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. 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. Again, there is a disconcerting aspect of this idea, and it gets to me. 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. This includes education, medicine, politics, art, charity, and politics again, just because that aspect is particularly weird. 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. Maybe high school is like that, but surely our most venerable institutions are better than all that nonsense. It’s like trying to hit a moving target while blindfolded. 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. 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. However, the authors present research showing that people with higher status usually walk, talk, dress and look a certain way. 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. Complicated stuff! It’s an interesting idea because you can sort of intuit someone’s status fairly quickly upon meeting them. This is an elaborate game with no written rules, and nobody even acknowledging that they might be judging each other. You have to let people know in other ways, like buying a Ferrari, using big words, or telling people how much you donate. You can’t just loudly shout about how awesome you are. For birds, bragging about their elaborate building is the point, but humans are worse off. 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. This largely comes as posturing and advertising. The most attractive people aren’t all architects, although that would be funny, so we need more complicated ways to show off. The implication becomes: humans probably waste a lot of time and effort to attract mates as well. We are walked through other examples of other animals doing the same thing. The males are wasting time and energy just to show off. These buildings are never used for anything else, like raising chicks. Some male birds, for example, build large and intricate structures out of sticks to impress the ladies. 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. This explains why most groups with a goal seem to be less good than they could be. 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. 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. 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”. They can be greedy, selfish, lazy, deceptive, and generally terrible. We are all aware that people can have bad motives. 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. I’m only joking, but I do notice that I spend more time second guessing my motives after reading this book. That being said, for personal sanity it is probably better to assume that they are wrong by fiat. This book has a fairly cynical perspective on most of what we think is important, but they provide good evidence that they are right. 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. “In the end, our motives were less important than what we managed to achieve by them” (312)Įlephant in the Brain, by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, is a profoundly weird book.