We Are Confused, Maladapted Apes Who Need Enlightenment

In a characteristically insightful and entertaining essay, David Pinsof argues that intellectuals greatly overestimate how many of the world’s problems stem from popular misunderstandings. In reality, Pinsof argues, people are highly rational and well-informed about their interests. This is what we should expect on evolutionary grounds. “Show me an animal that has succeeded in surviving and reproducing in a hostile environment for millions of years, and I will show you a rational animal.” It is also supported by extensive evidence about the rationality and accuracy of human cognition.

In Pinsof’s worldview, 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.

Why, then, do intellectuals so often chalk up the world’s problems to mass ignorance and irrationality? Partly, the narrative is simply self-serving. It is intellectuals, after all, who promise to liberate us from misunderstanding. They are our professional understanders.

But it’s also because they confuse our expressed motives with our real goals. Sure, Pinsof concedes, we look pretty stupid and misinformed relative to the high ideals and noble ambitions that we say we have. If we’re chasing objective truth, impartial justice, and effective altruism, we’re not doing a good job. But those goals are just elaborate fictions, self-serving public relations cooked up to make us look good. Our real goals, our hidden motives, are very different. We’re chasing the kinds of grubby rewards you would expect of apes forged in Darwinian competition: status, reputation, power, sex, and resources. And relative to those ambitions, we’re smart and sophisticated.

This analysis reframes many apparent examples of stupidity as strategies. 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.

Unsurprisingly, this perspective leads Pinsof to a bleak conclusion. If most of the world’s problems result not from misunderstandings but from conflicting incentives, intellectual enlightenment cannot save us. And even if it could, nobody really cares about solving the world’s problems anyway:

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