Why People Are Wrong & Truth Can't Change Their Minds
The Truth-Fitness Divergence
When we encounter logic or observation that would register as survival-negative our cognition actively prevents us from processing that conclusion. Instead, we avoid it. We avoid any information that our systems perceive as threatening, through one of several mechanisms. The most common form of avoidance is simply to filter it out as “wrong” or “incorrect,” without another thought. However, when the information is threatening enough, the next most common counter is a subtle switch from exploratory cognition to defensive cognition. We ask: “How is this wrong?” Instead of: “Is this true?” In the most extreme cases, perceived threats are met with psychological dissociation — where the threatening information is entirely blocked from our cognition.
This is why, when we first encounter a new source of information, one of the first things we do is to scan for clues to determine if the source of that information is part of our coalition. We scan for markers of tribal affiliation, in the form of coalition-approved buzzwords and political or virtue signaling. We do this, not because we are particularly closed-minded, but to protect ourselves from doing the expensive work of verification. When we can place someone readily into one of our preferred political, moral, or religious factions this acts as a low-cost confirmation that this person’s strategies for maintaining and acquiring both resources and status correspond with our own survival strategies.
When we cannot easily tell where someone stands, we are forced to continue to invest energy into critical evaluation of everything that they say, since we don’t know how to compartmentalize them. This makes trust and coordination with an unaffiliated person more expensive. So we mostly don’t do it.
Now, the ideas that we block automatically aren’t simply political or moral ideas. We also precognitively block ideas that we predict will cost us more energy to sort out than we anticipate them to return. If we don’t intuitively sense a clear reward for the effort to evaluate a complex idea, and we have a simpler option that we have already deemed to be “good enough,” under most circumstances we cannot get ourselves to do the work of sorting it out. Our brain simply looks at the complexity of the task, our prediction of its return on effort, and says: “No thanks.”
When it comes to ideas that our tribe or coalitions have labeled as “off limits,” or that register as counter to our own goals and status within those social hierarchies, we either ignore them, attack them, or, very, very occasionally, think about them critically and update our reality model. Moral language and taboos are relatively static constructions that act something like cached verification. When we default to trained moral platitudes, we are acting based on a stored coordination signal that attempts to synchronize behavior across large groups by short-circuiting further analysis. In this way, moral claims, as a distinct process from our innate prosocial behaviors, function in human societies exactly like pheromones function for ants. Ideologies are signals that define shared metabolic strategies for survival.
To summarize all of this: when we encounter information or logic that threatens our preferred model of reality, absent immediate selection pressure to update our model, we will block the logic and information precognitively — that is to say, we block it prior to what we normally think of as intelligence coming online.
If you have watched my channel at all in the past, you’ll probably have picked up on a few themes that I revisit regularly, these include: understanding truth, competence, verification costs, social status, metabolism, and reality alignment. All of these concepts are different registers and lenses for understanding this Truth-Fitness Divergence.
Evolution selects continuously for survival and not truth. This is easily verified. Consider: which is more important to you right now? All of your material assets or the truth for its own sake? Which is more important: the survival of yourself and your loved ones or the truth for its own sake? Your career and accomplishments or the truth for its own sake? Your romantic relationship or the truth for its own sake? Now, frequently we don’t need to choose all or nothing in any of these domains. The point is to help you recognize that in nearly all critical domains, truth is secondary to survival, energy capture efficiency, and social coordination. This is as true for each one of us individually as it is for institutions and collectives. We incorrectly assume that aggregated human cognition overcomes this. We think that when we have thousands or millions of people investigating reality, we overcome this bottleneck and arrive at something closer to the whole truth. But we don’t. Instead, we arrive at a reality model that incorporates the metabolic needs of its constituents, and most vocally, those who control the verification apparatus itself.
So what does it mean when we say that this strategy is selected by evolution? Surprisingly, this means that not understanding reality is the strategy that is most likely to ensure reproductive, economic, and social success as a human being. The person who more effectively coordinates with others; the person who is able to more readily extract energy from others without fully understanding the impacts of their behavior; the person who exhibits outsized optimism and confidence, that a more accurate model would reveal as naive; the group that relies on 1-bit moral signaling instead of complex energy analysis — each of these people will outcompete, using a sophisticated form of ignorance, that confers a compounding advantage.
So if these strategies work, what’s the problem? The problem, if you want to call it that, is two-fold. One, eventually reality comes to collect the bill. The strategies that outcompete do so by ignoring certain aspects of observable reality. Eventually, the points of disconnection from physical reality lead to problems. We overshoot. We take risks we can’t afford. This is what causes the observed boom and bust cycles we see everywhere in the natural world. Second — and this is strictly a matter of personal preference — there is an aesthetic deficiency in models with low reality alignment. But that is really a point of personal pride, not a diagnostic. For me, truth-seeking is a devotional practice. It brings me closer to my own nature and the nature of the world. But it costs social cohesion, mutual support, opportunities, and status.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments if this helped you understand anything or if you have any questions. Thank you for your attention, it is a very valuable resource.
Related Posts (I’ve written about this a lot!):
I’ll take that Nobel Prize, bitch.
Note: This means that formalized truth-seeking hierarchies, like institutional science and universities, are physically incapable of accomplishing what they think they are doing — for the simple reason that they are dominance hierarchies first and truth-seeking bodies as a distant second.