What do most people not understand when they think about human reasoning and how it works?
Yeah, look, reason is, you know, the faculty to form judgments, solve problems, be rigorous.
We tend to think of it as that is.
It's here to help us solve actual problems with you, A good image that you can have for reason what it is is.
You know the movie, the Stanley Kubrick movie 2001 The Space Odyssey.
And you have this bunch of apes, and they're pretty useless.
And then suddenly they wake up one morning, and there's this monolith, this black monolith.
And once they touch it, suddenly, kind of reason... fall upon them.
And then they discover that if they use a bone, they can use it as a tool and they can use it as a weapon.
And then the movie uses this as a starting point for what makes humans.
Humans use reason to solve problems.
And you can think that reason helps us do scientific things, find the truth, send rockets in space, etc.
But if you think about you and me, you know normal humans.
How do we use reasons?
I mean, we rarely really solve actual problems.
You know, when is the last time I kind of invented something or solve a practical problem?
I mean, it happens, right?
But it's not super frequent.
But what we do most with reason is not really that most often.
Every day we use our reason to reason with other people.
That is, we have most of the problems we face in our lives.
There are social problems.
There are problems when we interact with other people.
It's not solving, you know, that the computer doesn't work or that the dishwasher doesn't work.
It's solving how do I get my friends to do what I want, how to get my friends to understand me, how to get my boss to give me a raise, etc.
These are the problems we face.
And we use reason.
So we are reasoning But we are not reasoning like scientists to solve problems.
We're reasoning like lawyers to convince other people.
And then the key aspect.
It's this...
It's not here to solve problems.
It's here for us to convince other people.
And once you take this approach, it really explains a lot of people.
You have a big literature on people being irrational, making lots of mistakes, etc.
But then when you think, wait a minute, maybe we're not actually designed to be scientists.
We're designed to be lawyers.
And so some of the mistakes are by design.
You know confirmation bias.
You look at the information which is convenient.
You ignore the information which is inconvenient.
Well, that's what you do if you want to win your case, not if you want to find the truth.
So that's the way reason really works.
In that case, if human reasoning is more about persuasion than it is problem solving, is our capacity for problem solving just a byproduct of the fact that we're here and capable of convincing and persuading other people?
Yeah, look, that's a good question.
I mean, we have some ability, you know, we have some ability to problem solve it.
The anthropologists of psychologists looked at that.
They found that You know, we're pretty useless.
But lots of the solutions we have there are solutions that were given, that are social solutions, that we know how to do things because we've been taught how to do.
You know, you might remember, in Australia there were kind of British people like traveling in Australia and they lost themselves.
And they were kind of, you know, the locals who had their customs, et cetera, were able to survive with the land.
And these guys had just died because, you know, they didn't know.
They don't know where to find water.
They don't know how to find food, et cetera.
And, We individually, we really rarely find and solve problems.
We kind of inherit the problems which have been accumulated, the solutions which have been accumulated by past generations.
So we solve problems, but really not frequently.
What we do most often is just we use all the solutions that we inherit.
We're told how it works and we do it.
So is it right to say that our reasoning is self-serving in that way?
Yeah, yeah.
I think that's one of the biggest insights we get is that when we talk about reason with a big R, we tend to think of philosophers, of mathematicians.
That's a kind of iconic picture of reasoning, etc.
But really, what we do, if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, that's not being... hyper rational like that and very rigorous is not the best way of winning arguments you know if you go in debating you know that debating you have tricks you know you're not here to find the truth you're here just to win your case and that's the way our mind works you know so when you debate with other people when you try to convince other people you're going to you know uh just put a nice angle a nice spin to what you say you're going to avoid going into areas where you think that you may be in trouble etc and we do it naturally right we don't need to necessarily to necessarily strategize we do it naturally often we're convinced that that's the right way uh that what we say is right right and that's the way our reason works is is to you know take Completely being self-serving for us to find the best way of convincing other people.
But we also need to convince ourselves, right?
This is where self-deception comes in too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So...
This idea that we self-deceive and that it works strategically to convince others is an idea put forward by Robert Trivers in the 70s.
The biologist Robert Trivers.
And the problem he describes is, okay, why do we self-deceive?
And we know that we self-deceive.
We know that we are overconfident.
People tend to think that they are smarter, more handsome, nicer than they are, than other people, etc.
You have a lot of data.
When you ask people, are you a good driver?
I think 90% of people say they are a better driver than average.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's just not possible.
I mean everybody.
If you ask college professors, you know I think 90 will say they are better professors than their colleagues.
So it's at every level, you know, you have this kind of thing.
So okay.
So why do we self-deceive and why do we have all these kind of flattering views about ourselves?
So one...
One possibility is that we just like it.
I like thinking I'm good, so I choose to shape my beliefs and to form beliefs that I'm better than I am, because I just enjoy this feeling.
The problem with this explanation is that there are costs of being overconfident, of having wrong beliefs.
So you know, if I think I'm stronger than I am, maybe I'm going to go into fights I shouldn't go into.
If I think I'm a better climber, I'm going to climb a mountain, which I shouldn't climb.
If I think I'm a better diver, I'm a better swimmer.
I'm going to dive into this river I shouldn't swim into.
So there are real risks.
So, you know, from an evolution point of view, if we are all overconfident, There must be a reason.
And it can't be in our mind because evolution doesn't select our mind to be happy.
You know, it selects us to be successful.
So if we all tend to be a bit overconfident, there must be, because there are costs, there must be benefits.
And the benefits.
Robert Truffaut says that because we all try to convince each other.
You know there is always a risk that if I kind of lie, if I blatantly lie when I try to talk to you, you'll find out.
And there are costs, you know.
I'm losing reputation, et cetera, et cetera.
And maybe, you know, also you find out that I'm not being honest.
So one way of limiting this cost or one way of not being found out is actually to believe my own stories.
You know, like, you know, poker players, when they play poker, they have their sunglasses.
Why do they have sunglasses?
Because they don't want to leak cues of their emotion, their feeling.
So maybe, instead of having sunglasses, one way to play poker if you want to bluff and be convincing is to really believe that when your game is not great, actually it's a great game.
So it's not possible in poker because it's just very obvious you see the game.
But in the game of life, your cause is not that clear.
And so if you start believing that the hand that you have is stronger than it is, you might actually be able to bluff in a way you bluff, but you believe your own bluff.
And that's convincing because you don't leak cues that you're bluffing.
What are some of the other ways that self-deception creeps in that people might not notice?
Some of the more subtle ways?
Some of the most subtle ways.
Um, I think you know, I remember when I because I worked on self-deception and I published papers on self-deception and I talked to a journalist and the journalist says, oh yes, some people self-deceive.
And I was like, no, this is not it.
We all self-deceive.
So, you know, it's the design.
By design, we are all doing that.
Is that you forget the truth.
Forget the, you know, we have the view that we view the world and we reason with the world.
No, we have to think that just, you know being always a bit self-serving.
If it works, if you can get a small advantage by believing your own stuff and you can push, you know, convince others that, you know you deserve a bigger share, you know you're not guilty of this, of that, et cetera, it's going to be beneficial.
So I think the key insight is that we really see the world with rose-tinted glasses.
And, you know, that explains a lot of things.
You have a lot of conflict in social situations where you hear well, there's always two sides of the story.
Well, why is there two sides of the story?
Well, there's two sides of the story, because everybody is seeing the story trying, you know, like a lawyer, trying to see the point which is favorable, maybe ignoring or don't playing the points which are not favorable.
And that's why you have two sides, because there is only one reality, right?
But there are always two sides, because we are not And we believe that all side is a real one right.
That's what we do.
So I think it's pervading.
So when you say all the subtle thing, I think it's everywhere.
You think about...
You know if you're in a couple and you think about how you negotiate, who does what.
You know how you split the chore in the household.
There's a lot of conflict.
And people think if you ask couples there's an interesting study and you ask couples what percentage of their housework you do.
And the sum is always higher than 100%. right?
So it's maybe that the woman says I do 80% and the man says I do 30%, right?
So I think it's everywhere.
I was thinking about you know, you've alluded to self-deception being people perhaps thinking that they are better than average, but better can appear in a lot of different ways that we might not see.
I have to assume that the desire to be seen as a victim is, even if you haven't been particularly victimized is a type of self-deception.
And this is to make yourself better, but that betterness is couched in terms of your moral position.
Oh, I am somebody who is more moral.
I am more deserving.
And that's...
That's you purposefully putting yourself down, right?
On the surface it's I've put myself lower as I've been victimized, but that is actually just a second order.
4D chess move to try and get yourself to morally be seen as somebody who is higher, somebody who is worthy of more.
Totally.
Yeah.
You know like uh, that's.
One fascinistic aspect with these social games is that uh, you know, they're really rich.
And so uh, how to sometimes victimize, like sometimes some of the rules of fairness means that if you are like um victimized uh, you know, if you have been uh uh, if you have suffered some penalties, either by some other people or by society, etc.
