Robin Hanson explains why we are systematically self deceived about our deepest motivations.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hey everybody welcome to ideas having sex.

I'm your host, Chris Kaufman.

Today we are joined by Robin Hanson, professor of economics at George Mason University.

Robin is the co author with kevin, similar of the elephant in the brain, hidden motives in everyday life.

Robin, it's great to see you.

Welcome to the show.

Nice to meet you.

You want to just start by telling us in a broad outline what the book is about.

So I'm an economics professor and I've spent a career doing economics, although I did other things before that and over time, I think I've come across what I think our biggest mistake is the place we go the wrong most place I went the wrong most.

And that's in taking people roughly at their word at face value for why they do the main things they do.

So if you are studying education or medicine or politics or all sorts of things, uh, we usually ask, well, what's this thing say school about or hospitals about and people will tell us, oh, schools and to learn things and hospitals where you get well and then we will elaborate on that.

We will try to dig in more deeply into the supply and demand of each of these things and the various constraints.

And then when we do all that there's still some puzzling weird stuff that doesn't make sense.

And over the years, I've tried to collect a lot of these weird things that don't seem to make sense.

And I realized that if you just go back to basics and maybe reconsider why people are doing them in the first place, that you can make sense?

A lot of of a lot of these puzzles that they aren't quite as puzzling anymore.

As soon as you realize, you've been making assumptions about what the point was and you kind of opened the book with, I think a broad description of of what your thesis is gonna be like, how you have all these collections of puzzles and then you offer an account that kind of squares them all.

And I think signaling and self deception are pretty central to your account.

Is that right?

So the key idea is that your conscious mind, the one that you think you're listening to me with its job is not to be the president or king of your mind.

Its job is to be the press secretary.

So, but the press secretary does, it doesn't know why things were actually done, but when it's asked why did you do something?

Its job is to come up with a good story, a story that will make the organization look good and that's what you are.

That's what, that's what you do.

That's what you are, you are there to come up with an explanation.

So, um, humans, you know, for a very long time had norms, norms or rules about what you're supposed to do are not supposed to do.

And these are very important for humans and they're, in some sense, more important than most of the other things.

And many of these norms are in terms of motives.

Why did you do something?

So, if you hit me on purpose, that's much more of a problem than if you hit me accidentally.

So the fact that you hit me isn't the only issue.

It's did you do it on purpose?

So you're constantly looking at your what you do and saying, what motive could I use to explain what I did here?

That would make me the safest from accusations that that would protect me from other people accusing me of violating norms.

And so that's what you do.

You you attribute to yourself whatever motives are the safest.

And now that varies somewhat, but it's often not the best description of what you're really doing now, not the deepest, strongest motives.

And you are, in a sense, being self deceived.

You are not really understanding why you do things and that's how you were built.

And I have to warn you right now, you are built to be ignorant of your motives for a reason that's makes the press secretary's job easier.

And that's your job.

But, uh, if you want to understand the world and yourself and your role in it, then you need to look through and understand this more carefully.

But that will get in the way of your being a smooth and sincere press secretary.

So I warn you from the start, there's a trade off here.

Now, if your job is like mind, say as a social scientist, then you kind of need to understand what people are doing and why to make sense of the world.

Maybe if your job as a sales personal manager, then you also have an unusual need to understand what's really going on in yourself and the people around you.

But if you don't, maybe you shouldn't listen to this podcast, turn it off.

Forget you heard any of this.

Don't listen to Robin, keep it on.

You know, go back into the Matrix.

Don't take the red pill.

Reading, reading your book.

You do warn the audience that it can be a dark thing.

And you know, we don't like to look directly at the elephant and the elephant in the brain is is a play on the metaphor of the elephant in the room.

It's the big kind of obvious thing in our brain and our motives that we don't like to look at.

And it's it's hard to look at directly.

And as I was reading it, it's easy to picture people I know in real life who would just hate it.

Not because they would disagree with you necessarily though.

I'm sure they would, but because it's not it's not a pleasant thing to hear about people I know I'm built and I'm assuming you're built more or less in a way that makes it interesting to learn those kinds of things.

Even though I I believe you said you got a little tired of it by the end, you were you were glad to be done with the project when it was over because it's kind of dark business.

I mean, I I wish people would continue with the project and I could even help them.

So, um our book, the 1st 3rd of it tries to make plausible this idea that you could be wrong about your motives and why that might make sense evolutionarily and what it would mean.

And then the last two thirds of the book go through 10 different areas of life, trying to show you how these hidden motives can make sense of puzzles in each of these 10 areas.

But There's probably another 30 areas of life that you could continue on applying the same analysis tools to And that would be profitable.

That would be helpful.

But you know, give, even though a great many people have said that they liked the book and they thought it was insightful and they're glad they learned it.

Almost nobody wants to go find those other 30 areas and find the other ways that our motives are not what we think.

It's a telling lack of energy and enthusiasm for continuing that path.

So, I have started this podcast recently.

It's a recent endeavor.

If somebody asked me why I was doing this, I would likely say something like there are this isn't my day job, there are certain ideas I find intrinsically interesting or important and I would love the opportunity to get to signal boost them or share them with the world?

And even on a selfish level, I love being able to talk about them and maybe I don't get to do that enough in my normal life.

That's probably the story I would tell other people.

And and it feels like the story I tell myself what's what's a elephant in the brain story that might, you know, be going on underneath the surface.

Well, I mean, it's not that your story is exactly wrong.

You do love it.

And what it is involves talking about ideas.

You're just not telling the full story.

Why do you love talking about ideas?

What's the point?

So I think we should always sort of go back to the reference of we are animals, think of all the other animals in nature and look at all the things they do and ask why they do them for most of animals.

And most of the things where they're doing, you have a pretty straightforward story about what they're doing and why they're getting food, they're staying warm, they're building shelter, they're mating, they're defending their territory.

Um Right, but when we get to humans and the things they do the stories they tell don't seem very connected to the kind of purposes an animal would have.

So that's more what I need to hear in a plausible story, not just that you love something which you do and that it's related to ideas, but why is that the sort of thing that an animal would do so plausibly?

I'm showing off my quote unquote big old brain and my and my lofty interests to potential allies or mates.

Uh, this, this endeavor hosting a podcast maybe makes me look like an interesting and well rounded person.

That is that the kind of story that might rounded out and complete the picture a little bit.

So, so let's just be clear as humans are very social animals, more social than most primates, uh, and most other mammals.

And uh, the, the social environment was very important.

It's more important than anything else.

So in the social world, uh, it's not all uniform mix.

You'll have allies.

Uh, and these allies will be ones you will be especially associated with and you will need to choose them and they will need to choose you.

