Bullshit Links - February 2024

Photo by Quaritsch Photography on Unsplash

• Not another list of links! Don’t worry, if you’d rather read an essay, I recently wrote a guest post for one of my favorite substacks, Optimally Irrational. The post is about the evolutionary psychology of self-deception—or, as I call it, self-bullshitting. Check it out here.

• And if you’d rather hear me talk, I recently appeared on The Dissenter with Ricardo Lopes, a super-brainy podcast that does in-depth interviews with academics about their research (highly recommended, if you’re into that sort of thing). We spent most of the time getting into the nuts and bolts of my recent academic paper on political belief systems (i.e., why ideologies are bullshit). Then we spent a bit of time talking about whether the “meaning of life” is bullshit (yes and no), whether morality is nice (no), my preprint on social paradoxes, and self-bullshitting. Podcast here, youtube here.

• A new cross-cultural study shows that a significant chunk of people, around the world, see having too much money as… icky. They think of extreme wealth as unnatural, impure, and profane. In other words, having lots of money can raise your status, making you seem sexier, but it can also lower your status, making you seem gross. Hm… if only there were some theory that could explain this… Some theory about how status symbols become yucky and uncool when people see through them. If only...

• The philosopher Dan Williams lists his favorite academic papers of the year, and—I’m chuffed—my paper on political belief systems made the cut. He includes a great summary of the paper, as well as other great papers too—check it out.

• If you still aren’t convinced that happiness is bullshit and suffering isn’t bad, I wrote a long thread on Twitter/X making some additional arguments. Let the force of logic overpower you here. :)

• And if you still aren’t convinced, you might check out this new meta analysis of over 400 studies, which finds 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).” For those of you who don’t know what “d = -1.71” means, it translates to: “an absolutely massive effect size you almost never see anywhere in social science.” What could explain this? Well, it’s beautifully explained by the theory that happy emotional states are triggered by positive prediction errors, and that we get better at predicting valued outcomes with repeated practice and exposure. But it is baffling under the view that we’re pursuing happiness. Why would we get worse at pursuing the thing we want, as we get more and more practice at it? As I wrote in Happiness Is Bullshit, “We’re not pursuing happiness so much as chasing it away.”

  • Note: the meta analysis found different results when people were asked how well their life was going, but such “life satisfaction” measures are vague and weird. They’re basically ways of asking people if they’re getting what they want in life, and it’s totally circular to say that we want what we want in life. On the other hand, it’s not circular to say that we want “happiness” as an emotional state; it’s just wrong.

• Relatedly, a new study shows that when you ask people how well their life is going, a significant chunk of them seem to interpret the question as: “How high-status are you?”

• The philosopher Michael Huemer makes a compelling argument against political activism, very much in line with Darwinian cynicism:

  Many people appear to care: they talk about what’s good for society, they go to protests, they get upset about presumably bad policies. There are at least two motives that could explain political activism:

  1. A desire to help society.

  2. A desire to portray oneself (to oneself or to others) as helping society.

  These lead to almost identical behaviors. But here is one difference: If you want to help society, then you need true beliefs about how to help it. If you just want to portray yourself as helping about society, you don’t need true beliefs; you just need strong beliefs about what’s good for society.

  So people with motive (2) could be expected to try to maintain strong beliefs, whether true or not; people with motive (1) would scrupulously try to root out errors in their beliefs.

  Which description better matches most actual political activists? I think it’s the former. So one reason why we’re bad at solving social problems is that we aren’t actually trying to solve them.

You can read the rest of the post, which is great, here.

• As a diehard enthusiast of Darwinian approaches to human behavior, I’ve always been puzzled by religious celibacy. People abstaining from reproduction for their entire lives? How is that possible? Thankfully, my fellow evolutionary scientists came to the rescue and solved the puzzle. Celibacy arises when: 1) there’s fierce competition between siblings for parental resources (monks are more likely when wealth is passed down through sons; nuns are more likely when wealth is passed down through daughters), and 2) the fitness benefits accruing to the celibate’s siblings are large enough to offset the costs to the celibate. For evidence of 1) see this cool paper, and for evidence of 2) see this cool paper. Sorry I ever doubted you, Darwin.

• More evidence that morality is not nice: “A growing body of research suggests that violent extremists actually believe their harmful actions are morally righteous… They believe their violent means serve some virtuous end. What moral ends…? The short answer is that the moral priorities driving terrorists appear to be the same moral values that drive everyone else.” Read the rest here.

• Relatedly, a new paper shows that censorship of science is motivated by—you guessed it—morality. Censors are trying to help us. How nice of them.

• I feel like every time I do one of these list of links I bring up a new study showing authenticity is bullshit. Well, here’s another study showing authenticity is bullshit: when we think of ourselves highly—but not accurately—we feel more authentic. And here’s another one showing the same thing, and another one showing that when we feel most authentic, others don’t necessarily see us that way. And finally, here’s an older one showing that “self-actualization” (which is I guess a kind of authenticity?) is also bullshit and basically just status. So the feeling of authenticity is the feeling that you’re awesome, even if you’re not. Still waiting for the authenticity status game to collapse. Seems like it’ll happen any day now.