Today I want to follow up with something I've been working on: playable simulations of a disease outbreak. "Playable" means you'll get to tweak parameters (like transmission and mortality rates) and watch how the epidemic unfolds.

BUT...

I don't know how to make my interactive blog posts play nice with WordPress. So I'm hosting it on another part of the site instead.

Click here for the full experience

A teaser:

Click here for the full experience.

A teaser:

Of all the problems that can plague a discussion of beauty — and there are several — perhaps the most damning is how to define the word, to find a sturdy concept worthy of the label.

Look no further than the debates over whether beauty is “objective” or “subjective.” Is it out there in the world, or in here in our minds? When we can’t agree on this most fundamental distinction, we're not talking about the same thing.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of beauty recently, letting the word glide around over many possible meanings. It took a while, but I finally found one that clicked. Unlike the other meanings I’ve toyed with, this one is tangible and solid; it keeps its shape. I’ve had a lot of fun playing around with it, and I’m going to share it with you today.

But please, understand that I’m not trying to annex the word, to repurpose it to point toward my preferred concept. I don’t particularly care what other people mean when they talk about “beauty”; I have no dog in that fight. I just want to describe something that happens in the world, something I think is fascinating. And the best label I can think to give it is “beauty.”

Are you with me?

Here’s a little preview of where we’re headed: I want to talk about beauty as a game. Specifically, a two-player game. Or to be maximally precise: a family of games with two main player classes.

It will make sense soon, I promise.

In the meantime, please leave your semantic baggage at home, put on your Quinean naturalist’s hat (ideally with a bright feather in it), and let’s head out on a little armchair safari.

Desire

As a way of approaching this thing we want to talk about — “beauty” — we’ll begin with a simpler phenomenon. Whenever a creature observes something, gets a good feeling, and is attracted to it, let’s call that desire.

The phenomenon of desire — attraction mediated by perception — describes many of the basic low-level instincts that animals have. So we can speak of the desire for food and the desire for sex, to give some paradigmatic examples. But we can also say that mother animals desire their children, and vice versa. Or that a squirrel, looking up at a nice perch, desires it as a place to rest.

For our purposes today, no special cognitive complexity or inner experience is required. Even a lowly insect can be the subject of desire — as a dragonfly toward its mate, for example, or a dung beetle toward a piece of dung.

It’s not hard to see how desires like these can be adaptive, i.e., the kinds of features sculpted by natural selection. We can even see this in our own species. Smooth skin is a sign of good health, whereas boiling skin is a sign of disease, and so we evolved to desire the former and be disgusted by the latter. A ripe strawberry is nutritious, whereas deer droppings are not, and desire helps us choose between them. One of these landscapes is better suited for humans — and which are you drawn toward?

Not every desire is adaptive, of course; our sensibilities often lead us astray. But that’s what desire is for, that’s its purpose: to guide us toward what’s typically good for us.

So this is our first game. It’s a game of solitaire, played by a creature (whom we’ll call Desire) against a mostly static environment. The Desire player’s goal is to learn which features of the environment are good and should therefore be approached, and which features are bad and should therefore be avoided:

Sometimes Desire learns with its brain, as an individual creature within its own lifetime. But often the player’s brain isn’t flexible enough, so the learning takes place in the species’ genome via natural selection; in that case, the player is actually the entire species. Either way, Desire eventually learns what to approach and what to avoid.

Now we could stop here and declare that beauty = whatever triggers good feelings in a Desire player. This would be a perfectly sensible definition: if something appeals to you, it’s beautiful, end of story. This is the kind of beauty that people say is “in the eye of the beholder,” where each creature develops its own subjective tastes. The dung beetle can find dung “beautiful” while we find it disgusting, and there's no tension whatever between these two facts.

This definition of beauty would make a fine concept — if we were diligent about hewing to it. It’s just that games of solitaire are boring, so the word we’re attempting to pin down keeps slipping off for more exciting meanings, for denotations with sexier connotations.

Specifically, it’s when a second player enters the field — a player who produces something deliberately to attract the Desire player — that things really start to heat up.

Player Two

By way of introducing the second player, consider this brief visual history of plant life on Earth. We’ll start with the earliest single-celled organisms and work our way down to plant species in the present day.

So, Earth is 4.5 billion years old. And for the first 500 million years or so, it could reasonably be described as “just a bunch of rocks and water”:

(Please don’t fret over whether these photos are historically accurate — they aren’t. Just focus on the gestalt impression they make.)

Sometime around 4 billion years ago, the first single-celled lifeforms emerged. Here they are accreting into a so-called “microbial mat”:

A good while later, around 1.5 billion years ago, green algae arose. This is the proverbial “pond scum”:

Then, around 500 million years ago, plants begin to colonize the land:

But these plants lacked vasculature and had to live very low to the ground (think mosses). It wasn’t until 400 million years ago that plants like ferns developed stems and shot up into the sky:

Now pause with me for a moment to note the narrow color palette.

For most of its history, plant life on Earth has been characterized by greens and browns. Green, because that’s the color of chlorophyll. And brown, because that’s the color you get when you mix too many paints together — the color of accident.

So that’s what the plant kingdom looked like for most of its history.

... until approximately 130 million years ago, when suddenly this happened:

Please take a moment to be astonished by this image.

If you’d like — and I can’t recommend against it — take a moment to get high and then be astonished by the image.

In the meantime, some more flowers:

It’s easy to take flowers for granted, in part because they’re so familiar; we’ve known them since we were two feet tall. But when we step back and take the long view, we can see that they’re a dramatic departure from previous forms of plant life. Where everything else is drab and boring, a flower is bold and showy. While other plant organs are strictly utilitarian, a flower goes out of its way to be noticed. It’s a bid for visual attention in a world that’s otherwise oblivious to the gaze of others.

