The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Trivers.
The lesson number one - we need to self reflect in order to peek into the ocean of our own self deception (although it's fun to look into self deception of others). Secondly, we shouldn't kid ourselves that by just reading this book or self reflection we can avoid self-deception... we can only hope to keep it on a very long leash.
"We see (consciously) incoming information, as well as our internal intention to act, well after the fact. It seems as if it is difficult to learn after the fact what to predict ahead of the fact; thus, our ability to see the future, even that of our own behavior, is often very limited. I believe I have learned a lot about my self-deceptions but not in ways that prevent me from repeating them—often exactly.
Seeing your self-deception in retrospect is one thing, decreasing its frequency in the future a much deeper matter."
The lesson number one - we need to self reflect in order to peek into the ocean of our own self deception (although it's fun to look into self deception of others). Secondly, we shouldn't kid ourselves that by just reading this book or self reflection we can avoid self-deception... we can only hope to keep it on a very long leash.
"We see (consciously) incoming information, as well as our internal intention to act, well after the fact. It seems as if it is difficult to learn after the fact what to predict ahead of the fact; thus, our ability to see the future, even that of our own behavior, is often very limited. I believe I have learned a lot about my self-deceptions but not in ways that prevent me from repeating them—often exactly.
Seeing your self-deception in retrospect is one thing, decreasing its frequency in the future a much deeper matter."
John Horgan in NYT review reveals why Trivers is not very popular:
These concepts (reciprocal altruism et al.) were popularized by others, notably Edward O. Wilson in “Sociobiology,” Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene” and Pinker in “How the Mind Works.” All have credited Trivers, whom Pinker has called “an underappreciated genius, and one of history’s greatest thinkers in the analysis of behavior and emotion.” If Trivers is not better known, that may be because he has struggled with bipolar disorder since his youth.
These concepts (reciprocal altruism et al.) were popularized by others, notably Edward O. Wilson in “Sociobiology,” Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene” and Pinker in “How the Mind Works.” All have credited Trivers, whom Pinker has called “an underappreciated genius, and one of history’s greatest thinkers in the analysis of behavior and emotion.” If Trivers is not better known, that may be because he has struggled with bipolar disorder since his youth.
The central theme of the book:
Lying to ourselves has costs. We are basing conscious activity on falsehoods, and in many situations this can turn around and bite us, as we shall see many, many times in this book. Whether during airplane crashes, the planning of stupid offensive wars, personal romantic disasters, family disputes, whatever, we shall see time and again that self-deception brings with it the expected costs of being alienated from reality, although, alas, there is a tendency for other people to suffer disproportionately the costs of our self-deception, while the benefits, such as they are, go to ourselves. So how does self-deception pay for itself biologically? How does it actually improve survival and reproduction?
Hypothesis:
Applied more broadly, the general argument is that we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others. To fool others, we may be tempted to reorganize information internally in all sorts of improbable ways and to do so largely unconsciously.
The central claim of this book is that self-deception evolves in the service of deception—the better to fool others. Sometimes it also benefits deception by saving on cognitive load during the act, and at times it also provides an easy defense against accusations of deception (namely, I was unconscious of my actions). In the first case, the self-deceived fails to give off the cues that go with consciously mediated deception, thus escaping detection. In the second, the actual process of deception is rendered cognitively less expensive by keeping part of the truth in the unconscious. That is, the brain can act more efficiently when it is unaware of the ongoing contradiction. And in the third case, the deception, when detected, is more easily defended against—that is, rationalized—to others as being unconsciously propagated. In some cases, self-deception may give a direct personal advantage by at least temporarily elevating the organism into a more productive state, but most of the time such elevation occurs without self-deception.
On Overconfidence:
A very disturbing feature of overconfidence is that it often appears to be poorly associated with knowledge—that is, the more ignorant the individual, the more confident he or she maybe. This is true of the public when asked questions of general knowledge. Sometimes this phenomenon varies with age and status, so that senior physicians, for example, are both more likely to be wrong and more confident they are right, a potentially lethal combination, especially among surgeons.
On Economists:
Truth—or, at least, truth detection—has been pushed back steadily over time by the propagation of deception. It always amazes me to hear some economists say that the costs of deceptive excesses in our economy (including white-collar crime) will naturally be checked by market forces.
I know nothing about economics and—from evolutionary logic—could not have predicted a thing about the collapse of 2008, but I have disagreed for thirty years with an alleged science called economics that has resolutely failed to ground itself in underlying knowledge, at a cost to all of us.
