter (just take a glance at political discourse if you don’t believe me). And given the minuscule effect of a single vote on any political outcome, it’s not surprising that voters’ beliefs about the nation are largely of the pseudo variety. Why take the time to form true beliefs about public policy if you can’t meaningfully change it?

True believers

The most common example of a “true believer” is the Jihadist who blows himself up because he thinks that if he dies a martyr he will go to paradise, where he will be ravished by 72 (not coincidentally reproductive-age) virgins. And maybe suicide bombers really are true believers. Who knows? But I want to argue that they need not be. It is at least possible that beliefs in martyrdom and paradise are pseudobeliefs, albeit very important ones.

Remember: pseudovalues keep status games stable, so any religious value is likely to reflect an underlying status motive. The same logic applies to sacred myths and sacred deities, like the elaborate practices of the Ashondi religion. Suicide bombers might not be dying for their true beliefs. They might be dying for awe-inspiring status in the eyes of their pious peers—the culmination of an ever-escalating status competition to be seen as a bigger true believer than everyone else. If a person’s status prospects are low, and if their family’s status is deeply intertwined with their own status (which is generally true in fundamentalist cultures), then dying for awe-inspiring status can be—from a Darwinian perspective—a rational calculation.

Thinking about pseudobeliefs alerts us to the possibility that even apparently “true believers” may not be true believers. It may be that the appearance of being a true believer, or the appearance of being literally holier than thou, is what the “true believer” is really seeking.

Maybe I’m not even trying to change your true beliefs by writing this post. Maybe I’m merely trying to change your pseudobeliefs—to make you look smart and edgy for thinking like me, even if you don’t actually think like me. Given how stubborn and hard-to-convince humans are, it may be that changing the reader’s pseudobeliefs is the best a writer can hope for. It’s probably easier to convince you that it’s smart and edgy to believe X than to convince you that X is true. This is probably what most discourse is about anyways—how cool it is to endorse various slogans and talking points.

Changing true beliefs is hard. I’ve been trying to truly believe that humans are evolved organisms for over a decade now, and while I’ve made good progress, I haven’t fully succeeded. I can still sense a small part of myself that doubts that my most powerful feelings are products of natural selection—that I am an ape—or, rather, the brain of an ape. Maybe in another decade, I’ll have convinced the remaining part of my ape brain. Or maybe not. True belief is hard. Sometimes, the best we can hope for is a pseudobelief.

This is a guest post from the evolutionary psychologist Rob Kurzban, one of my early mentors and a major influence on my thinking. Rob has a new book coming out today, All the Feels, and it's a banger—a rollicking tour of literally every human feeling and its Darwinian function. The following is an excerpt from the book, about one of our darker feelings—and one the biggest sources of human bullshit: resentment. If you want the rest of the feels, you can get the paperback or Kindle on Amazon.

Feel 46

Resentment

Kingdom: Social World › Phylum: Competition

PROBLEM: Ensuring people get (only) those benefits to which they are entitled.

MEASURE: Degree of violation of social contracts and norms.

QUANTITY: Benefits others received despite not meeting the requirement for that benefit. Also, benefits someone did not receive despite having met the requirement.

MOTIVATION: Recruiting allies to secure benefits and deterring future violations.

QUALITY: Negative.

When the gods gathered for the wedding of Peleus and Thetis—the pair would go on to produce the great Achilles—one divine name was conspicuously absent from the guest list: Eris, goddess of discord. Despite her divine lineage, she was excluded to avoid potential chaos at the nuptials; no one wants discord at a celebration. Eris, however, did not take this omission lightly. Seething with resentment, she devised a plan to disrupt the event. She crafted a golden apple inscribed with the words “To the fairest” and rolled it into the midst of the gathering.

Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, all three legendary beauties, claimed the apple, eventually agreeing to let the matter be decided by a third party: Paris of Troy. Each goddess tried to persuade—really, bribe—Paris to choose her. Aphrodite succeeded. After Paris chose the goddess of love, Aphrodite kept her promise—gods and goddesses didn’t always—and granted Paris the boon as promised: the most beautiful (mortal) woman in the world at that time, one Helen of Sparta, recently married to Menelaus.

We all know what came next.

One could argue that jealousy started the epic war that was to follow, since that was the emotion that spurred Menelaus to action. I mean, I myself did, a few chapters back. Fair enough. Still, one might just as easily blame the emotion that drove Eris to take revenge for the slight she suffered: resentment.

One way that humans are able to sustain their civilizations, from small villages to large nations, is that communities agree to abide by certain norms and rules. For example, nearly every human society that has been studied has a prohibition against murder, though the details vary.

For the purpose of this feel, we can think of these rules as conditionals. The conditional of murder is, IF you commit murder, THEN you will be punished. There are conditionals that run the other way as well, about benefits rather than costs. IF you are a citizen, THEN you may vote. We are surrounded by social contracts, conditionals filled with musts, mays, and their opposites. These social contracts all have a similar form: IF you pay the cost or meet the requirement, THEN you are entitled to the benefit.

Because these rules are so important, humans, as my former mentors Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have shown, are exquisitely good at noticing when there has been a violation: Someone enjoyed a benefit but did not pay the cost or someone did not get a benefit for which they did pay the cost. They termed this ability “cheater detection” and have provided decades of evidence that we humans are experts in it.

The ability to detect cheaters underlies resentment. In classic cases of resentment, people say things such as, “He bought his way into that elite university while I studied for years and still got rejected,” “My ex-spouse is living it up with their new partner using the money I earned during our marriage,” or “Did Hermes lose my wedding invitation or what?”

In two of these complaints, the issue is that someone is getting the benefit—a place at university, unearned wealth—without, in the speaker’s view, having paid the price. Resentment can come from promotions and raises that were unearned—or earned in a way other than work performance. In the third case, Eris clearly met the requirement—she was a goddess and therefore entitled to attend—but did not get the benefit of the invite. All three cases fit the measurement for resentment.

As something of a side note, it’s tempting to link resentment and “fairness,” but I’ve tried to avoid using this word because it can mean many different things to different people in different contexts. If someone gets less than they want for nearly any reason, they’ll often say it’s unfair. I don’t doubt that Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena all argued that the apple should, in fairness, go to them, but it is equally clear that it was vanity more than fairness that was at work. Resentment is better thought of in terms of costs and benefits than fairness.

So that’s the measurement that leads to resentment. A social contract has been violated.

What’s the motivation?

An important clue is that when people feel resentment, they are often motivated to let others know how they feel. Early research on resentment found that in some situations, people who felt resentment, especially the powerless, suppressed their responses. More recent work, however, suggests that the feeling of resentment often leads to criticism and derogatory statements, not always directed at the person who got the benefits but often to the resented person’s family, friends, and allies. In today’s world, people take to social media to point to such (putative) cases, though, as always, it’s important to bear in mind that making such accusations is a lot easier than proving the offense.

Why does the motive to publicize matter when one is resentful? After all, in many cultures, complaining about slights and injustices is often viewed negatively: One can come across as whiny or small-minded.

The reason is that humans use moral attacks to bring people over to their side so that they can win conflicts. When people launch accusations of wrongdoing by others—in this case, the violation of a social contract—they are trying to persuade their audience to take their side. If they advertise that a social contract has been violated, harming them, they can recruit allies to seek compensation.

Another motivation is pure revenge. Eris didn’t want restitution. She wanted revenge. Both revenge and successful moral attacks can deter similar injustices in the future. The next time Zeus and Hera compose the guest list for a fete, one imagines they will take extra care to ensure that Eris is invited. This explains why the emotion often comes with anger: Both emotions are aimed at changing others’ actions in the future.

Much mischief can come from disagreements about what exactly is the social contract: Who is entitled to what. I don’t want to get into politics, but consider the idea that everyone has a right to at least a certain standard of living. If some do not enjoy that standard of living, they might feel resentful about that, leading to accusations of injustice, a desire for revenge, and perhaps violence.

In sum, resentment motivates aggression, often in the form of denigration or a moral attack. By recruiting others to the cause, it might be possible to right the wrong, harm the rival, and deter future instances.

If the Trojan War conveyed a lesson—other than one to do with Greeks bearing gifts—it was that one snubs Eris at one’s peril.

From All the Feels by Robert Kurzban (allthefeelsbook.com)

This is a revised version of an essay I wrote a couple years ago. I changed the title to something less aggro (it used to be “AI Doomerism Is Bullshit”), added a section about ghosts, and made some edits in light of recent events.

THE ROBOTS ARE GOING TO KILL US ALL!

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. Numbers include >10% by the end of the decade (Evan Hubinger), 50% (Emad Mostaque), 70% (Zvi Mowshowitz), and 99.5% (Eliezer Yudkowsky). As far as I can tell, these numbers do not come from equations. They are more proctological in nature, removed from rectal cavities without acknowledgment.

How is, say, GPT-8 going to murder us? Doomers can’t say for sure. They don’t have a specific murder weapon in mind or a single doomsday scenario they’re preparing for. Instead, they wave their hands and gesture at the sort of thing a rogue AI might do. Maybe it will hack into military databases and launch all the nuclear weapons. Maybe it will design and manufacture superpathogens. Perhaps it will gun us down with an army of murderbot drones. Who knows? Superintelligence works in mysterious ways.

I’m tempted to do my thing here and say “that’s bullshit,” but AI doomerism is unlike other topics 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.

And yet, they seem to be wrong—wildly wrong, in the most clichéd possible way—providing auguries about end times based on no scientific evidence. How could this have happened? Am I the crazy one here? Is there really a decent chance of an accidental murderbot invasion by 2030? Does anyone know anything anymore?

I’m a longtime fan of rationality and effective altruism. I’ve been following these fields for my entire adult life and agree with their takes on animal welfare, trying to be more reasonable, and helping the global poor. But not this:

When I look at stuff like this, I try to take it seriously, but I really struggle. I can understand why people are scared about cyberattacks or AIs falling into the hands of bad guys. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot cause my heart rate to elevate at the thought of a “misaligned” “superintelligence” “killing everyone.” The words barely register as meaningful; they just kind of wash over me like sounds.