And as part of the process of choosing you, they have to evaluate, you have to evaluate your general abilities, but also your specific loyalty to them and you are eager to show them that you have attractive capabilities and loyalties.

So one of our 10 chapters is the chapter on conversation.

So humans use language and of course we use it to a great many useful purposes.

You're ordering a pizza or you know, directing cars to park.

So they don't hit each other.

You can use language in a great many sort of obvious ways in which it's clearly useful.

But when we have these conversations like we're having now where we float away from our very particular personal concerns and just talk pretty abstractly, you might say, well, what's the point of that?

So our story is that sort of this kind of conversation is a game where we're supposed to sort of let the topic wander.

So instead of talking about the most important things to us or exchanging the most valuable information, we instead just wander.

So some of the puzzles of conversation relative to the simple theories are a simple theory of conversation would be I tell you useful things for you and you tell me useful things for me.

And after we're done, we both know more useful things than we knew before.

That would require that we keep track of who's told who how much and so we make sure we're having a fair trade, but also make sure that we talked about the most important things to us, the valuable things to us and we make sure that we got to those but never.

But in fact our usual conversation norms, we stay away from our most important topics.

We don't control the conversation very directly to say no, no, I need you to get back to this topic.

This is the this is the one I need and we don't keep track of how much I've told you and how much you told me.

And so our explanation is that instead it's a way we show off a backpack of tools and resources.

So if you think about every new topic that shows up that we don't control, because we're supposed to just be wandering your job is to pick something out of that backpack and and have it be relevant.

How have it be insightful and if you can just do that repeatedly, whatever topics show up that suggests you're a pretty good ally to have around wherever we go, whatever we need to do, you'll have something in your backpack that will help us.

And the idea is that's the game of ordinary conversation and it's also the game in academia and journalism and most of the other worlds of conversation including podcasts, uh they're all they all follow this norm of don't control the conversation, don't keep track exactly of what was useful to who don't talk about the most important things.

Instead let the conversation wander, talk about whatever the issue of the day is or whatever the conversation context has induced the topic to be about and bring something out that's relevant impress us with anecdotes, contacts observations, insights, jokes, teases whatever you've got.

Show us it's kind of like a test, but for the person your conversation partner is potentially as well as audience members, third parties watching, that's probably a bigger part of the story, maybe on social, on twitter or something like that you're having conversations for an audience or like this um will be sensitive to the audience of course, but the conversation strategy doesn't vary that much.

That is for every whatever the audience is, still pull out something in your backpack that will so impressively interesting and related one strategy as the person trying to say something impressive is to find to cheat and to find subtle, non obvious ways to steer a conversation towards something you know about so that you have something impressive to say, but it doesn't seem like you control the conversation and we have a great many norms, but we're not always that aggressively enforcing norms.

Sometimes we let people get away with violating as long as they don't do it in too obvious to manner and in some ways we're impressed if they can do that.

Well, you have a part in the book where you talk about the emperor's new clothes as a kind of myth, I think that maybe illustrates what you're talking about there.

The idea of of public knowledge or publicly available knowledge, like you might not need to enforce a norm as long as it's not too obvious to everyone involved that the norm is being violated.

So one of our biggest norms that influences a lot of these areas of behavior is that we're not supposed to brag bragging is forbidden, but of course if you notice a lot of conversations, people are indirectly bragging, they're just not directly bragging and in many ways that's okay, although sometimes people do call them out on it, but they might be of course vulnerable to the reverse accusation.

So an example we give in the book is the practice of drinking alcohol in public out of a brown paper bag.

So, you know, in many places, there's a law against drinking alcohol in public, and if you walk down the street drinking alcohol out of a bottle in public and the police sees you, they will feel obligated to arrest you for violating the law.

But if you leave your alcohol bottle in a brown paper bag where you bought it at the store and drink it out of the paper bag, then the police will not feel obligated to arrest you, even though they know that in fact, pretty much the only reason anybody ever drinks out of a brown paper bag in public is that it's alcohol.

So who's being fooled?

Well, nobody's really being fooled, but this is the prospect that maybe somebody might not know gives you an excuse and the famous plausible deniability, the police can say, well, they didn't know it was alcohol, It could have been something else and therefore they can ignore it because the police don't actually want to enforce this law, they don't think of it as a priority.

They probably think you're doing just fine walking down the street drinking alcohol, not causing anyone trouble.

Why should they bother you?

It's only when you make them see it, that they will then have to do something.

And this is true about many of the norms we have.

Again, you may notice that your friend is bragging, but as long as they're not being too obvious about it, you're not going to complain too much.

In our chapter on body language.

We talk about flirting.

So we often use our body language to flirt.

And one of the reasons we do that is because we're often not supposed to be flirty or or with the particular person who are involved and so we can be friendly and use our body language to flirt.

But we have plausible deniability.

If someone says stop flirting or why are you flirting?

You can say I was just being friendly.

I wasn't flirting at all and they can't prove that you were flirting and they might notice that you're flirting and not really mind.

As long as you don't make it really obvious, especially to third parties who might call attention to it.

Your second part of your book is mostly chapters where you kind of go over these specific puzzles and you have 10 or a dozen or so different different areas?

Well, let me ask you, I have a pretty of all of the areas which one do you think you get the most pushback on the most incredulity when it comes up that you're, that you're challenging the more noble everyday motives.

So the more general principle is that we each have something that's especially sacred to us or a few things and that's where we will be especially reluctant to accept people's claims about our motives.

So if you're a teacher, then you will be reluctant to hear our story about the motives of teachers and students.

But you won't mind so much hearing about art if you're not an artist, if you're not religious, you won't mind hearing about the hidden motives of religion.

If you're not into politics, you won't mind hearing the hidden motives of politics.

So the more fundamental principle is that you mind the one that you consider the most sacred and in, say, the United States today, it would be medicine that would in fact be what people consider most sacred.

That was the one that I had the most incredulity over.

Um, Now maybe I just fall into what you're talking about.

You know, it's, it's, it doesn't feel sacred to me.

Um, but it is, it's, but maybe it is, it is it just felt surprising.

I do think I, you know, you persuaded me and looking into it a little bit further persuaded me, but the the idea that medicine is just, I guess it wasn't so much the motives thing that it wasn't the idea that, that the motives surrounding medicine are largely about signaling care, uh, signaling care and that were, you know, useful allies and will be there for someone that felt very plausible and intuitive.

I was just surprised at the studies allegedly showing how much less effective medical care is for just raw health outcomes.

So in all of these areas, um, everything we do has multiple motives.

Any large area of life like education or medicine or religion or politics.