You can claim some retribution as a principle of fairness that we use.
And so, as a consequence, if these principles of retributions are commonly agreed, then it becomes potentially beneficial to be a victim.
Not necessarily to be actually a victim, but to be seen as a victim to benefit from that.
And...
And so self-deception here works as well.
But you could think obviously about people in the modern social spheres who think they have all problems of being victimized to claim kind of social recognition.
But even in the family you'll have like the kids, you know.
They say you know I'm the victim here.
My brother hit me, et cetera.
So they will ask for you to recognize a victim to be compensated.
So it's everywhere.
As soon as you have a rule which tells you that which we agree, which means that which is that if you have been, if you have suffered of something, you can be retributed.
In particular, if you have suffered from somebody who maybe you suffer can be retributed, you will have an interest potentially in being the victim in a different way.
Okay, so do you think that we're lying to ourselves more effectively than we lie to others?
Do you think we're better at self-deception than we are at other deception?
Well, I'm not sure who you would compare.
I think you lie to yourself not to have to lie to others.
I mean, you see, because when you lie to others, lying is risky.
Oh, that's such a... I already know exactly where you're going.
Yeah, the fact, The first thing, the fact that you have deceived yourself precludes the need for you usually to deceive others.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, you have...
You have a saying in Seinfeld where one of the protagonists says it's not a lie if you believe it right.
And so this is the thing.
If you want to convince others and if believing your own story is convincing and helps you convince others, then you don't have to lie.
And in a way, it's advantageous because lying is risky.
If I go out of my way and I say you know, this stuff which is white is black and you find out, well you know you'll be like I'm going to lose your trust.
Maybe you're not going to work with me anymore, et cetera, et cetera.
So, but if I...
So if I tell you, well, from what I see, it's black.
And you tell me, no, Lionel, it's not.
But I can say, oh, well, sorry.
That's what I looked at.
I looked at this information.
So that's what I believe.
So I kind of keep plausible deniability.
You know, it's harder for you to pinpoint that I really kind of purposely try to deceive you.
Yeah, it's not a lie if you believe it.
Okay, how much is the fear of losing your reputation the thing that keeps people trustworthy then?
You just mentioned there that recursive judgment of others this sense.
Well, how reliable is Lionel when he's taught?
Like, he got that thing wrong about that thing being white previously.
So is, I know that you know, and you know that I am going to keep track of you.
Is that the thing that keeps us trustworthy for the most part and almost hems in how much deception and self-deception we deploy?
I think it is, yeah.
You know, if you look at the kind of... You look at the fundamentals of cooperation between humans.
So humans, you know, I think you have to set out what characterizes humans is that we're not...
We're not like birds, like robins, where we have no interest in interacting with each other.
So robins, you know, they do their own stuff.
They don't talk to any other robin.
They find a mate once and that's it.
And we're not like ants.
Ants, they live.
You know, they're kind of almost clones because they share 75 of their genetic material.
So they are between siblings and clones.
So they kind of always agree naturally on what to do.
We are in this kind of in-between, which is complex, where we share.
We have a lot of interests in common, but we're also always a kind of part of conflict.
And so we have to negotiate this with each other.
And so, when you see that the key is, how do agents like us, who have somewhat aligned incentives, aligned interests, but not fully aligned interests, cooperate?
And what we can see is that one of the most insightful things from game theory is that once you repeat interactions, then you can really use the possibility of gaining from because we have some shared interests the possibility of gaining the future to police the interaction in the present.
So in the present you could always have a kind of an incentive not to be cooperative, because you know you can take benefits.
So you know I could lie today because yeah, if you trust me, you know I'm going to get an advantage.
But what you can see that if we have the prospect of interacting a lot, and then you...
If tomorrow, if we say that we agree to cooperate all the time.
But if I lie and if you find out I lied, you stop believing me in the future.
So there's a cost now.
The cost is that I lose this opportunity to cooperate with you in the future.
And when you extend this insight to the population well, you're a lot of people then the thing which polices us is this recall track, this recall that we have this reputation.
So the reputation is really This record that we have that all the people can check to see whether I did abide by the rules which ensure that cooperation is sustained.
And I think it's key.
You know, you say, is it a key thing?
I think this is a thing.
That is, this is the way it works.
That is, reputation is what makes us comply with the rules of cooperating now.
Because if we don't, then our record is tainted.
And then all those people will know that.
And as a consequence, they will not cooperate.
And then we have a cost.
We have the shadow of the future, which applies some pressure in the present.
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Yeah, so good.
Okay, so all of this, it presumably, is what makes human communication so complex, that it's not a simple task to try and do.
Yeah, you know what?
It's fascinating to, you know, communication comes to us very easily.
You know, we chat and we talk about things, et cetera.
Like, it seems normal.
But think about it.
Computers were able to beat Crunch's master, like, you know, 30 years ago, right?
Big Blue was in 1995, I think, beating Kasparov.
But it's only in the last two or three years that we get computers eventually able to speak like you and me.
Before, when you were talking to a computer, you felt it was artificial.
You felt that it was not very deep.
It was predictable, etc.
And not only with the new language models, you feel like you're able to speak.
You can still perceive the artificial nature of it sometimes, but it looks very natural.
So you needed 30 years of computer programming progress to reach this level.
It tells you how difficult communicating, talking like you and me, what we're doing now.
It's actually very complex, much more complex for a computer than playing chess at the level of Kasparov.
And the complexity is at several levels.
One thing you have to think about, what is communicating?
Communicating is when I say something, I am providing information, and information is me giving you something which is going to change your beliefs.
If I say something and it doesn't change in any way your beliefs, it's useless.
It's kind of boring.
So it's only if you have your beliefs and I provide something which is novel.
Change your beliefs that it is useful to you.
It could be, I could tell you, Chris, I've met this guy, he's very nice.
I could tell you what I tell you now about what I know.
I could talk to you about the weather or whatever, but I'm giving you something which is information.
Then, that's the basics.
Then if you want to look at how communication works, there would be plenty of ways we could do that.
There's plenty of things I could tell you.
I could give you information about you know I could talk to you about the dictionary, but I'm not talking to you about the dictionary now.
So What we do there's a linguist and psychologist, a cognitive scientist who have written a book about it is that we try to be relevant.
And relevant.
They define relevance as we try to provide the most information which is changing your beliefs in the most useful way to you, with the minimal cost for you to treat it.
So when I talk to you, I'm going to try to give you the most useful information to you, which are going to change your beliefs in a way that you find useful.
Well, at the same time, giving a message which is the least hard for you to process.
And you can see what is relevance when you violate it.
So what is violation of relevance?
Well, first, I could talk to you and give you information which is useless.
So, you know, I could talk to you about things you are not interested in.
You'd find me boring.
Or I could be talking in a way which is not easy for you to process.
I could speak very long and very technical.
And that would be, you know, and even if what I say is right and useful too.
But you know, I would not make it easy for you to access.
So this is a violation of relevance.
And what we do, we try to do that all the time.
This is amazing, you know, this principle of relevance.
It's not just when we talk about something technical.
It's every situation in our daily lives.
When we communicate, we very quickly communicate a lot of information in the minimal amount of words.
So I'll give you an example, for instance.
Suppose that John and Jane, they are thinking about what to do in the weekend and John says oh, what about going to play tennis?
And Jane says, I'm tired.
So now, if you think about it, Jane's answer is seems like if you're a robot, if you're a computer, you say you'd be like, wait a minute, like jane didn't say whether she wanted to or not to play tennis, she said she's tired.
So she seems like she's not sorry that you're tired, but can we get back to talking about tennis?
Yes, exactly.
And so how does it work?
So obviously, John is going to understand what she means, right?
But that she doesn't want to play tennis.
So how does John understand?
Well, John has done it first.
Jen is going to give the minimal amount of information, which is I'm tired.
Joan will say okay, we have an understanding, that's what Jane is doing.
So Joan will think okay, if Jane says that she's tired, it has to be relevant to what I was saying about tennis.
So it has to be relevant.
So why is it relevant?
Well, people being tired usually don't want to play tennis.
So she is indicating she doesn't want to play tennis with me.
That's why she said that.
But then, if you think about it, Jen has to anticipate that this is the way John is going to interpret her.
So she understands that John is going to expect her to say that because she thinks that he's going to understand.
So you have this kind of recursive mind reading.
I know that you're going to think that's what I want to say.
And when you start understanding that that you're putting your shoes into the other person, putting his shoes into yours, you realize okay, that's really really complex.
That's why computers... sound silly relative to us because they don't do that.
So they sound, you know, they sound a bit off.
Until the large language models, which are better now, but before they were sounding artificial, they were unable to do this kind of easy interaction where what is understanding each other is doing this kind of recursive mind reading.
Yeah, and I suppose...