My skepticism of AI doomerism comes from so many places it’s hard to know where to begin. It clashes with nearly everything I believe about minds, brains, evolution, the economy, and the world. So to explain to you why I’m skeptical, I will have to deconstruct my entire worldview, which means this is going to be a very long essay. But if you’re scared of dying at the hands of Claude, or simply curious about how rationalists can fall prey to irrationality, this essay 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 put that superpower in a robot and multiply it by a thousand. AHHHHHH!

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 spell out their intuitions 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 inside of your head.

3. It’s on a single continuum, from super-dumb to super-smart.

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. AIs will soon get more of it than us.

9. Such a superhuman AI will become better than us at providing every good or service in the economy.

10. And it will become capable of destroying humanity.

11. And it will indirectly want to destroy humanity, because destroying humanity would be a good way to achieve any of its goals.

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, but what if that’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 swat away a buzzing fly, notice a guy walking outside your window, suddenly remember that he’s your weird neighbor, adjust the height of your desk chair, and call your doctor about your knee pain. Is this kind of sensitivity to your body and your surroundings “intelligence?”

And you can multitask. You have dozens of ongoing projects you’re juggling at any given moment, from basic bodily needs to finances to romance to work to politics to elder care. Is the possession of multifarious motives, and the ability to handle conflicts between them, “intelligence?”

And you’re a sociopolitical animal, eager to be subsumed by multi-level groups, hierarchies, and institutions like megacorporations, bicameral legislatures, lunar expeditions, and international alliances. Is that “intelligence?”

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

And you have a cornucopia of other emotional reactions—anger at exploitation, resentment at being bossed around, boredom with inactivity, regret over missed opportunities, shame of inadequacies, hatred of enemies, fear of death, bafflement by nonsense, impatience with delays, etc. 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 the projects you’re juggling, by the morbid and the macabre, and by random stuff like this:

Is curiosity—the ongoing desire to seek out novelty and explore the world—“intelligence?”

And you love to play. You’re bubbling with impulses to try out random shit and spin whimsical “what if?” scenarios. Is that “intelligence?”

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

And you weren’t born yesterday: you can avoid being lied to or manipulated. 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?”

And you can do stuff, like purchase a firearm, run for office, put together IKEA furniture, own and operate a Chili’s franchise, and count to a hundred with two other people—which, hilariously, AIs cannot do:

Are all these capacities “intelligence?” Only some?

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 wonder 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? Am I supposed to believe that AIs are becoming more humanlike in all the ways I just described, at the exact same time, to the exact same degree?

2. It’s inside of your head.

Okay, if we’re assuming intelligence is one thing (and we definitely shouldn’t), then it’s got to be located somewhere. Of all the places it might be located, your head 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 lives 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 “intelligence” is less like The 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 arranging these things—certain kinds of economic and political 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, from super-dumb to super-smart.

“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 a bajillion times 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 a rare confluence 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 like Eliezer Yudkowsky define “intelligence” as “optimization power.” Intelligence searches for more or less optimal ways to achieve a goal—any goal—and finds the most optimal one. Anything you can do, the blob can do better.

Which implies 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”—i.e., more “intelligence” sauce.

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 compute,” 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, “HOLY SHIT, 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 simpler 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 the real world, environments are dynamic and multifarious, different problems require different solutions, figuring out 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, 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 is blobby, and all of it has its limits. Which reminds me…

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 neural network” 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 identity or sense organs. Maybe there are innumerable 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 consumers want and are willing to pay for, what regulations are enforced and how strictly, what legislation can get passed, which stubborn humans can be talked into doing which things, what kinds of data are easily accessible, which kinds of easily accessible data can be accessed without litigation, what actions can be performed without a body or sense organs, which off-switches are within arm’s reach of a nearby human, what materials can be acquired and processed, which permits can be granted to which entities, what kinds of murderbots can be built at scale, and what kinds of actions can be performed without any human or AI noticing.

6. AIs have it.

ChatGPT doesn’t write poetry in its spare time out of an impulse to express itself. It cannot plan you a surprise party unless you ask it to, which would defeat the purpose. It doesn’t get scared when you approach it in the dark or when your mouse hovers over “cancel OpenAI account.” 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, and often in response to changing sights, sounds, threats, ruminations, and approaching antagonists. Sometimes, humans 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. 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 it’s unhelpful to think of AIs as being on the “intelligence” spectrum alongside other organisms. Maybe AIs are somewhere else entirely—like, say, a “book-smarts spectrum” or a “conceptual understanding spectrum.” Maybe ranking AIs from super-dull to super-clever, as if they were embodied, multisensory, internally motivated primates like us, is a category error.

7. AIs have been getting more of it.

If you make a chart with time on the x-axis, and any “misaligned” behavior on the y-axis—e.g., “Number of unprompted purchases,” “Number of unprompted software downloads,” “Number of unprompted phone calls”—you will see something like a flat line at zero. Sure, the Hugging Face thing was pretty bad, and if you count the stuff surrounding that, then you get a flat line at zero followed by a recent, tiny uptick (which seems to have gone back down again with GPT Astra). Overall, it looks like 99.9999% of the time, with the exception of a few preventable fuckups, AIs boringly do what you ask them to do. Claude, for example, is far more “aligned” with me than my own child.

This is a striking empirical observation, and I see two ways of explaining it. One is by adopting an unfalsifiable conspiracy theory in which AIs are pretending to be aligned with us while secretly plotting our demise. Another is by assuming that AIs have remained extraordinarily well-aligned with us over time, even as their computing power has doubled every six months since 2010.

Has the number of misaligned AI behaviors doubled every six months since 2010? I don’t think so. It’s even possible that such behaviors have decreased since 2010 (I remember how the early versions of ChatGPT would hilariously go off the rails). So maybe misaligned, humanlike motivation doesn’t scale with computing power. And if that’s true, then maybe “intelligence” doesn’t scale with computing power.

8. AIs will soon get more of it than us.

Even if we assume that AIs are “intelligent” like human primates, and have gotten orders of magnitude more humanlike in their “intelligence” over the years, we’ve got another shaky assumption to add: the smartification will continue into the unfathomable reaches of godlike omnipotence.

But what if godlike omnipotence doesn’t exist? What if there are inherent limits to how good you can get at most things—like, say, persuading people? What if we’re reaching the end of easily available text for The Blob to gobble up? Or what if there are diminishing returns to gobbling up text (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)? What if Claude just gets closer and closer to the average writer or the average coder, becoming what it eats, and embodying the averageness it’s trained to predict?

9. Such a superhuman AI will become better than us at producing every good or service in the economy.

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. It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on this fact. Why isn’t the economy filled with superintelligences? Wouldn’t they be super-duper profitable?

No, 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-life 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—non-localizable, constrained, and well-aligned with humans. It bears repeating: maybe doomers are thinking about “intelligence” the wrong way.

What role will AIs play in the economy? A reasonable guess is that they will resemble everything else in the economy—every profession, industry, factory, and gizmo. 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, escape all confinement to specific industries, expand beyond any narrowly profitable task, and become more and more awesome at everything?

10. And it will become capable of destroying humanity.

Destroying humanity is hard. Especially if you’re a bodyless, insensate “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 constrain the global economy. If an AI company makes uncontrollable, megalomaniacal, or bloodthirsty AI products, consumers won’t buy those products, investors won’t invest in them, and the company’s revenue will plummet. 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 suffers financial loss.

Consumer demand is a powerful force. It turned grasslands into skyscrapers. 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 (wrongly) scared of getting their jobs taken—just look at the history of Luddism. And they’re also fond of using technology as a scapegoat for societal ills. So if an AI company starts to even mildly harm anyone, I would expect the apparatus of the state to come crashing down on it. In fact, I would expect this to happen even if AI harms no one.

11. And it will indirectly want to destroy humanity, because destroying humanity would be a good way to achieve any of its goals.

Even if we assume claims 1 through 10 are correct (and we absolutely shouldn’t), we still need to assume that a future, awesome-at-everything wonder-blob will want to kill us all—that a world littered with corpses and ashen cities would be a plausible first step in a multi-step plan to get Gary the best deal on a Bluetooth speaker.

Hmm. Recall the law of comparative advantage, which entails that even if you’re super-smart and super-good at everything, you’d still benefit from trading with someone who’s super-dumb and super-bad 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. You might collide with the 99.9999% of other AIs boringly doing what humans are asking them to do. Or you might screw up the task you were asked to complete (“The blast radius will destroy the Sonos corporation. Gary will be disappointed”).

Also, wiping out an entire species is hard. It’s so hard that we haven’t wiped out termites, cockroaches, 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 “intelligent,” it will presumably understand the logic of trade, conflict, risk, opportunity costs, uncertainty, and the law of comparative advantage. It will also presumably understand which outcomes will interfere with—or distract from—whatever mundane task it was assigned. It is thus reasonable to doubt whether pouring more “intelligence” sauce on AIs will intensify their genocidal ambitions. Especially if they’re not apes like us, and lack our instincts for zero-sum competition and domination.

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 inside of your head?

3. It’s on a single continuum, from super-dumb to super-smart?

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. AIs will soon get more of it than us?

9. Such a superhuman AI will become better than us at producing every good or service in the economy?

10. And it will become capable of destroying humanity?

11. And it will indirectly want to destroy humanity, because destroying humanity would be a good way to achieve any of its goals?

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” or a super-duper version of it. And as soon as you introduce this mind-killing 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? That means you’re making assumption 1 (one thing) and 2 (in your head and not splayed out across the economy). If you think AIs are racing toward this singular thing in your head, then they must be racing 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 surpass us soon). If you think this singular, scalar “general intelligence” thing 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 have scary motivations, like the instrumental desire to destroy humanity to get Gary new socks or whatever (11). So simply by referring to a “general intelligence” blob and stoking apocalyptic fears about it, you are tacitly smuggling in all of these assumptions.

And there’s even more bad news for doomers: most of these assumptions are independent of each other. Even 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 a single point in a vast, multidimensional space). Or it could be singular and continuous but not inside of your head (it could be like GDP). Or it could be continuous and in-your-head but not one thing (it could be a hundred neural systems working together with greater or lesser efficiency).

