Review of Elephant in the Brain

By Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

“In the end, our motives were less important than what we managed to achieve by them” (312)

Elephant in the Brain, by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, is a profoundly weird book. The authors take a sledgehammer to many beliefs that we hold dear, positing that we deceive ourselves on really important issues all the time, and we do this for selfish reasons. This book has a fairly cynical perspective on most of what we think is important, but they provide good evidence that they are right. That being said, for personal sanity it is probably better to assume that they are wrong by fiat. I’m only joking, but I do notice that I spend more time second guessing my motives after reading this book. Overall, their idea is an original lens through which you can see the world, and perhaps explains some weird outcomes in life that we normally would not expect.

What elephant?

We are all aware that people can have bad motives. They can be greedy, selfish, lazy, deceptive, and generally terrible. It’s so obvious! What’s weird is that we rarely think to ourselves, “I’m doing this because I am a huge jerk, but that sounds bad, so I’ll say that I’m actually doing this for the children”. The authors posit that even though we never explicitly think we have bad motives, we lie to ourselves and others to make ourselves seem better. At worst, we aren’t even aware that we are lying to ourselves! The book goes through our various institutions and sacred ideas, finding that we spend lots of time and money pursuing status and signalling our own greatness. This explains why most groups with a goal seem to be less good than they could be.

Why are we like this?

Why do we hide our own motives? The authors tour through evolution to see other examples for seemingly odd behaviors, and say that we might be like those animals. Some male birds, for example, build large and intricate structures out of sticks to impress the ladies. These buildings are never used for anything else, like raising chicks. The males are wasting time and energy just to show off. We are walked through other examples of other animals doing the same thing. The implication becomes: humans probably waste a lot of time and effort to attract mates as well. The most attractive people aren’t all architects, although that would be funny, so we need more complicated ways to show off.

This largely comes as posturing and advertising. However many artists claim to make art for arts’ sake, another goal is to make art so they can hang out with rich people and look cool. For birds, bragging about their elaborate building is the point, but humans are worse off. You can’t just loudly shout about how awesome you are. You have to let people know in other ways, like buying a Ferrari, using big words, or telling people how much you donate. This is an elaborate game with no written rules, and nobody even acknowledging that they might be judging each other. Complicated stuff! It’s an interesting idea because you can sort of intuit someone’s status fairly quickly upon meeting them. What are they wearing? How do they talk? What do they talk about? Even, are they ugly? Most people don’t explicitly go through a checklist in their head, much less out loud. However, the authors present research showing that people with higher status usually walk, talk, dress and look a certain way. My question is ‘how did we manage to agree on the rules of this dance?’ I think one tentative answer might be that there are no rules, but the best people are able to look like they are wasting the most time and money on useless things. That wouldn’t explain why people who spend 16 hours a day playing video games are not famous overall, but perhaps everyone has a slightly different criteria for what makes someone cool, and they themselves could not say exactly what they are looking for. It’s like trying to hit a moving target while blindfolded. 

Where are we like this?

Maybe high school is like that, but surely our most venerable institutions are better than all that nonsense. Or...probably not. The authors take a walk through the places where we as a society spend tons of money and time, and find random waste everywhere, given the stated goals. This includes education, medicine, politics, art, charity, and politics again, just because that aspect is particularly weird. We don’t seem to care that our institutions are inefficient or plainly bad for people, because we aren’t actually trying to make things better. Again, there is a disconcerting aspect of this idea, and it gets to me. I suppose that it is helpful in explaining why people and institutions act the way that they do, but thinking that way is very uncomfortable. If most institutions are simply status games, and only wear the veneer of caring about making things better, then improving the way that they operate seems borderline impossible. At the very least, you now have to satisfy the goals of everyone trying to look good before satisfying whatever you actually want to do.

Smarter than Everyone Else

If learning at Stanford is so great, and the material you learn there so important, then it makes no sense that Stanford is so exclusive. There should be 50 Stanfords, all trying to maximize enrollment so as many people as possible become geniuses and change the world. Stanford doesn’t actually do this, and applying to Stanford is widely known to be extremely hard. If the point of a university is to educate people, Stanford is doing a terrible job. If the point is to be widely known to be an exclusive club where only smart people can get in, then Stanford makes a lot more sense. Here, we find reputation to be much more important than the stated goal of helping people.

Apart from Stanford, other state schools also have odd requirements of their students if the point is to make productive graduates. At my college, we needed to take three classes in a mishmash of history and culture. We would read passages selected by the teachers for our edification, write papers that we thought the teacher would like, and receive our grades. At this point, I have no substantial knowledge from any of those classes. For some reason, I specifically remember that a certain statue was located in Cyprus. I might only remember that because I was very annoyed that I had to memorize that fact, and repeat it on request. If the point was to make me smarter, then making me memorize an arbitrary set of facts about ancient civilization in the Mediterranean makes no sense. However, if the point was to make me prove that I was willing to waste time to impress people who could affect my grades, and by extension, the opinions that people have about my intelligence, then we were all dancing the dance very well.