The fact that it's taken so long and it you know the entire corpus of every written word and now even synthetic data that AIs are having to create fake new source data to retrain themselves on, 35 or 30 years after we were able to be beaten at chess.
It kind of explains.
So one question on that.
I keep on learning about the importance of coalition building, of communication, of solving social problems, of theory, of mind.
I need to be able to work out what John means when he asks Jane and what Jane meant with that.
And John and Jane were friends last week, but not this week.
You scale that up to a Dunbar number of 150.
Yeah, how likely do you think it is that human consciousness, like the sense, the phenomena of being a me, of having a sense that i am here, of being able to model your mind, reflect on my own, my own motivations, that kind of metacognitive process?
How much of that do you think is just a byproduct of us having to be able to navigate our way through complex social games and communication?
Well, I think you know there's this social brain hypothesis which is like why do we become so intelligent?
And that is dealing with social interactions.
And I think I think that's the key to understand why we are as intelligent as we are and why we think the way we do.
It's because of the fact that we have to deal with social interactions.
When you compare us to other apes, et cetera well, the big difference is the complexity of our social network.
So if you look at apes like chimpanzees, for instance, they have some coalitions like two, three, But we have very large coalitions.
You look at your Facebook, you have hundreds of people at work.
You may have dozens of people, et cetera.
And so navigating this is really, really complex.
I mean, I think one thing that everybody will understand is that when you play video games you see a big difference between playing versus a computer, versus playing with versus players.
You know, when you play with a computer, usually quickly, you learn that the computer has this kind of predictable way of doing so.
When you play Super Mario and you arrive at the bus, you know, first time you get smashed, but then after you say ah, when it throws a fireball, you hide yourself in the corner and then after you jump on it again and it works all the time right.
And then you have to expect that you have to anticipate their next move, knowing that themselves they try to anticipate your next move.
So what you have is that the complexity of playing with other people is way, way more difficult to solve as a problem than the complexity of playing with either objects or even low-awareness animals.
So this challenge that we face?
I think it has likely put a tremendous pressure on our cognition for us to be smarter.
And most of what we do kind of resolves around solving and being successful at his social problems.
Yeah.
Okay.
So what's the difference in strategies that we use when we're being cooperative than when we're being in conflict?
Because yeah, sure.
Self-deception, we're going to believe most of the things that we say that makes it easier to lie.
But we can't do that all the time.
We have to be more collaborative and more sort of honest and aligned with certain people and more adversarial and more in conflict with others.
So how does cooperation and conflict, how did those two things change?
How does the way that we show up change?
I think you know I think I tend to talk a lot here about self-decision and conflict, because often we kind of minimize it or don't talk about it as much.
But I think we should emphasize that in our social interactions cooperation, I mean, we should appreciate, how much cooperation there is.
Most of what we do in life, in society, right is, we abide by a lot of social rules, about conventions, about how to do things.
You know, you go out and you drive.
You're in the U.S., so you drive on the right side of the road, right?
I'm in Australia, so I drive on the left.
And, I mean, you're going to do that 100% of the time, right?
I mean, at least in the U.S.
Some other countries, it's random.
But if you do that, and everybody does that, so there is regularity, and this is cooperative.
It benefits everybody.
I mean...
Sometimes you know you could benefit from breaking a few rules, and some people do.
But if you go on the road, most people respect the rules.
And you can extend this insights to all the areas of your life.
You go at work and people do work.
They don't.
You know, most people don't embezzle the company and run away in another country with the money, etc.
So cooperation is really uh, we have to appreciate how much cooperation there is and we comply with rules most of the time and i think maybe one um image that you could have is that if you think about a football, soccer match or whatever sport you you prefer, there are rules and the rules are applied.
That is, people follow most of the time the rules, but at the same time, it would be it would be wrong to say that people really follow fully the rules.
Because, if you think about football, for instance, people pull your shirt, they try to go over the line without being just enough for the referee not to blow the whistle, etc.
So that's what we do in life.
There are rules and mostly we follow them.
We will have a tendency to do that.
And self-deception here is going to help us, because we can do that while convincing ourselves that we're not.
So if we are called up, it says, oh, I didn't do anything wrong.
I didn't know I was doing anything wrong.
So we are mostly cooperative.
But there is always a potential element of conflict which often we try to rationalize our behavior with self-deception, try to get some advantages from.
It seems to me that communication would never really be fully cooperative, that even the most cooperative team two-people team would always be ever so slightly in conflict.
Yeah, no, you're talking about...
Once again, I really stress the aspect of cooperation.
I think we need to appreciate how much cooperation there is in communication.
But at the same time, you're totally right.
We're not ants.
There was always an element of conflict.
Conflict is a big word, but it just means that we don't want the same thing.
It could be as much as You know.
Somebody wants to talk a long time and somebody else wants to talk less, right?
And there's a negotiation you have.
Like if you are with your uncle, who talks to you at a wedding forever and you want to do something else.
There's kind of a conflict here.
And so conflict is everywhere.
And I think it explains.
Once you appreciate that it explains a lot of the kind of things which seems weird or mysterious in communication.
For instance in his book um uh, You write about it in several books, but I don't remember the Maybe, the.
I think it's a book on language in 1994.
Steven Pinker talks about why we use... I think it's the food for food books, a more recent book.
Why we use indirect speech, which is we use ambiguous statements or in windows.
For instance, when you're on a date.
At the end of a date you might say you know, do you want to go up and have a drink, right?
You don't want to say something more explicit.
So the question is, why do you do that?
Because when you said you want to go up to have a drink, it's pretty clear what was involved, but you're not going to say you know.
So he gives an example about...
You know somebody trying to bribe a policeman and say oh, you know, I would like for us to find a way to solve it here.
And he gives his wallet and there's a bill sticking out of the wallet.
So he's not saying, do you want $50?
And, you know, let me go.
No.
It says something ambiguous.
And ambiguity is everywhere.
So for instance, you know, when there's conflict in the office, usually it's not open.
People are going to drop hints that they're not happy with you, right?
They can be passive aggressive.
They're not going to say, you know, I'm not happy because of that.
So why do we not say things clearly and explicitly?
Well, it's because of this conflict element.
Because if there's a conflict, by not saying something I can in a way convey the message without keeping plausible deniability if things go wrong.
Okay, so if I say, for instance, do you want to go have a drink?
And my date says no, I can pretend that I was just going to, you know, invite for a drink.
So we can play the game where we pretend that nothing more was involved.
If I tell the policeman, I would like, could we solve this here?
And I don't offer a clear bribe, the policeman may not be able to have a case to put me in jail, you know, as an attempt for bribery.
And in the office, if there is a conflict and I get angry and says, you know, what are you implying?
I say, I'm not implying anything.
So you keep plausible deniability.
And so this is why our communication is so rich, because often we don't say what we mean, but we convey it indirectly.
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I was listening to Rob Henderson talk to Louise Perry about the Sydney Sweeney advert.
Oh yeah, about the jeans?
Yeah, did this ad for American Eagle and everybody got upset about it.
And what was interesting was The way that women sort of criticized Sydney Sweeney was not the way that if you were a robot you would probably predict?
It wasn't she is being is sexually overt and has big boobs and is a potential intrasexual rival for some other high value partner that I would like to get with.
And she is going to set an unrealistic standard of beauty that is going to be difficult for us all.
No, no, no, no.
It was none of that.
It was all couched in moral terms.
It was she's pushing eugenics.
She once attended a Trump rally.
Her family is like Central Southern American flag waving truck, driving country music listening Hicks.
And it was at no point. was the actual thing that was the issue being pointed at.
It was all, she's a bad person.
And I said that me and Rob were at dinner last night singing your praises.
By the way, we've managed to get 35 minutes in and I haven't plugged your sub stack.
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The interesting thing, women have a failure of a theory of mind, cross-sex mind reading failure.
Here, I think.
They think that by derogating Sidney Sweeney's morality, other men will think well, that's a beauty standard that is unreasonable.
She's a bad person.
Given that she's a bad person, I should not find her attractive.
Now, maybe it's some intersexual competition that they think.
If men see that lots of other women do not consider Sydney Sweeney to be a good person, they might not be attracted to them.
I'm going to just lay it out for the women that are listening.
That's not true.
Men are not going to not find Sydney Sweeney attractive just because other women don't find her a good person.
However...
If you are Leonardo DiCaprio and lots of other similarly valued men, if Keanu Reeves and Hugh Grant and Jared Leto and a bunch of other Hollywood A-listers were to say I know that you fancy Leonardo DiCaprio, but he's a bad man.
He's morally unjust.
I do think that that would impact women's assessment of this.
It's sort of male competition theory that men's judgment of other men is kind of a big mediator of how women find that man to be attractive.
This is David Putz's stuff.
I just thought it was really interesting.
You know, when you're talking about ambiguity deniability, you have this first level, which is it's not about her looks.
It's about eugenics.
It's about being right of center.
It's about not caring about normal people, et cetera, et cetera.