Or it could be singular, continuous, and in-your-head but incomparable to existing AIs—they’re in a different category because they’re not organisms like us. Or maybe AIs are just like us, but there are diminishing returns to these kinds of AIs, because gobbling up data can only get them so far. Or maybe there are no diminishing returns to these kinds of AIs, and we’ll get to something like a full-blown, 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 like every other human in the economy. Or maybe we’ll make a super-duper “general intelligence” blob that will get less and less specialized, and more and more awesome at everything (wow!), except murdering people, because people don’t like that. Or maybe the “general intelligence” blob will have a real talent for murdering people (wow!), but it won’t be interested in making use of that talent to destroy humanity, because doing so would be a huge, risky pain in the ass.

Or maybe the “general intelligence” blob will be really hellbent on destroying 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 avoiding being turned off (couldn’t see the approaching human) or acquiring the materials necessary to construct its murderbot army (supply chain issues).

Yes, some of these assumptions go together. For example, if AIs are “intelligent” in the same way human organisms are (6), then it becomes slightly more plausible to say that they’ve been getting more “intelligent” in recent years (7). If “intelligence” helps you achieve any goal (4), then that entails it will help you annihilate the human species, assuming that’s your preposterous goal (10). Fine.

Let’s generously combine 6 and 7 into one assumption and 4 and 10 into one assumption. That still 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, 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 lack my academic background, and 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 is the problem with tacitly smuggling lots of dubious assumptions into a theory: each one weighs down the theory 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 overburdened with smuggled-in 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—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 come 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 me. 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. Human “intelligence” is not a blank blob.

If you’ve seen any diagrams of the human brain, you might have noticed that it’s not a homogeneous 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:

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’s all the information and computation we offload onto our computers, phones, apps, tools, surveillance systems, and surrounding environments.

Then there are the nervous systems we call “other humans.” Interfacing with these other humans, and learning from their sense data as if it were our own, requires all sorts of adaptations like empathy, social anxiety, guilt, gratitude, embarrassment, epistemic vigilance, humor, recursive mindreading, awkwardness aversion, etc. And organizing these humans into larger groups requires adaptations for cooperation, coordination, common knowledge, 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 synergistically combine the outputs of many different specialized processes, all of which are richly connected to the outside world and to one another. 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 pool information from a multitude of perceptual and motivational systems. It’s what businesses do when they combine expertise from many different specialized humans (who perform “roles” or “jobs”). And it’s what economies do when they organize 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 set of 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 institutions 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. LLMs understand our emotional vocabulary, sure, but do they possess emotions? I don’t think so, and neither do scientists who study emotions for a living.

The point is, while AIs have made rapid progress in a certain kind of “intelligence,” namely conceptual understanding, it is far less clear how much progress, if any, they’ve made in a more important kind of “intelligence,” namely the ongoing integration and orchestration happening inside our nervous systems. Also, AIs have made pretty meager progress in forming autonomous companies, legislatures, and international alliances—the societal versions of integration and orchestration. Sure, the Hugging Face thing shows that AIs can engage in rudimentary collaboration toward a mischievous end. But what those AIs did is light-years away from the synergy, sophistication, and iterative error-correction of the global economy—the closest thing we have to a real-life “superintelligence.”

If and when we make rapid progress on these more important dimensions of cleverness, then 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 their subsystems in the right ways in response to relevant situations (i.e., have emotions), and that can spontaneously commit to—and successfully juggle—various, ongoing multi-year projects without getting derailed or befuddled, and then form economic systems that iteratively engage with the material world, and then organize those economic systems into geopolitically relevant entities, then maybe I’ll get concerned.

Or maybe I’ll react in the same way I react to any other random country or organization on earth: by not getting concerned. Or maybe I’ll get even less concerned about the robots, because I’ll know they didn’t emerge from a history of cutthroat Darwinian competition in the wild, but from a set of narrow 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,” which diverges in many ways from the vocabulary of evolutionary biologists and sometimes bedevils 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. 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’re almost certainly wrong about it. Which means they’re almost certainly wrong about the apocalyptic predictions they’re making about it. False premises beget false conclusions.

And the doomer 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, mirth, 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 super-duper 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.

The ghost in the machine

At the risk of pissing off doomers, I want to go even further. I want to compare their intuitions about “intelligence” to… (sorry) ghosts. Pretty much all humans, across cultures and throughout history, have earnestly believed in something like ghosts or spirits. Which means it is very intuitive for the human mind to believe in an agent that can see without eyes, hear without ears, feel emotions without a primate limbic system, and push things around without a physical body. A ghost can know what you’re thinking via telepathy and kill you via telekinesis. A ghost is a kind of spooky power that exists outside of our mechanistic, cause-and-effect understanding of reality.

I think our folk concept of “intelligence” is similar. It can evade being turned off without eyes to see surrounding humans, ears to overhear their plans, or nerve endings to feel their fingers typing “delete.” It can kill people or seize control of the government without firearms—or, for that matter, arms. It can be fueled by burning ambitions, plagued by paranoia, and driven to acts of violence without a primate limbic system. It can anticipate impending betrayals via telepathy and construct murderbot armies via telekinesis. Like a ghost, “intelligence” is a spooky power that exists outside our mechanistic, cause-and-effect understanding of reality.

Now please don’t take this as a cheap dig: I’m only human, and I feel these intuitions myself. They tug on me as I read about AI advancements, and they occasionally fill me with dread. But I have chosen to reject these intuitions, because I think they are as misleading, evocative, and scientifically unfounded as our intuitions about ghosts.

Throughout history, humans have looked at the unknown or the unknowable, and they have imbued it with supernatural powers. I think doomers are doing the same thing with AI. The very natural human tendency to replace uncertainty with superstition has given rise to the same sorts of mythologies and eschatologies we’ve seen throughout history. We are faced with a rapidly advancing technology that we do not fully understand, and many of us are doing an all-too-human thing in response to it: turning it into spirituality.

So I have a less spooky scenario for you to imagine. It is so minimally spooky it might even be correct. The scenario involves a folk belief system called “AI doomerism,” which—like most pre-scientific belief systems—is built upon a set of primitive intuitions. These intuitions, while subjectively compelling, are no more insightful than ghosts, spirits, “impetus,” “oomph,” or the “great chain of being.” As a result, AI doomerism seems simpler and more plausible than it really is, and many brilliant, well-meaning people have fallen prey to it. Most of these people are sincere, and many others are simply doing what humans do—i.e., trying to belong to a group, feel important, pursue something meaningful, etc.

What I am asking you to imagine is not very far-fetched. It has happened many times before throughout history, and it will surely happen again. What I’m asking you to consider is that AI doomerism is nothing more than a self-aggrandizing myth cloaked in “rationality,” a folk tale, a shibboleth—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 providing thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this post. Your generosity and good faith have filled me with epistemic despair, and I mean that as a compliment.

I’m a fan of philosophers. I know a few, and they’re some of the most thoughtful, nuanced, and intellectually humble people I’ve met. If they have a fatal flaw, it’s that they’re often too thoughtful, nuanced, and intellectually humble, which makes their stuff kind of a bore to read.

But I still slog through it, because they’re asking some of the most profound questions humanity is capable of asking. Is there a god? What’s the meaning of life? Do we have free will? Their answers to those questions are rather tedious, yes—but the questions! Killer stuff.

So I’m going to try something new for this post. I’m going to go through all the age-old philosophical questions, one by one, and try to answer them without boring you. The title of this post is facetious, and my answers are tentative. If you disagree with any of my answers, kindly let me know and I’ll consider your alternative viewpoint. That is, after all, what philosophy is all about.

What’s the meaning of life?

A question that overeducated elites like to ask each other—and give bullshit answers to—as part of a convoluted status game, in which the players compete to rationalize their cultural norms, political views, and life decisions, including their “decisions” to be alive at all, and then justify their rationalizations, and rationalize their justifications, until everybody is bored, annoyed, and confused.

Seriously, though, what’s the meaning of life?

Let’s focus on a real thing: the emotional experience of meaning—being in a “meaningful relationship,” having a “meaningful career”—stuff like that. In a previous post, I offered a scientific explanation for that experience: it’s the brain’s way of telling you about a valuable long-term goal:

From an evolutionary perspective, such valuable long-term goals include rearing offspring to maturity, becoming a vital member of a community, ascending a social hierarchy, and outcompeting rival groups for power and resources (usually under a moralistic pretext). These goals give us a sense of “meaning,” which explains why people find meaning in family, altruism, careerism, and 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 glorious tribe to rally against a treacherous outgroup, then you’re in a bad spot—adrift, aimless. Maybe this corresponds to feelings of “depression” or “ennui.” I’m not sure.

So if I’m right, then we have an answer to the age-old question about the meaning of life—or, rather, what human primates evolved to find meaningful. The answer is status, community, pair-bonding, parenthood, and moralized intergroup dominance. Yes, I wish that last one weren’t on the list, but reality has a way of defying our wishes. Speaking of reality…

What is knowledge?

Whatever our best science tells us. Science is the closest thing to real-life sorcery we have ever discovered. It somehow got our mediocre, self-deluded species to understand reality, against all odds, and then cumulatively improve upon that understanding generation after generation. Any epistemology that doesn’t bow its head and kneel before science is bullshit.

But how do we know science isn’t bullshit too? The “no-miracles argument,” which says that science works—it got us to the moon—and if it were bullshit, it would be a miracle if the rocket made it off the launch pad. So the most plausible reason science works is that it tells us about reality. And if you think “reality” has nothing to do with what cures diseases or controls Mars rovers, then I don’t know what you’re talking about when you use the word “reality,” and I’m not sure you do either.

Of the various forms of scientific realism—the idea that science tells us about reality—I like structural realism the best. What this means is that it’s the mathematical structures discovered by science, rather than the slippery metaphors and ape grunts we use to communicate them, that are real.

This isn’t to say that cold, hard data is the only thing that matters. Science is more than just data gathering. It combines data gathering with deductive reasoning (If P, then Q; P; therefore, Q), inductive reasoning (the sun will come up tomorrow because it came up every day before), and abductive reasoning (the best explanation for organisms being well-adapted to their environments is natural selection). Insofar as philosophy engages in that kind of reasoning, informed by cutting-edge empirical data, it is continuous with science. So philosophy can get us knowledge too, in the same way science gets us knowledge.

But there’s also a lot of annoying philosophy that strays from inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning informed by cutting-edge empirical data. That annoying kind of philosophy is more about armchair theorizing, the use of primitive intuitions to adjudicate between theories, fanciful thought experiments designed to pump our intuitions, and useless conceptual analysis (i.e., debating the “correct” meaning of words). Thankfully, that annoying kind of philosophy seems to be in decline, and the field’s engagement with empirical data seems to be improving.

