Overcoming Bias

Humans suffer two big but under-discussed biases, which together make us overly favor people we see as prestigious and sincere. First, humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution, wherein we copy each others’ behaviors, and this wouldn’t work if we copied from random others. So it couldn’t get going without our first big clue on who to copy: prestige. Which has become so entrenched that we greatly over-emphasize prestige now even when better alternatives are now available.

Second, selection to win in forager talky collectives induced key humans errors: to think they are great at reading others’ motives, to think that motives matter more than they do in complex modern worlds, and to feel overconfident in knowing which are in fact the better motives. These induce us today to like idiot story plots, to be overly paternalist, to overly trust salespeople and prestigious professionals.

This is my best explanation of why we today don’t use more betting market estimates and incentive contracts to buy medicine, lawyers, teachers, coaches, therapists, and other professional services, especially prestigious ones. We are too easily persuaded that such folks are sincere and thus can just be trusted, especially when prestigious. Add in a strong inclination to see bettors or folks with incentive pay as greedy and insincere, but to not apply such skepticism to salary-paid professionals.

Turns out, this is actually a much bigger problem that I’d realized. Our civilization will likely fall due to cultural drift, to be replaced by a new civ that rejects much of what we hold dear about ours. This fall can be blamed on our overly trusting prestigious and sincere cultural activists, who tell us how to change key values, norms, and status markers. And on our being overly trusting of key values that tell us to block capitalism from taking over more areas of life, and making them more adaptive.

If we had been distrusting enough re our values, and re our judgments of sincerity and prestige, and thus willing to buy professional services via bets and incentives, we might now be ready to demand strong concrete evidence of adaptiveness before changing key values. For example, we might be willing to move to a new firm, or neighborhood, which seemed unusually adaptive, and adopt its local values. But we are not so ready, and do not so demand; so our civilization will fall.

Humanity will not reach the stars until we become more hard-headed and adaption-favoring in our values. I’ve previously said that underneath it all our values are actually about adaption, I’ve predicted that our distant descendants would directly and abstractly value adaption (modulo self-deception), and I now make this prediction: our descendants who overcome cultural drift will in effect value adaption far more. Plausibly directly and abstractly so, though perhaps a bit indirectly.

Note that I do not say adaption must be our only value. I instead say you can’t make any value last long unless it is part of a pretty adaptive package. So you must ensure that your descendants are pretty adaptive, if they are to preserve stuff you value. It is like being told your city is being invaded, and you have one hour to pack one suitcase. Yes it matters what you pack. But it matters even more than you pack and leave soon.

I liked Richard Hanania’s two prior books, but less like his new third one, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. (“Kakistocracy” means rule by the worst, least qualified, or most unprincipled.)

I accept Hanania’s core claim, which is that, all else equal, political factions whose supporters are less elite tend to govern less well. Robustly, elites tend to be smarter, better informed, better organized, and to more follow local norms and laws. Yes, there are exceptions, and Hanania tries hard to list many of them. Even so, beware populists.

All of which I would have easily accepted based on a few pages of argument and data. Not that I would have then agreed with all his political stances. We can generate many other plausible “all else equal” political presumptions, like prefer smarter more honest more experienced candidates, and prefer bigger parties, those of your associates, and those with clearer track records. We can also identify many particular cases where elites seem to induce worse outcomes.

So what then is the point of a whole book on this one claim? Maybe Hanania wants to recruit readers to share his particular political stance. Except he doesn’t offer a party, a wing of a party, or even particular candidates, for them to support. So I guess a more plausible theory is that he wants to justify his stance, which he sees as unusual and thus vulnerable to criticism:

Right-­wing concerns about issues like DEI and the handling of Covid were completely justified. Yet I could not ignore that the Trump movement over time came to be dominated by epistemological nihilism, open bigotry, authoritarianism, and an embrace of conspiracy theories. Some of my values stayed the same, while others changed. I realized that being obsessed with race and gender issues is the other side of the coin of wokeness, and leads to a zero-­sum view of the world and policy ideas that make society as a whole worse off. I came to see my embrace of white identitarianism in my early years as a kind of mental derangement, yet it was one that had largely taken over the American right.

In which case, fine, I’ll count him has having justified his unusual political stance to the world, at least as much as most such stances are ever justified. But as much as I like Hanania, and found his other books insightful, I am just not that interested in which particular political candidates and parties I should have supported in each particular time and place. I guess I’m not that political.

More interesting to me is the key question of his Chapter 3:

Why does populism seem to have been gaining a foothold in one country after another over the past two decades?

Hanania largely rejects as explanations objective elite failure and increasing salience of immigration. He’s more sympathetic to tech change stories. He mentions Gurri’s theory that new tech let people see more elite details, which looked worse than they had expected. But he prefers the idea that tech let people explore and develop ideas that elites had blocked.

Hanania is most sympathetic to:

Revolutions and transformative political movements tend to occur in waves, driven by the contagious power of ideas and the examples of prior or contemporary upheavals.

But this just predicts correlated changes, not a recent trend toward populism per se. Re predicting that trend, I still put substantial weight on a toward-forager trend due to cultural drift.

Humanity has seen four great eras so far: animal, forager, farmer, and industry. And each era had two key levels of evolutionary competition: individual and group. This makes for eight great contests that have shaped our world.