Many of motives will be relevant there.

And what we call the IT motive will in fact be a motive that most people will agree does exist to some degree.

And the motive that they would point to as the main motive is a motive that I and my co author will say also exists to some degree.

So the difference isn't whether these motives exist.

The conflict or dispute is about the relative importance.

Their relative magnitudes in influencing behavior.

Most of us might say that of course, we will both say, be trying to help people get healthier and we would like them to know we care uh, for medicine or for school.

They might admit that we both learn things and want to show employers that we are going to be good candidates for employment.

But the question is the relative portions.

So that's where you'll be surprised.

You might have thought the signaling motives showing off motives.

They were a minor correction to what was fundamentally this other story.

And that's the news.

The news is this minor correction is actually the main story.

Can you just jump in and explain a little bit about signaling of course.

So, so signaling is just showing off or more precisely doing things with an eye to how it will seem, What will people conclude from what they see.

So if you are going to school, not just to learn, but to anticipate that an employer might be more impressed with you by seeing the degree on your resume, then you are signaling by choosing to do things to make sure that that degree is on your resume.

Uh that's the point.

Or in conversation if you say something impressive because it's relevant to the conversation and is one sort of motive.

But another motive is that you anticipate that when people hear they will be impressed and that pleases you.

So the idea of signaling or showing off is just the idea that you are doing things with an eye to how it will look.

And you know, I said that way, I think everybody agrees.

Yes, of course people do that some degree.

But again, they will assume it's a minor correction.

I don't recall if you you attach any numbers to it.

Do you have a sense of the proportion like bryan Caplan's book the case against education which you draw from, you know, he puts the breakdown of education being about 80% signaling.

Do you have any kind of estimates for the areas that you look at?

Specifically medicine?

I'm curious about, but in general like how much of it's signaling because you're right.

Nobody, nobody's gonna deny that, you know, when I'm sick and my friend offers to bring me chicken soup.

This isn't really strict about encouraging, like my physical health.

This is an act of loyalty and gesturing towards, you know, I care about you and I'll be there for you when things are bad, right?

We accept it as a minor but valued contribution to our behavior.

And the claim is it's a lot more than minor.

And so I would say overall, maybe 80% of human behavior, it can be understood in singling camps.

And so it's a big part, although I want to be clear, we're trying talking about unconscious motives, were talking about sort of habits of behavior and explaining that we're, we're not trying to explain what's at the top of your head when you're doing something.

And, but of course, the point is to realize what's at the top of your head, maybe a misleading indicator of what are the fundamental drives of your behavior.

So to you, you had asked about medicine, we've taken a long detour.

But again, the point was, you might say, well, of course, uh, even though I go to the doctor in the hospital to get healthy and I push other people to do that.

I do appreciate when they show me that they care about me.

And I want to make sure that I show other people that I care about them.

And that's a minor contribution.

Uh, and so, but that story has a number of puzzles to explain.

And one of the most dramatic puzzles is the lack of correlation between health and medicine.

In fact, uh, first when we look at sort of say regions, uh, nation's counties, uh, etcetera.

When you see in some regions where they consume more medicine and other reasons where they consume less.

And of course we've seen some regions where people live longer.

Another way they live less, these two are not correlated, at least after you control for a few simple court other other variables.

But you might think, well, that's a weird correlation.

But you know, surely something weird is going on there.

And if we get the right other correlates we will see the expected relations.

But our best data when we do randomized experiments, uh, also says the same thing.

So sometimes we take a group of people and for some of them we say for you, medicine is now free.

We will pay for it all go wild.

Get all the stuff you want.

And for other people, we say, well, sorry, we're not going to give you this big gift.

But we'll give you a little thing a little bit.

Maybe just so you make sure you tell us what you're doing.

And so for the people we gave this big gift of, hey, get all the medicine you want turns out they get more medicine And the other people don't get as much as the people who get more medicine, it's 30, more.

And then we can look at their health, we can say, Okay, you know, do they have fewer sick days or their severe symptoms less severe?

Do they live longer, etc?

And the bottom line is, we don't see substantial differences in health.

The people who get more medicine are not healthier.

Of course, if you have people who have, say, various medical problems and you give some people free medicine, they will have fewer budget problems.

The other people will be will get less medicine, but they'll still try and they will have money problems.

So, you know, you will certainly monetarily benefit people and they will feel perhaps even less stress because of that, making sure somebody else is paying for their own medicine, but health wise, they're not healthier even that story though.

So you're saying, would it be fair to say that you're helping them monetarily, but the money that they're spending didn't really need to be spent anyway.

If the story is primarily about improving physical health.

So you might have someone monetarily by subsidizing their medicine or you might help them monetarily by advising them not to buy very much medicine.

If they would if they would be willing to do that.

Now, now the the important point here is that we're talking about the aggregate of lots and lots of kinds of medicine.

So this is an average over many parts now.

There are definitely some parts where it's pretty clear that getting more medicine in that part is helpful and then people would be puzzled to say, well if there's parts that help and parts that don't make any difference, surely the average would help and say no, no, no.

There's also parts that hurt.

That's a thing that people have trouble getting their heads around.

There are areas of medicine where more medicine hurts you.

What's the term for that?

I a tre genesis, I'm not sure.

But in our book we first try to avoid throwing big words we don't need to.

So for a very dense book, it's very accessible.

That's our intention.

So, you know, it's it's not concepts that are too difficult for people.

It's concepts that they may not want to hear the studies that you reference in the book.

Um their their aggregate studies.

But do they take account of like longer term like is it You know, if you give people this access to cheaper or free medical care, when are they checking in to to see about the health outcomes five years later, have they done follow up studies?

You know, 30, 40 years later.

Right.

So I mean the basic fact of all academic studies of anything is it's going to be easy to find ways in which they are not as good as you hope right?

There's just a wide range of these things.

But you know, so if you look at, say, the regions of the country say, well, those are going to be over a very long time scale.

But the regions have differed in their medical spending over a very long time.

But you might say ah but that might be a correlation.

And then we say, okay, let's look at these randomized experiments.

But the randomized experiments are going to be over a shorter time.

So they might be over, say five years.

Uh and then we would look, you know, before and after the five years.

But again, you know, so the book didn't include a study that was just released in this last year, A study in India with 80,000 people.

Uh and it also found no effect.

Again, for every study, you could find things wrong with it, but it is like pretty replicated finding is the point even.

Yes, of course, it's a pretty it's a pretty consistent finding.

And and the studies you're talking about are lots of people there.

They're pretty broad in scope, right?

So, so, I mean, I think I can say with much more confidence is if you think that you can see the value of medicine just in your life and in the people around you, these studies have far more data than what you've ever seen.