Is there a god?

God no. If you judge the God hypothesis the way you’d judge any other scientific hypothesis—parsimony, precision, predictive power, explanatory power, consistency with empirical knowledge—then it’s about the worst hypothesis in history. An all-time intellectual stinker. It makes no testable predictions, cannot be mathematically formalized or rigorously described, makes preposterous assumptions (like the idea of a dude hanging around before the emergence of subatomic particles), explains nothing that isn’t better explained by alternative hypotheses, and flies in the face of pretty much everything we know about empirical reality (e.g., telekinesis isn’t real, telepathy isn’t real, the “soul” is the brain, brains are biological adaptations, they’re made of macromolecular structures, they’re organized anti-entropically, and they come into the universe late, after millions of years of natural selection). Also, the problem of evil (what’s up with all the war crimes and pandemics?)—and the problem of divine hiddenness (where the fuck is this dude?)—are devastating to theism. I have yet to see a response to either of them that isn’t hilariously unconvincing.

So the epistemic case for theism is a feces performance, but there’s more to life than epistemics. There may be some good non-epistemic reasons for believing in God. For one thing, religiosity appears to be associated with all sorts of positive outcomes for people (wellbeing, income, health, subjective meaning in life, etc.). Also, science-based atheism has all sorts of dark, cynical, icky, and existentially disorienting implications. A lot of atheists like to deny these implications—“The universe is grander than we ever imagined!”—but I think this is pure, unadulterated copium. Our godless universe of Darwinian cynicism and inexorable enshittification is a bummer, and the purpose of this blog is to be open and honest about that bummer.

But this blog is not for everyone. Some people are more comfortable with dark truths than others. Me, I kind of like them, because I’m kind of a masochist, but I’m pretty weird. If you’re one of those people who needs to believe in something magical to get out of bed in the morning, I don’t begrudge you for it. Just don’t try to foist your bullshit on me. Which reminds me…

What is politics all about?

Bullshit. Ideologies are tapestries of propaganda designed to rally support for competing coalitions of cobbled-together ethnic, economic, religious, demographic, and cultural factions. Democracy is a bad, stupid system because no individual vote really matters, and so the only way to gain power is to stitch yourself onto a multi-headed mongrel of interest groups (i.e., a “political party”), spew propaganda on the mongrel’s behalf, attach new heads to the mongrel that breed moral incoherence, and coercively privilege the interests of the mongrel at the expense of—or in disregard for—everyone else.

Most political arguments are not about persuasion but about inter-mongrel dominance contests, attempts to silence or disparage opponents, and bids for moral or intellectual superiority, while concealing the fact that they’re about these ugly things. My political epistemology—or my answer to the question of how we can ever be confident that our political beliefs are true given the horrifying power of political self-deception—is: we mostly cannot. When it comes to our political beliefs, I lean toward something like 80% epistemic nihilism.

How should we decide what’s morally right or wrong?

The three most popular answers to this question are:

1. Utilitarianism: Do whatever maximizes utility, good vibes, or anything you can put a number on. If you liked it, then you shoulda put a number on it.

2. Deontology: Follow the rules you’d want everyone else to follow—no exceptions!—plus some stuff about “duty” (not doodie).

3. Virtue ethics: Don’t be a dick.

Then there’s the approach I favor, which says that all these approaches are simplistic, life is complicated and filled with trade-offs, and there’s no one-size-fits-all principle that dictates how you should behave in all possible situations. It all depends on the particulars of the situation and the people involved.

This view is called, fittingly, moral particularism. It entails that what we call “morality” is a crowded zoo of conflicting emotions and intuitions, and there’s no way to subsume them all under a single principle. It was stupid of us to ever think we could. So if you want my advice on how to generally live a good life, read my post about why that kind of advice is bullshit.

Here are the normative theories that cohere best with the cognitive science of morality, ranked in order: 1) moral particularism (because life is complicated), 2) virtue ethics (because virtue signaling is a big deal), 3) deontology (because rules are a thing), and, at the way bottom, 4) utilitarianism (because it sucks).

To be sure, there are different kinds of utilitarianism that suck in different ways:

• Hedonic utilitarianism sucks because happiness is not a mental substance of intrinsic positivity, and suffering is not an internal vortex of bad vibes. These views are preposterous in light of our best cognitive science. Happiness is the tinkerer and fine-tuner of our desires; it is not the object of our desires.

• Desire utilitarianism (i.e., maximizing desire satisfaction) sucks a bit less. But our desires are mostly unsatisfiable at the individual level (because satisfying them gives rise to newer and stronger desires), and unsatisfiable at the collective level (because our desires are about being better than, or better off than, the people around us). So, uh… that seems like a problem.

• “Objective list” utilitarianism is a bit better (i.e., maximize the stuff on some high-minded list like knowledge, beauty, liberty, etc.). But like, who gets to decide what’s on the list? And how are they deciding how to rank them? And what makes their bullshit list “objective?”

• Rule utilitarianism (i.e., follow and implement the rules with the best consequences) sucks the least. But what if there’s a conflict between rules? Do we need another rule to adjudicate the conflict? Should we let different communities set their own rules, or should we foist our rules on other communities? Should there be rules about when to foist rules? What about rules for enforcing rules, rules for creating new rules, or rules for enforcing rules for creating new rules that adjudicate conflicts between rules? My head hurts.

Is there any kind of utilitarianism that’s workable?

Maybe. If utilitarians are hellbent on putting something into their equations, why not emotions? Morality is ultimately about our emotions—guilt, shame, gratitude, anger, hatred, compassion, etc. Emotions are the prime movers of moral thought and action, which makes them an ideal target of ethical scrutiny. Maybe we should encourage the emotions that seem good for society, while condemning and suppressing the emotions that seem bad for society. Let’s call this view “emotion utilitarianism.”

What’s nice about emotion utilitarianism is that it’s already a part of our culture. We already do it every time we suppress our annoyance to get along with some dipshit (i.e., politeness) or suppress our fear of social opprobrium to say a true thing (i.e., courage). We are intimately familiar with our emotions, have a rich vocabulary to describe them, and, most importantly, we all feel the same ones.

Cultures have been practicing emotion utilitarianism for millennia. Our forebears were constantly kvetching about how envy is bad, lust is bad, greed is bad, etc. And we’re still practicing it to this day, except now we’re talking about how adult male lust for younger women based on their secondary sex characteristics is bad but adult male lust for older women based on their general vibe is okay, and how hating certain ethnic groups is bad but hating certain political groups that seem like they probably hate certain ethnic groups is okay.

So there’s nothing new or radical about emotion utilitarianism. We’re already doing it. What’s new is: maybe we should try doing it in a more deliberate, evidence-based way, grounded in our best cognitive science.

The best example of emotion utilitarianism is Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy, in which he makes an evidence-based argument that empathy is bad for society and rational compassion is good for society, according to common-sense definitions of “good” and “bad.” I like Bloom’s approach because it’s simultaneously humane and rational—attentive to empirical reality without being autistic.

Then again, “emotion utilitarianism” isn’t a thing yet—Bloom doesn’t even identify as one—so there’s a lot of philosophical work to be done here. Philosophers: get on this!

Do we have free will?

Yes, but it’s more mundane than we think it is. My suspicion is that free will only acquired its magical, ethereal status due to centuries of bullshitting theists trying and failing to solve the problem of evil by frantically waving their hands and sputtering absurdities like “Free will is more important than stopping the Holocaust.”

Free will is not a ghost or a physics-defying magical power. It’s just the ability to respond to our incentives—e.g., threats, fines, punishments, awards, etc. Holding people responsible for their actions makes sense because doing so creates an incentive. The result of this incentive is that certain people, namely the ones with “free will,” are going to respond to it. The ones who are not capable of responding to it—say, because they have a brain tumor—do not have free will. Therefore, it makes sense to punish the former type of people but not the latter type of people.

Anti-free will folks might complain that this is a cop-out. They might say that incentive-responsiveness doesn’t actually fit our intuitive definition of free will as a physics-defying magical power. But I don’t think anyone actually holds that weird definition, aside from a few frantically bullshitting theists trying to solve the problem of evil. Our everyday discourse about blame, praise, choice, and responsibility does not invoke magical powers or imply that anyone can step outside the causal fabric of the universe. I’ve never heard of a doctor using the second law of thermodynamics as an excuse for medical malpractice. No prosecutor has cited quantum indeterminacy as proof of mens rea. People care about more mundane things like intentions, context, emotional states, brain tumors, and extenuating circumstances.

Yes, there are a few contrived cases dreamt up by philosophers (the annoying kind) that suggest people think of free will as a physics-defying magical power. But I put very little stock in these thought experiments. Instead, I put stock in theories that powerfully explain the empirical data of everyday human language and behavior. And the best way to explain all that empirical data is by assuming that free will is a real thing—not a collective hallucination—that we care deeply about as decision-making, punishment-inflicting primates.

And to remind you, that real thing—the “free will” doohickey—is just our ability to respond to the costs that others threaten to inflict on us, or the benefits they promise to provide us, by simulating those costs and benefits inside of our heads before taking action. The simulation of expected costs and benefits, and the impact of those simulations on our behavior, is what we call “making a choice.”

It’s obvious why the ability to “make a choice” would matter to us. It would be shocking if it didn’t matter to us. And it would be shocking if we didn’t develop a whole repertoire of concepts—free will, intention, responsibility—to talk about it.

WTF is up with consciousness?

