From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 12 2003 - 02:54:45 MDT
On 7/11/2003, Wei Dai wrote:
> > ... Evolution constructs
> > phenotypes to believe that they are acting for the good of the tribe,
> > because that is what wins public support.
>
>This all sounds very reasonable, but there is still a big piece of the
>puzzle missing: why does believing that one is acting for the good of
>the tribe win public support? Why doesn't evolution make the public
>realize that the person is self-deceived (or "evolutionarily deceived")
>when he says that the public good is served by him taking absolute
>power?
>
>We seem to still lack a theory of self-deception that explains why it is
>an evolutionarily stable strategy. Without this I'm starting to have
>doubts on the whole concept. Perhaps the dictator erroneously believing
>that taking absolute power is good for the public is simply a case of
>maladaptation, not self-deception, and in ancestral environments it was
>actually good for the tribe?
We lack a full formal account, but I think we do have informal elements
of an account. My guess is that on average the more good you actually
do for the tribe, the easier it is to have a high estimate for the good
you do for the tribe. Thus people can take your high estimate as a
credible signal of a (lower) level of good you do. Each person then
(unconsciously) trades off the social benefits from thinking they do good
from the costs of trying to have higher estimates than the evidence warrants.
>Robin thinks self-deception explains why people undergo journeys of
>self-discovery. But a simpler explanation may be that the optimal
>weighting of health, comfort, status, etc., depends on the environment and
>one's genetic endowment, and the "journey" is just a process of figuring
>out the optimum.
The question here is why humanity has not learned and passed down explicit
summaries of our basic preferences and how those depend on our
environments. It could be that our environment-dependent strategies
are so vastly complex that mere minds like ours cannot fathom them.
But I was suggesting an alternative hypothesis.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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