And then the reverse wouldn't be true.
I just thought that was a really interesting setup.
But I might be totally wrong.
It's a fresh theory, okay?
No, I get the idea of intersexual competition.
And there are psychological research showing that.
I don't remember the details, but I've seen papers where When you put a beautiful woman, she's more likely to get criticized or to be the target of gossip, etc.
And that kind of makes sense.
I mean, not because... I want to be clear that it's not because women are bad.
It's like, you know, men have all the problems and all the type of competitions.
It's just intrasexual competitions on both sides.
In the case of Sweeney, I could definitely see how these kind of players rule because, yeah.
I think also... because of what you said.
I think also in the case of the ad which I saw, I guess it breaks a bit of the codes, the political codes.
And in the US at the moment.
You know, for the last year it was very big about, you know, gender roles, et cetera.
It's kind of, it says, well, there's two things.
First, it's overtly kind of sexualizing the body of a woman.
And two, it's talking about genes, which is about biology.
And I think these two things it's kind of, you know, hurts the kind of political ideological setup on part of the US, in particular on the left.
So I can see how That could trigger this kind of reaction.
I don't know anything about Sydney, Sweden, or the political allegiance or whatever.
But I could see how people would react like, as you said, a coalition.
If you perceive it as being from the out group, against your group, and then people get very mean.
And that can also blend, as you say, with intrasexual competition.
But I could see how you're trying to dig something on her. on the family, whatever.
That's the collisional mindset.
The other ambiguity innuendo, plausible deniability thing like.
The perfect example of this, I think, is venting.
So some of the great research done around venting.
Again, this isn't for me to lay it at the feet of women.
Guys have, like, intersexual competition between men and women.
But women are a bit more interesting around this.
They're just more complex when it comes to that more complex yeah, in intersexual competition games and the way that they communicate and so on and so forth.
But venting is so fucking fascinating, dude like i.
I just find it's maybe the most interesting style of of human communication.
Um yeah, i'm talking to you, i'm christine, you're lisa, and we're talking about our friend, roberta.
And i say i'm so worried about roberta lisa, she's just sleeping with all of these guys and i'm really worried that she's gonna get her heart broken.
And you know, i keep trying to warn her about it, but she, she just doesn't.
She doesn't seem to listen to me.
And okay, like on the surface i'm being a good person, i'm being cooperative, i'm caring, i'm being compassionate for my friend, But under the surface, what I'm doing is talking totally openly about Roberta's sexual exploits.
I'm implicitly putting myself on a high moral pedestal by saying, I would never.
That is not part of me.
And it's all couched in if Roberta ever finds out that I told you I'm like Roberto, I'm just so worried about you.
I didn't, you know, this is, I care.
So good.
So I think I can give you the reason why you have this difference between men and women.
And basically the key difference is Our network of friends.
How our network of friends work.
You know you have a lot of friends and one friend you cannot talk to for two years and when you see him back say hey mate, how's it going?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's because... Well, that's one man.
I'll tell you maybe because afterwards.
And women, they have tighter networks.
Small networks, a few friends, and a lot of investment.
They talk a lot.
They invest a lot.
And so there is also gossiping, which you are talking about, because you manage reputation.
You want to learn about reputation.
You manage your own reputation.
So friendship for women is much more intense in terms of the investment in each particular friendship partnership.
And I think the reason for that is that men and women had to solve different problems in our ancestral times.
So when you read a fascinating book by evolutionary psychologist Sarah Hudry on mothers in ancestral times, one thing that is that it's very hard to raise kids.
You know, now you've got, you get the kid at the hospital and then you've got the nurse.
And then after you go to the kindergarten, you know, and drop the kid at the kindergarten super easy.
But okay, ancestors, they didn't have that.
And, you know, you need to collect food.
There's no supermarket to find the food.
And you need to collect food with this stuff, which is just sucking the energy out of you.
And so the survival of children likely was much higher when you got help.
So there's a lot of what we call alloparenting.
That is, a mother gets help from her family, in particular from her mother, but also from other mothers.
Sometimes, you know, other mothers helping to breastfeed your kid when you can't.
And so you know, for that you need, if you want to give your kid to other women, you need a lot of trust, because the kid is a huge stake, right?
So you want very strong bonds with a few people who give you a lot of help.
So that you know you can't ask Somebody who you barely know to take your kid and breastfeed your kid right.
So this is small network, tight bonds.
Men, on the contrary, most likely, you know, they didn't have this problem.
They were engaged more in kind of occasional collective work, occasional warfare, occasional hunting, which is in big groups.
And in this case, the defection of one person is bad, but not as dramatic.
You know, if this woman drops your kid on the ground, that's terrible.
If this guy doesn't show up for the hunt, he's a bad guy, but you know you're not going to die for that.
And so I think that's why we have these kind of men friendships are much lower maintenance right than female friendship.
But I think it's natural.
It's kind of a reflection of the kind of different social problems we had to solve.
Ancestors had to solve.
Well, I think the way that men...
The way that men and women compete, you know, overt versus covert.
I think the blast radius as well of male success versus female success.
People would assume, I think, that guys are more...
More competitive in a way because the status games are more overt.
You can see how this works.
But I use this example of Lionel Messi.
So if you are the reserve gold goalkeeper on the team that Lionel Messi plays for.
Mm-hmm.
You might think, well, I mean, I am so far in the shadow of them.
I'm not even the guy that is in the goal, while the other guy that's the superstar, is at the other end scoring in the opposition's goal.
But the sort of blast radius of goodwill of you being attached to Lionel Messi is so great.
In the same way as here's a hunting party of eight me, you and six of our friends that go, and you're the one that's really fast, and Robert's the one that's really strong, and another one's the one that's really great at creating a spear.
And I'm like, I'm the second best carrier or something.
And I'm like.
Well, I'm not exactly the top guy, but the fact that I'm associated with this coalition of men kind of raises me up in the standing overall.
The blast radius seems to be wide.
I'm not convinced that the same thing is true for women.
I'm not convinced that a single successful woman who is in your coalition has the same kind of blast radius.
Nope.
Look yeah, I don't know okay, I don't know work about that, but if you think at a kind of anecdotal level, it seems to me and I think there is research on that, but I don't know any specific but you know that you see that in movies that you have these girl, the groups of the cute girls, hang together.
You know they are like and so you want you would wonder if it was, you know, if there was too much competition from being close to the top girl, why would you want to be together?
You'd want to to be separate.
So i think um, i'm not sure, i really i'm not sure.
Yeah okay, so that's why ambiguity and innuendo is useful, because plausible deniability is, In particular, plausible deniability.
A thing that Pinker says is when you negotiate the relationships you know like, for instance, when you're dating, you negotiate the relationship, whether you want to change from friendship to more than friendship.
And so you want to keep your options open in case it doesn't work out.
When you are with a policeman, you negotiate the relationship whether you're in the law or outside of the law right.
So you want to keep your options open.
So when you negotiate relationships in particular, you want to keep plausible deniability.
One thing in Steven Pinker's book I love is he references the movie Harry when Harry met Sally.
So for your young listeners, it's an old movie from the 90s.
And Harry.
Basically he meets Sally and he sees a friend of his current girlfriend and he hits on her.
I think he says you're very attractive.
And she calls him out.
She said, how could you hit on me while you're my friend?
And he said, oh, I didn't hit on you.
He says, oh, well, maybe I did.
And so what?
You know, I take it back.
And she said, you can't take it back.
It's out there.
And it's out there, because now the difference is that if it's not ambiguous, once he has knowledge that he has done it, once he admits that he has done it, Then it's in the open.
He can't anymore pretend he has not done it because now everybody knows.
She knows that he did it.
He knows that she knows, etc.
So, you know, this is common knowledge.
And so you want typically to avoid this.
This is risky common knowledge.
You know, an open overture is risky.
So being ambiguous helps prevent this kind of thing.
Okay.
So could we look at ambiguity as sort of a communication style, a type of deception that we've sort of normalized?
I'm not sure if it's a kind of deception, it's kind of.
You know it's, it's one of these rich aspects of communication, that is, i can say something.
You know, i i talked before about recursive mind reading.
You can think of recursive mind reading as we have different levels of beliefs.
So one of the beliefs is you know, you might believe, i might believe what, that you, you something.
Then you might believe that i have this belief.
So, for instance, like maybe let's say um, we are talking about where to go on holiday and i want to go in brazil, and so that's a fact.
You might think oh, lionel wants to go in brazil, so you have a belief on me.
And then i can say oh trisk, believe that i want to go to brazil.
I have a belief on your belief.
And you can climb this chain of beliefs right and it gets obviously very easily complicated, complicated.
And then now what you can do is, when you say, ambiguous thing is that you can say something which are going to change the first sort of beliefs but keeps ambiguity at the higher levels.
So if I'm passive aggressive, for instance, I might let you to think that I'm annoyed at you, but you're not sure that I know, that you know, etc.