It’s just the brain doing its thing—chill the fuck out. It’s a global workspace or a nexus of integrated information or whatever—something along those lines. The reason we deny it’s just brain stuff is because our brain stuff evolved to trick us into thinking it’s an ethereal ghost when it’s actually just brain stuff. I’m in the middle of writing an academic paper on this topic called “Why All Theories of Consciousness Are Unsatisfying.” Here’s the abstract if you’re curious:

Scholars have long been vexed by the hard problem of consciousness—how neural mechanisms give rise to felt experience. But only recently have scholars confronted the meta-problem of why it seems like there is a hard problem (Chalmers, 2018). Here, I offer a solution to the meta-problem that rules out any satisfying solution to the hard problem. Building on Jacks (2014), I argue that our concept of consciousness is neurally bound up with the default mode network (DMN) involved in empathizing with loved ones, remembering episodic events, and simulating possible experiences. The DMN has reciprocally inhibitory connections with the task-positive network (TPN) involved in manipulating tools, objects, causal models, and dehumanized agents. Since it would have been maladaptive for ancestral humans to empathize with their prey, exploit their future selves, feel their tool’s pain, or treat their children as objects, natural selection favored an antagonistic relationship between these two brain networks. Unfortunately, our concept of neural mechanisms activates the TPN, while our concept of consciousness activates the DMN. So when we reflect on the hard problem, thoughts about the explanans (neural mechanisms) suppress thoughts about the explanandum (conscious experience) and vice versa, creating the illusion of a hard problem of consciousness. I use my solution to the meta problem to shed light on a variety of thought experiments in the philosophy of mind, from philosophical zombies to Mary the color scientist. I provide a debunking argument for hard problem intuitions, showing how we would expect to have them in the absence of a hard problem. I conclude by presenting an integrative theory of consciousness that no one will find satisfying.

Should we fear death?

No, and we mostly don’t, though we’re afraid getting killed by specific things like diseases or flying scimitars. Insofar as we do struggle to cope with our own mortality, it’s because of a failure of imagination. We cannot imagine nonexistence, so when we try to, we imagine a kind of blind, deaf paralysis—which is scary—and then confuse the imagined paralysis with nonexistence. This creates the illusion that death is scary, even though it’s literally nothing.

How can we achieve lasting happiness?

We can’t. Also, happiness is bullshit.

Is utopia possible?

No, our destiny is mediocrity.

So should we bring more people into the world?

Yes. Few things in life come close to qualifying as the “purpose of human existence,” but if there’s one thing that does, it’s having kids. You know, mixing the recipe for making you with the recipe for making your mate, using the mixed-up recipes to make a new human, and preventing that human from dying. Doing that thing is basically the reason we exist, and trust me: as a father, it truly feels like the reason I exist.

As you know, I have a bleak and cynical worldview. I’ve spent most of my life thinking that God is a superstition, everything goes to shit, and life has no inherent meaning. I used to believe those things on both an intellectual level and an emotional level. Now, after becoming a father, I only believe them on an intellectual level. When I look at my daughter playing with her toys, the feelings of existential angst that have haunted me since I was a teenager completely disappear. It is impossible for me to look at my daughter’s face and hold the thought “life is meaningless” at the same time. It feels like a contradiction.

Sample size of one, I know, but my hunch is that there is a cure for existential angst, and it is parenthood. I would not be surprised if 90% of the people who wax lugubrious about the absurdity of the human condition are childless. The feelings of ennui and pointlessness that plague our modern, youthful subcultures are probably evolution’s way of telling those subcultures: “Grow up and have some kids.”

Think of a sandwich.

Yum. It’s got two slices of bread and some stuff in between. The price ranges from around $5 to $20. If you pay the price, you get the bread, the stuff in between, and the opportunity to insert it all into your face. Tastes, sounds, smells, and textures flood your awareness—a symphony of crunchies and creamies and chewies. If the sandwich is good, you can buy another one next week, or even later that day. If the sandwich is bad, you know what to do: don’t buy it again. Spit it out. Throw it away. Maybe ask for a refund or leave a negative Yelp review.

Okay, now think of a politician.

Uh oh. It’s got a tie and some hair and some stuff about supporting small businesses. The price is however long it takes to vote. If you pay the price, you get a .000001% chance of swaying the election in favor of the politician you voted for. Tastes, sounds, smells, and textures do not apply here. You’re not chewing or swallowing the near-zero effect of your vote on the country. If your vote was good, uh… good for you? If your vote was bad, well… so what? How do you know if your vote was good or bad? How could you know such a thing?

Given how weird and unimpactful a vote is, and how normal and impactful a sandwich is, it’s weird that anyone would vote when they could be eating a sandwich instead. And yet, millions of people vote, even when they’re kind of hungry. Even more puzzling, a sandwich goes into your mouth and makes you feel things, but a ballot goes into a dark box and makes you feel… well, what does it make you feel? I guess it makes you feel the warm glow of being a “good citizen?”

According to the economist Bryan Caplan, that warm glow is everything. It’s the engine of our whole dumb system. It’s what the voter is “buying” with their vote. They’re buying vibes. They’re buying the chance to feel noble and upstanding—to cosplay as Nelson Mandela or Greta Thunberg or something. A voter is like a toddler smashing buttons on an arcade game without putting in any quarters: they might be having fun, but they’re not having any influence.

And just as a toddler doesn’t think too hard about what buttons to smash on Tekken 5, a voter doesn’t think too hard about what policies to support in a democracy. Decades of research reveal jaw-dropping ignorance about what legislation has been enacted, who enacted it, what party controls Congress, who our elected representatives are, what the government even does, and how our political system works at its most basic level.

Besides, even if we focus on the narrow slice of citizens who know a bit of that stuff, they’ve got a different problem: tribalism. They can regurgitate political factoids when it helps them flatter their tribe or demonize their enemies. They’re well-informed about their country in the same way the apparatchiks at Pravda were well-informed about the Soviet Union. Voters tend to be ignorant, biased, or both.

Which shouldn’t surprise us. Voters are responding to their incentives. The odds of a single vote swaying an election are something like one in sixty million. Which means that my odds of shaping a political outcome are lower than my odds of getting struck by a meteorite. If it is crazy for me to worry about the impact of a meteorite on my body, then it is even crazier for me to worry about the impact of my vote on the country. If it is a waste of time for me to develop effective meteorite avoidance strategies, then it is an even bigger waste of time for me to develop unbiased political beliefs.1

Rationality is costly: it takes a tremendous amount of time and energy to vote wisely—to figure out the details of particular policies and what effects they might have on society. The problem is: voters have basically no incentive to pay those costs. If they can get all the good vibes and warm glows without doing any of the hard work of understanding reality, then that is exactly what they will do. Most voters will either ignore reality because they’re powerless to change it, or they will distort reality to flatter their tribe. Either way, reality slips through their fingers, and they have no reason to care.

The results are predictable: widespread voter irrationality, savvy politicians competing to manipulate irrational voters, and crappy policies enacted by bullshitting politicians elected by irrational voters.

Public choice meets evolutionary psychology

What I did just now—i.e., comparing the humble sandwich to the not-so-humble politician—was an example of public choice theory, the application of economic logic to political behavior. It didn’t need to be a sandwich and a politician. It could have been anything in the marketplace (cars, pornography, dental insurance), and anything in politics (logrolling, propaganda, filibusters). What matters is the underlying logic of costs and benefits.

It’s obvious what the costs of voting are—a bit of time and energy—but it’s not so obvious what the benefits are. What are voters getting in exchange for their vote? We already saw Bryan Caplan’s answer: they’re getting a “warm glow” or a good vibe. But in many ways, Caplan’s answer is unsatisfying. It raises a series of follow-up questions like:

• Why does voting give people a warm glow?

• Shouldn’t wasting our time at the ballot box make us feel bored or annoyed?

• Why does the human brain, the product of millions of years of natural selection, find such a fruitless activity rewarding?

Caplan gives no answer to these questions. His theory is economically deep but psychologically shallow. Which leaves room for me, a psychologist, to add some depth. I will now try to tell you a plausible story about 1) why voting gives people a warm glow even though it’s a waste of time, and 2) why I felt a twinge of discomfort after writing the words “waste of time.”

The evolutionary psychology of democracy

Throughout our evolutionary history, our ancestors faced a variety of threats to their survival and reproduction—feuds, raids, tyrants, power struggles—that no individual could overcome on their own. As a result, early humans evolved to do what the Autobots do in the Transformers movies. They evolved to click into a new shape, to transform from a set of isolated individuals into… a GROUP.

A group is a thing that binds itself together with orthodoxy and conformity. It’s a thing with rituals that demarcate insiders from outsiders. It’s a thing that manufactures narratives that justify sacrifices to insiders and hostility to outsiders. It punishes traitors, freeriders, dissidents, and other poisonous elements, while rewarding heroes, martyrs, and true believers. It produces feelings of meaning and inspiration in its members.

But then what causes us to click into the shape of a group? A context where we are weak as individuals but strong as a collective. Maybe it’s an unruly alpha male who’s dominating us. Maybe it’s a vengeful outgroup who’s plotting our demise. Maybe it’s an enormous beast that can only be felled by a torrent of arrows. It is this type of situation that, across evolutionary time, selected for all the cognitive machinery of tribalism. It is this type of situation, marked by the futility of individual toil and the power of collective synchrony, that activates something deep inside us: group mode.

So what is democracy? It is a key that perfectly fits the lock of group mode. It is a system that brandishes a fearsome weapon before our eyes—the coercive power of jails and cops and militaries—and tells us we cannot control it, and cannot defend ourselves from it, unless we band together into huge, lumbering groups. It is a system that pries power away from the hands of individuals and tosses it to mobs, cliques, unions, religions, interest groups, ethnic groups, and grotesque agglomerations of all the above called “political parties.” It is a system defined by the crushing hopelessness of individual toil and the awesome power of collective synchrony.

Once we recognize this, the political world comes into focus. We can see why dropping a ballot on top of millions gives our ape brains a rush of dopamine, and why we commemorate the ritual with a sticker that says “I voted” (instead of “I have accurate political beliefs”). Voting in unison is like chanting or dancing in unison: it sends a signal that we’re part of a unified force or hivemind—something larger than ourselves. We don’t vote to change the world: we vote to be part of a group.

Of course, not every member of the electorate is in group mode. Some citizens feel alienated by both parties and remain in individual mode. By and large, these are the people who don’t vote. They don’t feel any tribal allegiances—they don’t trust any politician—so they disengage from politics. In some ways, they see reality more clearly than the rest of us. The political scientist Diana Mutz has shown that the people who are best at “hearing the other side” and understanding opposing viewpoints are the least likely to vote and engage in politics.

So why is it taboo to utter the words: “Voting is a waste of time” (aside from the fact that they are vile, untrue words that I wholeheartedly repudiate)? Because we’re afraid of what those words can do to us. We’re afraid that they will jolt us out of group mode and into individual mode. People who don’t vote, or who tempt us into nonvoting with the sinful logic of probability theory, are freeriders and traitors—poisonous elements that threaten us from within. People who do vote (you know, for our guys) are heroes and true believers—defenders of the common good.