The other explanations, beyond proving our capabilities of parroting facts, are also disconcerting, but seemingly explanatory. Propaganda, where we indoctrinate the youth to love our country, is good for the government. This would explain why the pledge of allegiance became mandatory in the United States. It would also explain why we spend so much time on World War II, where the U.S. beat the bad guys and everyone clapped. I’m reminded of a joke where most Americans have literally no idea what the War of 1812 was about, and that might be because we lost. Domestication is a very brutal explanation of education. Office work is hard. Most people don’t like being in a box for eight hours a day, possibly hating their coworkers and feeling oppressed by their boss. Imagine trying to make a 10 year old hold a 9-5 job. One of the functions of school is training children, not to perform a specific task, but to do as they are told. School makes much more sense if the point is to make docile patriots.

I’m actually curious if anyone reading this liked school. I certainly didn’t, for the most part. There were a minority of classes that I enjoyed, but school represented a time when several hours of my day would involve listening to a person I didn’t like, working on a subject that bored me. Most of my friends feel the same way, with some notable exceptions in certain subjects. The bad part is that I was generally pretty good at school. Some of my friends in high school were bad at school, and every moment in class was hard for them. If you’re getting Fs all the time, society is repeatedly calling you a failure. Grading is a great incentive to make children try hard, but it seems very wasteful unless you invoke signalling to explain why schools tout the kids who get good grades as highly intelligent. 

Kissing the Medical System All Better

When you put a band-aid on a scraped knee, you perform the ancient ritual of healing. Weirdly, this works pretty well! Americans spend more on medicine than most countries produce as their total GDP (241). There’s a sense in which this is caused by our medical system being really terrible with byzantine regulations that make things worse. The authors take the alternate route, where they blame the consumers of medicine for buying more medicine than they need. Even worse, the groups buying the most medicine don’t end up any healthier than the groups buying less medicine. That’s downright odd. I should note that the evidence that the authors cite does not include things like gunshot wounds, or other instances where your life expectancy is reduced to minutes without intervention. Medicine is excellent at acute trauma like that, and saving people’s lives in that situation is a triumph. My personal advice would be to see a doctor if you notice any bullet holes on your body. 

As far as status games ruining everything, let’s look at why more medicine doesn’t make you healthier. The authors present compelling evidence that most medical research is wrong. Crucially, whenever a sensational new finding is found, that finding is published and touted as a breakthrough without making sure that the experiment replicates, or works outside a laboratory. I think we might suffer amnesia here. Why do drugs that cure cancer keep getting discovered every year? It seems like we forget that a cancer cure was discovered already, and go on believing the latest breathless report that this one actually works! Even solely taking drugs proven to work, most treatments have side effects. Thanks to odd advertising loopholes, consumers can see random drugs that they might be able to take as commercials. At the end, the announcer is put on 5X speed and quickly goes over how the pill which they want you to take could cause increased blood pressure, melting face syndrome, death or even zombification. If these aren’t idle threats, then any drug we take could potentially make things worse. Combine that with the fact that the drug might not even make things better, and the insubstantial benefits of medicine make more sense. 

If medicine is conspicuous, I’m not sure how it compares to other forms of consumption. How do you feel about someone with a Ferrari compared to someone bragging about their open-heart surgery? Perhaps the surgery demonstrates that this is the kind of person with the money, spare time, and intelligence to do something extremely dangerous in order to eventually be more vigorous than you, and medicine is impressive that way. It also might be that doctors feel compelled to solve problems. If a patient complains, then the doctor must perform the healing ritual, which means giving the patient a drug, and advising plenty of rest. The patient can then happily tell their friends about the excellent care they are getting from their magical doctor. I suppose that is similar to talking about how maintaining your mansion is really hard. 

This Review as Conspicuous Consumption

From the outside, it would be nice if we were better. If we actually held intensely prosocial motives all the time, and never jockeyed for a better position in our organizations, we would accomplish a lot more. On the other hand, having high status feels wonderful. If only it wasn’t a zero-sum competition against other humans focused on the same goal. Given the state we find ourselves in, I think that we can at least mitigate the worst parts. We don’t need to play the most destructive status games. The book covers religion and politics as conspicuous consumption, and there we can find much more bloody contests. If we try hard enough, we might be able to restrict our status games to places where the side effects are mostly positive. If you are a prominent member of the Effective Altruism community for example, the incidental effects of your status jockeying are much better. Since you are judged by the amount of good you do in the world, you can gain respect by donating more money, or reducing global risk of everyone dying. Compare that to playing a status game at a nightclub, by showing off how much money you have, buying expensive clothes, expensive alcohol, and most importantly, expensive friends. Ideally we would not play status games, but I doubt there is a way out of doing that. I would recommend reading this book in order to recalibrate how you spend your limited time and money jockeying for better positions. 

Well, that, and you can seem smart by talking about your deep understanding of human nature.