So we keep the ambiguity on the top.
But I can still manage to let you know I'm not happy.
But then now, do you know that I know that you know that I'm not happy?
Maybe not.
You see?
And so, so when you tell me, are you unhappy?
I can say, no, I can't.
No, you thought I was unhappy?
No, I was not unhappy.
What's paltering?
I'd never heard of that term before.
Yeah.
Paltering is another interesting concept.
There was a paper published a few years ago on this.
Uh, It's one aspect of this rich aspect of communication, because we work with this Communication works with us trying to be always relevant.
You can actually manipulate that to say something and use the fact that people are going to interpret it.
So you can say something...
You expect he's going to interpret it in your favor, but actually you're inducing people in error.
So I'll give you an example, which I wrote in the post.
Suppose Jane and Jack are a couple and Jane says, I'm going to do a cake for your birthday.
And then the last minute, she doesn't have enough time.
So she goes to the bakery and she brings a cake.
And Jack says, oh, what a great cake.
And she says, oh, thank you.
Well, what does she say when she says thank you?
She must know that Jack, because of his information, assumed she did it.
So when she says thank you, she just implies that she did the cake, okay?
So this is paltering because saying thank you for what a great cake is not a lie, right?
But paltering is saying something true Thank you is you know she's not lying, saying thank you, but which is inducing the other person in mistake, in error, right.
Now she's leading Jake to believe that she did the cake by saying thank you.
So paltering is this.
You can actually deceive people by saying the truth in other news.
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That's interesting.
Yeah, I uh.
It's so funny man, when you think about the complexity and how it's not the first order thing.
It's not the second order thing.
It's five levels down.
It kind of becomes easier to work out why chess is actually a simpler game than just having a conversation and fully understanding what it is that a human means.
Yeah, exactly.
This is exactly that.
Because you know a computer, you're playing chess in a kind of much larger, much more complex strategic space.
A computer would have to form a belief about, you know, the world, form a belief about your beliefs.
And now having a model of you running the same stuff.
So he needs to have a model and then a model of you running the same model.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Yes, yeah.
Well, that's what I clunkily tried to explain about my consciousness theory of mind thing that in order for me to be able to understand what you're thinking, we both need to have a theory of mind.
Because if we were just automaton, we would be predicting each other, which I don't think allows enough with the level of complexity that we've got.
Like motivation reason conflict cooperation, all of these things start to fit in.
And, you know, exactly.
And, you know, in a way, the way the computer programming solved the problem is kind of cheating.
This thing of what is LLM?
What are the large language models?
Just large language models have been trained on human production.
So in a way the computers really never started solving cracking the code of communication from scratch.
They just modeled it.
Yeah, they just imitate.
So they're like all the humans talking.
And you can think about when you ask a question to chat GPT.
It's trying to find the best answer using all the corpus of human discussion and matching.
It's not exactly what it's doing, but you could think of it as trying to find the kind of interactions, the kind of answer that humans have produced in this kind of setup.
So it's more like an imitator It's doing more than that, actually.
But really, it's using the corpus of humans as a primary source to do what it does.
So it's not like the chess computers.
The chess computers.
They put a rule of chess and they put some algorithms to estimate the values of positions in the future, and then they use brute force to be able to compute 10, 20 positions ahead.
That's not what the LLM does.
It doesn't start from scratch.
It uses the human language or ability to communicate to try to imitate it.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Yeah, which is not the same, right?
No, it's not the same.
It's the equivalent of a P-zombie type scenario.
It is.
And you can see, once you understand what communication is.
As I said, you can see where LLM still fails.
For instance, one thing that you have with ChatGPT is it is very psychophantic.
It's always telling you you're great.
Yes, yes, yes.
And also, it never says, oh, that's a good question.
I'm not sure.
I don't know.
Dude, one time out of ten, nine times out of ten, it usually is sycophantic but accurate.
And one time out of ten, it is completely confident and absolutely wrong.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So if you ask me a question because I'm trying to be relevant, I don't want to give you a wrong answer.
So I will try to assess the quality of my information relative to the information you already have.
I'm already going to tell you something.
If I think I know something that you don't, that is useful to you.
If I don't, I say, well, I'm not sure I know, you know, I have anything to say on this.
But the chart GPT is not designed for that.
It's designed to predict the kind of you know answer uh word afterwards uh, that would be in a conversation and so it doesn't have this mind reading ability.
It doesn't go and say oh chris, you ask this question.
Actually, you shouldn't ask this question.
That's the wrong question, the real question you want, because i know what you want, you want, you have this problem.
You ask this question.
You should have asked this other question.
This is the answer.
That's what humans do.
Okay uh, but charge.
If it can do that, In what other ways?
You mentioned seduction earlier on.
Would you like to come upstairs for a drink?
What other ways is seduction a communication game?
Well, you know it's it's, it's.
Seduction is really.
You have.
I was talking about, like the negotiation of, uh uh, the relationship, like the relationship stages friend or not friend.
It's all about that, right?
So, so you have, uh, I mean, nowadays actually it's interesting because things have changed a bit.
Um with uh, the online dating you remove a lot of ambiguity about the status of what you're doing.
You know, in the past, when you meet in a bar, when you meet with friends uh, initially your friends and then There's a kind of step-by-step.
You break the ambiguity step-by-step.
So you say something which is a bit nicer or a bit warmer than you would with anybody else, and you see how the other person reacts.
And the other person either doesn't react, and so maybe you don't go further, or maybe the other person reacts, and then you can continue.
And that's the way the ambiguity is progressively, by these small steps, which are safer, progressively reduced until the point where you're There's not much ambiguity remaining that you can break it.
So that's the old style.
And I guess this is still happening.
But the thing is that with modern dating, because you have online dating, you start from the kind of more openly explicit point of view that we're here to consider whether we are a possible match.
Which, for my generation, must be a bit strange.
But yeah, that's the way it works.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I guess...
This shows just how important coalitions and social connection is to humans.
It's fundamental.
It is fundamental.
You know, for several levels.
I mean, at a deep level, if you look at the past, I mean, our ancestors were not living...
It was not like total anarchy, but it was not super peaceful.
There's a lot of evidence of, there's a lot of people dying from violent death.
And usually even within a community, the violent death comes at the head of other people from the community.
Like basically you imagine, you know, you piss off half the tribe.
One day you don't wake up.
They come during the night and they deal with you.
And that happens a lot.
Which means that when you think about it, then internal politics is key.
When you want to be with a strong group of friends, your reputation matters, you don't want to feel that you are the outside, etc.
And all psychology is really tuned to do that.
That is, to track where are the groups, in which group I am, what is my standing in the group, are people happy with me, etc.
And When we fail, when we kind of, you know, fall down in reputation and when people are pissed off at us, etc.
This can be very anxiety-inducing, because we are really social spaces.
And so, you know, if... Why do...
Getting you know when our friends, if our friends are not happy with us, that really can really upset us, because that's really we feel oh, I'm losing, I'm not in this group anymore.
And you have social experiments, very simple social experiments.
When you have like somebody, there are people throwing the balls and they throw the ball at you and you throw the ball at others.
It's on computer.
So two people throw the ball at each other, and sometimes they throw the ball at you and you throw the ball back at them.
And what they do is that after a while, they get the two other people to stop throwing the ball at you.
It's a mean experiment.
And what they found out is that this very simple experiment kind of induced anxiety in the respondent.
Because it's a game.
It's like, why are they not sending the ball to me?
You get excluded.
It's a very simple game.
So the feeling of exclusion and the monitoring about where we stand in which group is something which is very deep in our psychology.
Yeah, so I guess the thing that's interesting or that I can't work out is why it is that people feel in tension socially.
Why it is that there's a friction between autonomy and connection.
So if it's just that coalitions are really important, social connection is lifeblood to humans, but we also want this degree of independence.
I suppose that goes back to what you said.
We're not quite ants, but we're not quite robins and we're in this sort of messy middle zone and even us.
Do you want to be?
How many times have you somebody asked your partner uh, do you want to?
Do you want to talk, or do you want to be on your own?
I don't know.
It's like they actually don't know.
I kind of want to talk, but I kind of need to sort this out on my own.
Do you need a hand?
I want to have autonomy.
I want to have independence, but I also want to be able to rely on people.
I want to be able to open up.
There's a friction between autonomy and connection, which is difficult to navigate.
Yeah, it's a good point.
I've not talked about this before you asked the question, but I guess the way I feel it is that when you ask for autonomy, it's kind of a more superficial level that I want autonomy now.
I want sometimes something now.
But the belonging to the group is kind of for good, right?
So I want to feel that I belong, that I'm safely in a group, that tomorrow, if I come back, they will be the group.
Now, if tomorrow, yeah, today, maybe, you know, I want to be a bit on my own.
And because, as you say, we're not ants, so I don't want to.
You know always my life to be always shaped by anything from the group.