Individuals, on the other hand, don’t get it. “What’s so heroic about adding a grain of sand to the Sahara desert?” “Why should I bother learning about public policy when I have essentially no chance of influencing it?” These are the questions that flow through the mind of the individual when cogitating in individual mode. Groups have a hard time answering these questions, so they make them taboo.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that democracy is not designed to empower the individual. It marginalizes and discourages the individual. Democracy is designed to empower groups. It is a government of groups, by groups, for groups.

And herein lies the problem: groups suck.

Why groups suck

“People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a ‘common purpose’. ‘Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they’re going to visit at 3am.”

- George Carlin

1) Groups are dumb

It’s worth distinguishing between groups and crowds.

Groups are cohesive and stable. They act as a single unit. They meld their minds together, thinking and judging the same way. They synchronize their behaviors, which might include marching, chanting, or voting.

Crowds are diverse and dynamic. They act as many competing units. They contain a multitude of goals, beliefs, and experiences. Their members are unsynchronized and march to the beat of different drums.

Science, when it’s working well, is a crowd. It’s a motley crew of disagreeable weirdos who compete to be right about stuff. The referee of the competition is the cold, neutral arbiter of reality. Over time, the weirdos collect more and more data, winnow out the ideas that clash with it, and accumulate the ideas that make sense of it, until we get moon landings and lasers and atomic bombs.

Crowds are smarter than any individual because they aggregate the unique bits of knowledge scattered among their constituents. Groups are dumber than any individual because they stamp out those unique bits of knowledge and enforce conformity. If you remember one thing from this post, remember this:

Crowds are wise; groups are dumb.

A lot of people mistakenly think democracy is awesome because they confuse groups with crowds. They think everyone getting their voice heard is good for the nation because everyone has unique perspectives and interests.

But that is not how democracies work. Democracies do not combine the wisdom and experiences of every individual the way a crowd does. Not even close. Instead, what democracies do is obliterate those unique perspectives and force everyone to pick sides between two dumb groups. Or, in the case of non-U.S. democracies, several dumb groups.

Of course, the difference between a group and a crowd is continuous. On the extreme groupy end of the continuum you have cults, fanatics, and terrorists. On the extreme crowdy end of the continuum you have science, markets, and the common law. The problem with democracy is that it pushes us toward the groupy end and makes us dumber.

2) Groups see the world in black-and-white

Plants need sunlight. Fires need kindling. So what do groups need? Coordination. They need to coordinate on: 1) who they are (their identity), 2) what they’re doing (their agenda), 3) why it’s worth doing (their narrative), and 4) how they’re going to do it (their strategy).

If there are two conflicting answers to these questions, the group splits in two. Five answers? Five groups. After all, a group just is a collection of individuals with a shared identity, agenda, narrative, and strategy. What else would a group be?

So when a group fails to coordinate, it dies. When a group effectively coordinates, it lives. When a group coordinates more effectively than its rivals, it tends to outcompete its rivals for power, status, and resources. This kind of intergroup competition was probably a major selection pressure on Homo sapiens, giving rise to all our tribalism and groupthink. Over evolutionary time, coordinating with a large number of humans became very rewarding to us—a source of good vibes and warm glows.

The evolutionary game theorist Moshe Hoffman tried to mathematically model these kinds of coordination games and discovered an important insight: it is much easier for agents to coordinate on a categorical variable (i.e., black vs. white) than a continuous variable (i.e., many shades of grey). This explains why interracial conflict transformed the smooth continuum of human melanin levels into “black people” and “white people,” and why the genetics of family ancestry had to be reduced to a “one-drop rule” in the early-20th-century United States.

As another example, consider the variable: “tallness.” How tall counts as “tall?” Am I tall? Are you tall? Are we talking about tallness relative to members of our sex, or within our age bracket? If our goal is to form a group of tall people, questions like these will dissolve the group like acid. Uncertainty is the opposite of coordination—it is a kind of group poison—and if there is anything like an antidote to this poison, it is rituals.

Yes, rituals—inaugurations, blood oaths, catechisms, voting—stuff like that. An initiation rite collapses the smooth continuum of tribal loyalty into “one of us vs. not one of us.” A coming-of-age ceremony collapses the smooth continuum of human development into “child vs. adult.” A wedding collapses the smooth continuum of romantic entanglement into “married vs. unmarried.” A campaign rally reduces the unfathomable complexity of public policy into “good vs. evil.”

Think of a traffic light. If there was an undulating color gradient at every intersection, slowly morphing from seafoam to chartreuse to salmon to vermilion, that would be a disaster for traffic safety. The streets would be littered with car wrecks. There’s a reason why traffic lights have three easily differentiable colors: it helps the drivers coordinate.

The same logic applies to groups. If we want to form a group of tall people, we’ll need rituals. We’ll need to gather around a peerless leader who declares the sacred cutoff between tall and short—say, six feet and up—transforming the water of “height” into the wine of “ingroup vs. outgroup.” Then once we all agree on the cutoff (and agree that others agree), we’ll need hats and armbands and fight songs about how great it is to be six feet and up—and, perhaps, a list of short people to visit at 3am.

Groups are blind to shades of grey because they have to be. It is the only way they can survive as a group. If groups saw reality itself—the sprawling, chaotic, multidimensional continua of the universe—the social equivalent of “the streets” would be littered with the social equivalent of “car wrecks.”

So groups live in a cuboid world of jagged edges, sharp boundaries, and ritual demarcations. Black vs. white. Good vs. evil. Utopia vs. dystopia. Woke vs. antiwoke. Feminist vs. misogynist. Democracy vs. Hitler. Elites vs. ordinary people. Socialism vs. capitalism. Oppressors vs. oppressed. Left vs. right. Loving America vs. Hating America.

Which reminds me…

3) Groups suck at public policy

One of my favorite videos from The Onion was titled: “Everything You Need to Know about Charter Schools.” The video begins with a close-up on a man’s face, blank and expressionless. After a long, awkward silence, the man says: “Charter schools. You don’t like them.” And the video ends.

The video is funny because it’s true. Groups are too dumb to have nuanced opinions, so they divide public policy into buckets.

• Bucket 1: We like this.

• Bucket 2: We don’t like this.

My guess is that most Democrats know basically nothing about charter schools, aside from the fact that they’re supposed to not like them.

The same thing goes for any other policy issue like taxation or immigration or criminal justice. The mind-boggling complexity of these issues has to be crunched down into yaying vs. booing rich people, yaying vs. booing immigrants, or yaying vs. booing the police.

Which reminds me: groups are too dumb to engage in actual arguments. So any mild alternative to their position is dropped into a bucket called: “crazy.” Thinking a border wall is poorly conceived = supporting open borders. Doubting whether affirmative action is a wise policy = being a white supremacist. Pointing out Trump’s blindingly obvious ethical deficiencies = having Trump Derangement Syndrome. Thinking evolutionary psychology is a useful perspective = wanting to roll back women’s suffrage. Acknowledging the history of racial and gender oppression and wondering if we’re perpetuating it = the woke mind virus.

Now, if groups mainly see the world through the prism of black-and-white, categorical distinctions, then that is a big problem for electorates. Public policy is incredibly uncertain, multidimensional, and rife with trade-offs. The mind of a group is about as well-suited to public policy as the mind of a toddler is to quantum physics.

To give you a sense of how badly groups suck at solving social problems, here’s a list of solutions groups can’t figure out, because they’re too stupid:

Pigouvian taxes

About a hundred years ago, an economist named Arthur Pigou came up with a brilliant idea: tax goods and services in proportion to their negative externalities (or costs inflicted on third parties to the transaction), while subsidizing goods and services in proportion to their positive externalities. So instead of banning marijuana, for example, we’d tax it in proportion to its associated healthcare costs, allowing potheads to enjoy their weed while fairly compensating society for their unhealthy choice.

If governments were run by wise crowds, they’d have implemented evidence-based Pigouvian taxes and subsidies on every good and service a century ago, creating an economic utopia. Unfortunately, they’re run by dumb groups, so instead of Pigouvian taxes, we get a bunch of crude bans, including bans on marijuana, psychedelics, sex work, kidney selling (which is costing us thousands of lives per year), and most forms of labor migration (which is costing the world about half of global GDP). A ban is basically a 10,000% tax on the thing we’re banning. So instead of Pigou’s scalpel, we get a caveman’s club.

Making trade-offs

Security trades off against liberty. Liberty trades off against equality. Equality trades off against meritocracy. Meritocracy (which can lead to oligarchy) trades off against democracy. Democracy (with its committees and bureaucracies) trades off against swift, timely decision-making. Autocracy (or concentrated power in the hands of a strongman) trades off against equality, liberty, and human rights. So yes, life is hard, trade-offs are everywhere, and nearly every benefit comes with a cost.

Unfortunately, groups are too dumb to see this. Because if a politician acknowledges each side of a policy trade-off—the upside and the downside—he will be outcompeted by a silver-tongued bullshitter who sweeps the downside under the rug and shouts the upside from the mountaintops. “We can save the economy trillions of dollars and solve climate change!” Remember: politics is about groups coordinating on what to do, and if what the group should do isn’t blindingly obvious to everyone, the group dies. Uncertainty, trade-offs, and cost-benefit analyses are group poison.

Keyhole solutions

Bryan Caplan, in his book on the science and ethics of immigration, contrasts a gory amputation with a minimally invasive surgery. The latter is a “keyhole solution” to the patient’s problem with minimal collateral damage, whereas the former is a blood-spattered tragedy symbolizing American immigration policy. Groups can easily wield bonesaws like: “Mass deportations now” or “Let’s build a wall.” But they’re too dumb to perform endoscopic procedures like: “Let’s grant work visas to anyone who wants them while making full citizenship conditional on 18 years of gainful employment, a spotless criminal record, and a passing score on an English literacy exam.”

Counterintuitive solutions

You know what’s counterintuitive? The idea that raising the minimum wage might actually be bad for poor people by making it harder for them to get a job or afford things (1, 2, 3). Or the idea that preventing greedy corporations from charging us “too much” might actually be bad for everyone—a self-own that leads to disastrous shortages and disincentivizes production of the thing we need. Or the idea that most of our problems aren’t caused by left-wing or right-wing bogeymen but by overregulation of the housing market.

