This is a guest post by David Pinsof, who writes the excellent ‘Everything is Bullshit’ Substack.

One of the great joys of intellectual life is finding someone to argue with in good faith. As someone who thinks most arguing is bullshit, it’s all too rare and precious to have a genuine exchange of ideas stripped of character attacks, strawmanning, and status jockeying. Thankfully, I think I’ve found such a good faith interlocutor in the ever-brilliant Dan Williams, who has written a moderately cynical yet optimistic essay in response to my soul-crushingly cynical and pessimistic essay, A Big Misunderstanding.

Dan’s post is called “We Are Confused, Maladapted Apes Who Need Enlightenment.” What Dan means by “enlightenment” is something like: “the culture and ideas of intellectuals.” And what he means by “confused and maladapted” is something like: “irrational, ignorant, self-deluded, and in dire need of the culture and ideas of intellectuals.”

My essay has a different message. I argue that we humans are pretty savvy and rational, shaped as we are by millions of years of natural selection, and that intellectuals often overstate the demand for their grand ideas, in large part by pretending we humans are confused and maladapted, so that they can cast themselves as humanity’s saviors.

So my response to Dan might be something like, “Yea, maybe humans are kind of confused and maladapted sometimes, but it’s also really insightful to see humans as savvy animals strategically pursuing their Darwinian goals.” And Dan might say something like, “Yea, it’s pretty insightful to see humans as savvy animals strategically pursuing their Darwinian goals, but it’s also really important to recognize that humans are confused and maladapted sometimes.” It’s basically a disagreement over where to put the italics.

But if it was all about italics, I wouldn’t be writing this. There are a few areas where Dan and I might truly disagree, which is very exciting to me. Maybe one of us or both of us will change our minds or come to see the world a bit differently. Maybe you, dear reader, will benefit from the back and forth. What a beautiful thing. Let’s go through what I see as the biggest potential sources of disagreement.

Stone Age Minds in Modern Skulls

A big part of Dan’s post is about evolutionary mismatch. This is