So if these studies, it's ambiguous whether there's any effect, then there's really no way that you're seeing a real effect in your life and the people around you.

There's just too much noise there and it's likely that you're going to notice the effects that you're looking for more.

You're going to notice the times.

I mean, they're probably any number of times.

If I really was keeping track that uh specific healthcare did little to nothing to help me, I might remember the one or two times that it really just notice the usual course of sicknesses your, well then you get sick and then you get better and then you're not sick anymore, right?

Or in the middle you die.

That's it, right?

That's pretty much how it goes.

So if you got out of the sickness, then you look, oh well I started to get sick.

Then I went to the doctor and they did something and then I went got well and now I'm not sick anymore, right?

So it's very, very tempting to credit the medicine for getting well again.

But you realized that would have happened had you not gone to the doctor just in general?

What it is to be sick is a temporary difference which usually goes away.

This this thesis as it applied to medicine gave me a lot of sympathy for alternative forms of medicine that are more obviously ineffective, but are simple and cheap.

It seems like a nice hack to do all of the care signaling, but not be spending billions of dollars.

So I mean, I don't wanna I don't wanna throw acupuncture under the bus or whatever.

I, I don't know that much about it, Maybe it's very effective, but things in that vein that aren't as expensive as Western medicine.

Is there something to be said for allowing the popularity of those kinds of things to cheapen the signaling?

So the problem is that the cost is the signal to a large degree.

We often look at how much effort it took to do something as our primary signal of how much somebody who cares about us when they do something.

So it's not enough that they just did something we want to know how much they did and how much isn't in terms of how much it helped us, it's how much it costs them.

You talk about, you know, bringing store bought food to someone who's, who's morning versus making, you know, a casserole yourself and bringing it over.

So one of the features about medicine that's very striking is that the percentage of our income that we spend on medicine goes up as we get rich and more, particularly as our society gets rich.

So as the people around you get rich than how much you spend on money goes up as a percentage of your income.

That's true, like in a more localized way too, like if I'm, if just like my neighborhood is spending more or are there more localized effects of that or my peer group, I'm not sure we've measured that, but clearly it's a social effect.

That is the standard that you're trying to live up to is a standard that you're inferring from some social context, not the entire world and therefore, you know, we're not sure exactly how wide that is.

But if you move to say from a poor country to a rich country and you had the same income, still the percentage of income you would spend on medicine would go up.

Why is self deception so central to your account of human behavior?

So each of the things that we're doing that is each of the motives we actually have our reasonable things to do, show people that you care about them, try to impress employers, etcetera.

Uh But the problem is that many of them are close to violating norms in particular showing off.

So since we're not supposed to show off, but we are showing off, then we need an excuse for what we're doing that isn't showing off and we need to believe this excuse.

So our minds have a lot of different channels by which what we believe and feel reveals itself to other people.

It's not just in the words we say, it's in the tone of our voice, it's in the angle of our head, it's in our body language, it's in our volume.

It's it's where we're looking we just reveal our concerns and interests in a lot of different ways.

So it's not enough just to lie in one little way that because all the other channels will belie the lie, They will say something different.

So the usual solution to effective lying is to believe the lies that works in acting, works in sales, works in politics.

So when you have a audience who's paying attention, who could tell whether you're being sincere then the way that you lie is to sincerely believe what's not true, and that's why you self deceive deceive others.

Exactly.

Now, you know, when you take actions, there will be two kinds of consequences of your actions or actions that have beliefs right?

There's two kinds of consequences of your beliefs.

One is that it influences sort of actions that affect your payoffs and the other is it influences what other people think about you.

So if you could lie, then maybe you could calculate which actions you could take according to your true beliefs, such that you wouldn't suffer as many consequences there.

But that requires that you be able to sort of split this difference while cover it up and know which things people are paying attention to.

If that's just too hard.

The simple thing to do is just believe the lie and then accept the cost that you will then sometimes do the wrong thing because you're believing a lot.

I think we all know that it's you know, it's inherently very difficult to do that kind of thing.

Well, that's why it's a it's a common trope of many supervillains is that they're these master manipulators who are very consciously keeping track of dozens of different lies and deceptions.

I mean the easiest thing to just notice, it's hard to be a professional actor.

Those people are, it's a skill that takes years to develop, and it's hard and most of us are bad at it.

So you say that animals engage in behaviors that seem straightforwardly altruistic often, or pro social, but that they have other, more complex motives underneath, but that it doesn't make sense to call those motives hidden in the way we talk about human, hidden motives.

Can you say more about that?

So we give the example of the babbler bird who lives in groups of birds and they are seen to do two things.

One is that some of the birds will sit at the top of a bush and watch out for predators who might be coming to grab and eat one of their birds.

And if they see such a predator, they will squawk and call attention to it and then run away.

And um they will be putting themselves at more risk by being at the top of this bush, but they will still do this thing.

Another thing these birds will do is they will put food in the mouths of other birds, they will get some food and then give it other birds.

Now these look like helpful to behaviors to us.

If we were doing these things, we would tell each other that we were doing them because we are just trying to be altruistic and helpful.

Now the birds don't say anything about why they're doing them.

They just do them.

But these explanations are trying to be helpful is in somewhat in conflict with the following.

To further observations, these birds at the top of bushes, they will fight other birds to be able to stay up there and often when they are giving food to the other bird, that other bird will resist and they have to shove the food down the throat of the other bird against their will.

So it's less like being drafted into the army and more like winning some kind of a prize.

Right?

So there, it seems like there's a status hierarchy among the birds.

And the high status birds are doing these things like watching out at the top of the bush and giving each other other birds food.

Now the method by which they acquire status is overall helpful to the bird community.

They would, the bird community would do worse if they did other, more destructive things as the way they acquired status.

Nevertheless, each bird motive seems to be primarily to acquire status to become the top bird.

Uh And that makes sense for it.

But again, the key thing is it's not what we would have said they were doing had we watched what they were doing unless we started to pay attention to some of the details.

And it's also not hidden just because they're not a species with language that needs to bother about lying.

Is that kind of the point, right?

You talk about how I guess there's there's competing explanations for how human intelligence developed and you and your co author are partial to the explanation that centers on this arms race between lying and lie detection.

Is that right?

I don't know how central that is necessarily.

But certainly humans did have an arms race between line and light detection and humans were very social.

So the most fundamental point would be just to say your minds were very evolved for social context alone.

Animal as a different sort of animal, they all have a different sort of mind.

Your mind isn't that sort of mind, Your mind is the sort of mind that works best in these social groups and that includes you're paying a lot of attention to what other people are doing and what they might think of you.

