Welcome to Ideas Untrapped podcast. In this episode, I talk with economist Robin Hanson. This episode is about an everyday exploration of some of Robin's biggest ideas. We discussed the hidden motives behind our everyday behaviours and how they shape institutions like education, healthcare, and government. We explore his ideas on signalling, innovation incentives, and alternative governance models like futarchy. Robin also discussed his latest idea of Culture Drift: how humanity's superpower of cultural evolution can tend towards a maladaptive direction. Robin thinks this explains worrying trends like persistent low fertility at a time of material abundance, and he also explains why we are reluctant to confront this problem despite our common practice of cultural entrepreneurship.

Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He has written two fantastic books, Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain (co-authored with Kevin Simler).

You can find all of the ideas discussed in Robin's books (linked above) and on his popular and immensely brilliant blog Overcoming Bias.

TRANSCRIPT

Tobi: Welcome Robin, to the show. It's an honour to talk to you, and I look forward to our conversation.

Robin: Let's get started.

Tobi: Okay. So I'd like to start with your book, with Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain. You argue that much of our supposedly noble behaviour from charity to healthcare to politics is actually driven by hidden self-serving motives like signalling and status seeking. If so much of human activity is essentially about showing off or gaining social points, what does that imply for how we should design or reform institutions?

Robin: Well, the key idea of the book is that in many areas of life, our motives aren't what we like to say. And this fact is well known to psychologists, but not so well known to the people who do policy in each of these areas, like say education or medicine or politics. The people who do policy in those areas tend to take people at their word for their motives and they analyse those areas in terms of stated motives, and our claim is that you are misunderstanding these areas if you take people at their word and you'll get a better sense of what's going on there and therefore what you can do if you would consider that people might not be honest about their motives.

Tobi: Yeah, I mean, for example, schools, hospitals, and other public or perhaps even private institutions that we interact with openly acknowledge or accommodate our signalling drives rather than pretend that we're always pursuing high-minded ideals. What are the hard parts to reconcile about these facts of the human nature?

Robin: Uh, well, for example, people in the United States are most surprised by our medicine chapter, where we say that in fact on average people who get more medicine aren't any healthier and therefore they're spending way too much on medicine for the purpose of getting healthier. That's very surprising to people and it, of course, suggests that we don't need to spend as much as we do. Instead of subsidising it, maybe we should even tax it. But it also helps understand why we are doing as much as we're doing because we're using it as a way to show we care about each other rather than a way to get healthier. And so if you want to spend less on medicine, you'll have to ask, how can we find other ways to show that we care about each other instead of overspending on medicine?

Tobi: On a personal level, has recognising these uncomfortable hidden motives changed how you live your own life or conduct research? Do you ever catch yourself in acts of self-deception or signalling and you then consciously adjust your behaviour?

Robin: I think many people are tempted to try to look inside themselves to figure out what their hidden motives might be, and I don't think that's going to work very well. So my approach is just to look at how people on average are, and ask what motives best explain typical human behaviour and then just assume I'm like everybody else. So, I have come to terms with accepting that my behaviour is driven by motives that are probably not too different from the motives that drive most people, most of the time. So if other people are going to the doctor to show they care. I probably do too. If other people are going to school to show off how conscientious and intelligent they are, then that may be what I'm doing as well. And I'm just going to accept that I'm just not going to be that different from other people.

Tobi: Over the past, I would say six years or so, particularly with the rise of what is generally termed as woke, the phrase virtue signalling became quite popular. And this is something that you have been writing about before it gained that currency. You've noted that humans, when times are good, devote more energy to visibly displaying values either through charity, moral causes, patriotic posturing, as a way to boost our social standing. How do your theories of hidden motives and signalling help explain the way people behave online? And how does that affect the rise of political polarisation in the US perhaps?

Robin: So the term virtue signalling is usually used to describe behaviour that the speaker doesn't think is very virtuous. Um, so when we signal in general, typically our signals are effective and that we are actually showing the thing we claim to have. So if by going to school you show that you are smart and conscientious and conformist, then typically if you go to more school than other people, you are in fact more conscientious and conformist and intelligent than other people. You are successfully showing that. So the analog, if you took it literally for virtue signalling, would be that you are showing that you are virtuous. And that should be good. Maybe it's not so great that you are so eager to show it, but it is a good thing about you that you'd be showing. So the phrase virtue signalling is instead a criticism of people who are trying to appear virtuous without actually being very virtuous. That's, I think, the implication of the claim. And so that certainly could be happening and we should certainly wonder whether people who are claiming to be virtuous actually are virtuous. So certainly a lot of what's happened on the internet in the last ten years is what they call cancel culture and so that's where a particular person is accused of being bad or doing bad and then a mob, you know, jumps all over them and maybe gets them fired, gets them, uh, you know, thrown out of an organisation, gets people to quit their YouTube channel, et cetera, because they have been accused of being bad. Then the question is, well, if in fact they are bad, and if in fact these sort of responses are the appropriate response to someone who is bad in the way they are claimed to be bad, this wouldn't be such a terrible thing. Uh, the claim is that in fact they are accusing people of things they aren't guilty of or vastly exaggerating their guilt. And then it's bad if people are going way overboard to cause them harm without good cause.

So certainly one of the things that's going on in the world is the difference between gossip and law. So, uh, law didn't really exist until, say, 10,000 or so years ago. Before that, for maybe a million years, we had gossip. And the way we managed people doing bad things and dealing with that was by gossiping about it. And we mostly lived in pretty small groups who knew each other pretty well, so it wasn't that hard for people to gossip and figure out what's really going on and then react by whatever way they chose to do when they talked about it together. But in much larger societies that we've created in the last 10,000 years, gossip doesn't work so well. Because there's this incentive to a rush to judgment. When somebody comes to you with a complaint about somebody else, your main incentive is to agree with this person in front of you who you know better than the other person being complained about. And so in gossip, people tend to believe whatever they're told and they don't get the whole story. They don't ask for the other side of the dispute. And law was invented substantially to overcome this problem with gossip wherein there's a central place that you take an accusation to and that central place's job is to hear all the evidence before they make a decision. And then that overcomes the rush to judgment.

But when we have things people disapprove of that aren't illegal, then we revert back to gossip and then we have the problems of gossip wherein people are too quickly agreeing with an accusation before they've looked at the full, um, evidence from the other side. That's something that's going on lately with new social media when there are many accusations that many sympathize with that are things that aren't and not, in fact, illegal. But these are all relatively minor variations on the basic thesis of our book, which is that people are trying to look good and they do many things in order to look good, but when they do, they are actually good. On average, they are showing things that are actually good in order to look good.

Tobi: An idea that also become quite popular first in scholarly circles, but I mean, I see it almost everywhere now, maybe that's not a statistical fact, but it's the idea that evolutionarily, humans are not truth-se