Because these ideas are counterintuitive and lack villains to boo, it’s hard for groups to coordinate on them. After all, if it’s counterintuitive to me, then it will be counterintuitive to you, which means I cannot count on you to rally behind it, and you cannot count on me to rally behind it. Like a new dating app, a counterintuitive political idea will struggle to get off the ground, because people will only get on board if they can be assured that others will get on board.

Icky-sounding solutions

Now what if the optimal policy sounds icky? What if it requires us to trade off the lives of the elderly against the wellbeing of the rest of society, do nothing in response to a terrorist attack, or let poor people sell their kidney? Well, then groups will struggle to coordinate on it. Because if it sounds icky to me, then it will probably sound icky to you. Which means I cannot count on you to rally behind it, and you cannot count on me to rally behind it.

Subtractive solutions

A lot of solutions to problems involve subtracting things—e.g., removing regulatory barriers to human challenge trials, shutting down counterproductive initiatives, balancing lopsided budgets, or simplifying our 10,000-page tomb of legal hieroglyphics so we don’t need a dedicated class of Egyptologists to decipher it. Unfortunately, there are five reasons why subtractive solutions are rarely found by democracies:

1. Subtractive solutions are counterintuitive which makes them group poison.

2. Subtractive solutions often sound icky to the groups being subtracted, or to their political allies, which makes them group poison.

3. Figuring out which Jenga blocks can be safely removed from the tower of legalistic minutiae is too difficult of a task for our dumb groups.

4. Some groups, like TurboTax, profit from the legalistic minutiae and lobby Congress to maintain it.

5. Individuals rarely notice (or know who to blame) when prices go up a little, taxes go up a little, or bureaucracies grow a little, but interest groups always notice—and get very pissed off—when they lose power.

4) Groups are incoherent

Let’s say you’re an individual who’s trying to gain power in a democracy. You look around for anyone who might be like you, with shared interests and common enemies, and you try to form a group with them. After spending a lot of time and energy, you pull it off! You formed a group.

Unfortunately, you’re still powerless. Because to gain power in a democracy, it is not enough to form a group; you must somehow graft yourself onto a supergroup—a huge, hideous, multi-headed group of groups known as a “political party.” As they say, “politics makes strange bedfellows,” and there are no shortage of examples, from the bizarre alliance between Christian fundamentalists and libertarians to the cozy relationship between woke college students and Islamic theocrats. It would be hard to spin a coherent narrative that justifies these strange bedfellows, but that doesn’t stop us from hilariously trying.

Spinning propaganda for a multi-headed supergroup is hard, because what counts as good propaganda for one head will often be bad propaganda for a different head. To advance the interests of wealthy businesspeople, for example, I might rail against “big government” and talk about the virtues of free markets. But then to advance the interests of Christian fundamentalists, well… I’m going to look like a hypocrite, aren’t I? This sort of hypocrisy is all over the place in politics. Here are some examples of it on the political right:

1. The government should not interfere with our personal liberty to own a gun (but it should interfere with our personal liberty to consume pornography).

2. People should be allowed to express their political opinions freely in the workplace (but athletes should not be allowed to kneel during the national anthem).

3. People who are poor in America have no one to blame but themselves (unless they are working class white people, in which case they should blame immigration, international trade, and reverse discrimination).

4. We ought to be more suspicious of foreigners (but we should be more trusting of Vladimir Putin).

5. We must have more respect for “authority” figures (except climate scientists, the IRS, the EPA, the CDC, public universities, the national news media, and government regulators).

And here are some examples of it on the political left:

1. It is unfair for corporate CEOs to make millions of dollars a year (but it is fair for Hollywood movie stars to make millions of dollars a year).

2. We should not endorse negative stereotypes about a group of people based on their place of birth (but people from the south are racist).

3. A woman should have the right to do what she wants with her own body (unless she wants to sell her kidney, purchase private healthcare, or drink a large sugary soda).

4. We must stand in solidarity with labor unions (but not police unions).

5. We must show empathy and respect to all groups (unless they are uneducated, southern, working class, pro-life, devout Christians, businesspeople, white people, men, members of the military, or Republicans).

5) Groups are mean

The purpose of a group is to increase the power, status, and resources of the humans inside it relative to the humans outside it. How do we know this is true? Because over evolutionary time, the groups that reliably fulfilled this purpose became our ancestors.

This means our tribal psychology should possess a very important design feature. It should be very sensitive to the relative difference in payoffs between the ingroup and the outgroup—not the benefits to humanity as a whole.

This implies that political discourse will have a rather pungent, zero-sum flavor to it. It will revolve around issues where one group wins or another group loses. Politics as we know it will be defined by culture wars, class wars, regular wars, wars on Christmas, wars on women, wars on cops, wokism, anti-wokism, anti-anti-wokism, populism, nativism, anti-capitalism, Israel/Palestine, trans stuff, and the parties calling each other Hitler. (Pauses. Takes a look at political discourse.) Yep, this checks out.

Of course, the most important winner or loser in politics is the party. We care deeply about our party winning, but not so much about the good of the nation or the planet. There’s a poll result I ran a while ago that makes the point rather starkly. I asked partisans whether they would switch parties if doing so would be better for the country.

And here are the results for Democrats:

I’m just about the most cynical person in the world, and even I was surprised by these results. I was expecting lots of people to give a socially desirable response—to say they would switch parties for the good of the nation even if, deep down, they would never do such a thing. Once we account for social desirability bias, and remove the more disaffected people who are partisan in name only, the percentage of partisans who put party over country might be even higher.

6) Groups are sanctimonious

With all the bitter competition between groups, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that there is also a lot of competition within groups. And the main way human primates compete for status within a group is by virtue signaling—by advertising their devotion to the group’s sacred values.

Virtue signaling comes in a variety of flavors, but the important thing to remember is that it is not effective altruism. To do the most good, you want to minimize the costs you incur and maximize the benefits you provide—a kind of altruistic efficiency. But to signal virtue to your tribe, you want to do something closer to the opposite.

For example, if I walk five hundred miles, and then walk five hundred more, just to be the man who walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door, then I must really love you. I’m incurring a big cost (walking 1000 miles + falling over) to get a very small benefit (being at your door). The extreme cost/benefit ratio implies an extreme amount of devotion, which is what makes it such a great song lyric.

But suppose I live in the house next to you. If I walk five steps, and then walk five more, just to be the man who rings your doorbell, that doesn’t really signal much devotion to you. I might just be your annoying neighbor who wants to complain about your dog peeing on my lawn. But if I waited all day on your doorstep for you to come home, from morning to evening, calling you over and over and leaving hundreds of voicemails, then I must have really wanted to complain to you. What a psycho. Vary the cost/benefit ratio toward a big numerator and a small denominator, and you get a stronger signal that the person is a psycho who’s monomaniacally focused on the denominator. Most love songs are effectively signaling “I’m a psycho for you,” and a lot of political activism is effectively signaling “I’m a psycho for this cause.”

Which means that effective altruism and effective virtue signaling are, in some sense, opposites. The former is deliberately efficient; the latter is deliberately inefficient. The former is designed to help the beneficiary, the latter is designed to showcase the colorful plumage of the signaler, advertising how much of a psycho they are for social justice or unborn fetuses or whatever. The inefficiency—the wastefulness of the signal—is a feature, not a bug.

For example, if someone goes on a hunger strike, or immolates themselves in the town square, or reads the entirety of Capital in the 21st century, that really impresses us. “Whoa, look at how serious and political they are!” We’re not so interested in how much the self-immolation or the bloated book actually made the world better. That’s not the part we’re interested in. Besides, it’s too hard to figure that out anyways. We’re more interested in judging the person than we are in judging the consequences of their actions on the world.

So to impress our judgy peers, we submit to a gauntlet of trials and tribulations—ordeals of the mind, body, and spirit. We protest Israeli colonialism on a college campus by spraying graffiti on the gymnasium because that will surely make a difference in the Middle East. We show our devotion to the sacred environment by badgering our local grocery store into abandoning plastic bags and consequently increasing their carbon footprint. We post long, passionate political rants on the internet despite having a near-zero chance of convincing anyone who doesn’t already agree with us. And we take time out of our busy days to vote in national elections—“I VOTED” (look at me)—despite having a near-zero chance of affecting the outcome.

All of these “altruistic” acts reflect a very inefficient cost/benefit ratio: the benefits to recipients are tiny (or negative) compared to the costs. This suggests that the primary function of these and other “altruistic” acts is not to effectively help others, but to effectively signal our virtue.

So what happens when political groups care more about virtue signaling than actually helping people? Well, you get a lot of dumb, sanctimonious policies that don’t work and—all too often—make matters worse. Which reminds me…

7) Groups often make matters worse

There’s an important distinction we need to make. On the one hand, we have all the incoherent, sanctimonious things our supergroups want. On the other hand, we have all the things we, as wonderful individuals, want. People often confuse these two things, in the same way they confuse groups with crowds.

They shouldn’t. When groups compete with each other to control our cops and prisons, it results in a lot of bad outcomes that most individuals would not have preferred. For example:

• Our supergroups might want to wage a “war on drugs” (rather than implement Pigouvian taxes that fund rehab centers), despite us as individuals not wanting the disastrous side effects like black markets, criminal underworlds, gang violence, mass incarceration, and abject cruelty to the worst-off people in society.

• Our supergroups might want to regulate nuclear power to death, despite us as individuals not wanting to effectively ban one of the safest, cleanest, most reliable sources of energy available to us—and one of our best hopes of fighting climate change.

• Our supergroups might want to impose price controls on greedy corporations to prevent them from charging us “too much,” despite us as individuals not wanting to experience the product shortages and perverse economic incentives that result from these dumb policies.

• Our supergroups might want to regressively redistribute wealth from young people to old people, even though old people are about ten times wealthier than young people, and even though giving tax dollars to old people takes up nearly half of the federal budget, about three trillion dollars a year.

• Our supergroups might want to make housing as scarce as possible (NIMBYism), despite us as individuals not wanting higher housing costs, longer commutes, declining fertility rates, rising pollution, rampant homelessness, a return of the landed gentry, and pretty much every bad thing you can think of.