It seems like an interesting thing to look at would be animals along a gradation of sociability to see like how dose dependent this, your elephant in the brain kind of explanation for behavior is like, would you see less and less of this kind of behavior progressively with less and less social animals.

So the basic thesis would be you don't have any sort of self deception until you are giving presentations of yourself to others.

That's the whole point of self deception is to adjust what others think of you through your presentation to them.

So until you're even thinking about how you present yourself to them, there's less ground for self deception.

Now we have seen, say monkeys or chimpanzees.

They come across some food, say, and then they notice another monkey coming and then they go look at something else and wait till the monkey's gone.

And then they go back to the food because they're aware that just where they are pointing, their gazes kind of so they don't want to give away the location of the food they found.

Yeah.

So they are manipulating their appearance in order to hide the fact that they have found some food so clearly.

You know, in that sense they are aware of, you know, the others perceptions and they are trying to be deceptive.

Uh Self deception will be more feature when you have the sort of more of a rich story you're telling about yourself to other people.

So it's less clear that there is much self deception outside of humans.

Do you see any of that in some of the in some of the, you know, higher primates or evidence of something that looks more like?

Well, I don't know what it would look like to see evidence of self deception in an animal you couldn't talk to.

But uh more evidence of just trying to deceive others in dolphins are apes.

I don't know such evidence.

Again, the key point is that humans are deceived especially about their motives, but that only makes sense if they're talking about their motives to other people and telling a story where their motives are involved.

So I don't know that we see much of other animals describing their motives to each other.

I think one uncomfortable part of the book for me was not so much the sacredness of a particular chapter on the puzzle.

The puzzles, you know, associated with politics or medicine or education or whatever.

But when you're describing this kind of self deception, sometimes it's it's self deception is very thorough so that you don't notice it.

And sometimes it's not quite as thorough.

And uh, you are a little bit aware that you're being kind of a rascal in your own head.

And so some of it seems familiar and and that you think to yourself, what have I done that.

And one of the effects it definitely had on me was to make was to make me want to be a better person in those areas where I maybe notice that I do it a little bit many people do react to our book in a self help sort of mode.

That is uh, you have the story you've been presenting about yourself to the world.

And now you see that you don't live up to the story you've been telling and you vow to do better and you know, there's not much wrong with that, as long as you're aware of just how far you can possibly go.

Uh this is human nature.

This isn't some recent sort of affectation based on people watching a recent movie or, you know, some particular new piece of software that came out were talking human nature that's been this way for a million years.

So this is deeply embedded in your mind and your mind designed the way you are constructed is this way you don't we don't even know exactly what it would be like to be the sort of human who wasn't self deceived in these ways or uh you know, dishonest about their motives because that's just not the sort of human we've ever seen much of.

So I think when you see a difference between your ideals and your reality, there's two ways to resolve that.

One is to raise reality to your ideals, and the other way is to lower your ideals down to reality.

So obviously it'll have to be some combination of the two, but I think you'll have to be realistic.

So, um you I mean, I I think it's worth pausing and think realizing that if everything we say is true, still humans are by far the most interesting creatures on the planet.

They are the creatures you're going to want to spend most of your time with you still like and love them.

They still like and love you, we still are in fact helping each other in enormous ways.

We are working together in enormous ways.

We value our lives and our community and that's still true.

You don't deny positive and pro social motives in the book.

You just kind of a little bit.

So I mean no, for example, when I say that I want to show you that I care about you in medicine, it's because I really do care.

That is when we signal to show something we typically do.

In fact show the thing we are trying to show that is we don't on average fool people if I try to show you my carrots because I actually care.

I succeed in showing you that I care.

It's a feature about me that I care and I am showing that if I'm showing that I'm smart in school then it's because I'm smart and when I show I'm smart, I actually am smart and all of these things we are trying to show are real.

They are real things we are trying to show and do show.

But they aren't necessarily the things we say, we're trying to do our show.

A lot of what the book is an attempt to do is to explain a large set of puzzles in actually existing data.

Can you say a little bit about what predictive power this account has and you know what if anything you might expect to see either in you know, data that hasn't been collected, or just data that you don't personally already know.

Well let's take education.

So, um the usual thing people will say about education is they go to school to learn useful things, which will then be more useful and like, like for work, and the puzzles with that point of view are that most people don't seem to actually remember much of what they learn, and it doesn't seem to be very useful, and even so, the people who do better in school, you know, get higher wages and better positions.

Uh, so our basic explanation is that you're showing off, you're showing off how smart and conscientious and conformist as you are, that you've mastered sort of modern workplace habits and modern culture styles.

Uh and that's all true.

And so now, if we look at, say, attempts to reform education, we see that for example, people have been spending decades learning how to actually teach people more stuff faster and that schools have just been uninterested in adopting those things.

They have not wanted to teach kids more things faster, because maybe that's not the point.

The point is just to distinguish which, which kids are better than which other kids and they do just fine at that.

Okay, so this theory has a strong prediction about which kinds of educational reforms will get traction.

Some of those predictions have already been borne out, and I would predict will continue.

So the kinds of educational reforms that won't get traction are the ones that actually help you learn more things faster.

There's not much demand for that.

Uh, there's a demand for winning in the existing educational games, but not from changing the games to help you learn faster.

But what it does predict is if there was a thing about you that current schools can't show off very well, but that you want to show off well, then there would be an opportunity for a new kind of school or at least after school program or part of a school where they focus on showing that feature that you have, that you want to show off that schools aren't letting you do.

So, an example that I think is being good on your feet in conversation.

Schools don't test much for that.

Most schools are writing and reading and if you give a speech, it's a rehearsed speech on a rehearsed topic and um, people who are just good, inflexible and conversation being productive, thoughtful in a conversation, schools aren't rating that, they aren't scoring it, they aren't teaching it.

So, if you're good at that, it doesn't show up in your grades.

So, if you were actually good at that, you would be open to a school that said over here, what we do is we show we teach people how to and show that they are good in conversation.

They're good in a meeting, they are good in a group working things out together and there would be an opening for a school or at least a set of classes like that, that's the kind of prediction you would get, you need to be giving people basically not only what they pretend to want, but also what they actually want.

They pretend to want to learn, but that's not enough.

They actually want to show off.

So we'll need to let them actually show off, although you will also need to let them continue to pretend because they do not want to take down the facade.

So reforms that are going to allow people to show off in novel ways and in ways that can be plausibly ranked and sort, you know, that you can sort people and that they're honestly impressive and useful so that you would have potentially schools that if what they're actually doing is sorting and ranking people based on, you know, how good they are, particular useful things uh, than whether or not they can teach more effectively is not going to be so important is whether or not they can show off a new and effective skill that some proportion the population has.

