Summary
Humans often act strategically, not stupidly, using biases to win status and allies. But we are also biased and ill-suited to the complexity of modern societies, so ignorance and misperception persist. Enlightenment ideas and institutions can harness our motives and correct errors, if enough people adopt them.
Highlights
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even the dreaded cognitive “biases” that psychologists love to tell us about function as adaptive mechanisms that help us survive and thrive. Confirmation bias, for example, provides us with intellectual ammunition for persuasion and reputation management, while overconfidence and self-serving illusions help us win friends and influence people.
Si no fuesen adaptativos, no existirían. Los sesgos son heurísticas.
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For example, “tribalism” isn’t a cognitive error to be remedied by debiasing and education; it’s a winning strategy among groupish primates who care more about power and prestige than truth or justice. Ineffective altruism and slacktivism don’t result from miscalculating the most effective ways to help others; they help status-seeking activists buy noble reputations at a discount.
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Yes, we are savvy and strategic primates pursuing goals we’d rather not admit
Los descubrimientos del psicoanálisis, respecto de los aspectos moralmente reprochables de nuestro ser, son respaldados por las perspectivas evolucionistas y las características individuales que modelan para explicar el funcionamiento de nuestras sociedades.
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There are many holes we will never escape from. There is an unavoidably tragic aspect to the human condition. But when scaffolded by the right incentives and error-correction mechanisms, we can draw on intellectual knowledge and cooperation to climb out of the worst pits we find ourselves in.
Este es el aporte de los dispositivos cognitivos al desarrollo y sostenibilidad de las sociedades modernas.
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although all species are unique, it’s not just human chauvinism to think that we’re uniquely unique, a genuinely new kind of animal. There is no single quality responsible for this—no magic bullet that set our ancestors on a novel evolutionary pathway. Instead, there is a set of interacting traits connected to our unique capacities for cognition (how we think and reason), cooperation (how we work together), and culture (how we share and accumulate information). Through such abilities, we have acquired unprecedented powers to design and redesign our environments, but we have also become vulnerable to novel risks and failure modes.
Somos únicamente únicos.
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reflection on human evolution should never be used to discount the importance of ideas. We evolved to be a species dependent on good ideas—on the knowledge, wisdom, and understanding that we acquire from others. If such ideas are misleading or deceptive in ways we can’t anticipate or detect, even optimal learning mechanisms won’t prevent us from being misinformed in costly and sometimes catastrophic ways.
Este es, literalmente, el corolario de la teoría de los dispositivos cognitivos: las ideas nos transforman y permiten ir más allá que nuestras disposiciones biológicas innatas.
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Natural selection adapts organisms to their environments. When these environments change, such adaptations can become “mismatched.” This is why things aren’t going so well for polar bears.
Se puede utilizar esta imagen (y la de la mariposa de los abedules) para explicar una de las razones por las cuales la psicoterapia puede volverse necesaria frente a situaciones específicas de la vida, a pesar de no haber sido requerida previamente.
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In the human case, evolutionary mismatch is often invoked to explain relatively mundane things, such as why so many of us are obese. As the familiar story goes, sugar and fat were scarce in ancestral environments, so we evolved to crave them. In modern capitalist societies, they are abundant. So we gorge on cheesecake and pizza served to us by profit-seeking companies that place no value on our welfare. There is no savvy strategy behind such overeating. Most of us are simply heavier and unhealthier than we would like to be. This basic lesson generalises to many other contexts, including those where our maladaptation is harder to observe than our fatness. The most important of these is modern politics.
Analogía no sólo aplica para dieta digital, sino que también para la política.
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When pharmaceutical prices rise, we assume that greedy executives are to blame rather than laws, regulations, and insurance markets. When housing or renting becomes unaffordable, we blame the avarice of developers and landlords rather than building restrictions, permitting processes, and construction costs. Such tendencies served our ancestors well. In hunter-gatherer societies, it’s reasonable to trace significant events to identifiable agents with familiar goals, and to link good and bad social outcomes to good and bad intentions. Invisible-hand coordination and emergent order are, therefore, deeply counterintuitive.