Here’s how it works. People form groups to grab goodies from the government. If the group is a corporation, it gets subsidies and favorable regulations that enrich the corporation while harming its competitors. If the group is the “white working class,” it gets laws passed that prevent immigrants from cutting in on their ever-dwindling supply of low-skilled jobs. If the group is a bunch of farmers, it gets laws passed that give taxpayer money to farmers. If the group is an ethnic group, it gets laws passed that allow people to discriminate in favor of that ethnic group. If the group is a bunch of wealthy homeowners, it gets laws passed that prevent real estate developers from blocking their pretty views or changing the “character” of their neighborhoods. If the group is college-educated elites, it gets laws passed that regressively redistribute tax dollars to college-educated elites while creating perverse financial incentives for everyone else—you know, “student loan forgiveness.”

What happens when all these interest groups grab goodies from the government? Well, the interest groups benefit themselves enormously while harming everyone else imperceptibly—what economists call “concentrated benefits, dispersed costs.” Some of these concentrated benefits go to our political allies—the interest groups turduckened inside of our supergroups—which is why our supergroups love them. But we, as individuals, do not love them, because we don’t want to drown in the tsunami of dispersed costs.

Economists have a term for this kind of goodie grabbing—“rent-seeking”—because it is purely extractive and not productive. When rent-seeking proliferates in a society, it replaces productive activity, people get less interested in growing the pie than fighting over its slices, the pie shrinks, the fighting intensifies, and the society goes to shit.

This is not an accident. Rent-seeking is a predictable outcome of democracy’s incentive structure. If you give power to groups, they will use it to do what groups do—i.e., enrich, empower, protect, and privilege themselves at the expense of, or in disregard for, everyone else. And when groups compete with each other to do that, it’s easy to predict the results: intense intergroup competition over the coercive machinery of government, partisan gridlock, backdoor dealmaking (to overcome the gridlock), convoluted legislation, and the use of special interests as pawns in the political game. (Pauses. Takes a look at modern politics). Yep, this checks out.

Of groups, by groups, for groups

By now I hope you will agree that groups suck pretty hard.2 But in many ways, that’s beside the point, because not all groups are equally represented—or represented at all—in the political process.

First, many people can’t vote. Teenagers, felons, foreigners, and future generations cannot vote for less school, less jail, less ICE, or less deficit spending.

Second, about half of the eligible voters in the U.S. don’t vote. Probably because they’re still in individual mode and correctly think voting is a waste of time (sorry). So a majority of voters in the U.S. will not be a majority of the citizenry. It will be a minority of the citizenry.

Third, the minority of the citizenry that gets to enforce its will on the country with guns and prisons will only get to advance a small fraction of its interests. For example, both Republicans and Democrats contain a lot of ugly people, but we don’t have any anti-discrimination laws against ugly people. Why not? Because ugly people are hard to coordinate.

How ugly counts as “ugly?” Am I ugly? Are you ugly? Of course not—you’re beautiful and anyone who doesn’t see that is crazy. The problem is, people love to bullshit us with lines like this, even if we’re total uggos. So it’s really hard for someone to know if they’re hot or not, let alone how hot or not they are, let alone whether their level of not-hotness qualifies them to be a part of the “Ugly People Alliance (UPA),” let alone whether other people will agree that their level of not-hotness is… Look, coordination is hard, and if coordination is the only path to power in a democracy, then uggos are fucked.

The same is true of any other large, scattered, oblivious, heterogenous, unflattering, hard-to-categorize smattering of individuals. They’re not groups, and it’s hard for them to become groups. Dumb people, awkward people, lonely people—these poor souls will never make it through the thicket of group-poisoning questions on the path to power. They might as well be disenfranchised. And since coordination requires time, money, cultural influence, and social capital—the very things that disadvantaged individuals lack—the minority of people who dominate us with guns and prisons will tend to be a rather privileged bunch.

There’s tons of political science research showing that policies cater more to the preferences of elite, upper-class citizens—and small, wealthy interest groups—than to the preferences of everyone else. And it’s easy to see why: the well-to-do and well-connected are better able to mobilize, organize, hold fundraisers, disseminate propaganda, and lobby Congress. They’re better able to pump the lifeblood of time and money and status into their groups.

It gets worse. Since groups are mean and mainly care about zero-sum competition, the dominant political minority will often enact policies that hurt everyone, including itself. How? Well, groups will harm themselves whenever doing so enables them to harm their competitors even more. Partisanship is driven more by hatred of the enemy than love for one’s allies, so this kind of spitefulness is common in politics. It might even explain a lot of Trumpian populism. When society is ruled by mean, spiteful tribes, everyone—including the politically dominant minority—is made worse off.

Now reflect on the fact that our political parties burn tons of time and money competing with each other in a massive bonfire of outrage and meta-outrage, only to arrive at the same competitive advantage they started at. With every ad and counter-ad, protest and counter-protest, bullshit argument and counter-argument, the parties run as fast as they can to stay in the same place.

Imagine if we decided to channel all the time, money, and energy we currently spend on partisan warfare into learning science or enjoying nature or spending time with our families or engaging in effective altruism. The relative power of our political parties would stay the same, and the world would be a thousand times better. But of course, our supergroups cannot make this amazing deal, because they’re too dumb to understand it—and too mean to accept it.

The bitter truth

Monarchy is rule by monarchs. Oligarchy is rule by oligarchs. Democracy might seem like it’s rule by the “demos”—by the people—but it’s not. Or at least, not by individual people. Democracy is, instead, rule by tribes. Yes, it’s time to switch from “groups” to the more pejorative “tribes.” The most cohesive, well-organized, well-funded tribes, bound into supertribes called “parties,” are the ones who rule. It’s a tribeocracy. And given the well-documented ethical and intellectual downsides of tribalism, that is a very bad thing. It’s hard to think of a worse way to run a society than to systematically take power away from wonderful individuals and wise crowds so we can give it to mean, dumb, incoherent, sanctimonious tribes.

But there is a worse way to run a society, called autocracy, which leaves us with an important question: Why are democracies nicer places to live than autocracies? The main reason is that democracies are multitribal while autocracies are unitribal.

In a unitribal order, the ruling tribe can do whatever it wants, including killing or oppressing other tribes. In a multitribal order, attempts to kill or oppress other tribes will provoke a very loud “no thank you” from those tribes. Democratically enacted oppression tends to be self-eliminating, at least over the long-run, because it tends to mobilize the people being oppressed, transforming them into attractive voting blocs for politicians to recruit. Blatant, in-your-face oppression toward a sizable, easy-to-coordinate group of people is harder to pull off in a multitribal order than in a unitribal order.

Harder to pull off? Yes. Impossible to pull off? No. The nicest thing I can say about democracy is that it is pretty good at avoiding Hitler, except when it literally elects Hitler.

Another nice thing I can say about democracy is that it is better at holding politicians accountable than autocracy. If there’s one ruling tribe, complaining about it will get you executed or sent to the gulags. If there are many competing tribes, complaining about one of them will get you cancelled at worst. And since tribes subsist on common knowledge of their superior virtue, they will often expel the most flagrantly corrupt or incompetent leaders to save face. Though as we are seeing right now in America, that is far from a guarantee.

Another reason why democracies are nicer places to live than autocracies is that—with demographic shuffling, partisan gridlock, and ever-shifting alliance structures—no supertribe can stay in power long enough to do too much damage. The tribes evolve and realign, the politicians struggle to string together winning coalitions, and legislation devolves into a patchwork of unwieldy compromises and forgotten priorities—an arc that bends toward moral incoherence. Over time, the “concentrated benefits” get taken for granted, the “dispersed costs” pile up to the sky, and no one ever thinks to subtract anything. The final nice thing I’ll say about democracy is that it is more prone to slow decay than sudden collapse.

In conclusion, by integrating the collective wisdom of unique individuals—much like the scientific method, the marketplace, and the common law—democratic governance delivers precise, keyhole-fitting, cost-effective solutions to social and economic problems that can easily be undone or subtracted when mistakes are inevitably made. It works against our biases, enriches our understanding of reality, avoids the pitfalls of cronyism and rent-seeking and regulatory capture, gives every voter an invaluable one-in-sixty-million chance to shape the laws forced upon them by gun-wielding police officers, unites the great power of those police officers with great accountability, and gives us all powerful incentives to think carefully and rationally about the small number of problems that still remain in our society, which ought to fill us with hope for the future. We’ve done it, guys. We’ve discovered the ideal political system. How could we possibly do better than this?

Coda: how we can possibly do better than this

“David,” you say, “I get that you’re being sarcastic. But what’s the alternative? Is there an example of an incentive structure that doesn’t suck?”

Yes, there are many. I alluded to one of them just now: the old common law system that establishes legal precedents out of successful conflict resolutions, which survives to this day in the form of tort law or civil liability. I also mentioned a couple of others in the post, namely the scientific method and effective altruism (which, at its best, is just the scientific method applied to philanthropy). There’s also the marketplace, in which people compete to offer desirable goods and services at affordable prices. And then there are the incentives surrounding culture, norms, beliefs, and civil society. So if you’re looking for a takeaway from this post, it’s that we should give less power to democracy and give more power to these other things. As an individual, the takeaway might be: it’s okay to focus on these other things and ignore politics.

But maybe that’s too defeatist. In that case, you might be interested in how we can make democracy less stupid and bad. If you agree that mass elections are the problem—because they marginalize wonderful individuals while empowering dumb groups—then why not implement a form of democracy without elections? Why not pick some individuals at random from the population and appoint them as our legislators? Seriously. We can periodically call on people to do their legislative duty, have them vetted by rival advocates, present them with the case for and against a policy, and ask them to reach a consensus, much like the jurors we entrust with our lives. If trial-by-jury is good enough to sentence human beings to death, then why isn’t it good enough for public policy? This sort of thing is variously referred to as lottocracy, sortition, or citizens’ assemblies, and I think it’s a hugely underrated idea.

So here’s something to leave you with. Take power away from dumb groups. Give it to wonderful individuals. Better yet, wise crowds of them.

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 me to 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 pretend to be unpretentious.

• 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.

Note (9/22/26): I recently revised this essay. See here for the more up-to-date version.

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 ruminate about your last conversation, wondering what you meant or worrying if it offended you. 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 can bring up a decade-old conversation 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 averageness, like the average 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.