Right, I really liked your chapter on laughter that one stuck with me.

I don't know if that if that's one like politics or medicine or education that would upset people, but it's very interesting.

I think the laughter is least likely to upset people.

I think so too, But it was very it was very surprising.

You might think so.

The thing to notice is if I ask you, why are you laughing you say?

Because it's funny and if you think about it, that's not much of an explanation at all.

Question is well, what makes something funny?

And uh there's been, you know, many attempts to give a description and sort of the standard accepted description now is the one we talk about, which is that laughter is and I'm we're still playing signal.

So animals play humans play.

And in play we do a stylized version of a real thing.

We play fight instead of real fight.

We play chase instead of real chase.

And in play fighting or chasing.

It looks like the real thing except we've taken our claws.

We try not to hurt each other and it's in some sort of a safe space.

And while we're play fighting or chasing we might accidentally hurt each other.

And at that point we need to switch out of play mode and say, 00ops sorry and like deal with the hurt.

So if we're in play mode then we have chosen that okay for at the moment we're safe, we're okay, there's not threats that we're dealing with.

So we will invoke play mode.

Now we'll move into the mode, we will pretend like there are threats and problems but there really aren't and we're just playing.

But if somebody should actually get hurt, then we need to switch out and say, okay, we're not playing anymore and let's deal with.

So animals need a way to say we're not playing anymore.

We're stopping playing.

And they also need a way to say now we're still playing, it's okay.

And for humans, laughter is that we're still playing signal.

So a lot of human play is about social play that is instead of play fighting or play chasing.

We play following social rules, We play social games.

And in that playing we might for example, insult each other, but they will be play insults, not real insults and we have to watch to see that nobody's actually getting hurt.

And so the way you show that we're still playing and I'm not hurt is to laugh, laughter says I'm relaxed, I'm comfortable, I'm okay, we're still playing.

This is fun.

I'm a little bit of a prankster and I've definitely learned, you know, through, through the presence or absence of laughter, laughter, which ones of my friends, it's acceptable to play pranks on and scare and to what level most people think about laughter and funny comes to mind immediately as an explanation.

I mean, tickling maybe is like a quick counter example that some people come up with, but you know, tickling is not the only puzzle in the humor story about laughter why you laugh when things are scary for instance.

So in the book we give the example of the joke, which is about don't drop the soap in the prison shower.

So if you think about it, it's basically saying, oh, you'll get raped if you drop the soap, so don't do that.

And we laugh and you might think, well, what's so funny about prison rape?

That doesn't sound very serious, somewhat horrifying.

Why why would you laugh about that?

Well, you might say because we do laugh, it is funny, but what is it about it?

It's funny.

Well, key point is that you and I are not imprisoned nor is anybody we know in prison.

So we aren't threatened.

This is not actually a threat to us, but because we can sort of see how it might be a threat to someone else.

And we can sort of see how someone might think we were threatened.

So if we laugh, we reassure everybody.

No, nobody here has a friend in prison.

Nobody here feels anything bad about that.

You've got a great chapter on art.

The thing that stuck out to me mostly about the art chapter was thinking about it as a mating signal is kind of an elaborate way of showing off your I don't know, your your skills in general and your and your abundance of resources.

So most people again are willing to grant that.

That's part of the story, they just want to subordinate it and say, well, the main thing is the beauty or the, you know, provocation of the art, that art has this fundamental purpose of, you know, giving you meaning or provocation or beauty or something that focus.

And yes, as a side effect that may make you impressive to people and other people may want to meet with you.

But that's just an extra benefit.

That isn't the main story.

And we're going to say it is the main start.

And so away again.

The key structure of all these chapters is we give the usual story and then we show you a bunch of puzzles that don't fit so well with that usual story.

So art the usual story is that the point of art is the experience it gives to the person consuming the art.

The experience produced in the mind of the person listening to the music or looking at the painting or touching the sculpture.

That's the point.

And everything else is there to create that point.

And the puzzles are that we have ways in which we have the same experience, but other context change and we care about that other context.

So, if a piece of art is created by a committee or a group of artists, we like it less even if it's the same art art made with difficult materials and difficult methods.

We like that art more so, for example, painting was very realistic until photograph were possible.

As soon as photography became possible.

All of a sudden realistic paintings were not very interesting, not very in demand.

We had to find something else that was hard and we see this pattern over and over.

We are impressed with things that are hard, not just with the experience it produces.

And if you can find a way to take a rare experience and turn it into an easy to generate experience all of a sudden, we're not so interesting.

You talk about the poll done by art goers that they would rather see, you know, the ashes of the real mona lisa.

If it had been burned up than a perfect replica of the mona lisa is kind of, you know, illustrating this.

I, I recently heard a conversation talking about something just like that.

There was a painting people had thought was maybe a lost Da Vinci.

And the original version was very badly scratched and damaged and it had been restored.

And a lot of people saying they would have much rather had the badly scratched and damaged potential da Vinci, It wasn't even guaranteed da Vinci.

So for people in the United States, we give the example that two centuries ago in the United States prisoners in the Northeast.

Uh, we're often fed lobster because it was very cheap and in fact to be kind to them, there was some rules about they could only be fed lobster so many days a week because otherwise they would be being cruel to the prisoners feeding them disgusting.

See bugs.

Right?

Whereas now since lobster is very expensive, it's a very elite and supposedly extra tasty food, what do you think have been some of the best criticisms of your thesis that have made you think?

Well certainly people have, you know, tried to clarify the degree to which we are conscious or not of these things.

You know, if if you thought we were claiming that people are very conscious that we're not and you know, an issue is what are we, what are we triggering off of in the modern environment in order to signal things?

So, you know, the basic story would be that we evolved, the signaling happens a long time ago and the world changed.

And now the key question is, well, how are we adapting to the new world?

That depends on sort of what cues were encoded in our behavior to be the queues were reacting in terms of, we, we try to show each other we care with medicine.

Well what counts exactly as medicine or you know, what counts exactly as even learning things.

Um, so certainly people have noticed that in education, say, uh there is a lot of sort of cultural shaping.

If you look at the stories of in the early days when education was spreading around the world, there were stories about the differences between educated and uneducated people.

If we look at a whole community of people who were uneducated and compare that to a whole community of educated, even if the educated ones aren't actually learning useful particular facts or skills they do seem to be learning something important about accepting the modern workplace.

So the usual stories that these other workers were just not willing to do what they're told in a modern workplace, it's not that they were dumb or incompetent, but they were proud people who go to school are more willing to do what they're told and that makes a big difference.