On Induced Self-deception:
There is something called induced self-deception, in which the self-deceived person acts not for the benefit of self but for someone who is inducing the self-deception. This can be parent, partner, kin group, society or whatever, and its extremely important factor in human life. You are still practicing self-deception but not for your own benefit.
Neural-representation of Self-deception:
Right brain is emotionally honest and left actively engaged in self-promotion.
Self-deception at genomic level:
The relevance of genomic imprinting to deceit and self-deception is several-fold, of which the most important is the internal fragmentation and conflict it generates. In important parts of our family lives, we are two separable people (not one) with partly divergent aims, theories of reality, and degree of deceit and self-deception - two people who are also tempted to deceive each other. We call these two people our maternal and our paternal selves.
On Marriage:
Evidence suggests that martial satisfaction declines linearly over time, but people have a biased memory - they remember early declines in satisfaction but more recent increases that offset the early decreases.
On False Historical Narrative:
It replaces a potentially negative personal self-image with a positive one-or; more accurately, a negative image of one's ancestors with a positive one.
On War:
Faulty decisions are said to arise from four main causes: being overconfident, underestimating the other side, ignoring one’s own intelligence reports, and wasting manpower. All are connected to self-deception. Overconfidence and underestimation of others go hand in hand, and once self-deception is entrained, the conscious mind does not wish to hear contrary evidence—even when provided by its own agents, whose express purpose is to provide such information. Indeed, the old rule was to shoot the messenger.Number one was just extreme hubris and self-confidence. If you truly believe in the power of free economics and free politics, and their attractiveness to all populations of the world, and their ability to sweep away all manner of ills, then you tend not to worry about these things so much. The other major reason is that, given the difficulty of mustering public support for something as extreme as an offensive war, any serious discussion inside the government about the messy consequences, the things that could go wrong, would complicate even further the selling of the war.
On Religion:
According to cognitive dissonance theory, greater cost needs to be rationalized, leading to greater self-deception, in this case in the direction of group identity and solidarity. Why do religions provide more fertile ground for this process than secular communes? Perhaps because religions provide a much more comprehensive logic for justifying beliefs and actions.
On Economics:
They often implicitly assume, as we noted in the first chapter, that market forces will naturally constrain the cost of deception in social and economic systems, but such a belief fails to correspond with what we know from daily life, much less biology more generally. Yet such is the detachment of this “science” from reality that these contradictions arouse notice only when the entire world is hurtling into an economic depression based on corporate greed wedded to false economic theory.
The mistake is partly related to the fact that “utility” has ambiguity built into it. It can refer to utility of your actions to you or to others, including the rest of your group. Economists easily imagine that the two kinds of utility are well aligned. They often argue that individuals acting for personal utility (undefined) will tend to benefit the group (provide general utility). Thus they tend to be blind to the possibility that unrestrained pursuit of personal utility can have disastrous effects on group benefit. This is a well-known fallacy in biology, with hundreds of examples. Nowhere do we assume in advance that the two kinds of utility are positively aligned.
On Consciousness:
There are two great axes in human mental life: intelligence and consciousness. You can be very bright but unconscious, or slow but conscious, or any of the combinations in between. Of course, consciousness comes in many forms and degrees. We can deny reality and then deny the denial. We can be aware that someone in a group means us harm but not know who.
Try to avoid overconfidence and unconsciousness. Each is dangerous; together they can be deadly
Recent Mother of all Self-deceptions:
Bush himself joked about the August 2001 memo saying bin Laden was planning an attack within the United States. Indeed, he denigrated the CIA officer who had relentlessly pressed to give the president the briefing at his Texas home. "All right," Bush said when the man finished. "You've covered your ass now," as indeed he had, but Bush left his own exposed.
This is the deep feature of self deception: success entrains confidence but also overconfidence. How many of us have taken success one step too far? (Bill Clinton and his women?)
"It doesn’t matter how beautiful the guess is, or how smart the guesser is, or how famous the guesser is; if the experiment disagrees with the guess, the guess is wrong. That’s all there is to it."
- Richard Feynman
This is the deep feature of self deception: success entrains confidence but also overconfidence. How many of us have taken success one step too far? (Bill Clinton and his women?)
"It doesn’t matter how beautiful the guess is, or how smart the guesser is, or how famous the guesser is; if the experiment disagrees with the guess, the guess is wrong. That’s all there is to it."
- Richard Feynman
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