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Great video. I think the book The Elephant in the Brain is required reading in this context: http://elephantinthebrain.com/

Two of the most under-discussed aspects of gifts are their functions as displays of power and demonstrations of conspicuous care. Robin Hanson’s book The Elephant in the Brain touches on this.

The Elephant in the Brain is a good read that generally supports this article.

Recently: Enlightenment Now, by Steven Pinker, and The Elephant in the Brain (by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson), two books which share the quality of being bold and courageous in their claims, which go against huge parts of the "common discourse".

A book I enjoyed on understanding people is The Elephant in the Brain. I'll check out yours. Thanks!

The Elephant In The Brain has a chapter on education which clearly draws a lot from Bryan's book The Case Against Education. Interestingly Bryan Caplan was one of book's pre-publishing reviewers.

The Elephant in the Brain - Hidden motives in everyday life
(Kevin Simler & Robin Hanson)

Finally human behaviour makes perfect sense.

> Is there a citation I can refer to about this statement?

I recently read The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, which discusses this topic in great detail.

"The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life"

It gives you an alternative perspective on art, school, charity, politics (including office politics), religion, and, well, yourself. This book will likely make you revise at least some of your beliefs.

I can't recommend his book with Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain, enough, it will change the way you view the world forever

Robin Hanson's The Elephant in the Brain asserts that there was once an imperial Chinese court that banned punning with the penalty of death. I haven't found another reference for that. But reading puns.dev makes it somehow more plausible.

does it really? I am in the middle of reading it The Elephant in the Brain and I agree with the parts I read.

I strongly disagree with Weinstein and think he's spreading conspiracy theories

> A lot of times we identify with something on a different level then is logical, I believe the same is happening with a lot of these people and 'authenticity'.

I'm reading The Elephant in the Brain. Its shocking how much we do as humans that we delude ourselves into believing.

This is the same Robin Hanson that recently authored "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life". His physics background makes for interesting economic analyses.

You might be interested in the opposite perspective, too. Some authors believe conversation (and indeed nearly everything we do) is an art of posturing. We converse because we want to show how eligible mates we are. We want others to know how intelligent we are, or how brave we are, or how resourceful we are. I highly recommend reading "The Elephant in the Brain" for more about that. It starts a bit slowly but then picks up!

- The Origin of Wealth. Fantastic book on the new field of complexity / evolutionary economics

- The Language Instinct. How mind creates language.

- The Elephant in the Brain. I’ve posted notes here https://invertedpassion.com/notes-from-the-elephant-in-the-b...

- Existential Cafe. History of existential thought. Excellent book.

- 12 rules of life. Highly opiniated but well argued book on how to live life

- Skin in the game by Nasim Taleb.

- Daemon. The sci-fi book that anticipated what rouge blockchain like programs can do. Again, highly recommended

(2016)

The same author later co-wrote a book, in 2018, called The Elephant in the Brain, which expands on some related ideas.

> I am interested in the notion or aspect of consciousness that relates to why people behave the way they do, think the way they think, and are not only largely oblivious to it (the idea of examining behavior and the ~motivations behind it) but commonly hostile to it, sometimes extremely so. Or even more interestingly, the ability to easily notice the behavior in others, but utterly incapable of seeing the same thing in oneself.

The book The Elephant In The Brain touches on this. Short version: effective self-deception is the only way to effectively deceive others, as we as a species have developed very finely tuned bullshit detectors. To recognize and acknowledge your own hidden motives is to ensure that you won't accomplish your evolutionary goals (survival/reproduction), so evolution has generally limited people's ability to gain insight into themselves.

Read your list, we have a bunch of books in common

Why Nations Fail (was an interesting read!)

Thinking Fast and Slow (This was on a lot of trader desks and was a good read.)

The Elephant In The Brain (this is the first audiobook i have ever listed to, agree, highly underrated.)

Principles (many years ago, I worked at BW for around 4 years... It was required reading, but remains one of my top recommended books. I actually own a copy of his original principals, and still bought the hard cover. Dalio's deep thinking is amazing).

A little more specific:

The elephant in the brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler argues that most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signaling or status seeking . this is not a new theory, but Simler and Hanson argue that a lot more human behavior can be explained by signaling .