That is some part of like the human capital story of education that they're learning something, it just might not be what's usually advertised.

They're learning how to take orders and sit still and do boring tasks that seem pointless to them, which apparently is a big deal.

That's what most people do at work, right?

But most humans in history have not been willing to put up with that.

So, I think most people today don't really realize that most humans who have ever exist would not put up with what they put up with in terms of going to work and being told what to do and being compared to other people and having to accept somebody who you don't necessarily admire, telling you what to do or being raised up above you as an exemplar compared to you how much of the modern workplace has been dramatically and heavily subsidized for decades by the school system, making people more amenable to it.

So, it raises the question about when school reforms, to what extent you might mess with that key part of the process, to what extent will you?

So for example, people think of creativity as a good thing and then they like to say promote the idea that educated people would be more creative.

But the data is pretty clear, school squashes creativity.

Uh, it doesn't reward, it, punishes creativity and kids learn to be less creative.

That's very intuitive.

But is there a lot of work on that?

I haven't, there's there's enough, there's enough.

But the point is to realize most modern workplaces are not looking for creative work workers from their point of view, creativity is just variants terror.

It's like you're not doing what you're told.

So it's a relatively limited set of job positions and roles well, where for in some particular dimensions you want creativity, but for most things they don't and and from therefore for most kinds of jobs, educated workers are more appropriate because the creativity has been beaten out of them a bit.

Yeah, I feel like most workplaces want initiative and flexibility within a relatively tightly constrained mold that is your job.

You need to be listening to the cues about in which scope do they want you to be innovative or think out of the box and to come up with new ideas, but that's a very limited scope and you need to be controlled enough to keep it within that scope, otherwise they don't want it.

But if it's going to be everywhere or nowhere, I would rather it be Nowhere.

I believe you've hinted on your blog, overcoming bias or maybe on your Twitter that you you've considered doing a sequel series of chapters about these other 30 puzzle areas you've alluded to.

Is that something that's not in the works?

But of course I would be, you know, open to to enthusiastic encouragement perhaps.

But like I said, other people don't seem to be eagerly trying that that the obvious thing that occurred to me would be say, the elephant at the office to try to pick, you know, a bunch of office phenomena and to talk about their motives.

Well, I hereby enthusiastically encourage you.

But, you know, I do think again, there's all these different areas of our lives where there's a lot of puzzles, a lot of things that don't fully make sense.

And this would be my best bet about The direction of thinking that will help you figure out.

Because in these other 10 areas, they seem to go a long way.

Yeah.

What are, what are just a handful of potential topics you would explore in this hypothetical project?

Well, for example, at the Office, you could have meetings, many people have puzzled over why there seem to be too many meetings that go on too long.

There are memes about it.

This meeting could have been an email.

Right?

And so, you know, apparently there are real functions for that.

You can think about remote work and the previous obstacles to it and what the real obstacles to remote work were compared to the actual I teach law and Economics.

And so there's a lot of areas of law that we might wonder.

So, you know, we have a lot of laws on the books that we don't enforce very much.

Why bother to have laws if you're not going to enforce them?

That tells you something about the motives.

We have a lot of legal procedures that don't actually seem to help very much.

They just seem to add a lot of cost and trouble and delay.

What's the point of all that you're you're an academic, how much of academic books or even popular books or articles are window dressing as opposed to content.

You know, basically Academia is best understood as a place where people are credentialed for various kinds of impressive nous and intellectual progress is largely a side effect of that.

So, I think if you look at the impressive nous that the credential, they are quite quite effective.

That is academia, when it, when it says somebody is impressive, they are in fact impressive.

Uh, and when it rejects people for being less impressive, in some sense, they did fail at being impressive.

Now.

In terms of intellectual progress though, the people who are the most impressive may not actually produce much progress and the people who were rejected may produce more.

But if your point is just credential people as impressive, that's not your job.

And most of the customers of acts, do you think of who are the customers of Aca demy First, there are students.

Second, there is a journalist who decide who interview 3rd.

There would be patrons who fund academics.

Those are the three main outside customers of academic.

When they go to choose their clients to choose the academics, they don't look at their intellectual progress.

They don't look at the value they produce to the world.

They overwhelmingly look for prestige.

They look for who is impressive.

Students want to go to a university where the professors are impressive or prestigious.

Journalists want to interview.

The professors who are prestigious patrons want to fund the professors who are prestigious and impressive.

They're all looking for that prestigious, impressive product and they are getting it.

The people that they are getting are in fact credential and known and accepted and truly are more impressive in terms of their ability to do whatever kind of skill each field ranks people on, but they say they're there to create intellectual progress and that's just not true.

But that's just like all the other hidden motives we've talked about.

The thing they're doing is somewhat useful, Certainly useful to the people involved.

It's just not what they claim that they are doing.

And like you said, hopefully we get some intellectual progress as a side effect.

You have to say.

if you look at all the different areas of life, all the different walks of life.

Look at firefighters, you could look at jugglers, you could look at cat groomers, you say, where is there the most intellectual progress happening?

Well, you'll probably have to give it to those academics.

They're doing a lot better than the jugglers or cat groomers on average.

So it's just a lot less than it could be.

It seemed to me like elements of environmentalism would be a good fit for a chapter and something like that.

Like there's, you'll notice that our chapters on politics and religion try not to pick on particular political groups or particular religions.

That's probably smart.

We would get a lot more resistance have we, you know, picked on particular sides.

Now, all the different sides will be guilty of something.

But nevertheless, uh, you know, it's a bit dangerous, I think, to just pick one side of some conflict and find all of their hypocrisies because they're in plentiful amount in all the different sides.

So, on environmentalism, I'm sure the pro environmentalists and the anti environmentalists will also be found to be not living up to their claim motives.

I was gonna say that might be a safe way to do it.

Pick up, pick a big enough topic and then find, find the examples that are equally likely to upset both sides, but maybe upsetting both sides isn't the primary goal, my first metric would be just how common is a behavior, Right?

So, I mean, environmentalism still isn't very large percentage of people's lives.

It's not a big percentage of the world.

I would say, you know, pick things like friendship marriage, uh, you know, sleeping just a big common behavior.

Just ask, well, why do we say we do that and how sure are we?

That that's the real reason.

I would say that's that's a very productive research strategy.

Ask about the biggest, most common things you do.

Why do you do them?

And are you sure?

Well, I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping that you end up pursuing something like this because it's an amazing okay.

But now the question is, do you really want to know evolution that, that you didn't want to know this.

That's why you didn't know.

This wouldn't be that hard to teach you.

This isn't so complicated.

This isn't rocket science or quantum physics.