During the ~500Myr year era of animals, max brains doubled roughly in ~40Myr, which was also roughly the typical cycleperiod of biodiversity and mass extinctions. Most animals lived in families of ~6, and had two key contests: competition between organisms specified by DNA, and competition between species of organisms, re DNA-specified features of organisms that couldn’t vary easily within species. Turns out, between species competition actually mattered more than within species.

~1Myr ago, DNA evolved humanity’s superpower of cultural evolution, which has since allowed us to evolve far faster than other animals. Humans then doubled in ~250Kyr, in the context of ~100Kyr ice age cycles. Slowly DNA was tamed by culture, to let most behavior be controlled by habits we copied from each other. As this wouldn’t worked if we copied at random, we also evolved status markers to show who to copy, the first and most important of which was prestige.

Individuals have more cultural than DNA parents, which strengthened group selection of human bands of ~30 individuals. With weapons and language, this let such bands empower talky collectives to limit dominators and enforce norms. This created strong individual prestige contests which induce the evolution of social intelligence to impress and favorably influence this collective. Evolutionary contests between group cultures evolved healthy norms, group markers, and status markers.

When humans became dense enough ~10Kya to no longer need to move often to collect food, they stayed at “farms”, could collect a lot more physical stuff, formed more local inequality, and were close enough to neighors to engage in both trade and war with them. Thus arose new individual market contests to trade well to collect the new status marker of wealth, and the new empire contests between groups to win wars, aided by groups awarding prestige to war heroes. Over this era war started strong and got weaker, while markets started weak and got stronger.

Farmers doubled in ~1Kyr, and peasant-village-scale farmer groups of ~1000 encouraged religion and much stronger conformity. But increasing density and ease of travel, including initially small and rare cities, led to a slowly increasing scale of trade, which led to stronger divisions of labor at larger scales, which cut conformity. So during this era morality slowly moved away from strongly-felt enforcement of similar behavior among close kin, toward less passionate more abstract rules of fair treatment of mostly non-kin. Trade and war slowly acquired stronger moral salience.

Empires rose and fell with a ~300yr cycle time. War wins allowed larger regions of trade which fed war efforts, often creating a virtuous cycle for a while. But such cycles consistently ended in empire falls, apparently often driven by internal decay of key norms and status markers. So it seems that group selection of cultural norms and status markers was often not a healthy evolutionary process within big farmer empires.

A few centuries ago humanity leaned to better manage larger orgs, including networks and hierarchies. This added org rank prestige to individual competition, and competing orgs enabled dramatic increases in the capacity of both empires and markets. Competition between orgs mattered more than competition within them.

This allowed the “industrial revolution” of the world economy doubling in ~20yr, in the context of ~6yr business cycles. Sci/tech networks aided faster evolution of tech and commerce practices, which big capitalist orgs encouraged and applied. Big civil service orgs supporting empires increased state capacity for war, regulation, and redistribution. Each org had its own internal culture, which decayed during that org’s duration, but org cultures improved over time due to competition between orgs.

Bigger higher-capacity states oversaw the merging of peasant cultures into national cultures, of population ~1M, and then increasing world travel, talk, and trade has induced the merging of elite national cultures into a global monoculture. Capitalism-induced increasing wealth, health, and peace has greatly cut group selection pressures on remaining culture(s), and it is much harder for culture to adapt to that new ~20yr doubling time.

Initially during the industry era both nations and capitalism increased in influence. But then ~100yr ago world monoculture switched from trying to preserve culture to “modernist” celebration of cultural activists who change it. Culture then became stronger, suppressing both nationalist and capitalist competition via norms limiting their scopes, and via increasing skepticism of them. Culture has been plausibly drifting maladaptive toward lazy/myopic/selfish, reverting to forager styles, and suffering random walks in other ways.

Thus, as in prior empire falls, the world now seems to have an unhealthy environment for the evolution of cultures as groups, plausibly causing our fertility fall and other maladaptive trends, which will likely lead to our civilization falling, to be replaced by others with quite different norms, values, and status markers, and delaying for several centuries Earth’s rise to become grabby aliens. Even if we achieve AI that can replace humans broadly across jobs, such AI would still likely suffer this key cultural problem.

Yes, I’ve talked about cultural drift several times before. But the above analysis seems to help to better frame it. The key problem is that the most powerful evolutionary process yet discovered, capitalism using big orgs, is causing evolutionary progress in its domains much faster than what simple cultural evolution of norms and status markers can adapt to. And while the usual solution to coupled evolutionary systems of mismatched powers is to let the weak system be driven by the strong, humans now accept a trump status for culture, in thinking that moral systems must always win all overt conflicts with other systems.

One hacked solution is for a big group to adopt a measurable sacred goal that they see as consistent with their morals, but which also happens to be inconsistent with civilization collapse, like the date a million people live in space. And then adopt a competent governance system, such as futarchy, to actually achieve that. But if this approach doesn’t work, it seems our descendants won’t get to the stars until they find a way to give far less deference to their prior systems for managing morality.

Note that if there is a fifth era with parameters that fit the pattern of the last four eras, it could start anytime in the next century or so, it would double in roughly a month, suffer a cycle with a similar period, and have population sizes of ~1T.