Interestingly, I think it was in the book The Elephant In The Brain, it remarks that sometimes people are depressed because they stop looking at the world through the normal veneer of self-deception and start seeing it for what it is and they realize how horrible, sad and shitty humanity and the world actually is.

Why Nations Fail (amazing!)

Chimpanzee Politics (interesting)

Corporate Confidential (paranoid, but worth a read)

Developer Hegemony (red pill for developers!!!)

Bargaining For Advantage (reasonable)

Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision Making (abstract as hell but rewarding)

Thinking Fast and Slow (loved it)

The Elephant In The Brain (seriously underrated)

The Brain That Changes Itself (inspirationally freaky)

The Power of Habit (good!)

The Secret Barrister (mildly disturbing)

Thinking In Systems (huge fan of this book!)

A Short History of Truth (meh...)

Man's Search For Meaning (brooo... I am so sorry)

Thinking In Bets (meh.. really meh)

The Road To Ruin (alright. Interesting even.)

Lying For Money (lots of fun!)

Great Answers To Tough Interview Questions (what it says on the tin)

Traction (good overview of marketing tactics)

Lean Customer Development (pretty good)

The Mom Test (eye opening)

Lean B2B (solid playbook)

Principles (instant classic)

* Elephant in the brain - the hidden motives we all follow, should be required reading before people come up with policy improvements to the world

* Sapians - great for a global view of our history, and an understanding of how important myths and religions have been for us being successful (as protocols for getting on)

* Thinking in Systems - toolchest of mental models for dealing with complex systems

I don't quite agree with this reduction. A good reference textbook is specifically designed to convey a clean linear story of the otherwise ugly conceptual development of research ideas. Notes are personal. Textbooks are a deliberate transform of those notes meant to convey structure in ideas to the average person in the target audience.

I find it funny that someone would go through the pain of undertaking an endeavor as large as writing a textbook, just for themselves. For that, they already have their notes. If you are hinting that writing textbooks (good or bad) has professional consequences, sure. Are they wrong in doing so? I don't see why they shouldn't bear the fruit of good exposition.

Stretching the argument further, you might as well explain almost every action as "people do X for themselves". Kevin Simpler explores this theme in detail [1].

[1]: The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life (https://www.librarything.com/work/19982533/book/195649617)

Our brains are complex things, with many independent actors.

There are pragmatic parts that determine what actions would best serve your interest. These parts mostly make the decisions.

There are other "press secretary" parts that come up with good sounding motivations for these decisions. You will believe those reasons, and state them with conviction.

You may then be lying, if the press secretary lied to "you", but you don't consciously know that. Apparently evolution has favored that model, and here we are.

I learned this reading "The Elephant in the Brain" (https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...)

I don't want to be snarky, but there can totally be a non-technical outer context where all this was a very good strategic move.

Certainly, one should not always assume dark Machiavellian moves, lest we become too bitter and cynical, but business isn't engineering.

Read the book "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life" by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. If not for other reasons, to acquire a different set of mental tools to understand motivation. Because I feel like you seem technically proficient but lacking in imagination of more important games of power in the background. And these aren't Disney villain machinations, they are normal everyday things that people implicitly understand and participate in, while being perfectly ordinary, nice, polite people, no mustache-twirling villains. Eat or be eaten. Periscope was eaten, now they are being shat out.

Which begs the question, since humans have been able to dominate their ecology and competitors to such a massive degree, why didn't our evolution stagnate a long long time ago? The answer, as far as I have read, seems to be that for humans, competition within the species (for sexual opportunities, position in the dominance hierarchy, etc) has been the primary driving force pushing our brains to evolve to the size it is today.

A few sources that support this thesis are the books, "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny", "The Elephant in the Brain", as well as this paper: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/5717...

> Most people were more interested in how it made them feel to do something nice for sick kids. I didn't understand that, I thought the goal was to perform the maximum amount of good for the kids.

I recommend two books:

1. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
by Paul Bloom https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062339355/against-empathy/ Summary: people should be more compassionate, not more empathetic.

2. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life http://elephantinthebrain.com/ Summary: 80% of what people do is signalling for others and themselves.

You were not wrong. It's just that these company exercises are all about social signalling. Instead of sitting in a circle and everyone telling everyone else about their values and empathy and personal development they did some task that achieved the same.

I found the same documentary instructive. I think there's an insight there into human tribal instincts, demonstrating that our epistemologies can't help be be socially mediated. It was flabbergasting how deeply intelligent some of the true believers were, and it's a little too convenient to label and discard them as crazies or outliers. They might be a little more representative of the human animal than any of us want to admit.

What's most unsettling is, there's no reason to expect that the same psychosocial tribal mechanisms are not constantly active, even when the facts are on the side of one's tribal beliefs. This leads to any number of blind spots, not only in truth-seeking and self-correction, but in social dynamics (in-group vs. out-group). Our brains are exceptionally, insidiously good at working backwards, not just to convince others, but to convince ourselves. Those who can spin on a dime and update/discard ideas in the presence of new evidence are a truly rare breed.

Two of my favorite books on motivated reasoning and self-deception:

Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy D. Wilson: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013827

The Elephant in the Brain, by Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler: http://elephantinthebrain.com/

In the book "The Elephant in the Brain", there's an interesting observation that increased lying and politicking was necessary selection pressure for increased human intelligence.

Similarly, I wonder if our increasingly low-trust, hyperconnected society will cause us to adapt (evolutionarily) in new and interesting ways. Obviously, all of this happens way faster than we evolve, and we'll need better tooling or cultural norms to deal with this stuff.

The book to read to learn about this is "The Elephant in the Brain".

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H8K4G9G/

Really enjoyed:

- 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer

- American Wolf - Nate Blakeslee

- Atomic Habits - James Clear

- But What If We're Wrong - Chuck Klosterman

- Conspiracy - Ryan Holiday

- The Courage To Be Disliked - Ichiro Kishimi

- Elements of Fiction: Characters & Viewpoint - Orson Scott Card

- The Elephant In The Brain - Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler

- Good Strategy Bad Strategy - Richard Rumelt

- Gridiron Genius - Michael Lombardi

- The Longevity Diet - Valter Longo

- Open - Andre Agassi

- Warriors & Worriers - Joyce Benenson

- Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker

- World After Capital - Albert Wenger

In the book “The Elephant in the Brain”, the author makes the argument that our consciousness is entirely the PR department of the brain, making explanations for the “company” but not truly knowing what’s really going on.

That is, all our thoughts are post-event justifications to make us feel good.

There’s this famous experiment where they show two different things to each eye of a brain divided patient. The patient would then follow instructions from 1 eye, but provide a justification based on what the other eye saw. Like a PR rep having to do the job but with email and communication being down.

The PR rep has to interpret things in a way that is in harmony to the external environment. Making the self seem self-less or hardworking or moral, etc...

Where it gets interesting is that the resulting PR effects affect the environment which then trigger new behaviors resulting in new PR spin. The PR rep has a degree of control over the system yet at the core of it, the PR rep is installed by language/culture/society and is somewhat of an outsider. Like an overly idealistic justice warrior sent to whitewash some corrupt company and being frustrated by the job.

> our brains just generally don't operate on a rational basis because it's not practical for humans.

It goes way deeper than that. Reasoning being hard to do well would explain a high error rate, but not systematic biases. I think human reason mainly evolved for (as you said) getting ahead socially, and only secondarily for solving object-level problems. There's a good recent book, The elephant in the brain.

The Elephant in the Brain is a similar book, it talks about the hidden incentives that everyone has. Once you read it and understand such incentives, you understand why things are the way they are.

For example, why is education so focused on work rather than learning? One answer is due to credentialism, specifically for employers to know whether you can sit for 8 hours and do work for them, just as in school.

Regarding 3, I don't think you can uninvent it, as it seems to be part of human psychology. Books like Sapiens and Elephant in the Brain explain why, religions are useful social technologies to bring together large groups of people and coordinate them. Humans in religions which were able to do that have survived in the game of natural selection versus those who did not believe in religions, and so religion itself has become melded in our psychology.