This is pretty basics.

But evolution decided that you would be better off being agreed about this.

So if we tell you about it, we're going against that.

So we should ask what's the point of knowing about this?

You'll need some reason why your life and your problems are not what evolution expected from you.

Now, I would think that's appropriate for, say a social scientist or a policymaker.

Someone whose job it is to understand the world to make recommendations.

A manager or a salesperson.

But I'll still have to ask you.

But for you what will you want to know?

You know what will be the purpose of figuring out what's really going on?

You talk about charity at one point we pursue charities that are maybe not particularly effective at just helping the needy.

And you talk about some strategies for overcoming that.

One of them is surrounding yourself with a community like effective altruists who value the effectiveness of charity.

And I think maybe there's something similar at play.

Uh if you if your peer group values raw, unadulterated self understanding in a certain way and I think I would guess that yours does being surrounded by G.

M.

U.

Faculty or whoever your close friends are and and to some extent that's my peer group.

So maybe maybe there's a there's a good selfish reason for me to want to know more about this On in the movie the Matrix there's this oracle who at some point says you know and what will really bake your noodle is you know as as she introduces something hard for him to assimilate.

Many of us are in communities that pride themselves on being unusually realistic and reality oriented.

It's a self identity that's embraced by a wide range of groups and many of them do have specific things they can point to as uncomfortable truths that they embrace that other people don't.

Which what makes them proud to be part of their group because they embrace these uncomfortable truths.

Now the question is, do they really want all uncomfortable truths or did they just want to wave the banner of the truth people?

Uh, that's what you won't you won't find out the answer to that question until you actually show them more truth.

And you don't know whether they in fact will want to hear more.

So in many ways, many groups, you know, have a limited set of truths that they embrace and that their story is that these truths that they embrace are the proof that they are truth oriented.

That doesn't mean they're looking for more.

That's very well taken.

And I can't I can't say for sure speaking personally and for people I know who've liked your book.

I'm sure there is some set of chapters you could write that would push me over the edge and make me want to close the book and say no more.

No more.

I can't I obviously can't predict what they are.

My general advice is you have a limited budget for honesty.

Whatever you think about yourself, you will only be able to shine the spotlight on a small area and the other areas will remain dark.

So choose well where you shine the spotlight.

Ask what is it that you really most want to understand and be truthful about and figure that part out and let the rest be you have a limited capacity Speaking of the spotlight, you and your co author mentioned in the book some of your own hidden motives for writing it.

I wanted to know what they are and how they've worked out so far.

Well, as we said, uh, that we did at the end of the conversation chapter.

So we said that in general, people um try to show off this back pack of tools and resources that they can impress people with with whatever topic comes up.

And you know, we'll have to admit that that's what we do to That is a substantial motive for us to write the book.

And for me to be giving talks like this with you, is that we will therefore be impressive and people will like us more and they will be more willing to associate with us and to, you know, share alliances with us, That will be something we get out of this.

So we might hope to see a happy coincidence between that goal and the goal of of illuminating the truth here.

But we do see a substantial cost that we're paying.

That is So, you have to ask you a question like, the things we reveal in this book, they are very like important that as they talk about big, important areas of life and they change your mind in big ways, And they aren't that hard to figure out, and we're not especially smart.

So, you know, if there have been 80 billion people on earth so far, why is it us who wrote this book now rather than other people earlier?

And you might say, well, yes, it's insightful and yes, it's important, but it also kind of distasteful and people just didn't want to be associated with that sort of distasteful point of view, even if it was impressive.

And yes, you've become more impressive, but you've also become more distasteful.

So, you know, live with the package.

I realize, I don't know too much about your co author.

Can you say a little bit about him?

I want to make sure he gets his, his impressive.

I'm very happy that I had him as a co author.

He is a better writer than I am.

And so the better quality of the writing of this book compared to my first book has to be credited to him.

Uh, and he wasn't just a writer, he was also a thinker to contribute to the book.

He was a software engineer, he still is a software engineer who uh sort of burnt out a bit from his job, decided to take some time and be an intellectual.

And he thought of starting a PhD program somewhere and he thought, well, co authoring this book could be a substitute for that.

And I would think he's right, that is his being able to write such a book and completed and publish it, I think is an accomplishment at the scale of a PhD thesis and that he has earned that level of respect.

Now, once he finished the book, he found that he was itching to go back to software and that's what he's done and he's also decided he doesn't want to do interviews like this.

And so he's left that for me.

So, um I am doing these interviews and he's doing software.

Where can people find you if they want to find out what you're doing, what you're working on?

I have a website Hanson dot gmu dot e D U I have a blog overcoming bias dot com and I'm on twitter at Robin Hanson.

And if you just google my name Robin Hanson, you'll find all these things.

Is there anything you're working on?

Definitely right now, any, any up coming books or projects we should know about?

Well, I have sort of two main project areas, um one is gravity aliens.

So if you look at gravity aliens dot com, you'll see all my work about that there.

And that may be the basis of a book soon.

And I've also been working for many years on radical institutional reforms centered around the idea of paying for results.

So there's a lot of ways we could pay for results and get more results in the world than we do today, is that centered around prediction markets, prediction markets are one of the ways of paying for results, but they're not the only way I have a legal reforms based on the idea of vouching and medical reforms based on the idea of health, not health care and in a lot of areas, again, we could get more results.

So that raises the hidden motives question.

Do we want results in these other areas?

Which is a serious question.

So, we talked about how medicine doesn't actually seem to produce more health.

If we could in fact produce more health, would we want it?

If we offered a product that by the structure of the product would ensure that we would only be spending money on stuff that actually improved our health.

Would we buy the product?

Does having written this book and the conclusions you've come through make you less motivated to pursue policy outcomes that run counter to people's motives.

The book shows us that policy work is harder than it seems, and it already seemed hard previously, we had what people said they wanted and then trying to find a way to get them what they want and also to convince them that in fact they will get what they want and sort of work through the whole political process.

But now we realize that's not good enough.

In addition to getting people more of what they say they want.

We also have to get them more of what they really want.

But let them hide it.

Let them continue to pretend for the first part and still also get the second part.

That's more difficult than now.

It's also more difficult to push that through a change adoption process because that process will also need to pretend that it has different motives than it does.

That's a very enlightening and very frustrating conclusion.

Nevertheless, you know, I still think it's worth trying.

That is, There are a lot of big ideas that have been neglected.

A lot of big improvements are possible.

You know, if you're only one person out of 10 billion, if you have more than a one in 10 billion fractional influence, then you're you're better than average.

Well, Robin, thank you so much for joining me.

It's been awesome talking to you.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot for having me take care.