But I think there is this kind of.
The primary thing is that I want to feel confident that I'm part of the group.
And if this is getting threatened or if I'm worried that it's threatened, I'm going to be stressed about it.
Okay.
Well, what does coalition psychology tell us about our anxiety to belong then?
We need, we can't bear to be left out if we feel like the group is pulling away from us.
How does coalitional psychology sort of tie in with that need to belong?
Well, I think it explains why we have this need to be.
So I said, you know, I gave you the kind of extreme version about why we need coalition, not to be picked up and not to be at risk in ancient times.
But really, coalitions are useful for plenty of things.
In the case, for instance, of mothers you know being with a tight group of other mothers it helps provide support and insurance.
If you're in a big group, you can do things that you could not do, like moving house.
You move sofas, et cetera.
You can do it on your own.
So coalitions are useful for plenty of things.
And I think our coalitional psychology is that we always care about being in a group.
We care about two things.
We care about being in a group or standing in the group.
Or standing is how other people see us in the group.
And, you know, when you unpack a group, there's always an internal hierarchy.
So it's not like... it's like a fractal.
If you think of a fractal, you know, it's a kind of Russian dolls.
You know, you open a Russian doll, there's an old Russian doll.
So a coalition is like that.
So you have a group of friends and from the outside, it's like, oh, these are the group of friends.
Okay, but you go inside and actually in the group of friends there's kind of an inner circle, an outer circle.
One thing you can see very quickly, very nicely, very interestingly I think, is the game show Survivor.
So you watch the game show Survivor.
Officially, it's a game show on surviving in the jungle.
But actually, most of it is not.
Most of it is a collisional game, because you have a group and they tell you at the end of the day, you'll have to eliminate one of you.
And so it's kind of... run on the anxiety of being excluded massively.
So you know they are in the group and they know that at the end of the day one of them is going to be out.
And what's very interesting in the show is that right away you see that there's an inner hierarchy.
People say, oh, I'm safe.
I'm in the top three.
There's a top three in the group.
How do you know what's the top three, right?
And so there's a top three and there's the loose two and there's the bottom two, for instance.
And so the bottom two, they know that they are on the chopping block.
So, you know, we have this psychology.
We quickly go in a group and we feel oh, in this single group there's this guy.
They're a tight bond, they're respected by others.
They're unmovable.
They're part of the group.
But me, I'm in between.
I'm not sure.
Maybe they could live their life without me, right?
And so if you're like that, you're stressed, et cetera.
So this is the way our psychology is shaped.
We really care about these things, and that drives a lot of what we do.
Well, surely you can't have a flimsy coalition.
One of the things that you need is commitment.
So what are the ways that coalitions test loyalty?
So, I mean, you're dead right.
When you know a key challenge for coalitions is the.
You need loyalty, you need the commitment that people are going to work for the coalition.
You know, if you're on a football team, you need the confidence that everybody's going to put you know to work their best to try to win the match.
If you're in an army platoon, you need your confidence that you know people will have your back when you run towards the military, the front line, et cetera.
So what you have is that here we have a problem in game theory.
It's a problem of that you have two potential situations.
One situation where people trust each other and all go and work for the group.
Okay.
So the football team gives us a hundred percent and the army platoon all run in the same direction, at the same time.
Hmm.
And you have the other situations where, if I don't trust that you and others will do that, why would I do that?
So maybe I don't.
I don't run, and you don't believe, you don't trust that people will run, so we are ineffective.
So it's also a possibility.
And to move us from the situation where an ineffective group to the situation where we run as a unit, We need the confidence each other, the shared confidence that we believe that we think we're a unit and we work as a unit.
And how do you get that?
You get that with social identity.
So the groups work like they have this kind of bond, this feeling that we are a team.
And I know we're a team.
I know you know we're a team.
We share the team's logo.
We share the team hat, the team T-shirt.
We share the team song before the match, et cetera.
And so...
And that explains a lot, again, about human psychology.
We think things which are described as irrational, like you've got the football supporters spend a lot of money on the signs for their football team.
They sing during the match.
Sometimes they sing during the match.
They don't even watch the match.
And you think, that's a bit surprising.
But that's because psychology gives a lot of weight on caring about signs of loyalty, displaying signs of loyalty because being seen as a good group member, being trusted as a good group member, you want to signal, you want to tell everybody hey, you know guy, I'm a part of your team and you know I'm clearly, I'm not going to defect anytime.
So this explains a lot of what we do.
We always want to show and we're worried about signs that people could think oh, maybe they will think I'm disloyal, you know I'm not, et cetera.
So we care about that a lot.
Yeah, I had it in my head, this idea around, especially during sort of 2020, when the purest beliefs you needed to adopt your entire ideology, wholesale that what people were doing with some of the more extreme political beliefs that people were being asked to raise a hand in support of, was that it was less about.
We think that this particular new policy is something which is really effective and more.
This is a test of fealty.
It's like yeah, are you prepared to put reason to decide?
And actually, in that way, the more ridiculous the political belief, the stronger the show of your loyalty to the group, because you've had to suspend even more of your reason and your rationality in order to Does that make sense?
No, that totally makes sense.
Actually, it more than makes sense.
There are people writing on this.
You can think that Beliefs is what's in your head.
So it's, you know, whether beliefs, I believe yes, but at least signs of claims that you hold the beliefs of the group, they are important to signal loyalty.
And I think you're totally right that you know within the group there's a competition to.
There's also kind of competition to look good within the group.
So one thing that you could have in particular in political group and you can see that, you know, it's not just on the left, on the left, on the right, you see it in different ways is that if I want to claim which is a bit more extreme, which is a border of you know, I may tread off a bit of credibility.
That is, I say something which is extreme or maybe the factual evidence is not super strong.
But I show to my group that I care so much about.
You know the message of my group that I'm willing to say something, which is which is that, instead of if, on the contrary, I'm like oh, you know, I'm not sure.
On one hand, on the other hand, people think, like Lionel is not reliable in one of the groups, he has some doubts yes yeah well, so you have as a consequence the fact that this can give kind of a premium to exaggerations right at the margin, because there's this kind of competition for people to.
I am even more committed.
Look at how committed I am.
Oh, you only hold that version of the belief?
Allow me to show you how much reality I'll suspend in service of this thing.
This kind of explains almost all of political polarization as far as I can see.
As soon as you see most of the political polarization as being one of two things.
First is algorithms online can get you to click on stuff in one of two ways.
The first way is to become better at predicting what you will click on.
And the second is nudging your preferences to make you more predictable and more easy to work out.
So algorithms work in two ways.
It's not just becoming better at reverse engineering what Lionel wants.
It's making Lionel more predictable so that my algo works better.
So this naturally pushes people out to the edges, because if you're in the middle, you go left on one thing, you go right on the next thing, you go right on the one after that and left on the one after that.
It's like, no, if you just push people out to the edges, that's more predictable.
So that's the first thing.
But the second thing is as soon as you realize that If you don't adhere to your coalition's beliefs on this thing, you pay probably more than two costs, but you pay two very high costs.
The first one is you are seen by your own side as an unreliable ally.
Well, Lionel was with us on immigration, but he wasn't with us on gun rights.
So what do we think is going to happen when the school reform comes in, or the taxation change, or what's going to happen with socialized health care?
We need to keep an eye on him.
We're going to ostracize him a little bit.
He's not going to be part of the inner sanctum.
So that's the first cost that you pay on that.
But on the other side, the opposition sees you as having flawed thinking, as not being committed to the cause, as not being actually that much of a steadfast.
They can see the gaps in your coalition and they can see that you were a weak part of that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I agree.
So I think what you have is that in every, in any kind of political situation, political system, you have different competing incentives.
One.
You have the loyalty coalitional incentives which drive polarization, which is I care about being seen in my groups.
And then you have the reputational credibility incentives which are present in communication games, right?
So these are the stuff where, if I tell you something, if I'm not diligent in the information I provide to you, if I'm putting forward claims that you find out are false, et cetera, I'm going to lose credibility.
Then now the question is, what do people care more about?
In a good situation, in the public sphere... people care more about the credibility so you know yes you have loyalties to your coalition but nonetheless you don't want to say crackpot theories you know because you worry that you know you're going to lose your credibility I think the problem when it gets very polarized is that then you you know the coalitional instances re-trump everything so now saying something which is false but is in favor of your coalition then doesn't you don't have much cost anymore and Something I think that has happened over the recent years, and maybe it's in part because of social media, but I think it's more than that, is that the kind of mainstream institutions which were kind of holding in check speech and the credibility of what is said, if you think about the mainstream media or the scientists, universities, etc., they have lost their trust from the people and their ability to and force this kind of credibility cost.
And so the consequence in the political now, in the political party in the US, in the political arena, it doesn't cost much to say something which is wrong if you said it, if you were within your coalition, because there's no sanction right.
So if something is wrong, it doesn't work.
You drop it and you can say something else and you can move on.
So this sounds a lot like politics.
Right, I'm aware that we're talking about coalitions, but even the process of politics, not just the coalitions of the groups of people, the sports teams, the religious groups, whatever is it.
Is it better, do you think, to understand democracy as a coalition game than a truth-seeking exercise?
Yeah, totally.
So I wrote about it, and I think it's key to understand what democracy is.
So I'm not sure.
Maybe people have different views of democracy, but when I heard or looked at democracy initially when I was younger, You know you hear a lot about the ideal of democracy Greece.
The Greeks, they had the agora, which is this public space.
People meet and discuss and make collective decisions.
And in a way, this is often used as an ideal and you judge the modern democracy relative to it.
So for instance, like we think, oh, that was direct democracy.
So the real democracy is direct democracy.
You have an assembly and they decide together.
Now what we have in modern democracy, we have representative democracy.
So you vote for people, and in the parliament or in the presidencies, they decide, right?
So often this is seen as a kind of compromise, which is an imperfect compromise, because the real ideal democratic stuff is the agora.
And then what we think that people do in this public sphere, the agora, is that they try to find the right solution for the city, the right solution for the society.
But I think that that is mistaken, because...
Once you understand that what we have is that with people with imperfectly aligned incentives.
They are in groups, groups who have, who have gathered these people who have similar incentives and similar interests, and with opposite interests.
What the key of politics is?
Not finding the truth.
Most often it's finding ways to finding compromise between the different coalitions.
How you split the gains from cooperation.
So we cooperate in society.
We create wealth because there's no crime, because there's no war, because there's laws and you know companies work, etc.
How do you split the gains from huge taxation and very limited inequality funds to very limited taxation and large inequalities?
And it's not just that.
It's like, should we say that some professions deserve more because it's harder, for instance?
You have all these questions you can think of.
And that's the debate of politics.
And what you have is that coalitions...
Lack is something which is in politics, but it's also in everyday life.
When you negotiate about bargaining.
Bargaining is present always in all interactions, even in a household, for instance.
You don't usually bargain in a raw and uncouth way.
You don't say, I want more.
You don't go to your boss and say, I want a raise.
I want 20%.
And why?
Because that's what I want.
No, you don't say it.
I really feel like I'm contributing a lot to this project.
I've worked very hard.
I think that the team is being carried forward by me.
The future growth of the business really depends on me.
Yeah, so what you do is that you're using principles, typically of fairness.
You say, well, that's fair because of my contribution.
I deserve more, right?
I've been here for a long time.
I've experienced all that.
I deserve more.
And so what we use, we engage in what the game theorists can be more called the game of morals.
So there's a game of life, but instead of fighting and bargaining like if we were haggling on a street market every day, We haggle on principles in the game of morals.
And these principles you can think of as kind of general ways to solve all the kind of particular bargaining problems we face in our everyday life.
So, instead of bargaining in every situation like, let's say, in your household, instead of every night haggling on who is going to do the dishwashing, You bargain on general principles, and these principles then solve all the individual situations.
So that's why our discussions are about fairness agreements, about principles, and that actually solves the problem.
So what you see in politics is that coalitions like political parties et cetera, they put forward ideological platforms.
And these ideological platforms.
They're actually this kind of proposals to change the principles of fairness which are, at the moment, the compromise in society.
So they're handling in the game of morals to change the social contract which holds all the agreed principles of fairness we use in society, to tilt how you bargain and who gets what in practical situations.
That's what politics is.
So it's not that people are ideally just ideas which comes from nowhere, because they tend to reflect the interests of the coalitions.
But at the same time, these ideas, these principles, they have to be kind of consistent.
They have to be rigorous.
They can't be incoherent.
Otherwise, they can't work and make a case.
And they couldn't be too self-serving either, because it would be flagrant about what it is that people are doing.
Yeah.
So if there were two selves, you know, if everything that you do when you put forward principles is just to be self-serving, then people will know that there is no point listening to what you say, because you know there is no information in your principle.
The principle.
In a way it's like you know.
Another example is like, let's say, you start playing a game.
You want to agree on rules.
Okay.
If, when you propose to a rule for the game I know that you always propose the rules which advantage you.
I'm going to stop listening to you.
So we need to propose the rules, which can be an agreement where we think okay, we're not sure, you know, tomorrow the rules might be against you.
And I know that you're going to abide by the rules.
So that's yeah.
You lose credibility if you always just find the principle today which advantage you and contradict what you were saying yesterday.
What is a political ideology through this lens then?
Because with that perspective it doesn't exactly feel like.
Democracy is a system where people deliberate to find the common good.
What is political ideology?
Yeah, so I don't... I mean, when you say people...
They don't debate to find the common good.
I think it's true.
There is no common good.
Because we are individuals, we have... some converging interest, but not totally identical interest.
And so there is not one single common good.
Let's say that, even if you tell me.
Let's say we agree that climate change is important and we need to build windmills.
Okay, do we put them in front of your house or in front of my house?
So yes, there are good solutions.
Some solutions are better than others, but there are always aspects of bargaining.
And so the key is to find an agreement which is going to be sustainable.
You know, we find something which is not always lead people to try to renegotiate it, people to complain, et cetera.
So we need to find, we need to find.
When I say we need to, what works is finding agreement that people are willing to live with, right?
That's what it is.
So ideologies are, is you can think that there are bids from coalitions to say okay, you know what I want.
That's what we want.
And if the coalition is very tiny and they can be very extreme because you have a few people they can be very different from the rest of the population.
It is to be very extreme.
But an ideology is a bid to change a social contract in your favor.
So if you are maybe on the left, you say, we want more taxation.
We want to reduce inequalities.
We want these people who work hard in working classes to have higher wages.
If you're on the right, maybe you say, well, we want less taxes.
We want to give more incentives to entrepreneurs to be more successful, etc.
And these are nice ideas, but they tend to be aligned more with the interests of those who voted in these parties than those who voted in these parties.
And you try to move, to tilt this compromised social contract at the moment in one direction or the other.
If democracy doesn't seek truth, why is it that people defend it so passionately then?
Right.
That's an excellent question.
I think...
It is wrong to think that democracy is great because people seek truth.
And by the way, we talked about the social media.
One big disappointment with social media was that when you go on the internet, some people were thinking it would be a big democracy, a big public sphere, a big agora.
Every citizen is going to be talking with each other.
We can, in a way, cut the middleman of the mainstream media, of the politicians, for people to be enlightened and decide collectively about what to do.
And then what you see?
That people watch cat videos and the algorithms feed them not great content and they're not interested in politics and people are polarized.
So it didn't go at all in the direction people were hoping for.
So if democracy is not to find the truth, what it is?
Why is it great?
I think democracy is great because for the people most people it's the best system to ensure that their interest is represented.
What you can think of is any political system is characterized by the size of the body of people who select the leader.
There's a book by political scientists and game theorists who call that the selectorate.
Selectorate is the people selecting the leader.
So for instance, in the USSR, during the Soviet regime.
It was a Politburo.
So you have a group of 12, 25 people.
If you want to be the next leader, you need the majority in this group.
So, okay, that's one version.
Another version is when you have a lot of people.
And democracy is a selector.
It basically is most of the population, population voting.
So it's a large amount of people.
What you have is that the coalitional games are going to take place in the select rate.
So the coalitional games in the Politburo.
If you know the history, it's very cutthroat because most people died.
Basically, you're elected leader or you die.
The second guy, the one who's not elected, often has a limited lifespan because he's kind of a threat.
That's a real mortal game there, yeah.
Exactly.
And so the guy's eliminated often.
So the coalitional games are within this thing.
In Indian democracies, the coalitional games are within the large body of citizens who vote.
But what it means is that the leader, the aspiring leader how many people does this leader?
Has to please.
Well, in the Soviet Union, the leader has to please like, you know, 15 people. to be elected.
In a democracy, the leader has to please 51% of the population.
And because coalitions are very flexible and can change a lot.
If you want to please 51 of the population, you might need to be able to personally talk to more than 51 of the population the other contender as well.
And so what you have is that everybody's interests tend to be respected and taken care of, because the politicians who compete to be elected They care about you because you're part of this electorate.
Well, if you are in the USSR, most people are not in this electorate.
Only a tiny portion of people are.
And so if you don't matter for the leader, if you're not happy, too bad for you.
So I think that's what democracy is good, because very large proportion of people decide who is elected very flexible coalitions.
So everybody has a chance to be at some point in the majority.
And that means that you matter more.
And the politician has an interest, even if he's not philanthropist or even if he's not a pure altruist.
He has an interest to care about what you think in order to get your support.
The thing that sort of ties everything that we've spoken about together today, I guess, is the invisibility of it to us.
The fact that there is a thing happening and our awareness of what's actually happening.
They sometimes touch up against each other.
But I mean, I remember the first time that I learned about self-deception and the funniest thing in the world you saying yes, some people are self-deceptive.
It's like dude you're so self-deceptive that you're deceiving yourself into believing that only some people are self-deceptive.
That's right, yeah.
Is there anything else to explain other than the deception thing?
Is there anything else to explain why we're not aware that we're playing these games?
Okay, I think that's a fascinating question.
We have been talking and saying all these games, what we do, and they are very complex and we're really good at it.
But at the same time there's a very surprising thing is that we're often not aware that we're playing these games.
I think you have several answers.
One answer is that you don't need to know.
In a way, nature, evolution, doesn't need to give you the rule book for you to be effective.
You know, we are very good at throwing stones, for instance, and we don't need to know the Newton mechanics behind it, right?
Okay, so we anticipate the trajectory of a stone.
You know, if you catch a baseball, a ball of baseball is thrown at you.
You're able to anticipate its movement and catch it.
And though you know you do that before having done any physics in high school, by telling you the laws of physics, et cetera.
So in a way, nature doesn't need to give you the rule book for you to be effective.
It can just give you the ways of solving the problem.
I think that's one first answer.
So we can be very good because we have the heuristics and the rules to work out in these gaps, even if we don't need the you know full understanding about what's exactly happening.
But I think there's also another aspect of it is that often it's even better if we don't know.
And it's another strategic aspect is that you know You have the saying.
For instance, sometimes you call people, you say oh, this person is a player.
Or you say, this person is very strategic.
And this is actually not a compliment.
When you say this person is very strategic or this person is a player, you mean, you know, this person is computing.
He's trying to find the best ways of doing, of acting. without caring for principles, for instance.
Do you want a friend who is strategic or do you want a friend who is just loyal and trustworthy?
Maybe somebody who is very strategic is not totally trustworthy because maybe if the calculations do not add up tomorrow, it's not going to be right.
You're going to be on the receiving end.
You're going to be an enemy and not a collaborator.
Yeah, you know, maybe today is a friend because he finds its advantages, but what about tomorrow?
So you don't want somebody who calculates every day whether it's advantageous to be a friend with you or not.
And so, you know, this is a deep problem of... trust?
How can we trust each other, given that we always have options to defect from cooperation?
There's always plenty of opportunities to take some short-term advantage by not being fully cooperative.
I could lie a bit, I could not do the right thing, you will not know, etc.
So, how can people trust each other?
And one solution is is to commit, to be committed to a course of action.
So one solution is more than to be committed.
It's to be committed credibly and to be able to signal this commitment.
I think love is a good example.
If you have two, a man and a woman, If each of them were every day being in the relationship but open to you know, checking whether other partners could be better, that would be hell right.
So imagine you're in a relationship and then every day if another guy, if he finds another guy you know better in the street She drops you.
The problem of this kind of situation is that that would make it very risky to invest a lot of effort in the partnership.
So to invest, you need to trust that this stuff is going to last long.
But to trust that this stuff is going to last long.
You want the other person to be not looking at other options.
But looking at other options seems to be rational, seems to be strategic.
So how do you prevent that?
Well, the solution that's likely given by nature is this strong emotion that we have, which binds us to others, and which are visible and give visible signs to others that they can trust.
So in a partnership between a man and a woman is going to be love, so people will feel strong emotions of love and when people are in love, they will purposefully not look at other options.
And also this emotion is very things, gives cues, signals which are, you know, you can see when somebody is besotted with another person and that's credible.
And so you, if you want that's what you want, you want to try to be with someone who is in love with you because you're confident that this person is going to be willing to stay with you for a long time In a group of friends.
That would not be love, that would be friendship.
But this is the same kind of stuff.
You want some people who are loyal and who are with you because they're friends, not because they're just a short-term advantage.
Now we're still playing these games, but in a way nature, the way for us to be playing these games well may be to care about not playing the games in the short term.
There is a, there is a theory in evolutionary psychology which is more than a theory and I think there's a lot of validities that you can think of the mind as made of several modules solving problems.
That's a general theory from evolutionary psychology.
But one of the applications of the theory is that your mind can be in a way could be divided into part of your mind which kind of treats information, and part of your mind will make the decision.
And the trigger of these emotions when you feel in love, when you feel friendship, et cetera could be strategically triggered by one part of the mind.
And your self-conscious person really feels these emotions, really is committed, and that makes you better as a player.
I'm not sure.
I think the Oracle took suit to Neo and after a while, she has asked, what did you tell him?
And she said, I told him what he needed to know.
What it means.
It means she didn't tell him the truth.
She told him what he needed to know to be effective.
And you could think that part of your brain do exactly the same thing.
You.
You know, from all the information you get, your self-aware person in your mind only get the information you need to know to be effective.
And that means that yes, our mind you know part of our mind is strategic and knows when to trigger the emotions, et cetera.
But it doesn't tell us We don't have an interest to be strategic when we act.
We have an interest to be committed and to believe that we're not playing the game.
Okay, humans are better at playing games when they don't know that they're games.
Yes, because if you don't think as a player, if you don't think strategically in the moment, then you can be a more attractive partner in social cooperation.
Yeah wow, do you think we'd be better off if we just realized that life is all games?
Look, I'm not sure we're better off.
I think, in a way, you know, sometimes living the dream is better.
Maybe it's like in the Matrix, you know, I'm pulling you out of the Matrix.
The reality outside is horrible.
This is evolutionary theory overall to me.
Learning anything about evolutionary theory is just a sequence of becoming more and more aware of how little control I have over my desires, how little I author my own thoughts and actions, that the thing that I used to take pride in I shouldn't take pride in, because actually it's some thinly veiled status quo.
It's very humbling.
My point is it's very humbling.
We did this last time.
I was talking to you about imposter syndrome and again i i really appreciate the fact that you sort of lay out on your sub stack, you just lay out the way that these dynamics work and i think that it's.
It's very good for sort of peering under the hood.
But if you were to, when it comes to the way that you operate in your own life, Knowing what you know about the fact, communication is a game.
Coalitions are a game, politics are a game.
Self-deception is self-serving.
Are there any ways that you have used this information in a practical manner?
Or is it just, is it simply something interesting?
Or have you actually adapted your behavior in any way, given what you know about this stuff?
Yeah.
I'd like to tell you that it's super helpful in practice.
I mean, that's the way I see the world, so I can't help it.
But in a way I like the fact that you understand the world as it is, instead of the kind of narratives and stories we tell ourselves or society tells us.
But at the same time, it's a game of the games.
You know, knowing it's like, look, it's like we play football.
We play football.
If I come and I say, well, you know, I have a PhD in football techniques.
So I know really why football works well.
It doesn't change that if I want to play football, that's, you know, my PhD in football techniques.
It's not necessarily super useful to score a goal.
You know, it might at the margin helps me understand that I should shoot that well or the other.
But the game is the game.
And often, as I said, you don't necessarily need the rulebook to be effective.
We are very effective already at playing these games very well.
So understanding these games is mostly useful, I think, intellectually.
Also, it's useful often to avoid mistakes and to appreciate my own kind of biases, etc.
But it doesn't still mean that the games are the games.
It doesn't change.
Well...
I guess we're at the mercy of this stuff.
At least for me, it helps me to have more empathy and a bit more peace around other people.
I'm...
I wish I could extend that to myself, actually.
It's kind of like I don't know, like some sort of inverse stoicism, where you're able to see other people and say you know, like as soon as you learn fundamental attribution error and you go.
The guy that cut me off in traffic, he was probably just late.
He's probably not an asshole.
And even if he is an asshole, he's an asshole that's late.
So that's fine.
Yet, if you are... constructed in a way where you're always trying to push yourself to do more.
Um, turning that degree of game playing self-deception coalition, dynamic intersexual competition and going.
I should give myself a break.
I should be easier on myself.
That's, that's the final boss of social anxiety, not being kind to other people, being kind to you.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And and the way I think, understanding all that uh, in particular self-deception.
Often you're like okay, I want to make that case, but is that case really kind of you know the best one or the most accurate one, or is it just self-serving?
So, you know, you become a bit more like critical and aware of the kind of biases that you have.
It doesn't make you better though at winning the game though, because self-deception is useful.
So if you curb your self-deception, It might actually not make you better at convincing others.
But yeah, I do appreciate that sometimes.
It helps me take a step back.
Good.
Nidal Paj, ladies and gentlemen.
Dude, everyone needs to go and subscribe.
Optimally Rational on Substack.
What else?
Is there anywhere else that people should go?
No, that's it.
Oh, well, if they are really interested, that's it.
I've got my book Optimally Irrational, where I talk about psychology and why the good reasons we behave the way we do, why there are a lot of strange things we do in our lives.
There are lots of good reasons behind it.
So it's in the book as well.
Until next time, hurry up and get writing so we can talk some more.
Thank you, Chris.
Looking forward to it.
If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list.
It is 100 books that you should read before you die.
The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read, with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.
And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books.
That's chriswillx.com slash books.