This is player two, AKA the Beauty player:

And of course, Beauty can only be understood in tandem with Desire, the player experiencing the attraction:

We all know what flowers are up to: they’re a plant’s way of having sex. For fertilization, a plant needs to get its pollen (i.e., plant sperm) over to another plant of the same species. Before flowers, plants did this by releasing their pollen in water or on the wind, hoping it would land in the right place. But this is a scattershot approach, error-prone and exceptionally wasteful. The genius of flowering plants was figuring out how to move pollen precisely and reliably by recruiting animals as their couriers. These are our Desire players, and in the context of flowering plants, they’re called pollinators. The most iconic pollinator, of course, is the honeybee. But the role can be filled by many other insects (like butterflies), as well as birds (hummingbirds) and even mammals (bats).

This relationship is simple, but also profound. The plant lures the pollinator with the promise of food (e.g., nectar). And when a plant consistently delivers on its promise, the pollinator keeps coming back. Not just to the very same plant, but to other plant of the same species, thus ensuring an extremely high fertilization efficiency.¹ And the flower mediates this relationship by acting as a brand image. Its distinctive shape and arresting colors are a mnemonic to remind pollinators of the plant’s good faith and credit. “Get your sweet nectar here!” the flower calls out, “And wherever else you see our trademarked signs!”

Thus the flower’s beauty isn’t capricious. It’s a solution to a very concrete problem.

And what a solution it turned out to be! Since bursting on the scene some 130 million years ago, flowering plants have completely taken over from their predecessors, such that they now dominate the landscape. It’s estimated that flowering plants make up 90 percent of all plant species and more than half of all biomass on Earth.² That’s the power of beauty.

A game for two players

Here, then, is our game. It’s played between two player types, Desire (P1) and Beauty (P2).

The essence of the game is simple: the Desire player makes a free choice, based on perceptual cues, about what to approach and what to avoid, while the Beauty player strives to attract the Desire player by performing or producing something:

Note that the Desire player here is more or less identical to the Desire player in the game of solitaire we described earlier. In both games, Desire’s goal is to learn which perceptual cues are good vs. bad. So as the bee buzzes around, it uses its aesthetic sense to decide where to land — and when it sees something that tickles its brain in the right way, it flies toward it. But the bee doesn’t particularly care that the flower was made by an adaptive Beauty player. If nectar started bubbling up from the ground, the bee would be just as happy, and would soon develop a preference for cracks and fissures rather than flowers.

The Beauty player, however, can’t play solitaire. The whole point of Beauty is to make something Desire wants, to trigger the oooh-circuits in Desire’s brain. Without Desire, there’d be no audience for Beauty’s performance, and no reason for it to make anything beautiful.

The metaphor of lock and key might be helpful here. Desire’s brain acts like a lock, and only certain perceptual cues will fit the lock and engage the attraction response. Beauty, then, has to produce something that works as a key:

But whereas a physical lock-and-key system is engineered all at once, Desire and Beauty coevolve slowly. Their dance goes something like this:

1. The Desire player starts by playing solitaire, and evolves perceptual preferences that help in its environment. For example, an insect might develop a slight attraction to round shapes and/or bright colors (for reasons that have nothing to do with flowers).
2. A nascent Beauty player then evolves a form to deliberately target those preferences — a key that fits Desire’s lock. At first the form will only work as a weak trigger, but over time Beauty will learn to make stronger and stronger stimuli, like brighter colors and more symmetrical petals.
3. Meanwhile, as long as the Beauty player continues to reward the Desire player (e.g., by feeding it nectar), then Desire will develop an even stronger preference for the relevant stimuli. What was initially just a slight bias will become a fixation.
4. If this relationship is fruitful, other Beauty players will inevitably try to get in on the action. And thus each Beauty player will need to outcompete its rivals by producing something that works as an even stronger trigger to the Desire player.

And so on. This positive feedback loop — Desire chasing Beauty in realtime and Beauty chasing Desire over evolutionary time — is what drives the production of beauty in every nook and cranny of the natural world:

Please note: This is not a Grand Unified Theory of beauty. There are many important questions not addressed by this framing — for example, questions about taste and class, or which forms of beauty are sublime vs. merely kitsch. The idea of beauty-as-game will happily endorse both a Rembrandt and a Thomas Kinkade as “beautiful” — and if that’s a problem, you’ll have to seek distinctions elsewhere. Instead, the perspective offered here will help answer questions like Why does beauty grow? and Under what conditions is beauty stable? Or even, How will beauty behave on other planets?

It’s about, in Sarah Perry’s phrase, the ecology of beauty.

Of course, no two beauty games are identical. They’re played in different media and different environments, and the economic relationships between the players can differ wildly from game to game. But there’s enough in common across all games that they’re worth examining together; they constitute a family. And that’s what we’re here to study.

Two-player beauty in animals

Now when I mentioned flowers earlier, I may have given the impression that they were the first Beauty players on Earth. Actually they're just the first in the plant kingdom. Whereas animals have been playing Beauty with other animals for quite a bit longer — maybe 300 million years longer, give or take.

When animals play beauty with each other, they almost always do it in the context of sexual selection, that is, in the competition for mates. Sexual selection typically occurs in polygynous species, where the males compete for opportunities to mate with the females. This kind of competition doesn’t always produce beauty; often it results in raw male-on-male aggression. But in species where it’s harder for males to dominate the females — i.e., when females have more choice — males must compete to attract potential mates. In other words, males play Beauty and females play Desire.

(Whether this pattern applies to the human animal, we’ll discuss below. But it’s a strong pattern across the planet, and the rare exceptions serve to illustrate the general rule.)

In terms of beauty, sexual selection driven by female choice tends to produce some spectacular results. It’s how we get the bright scales of the cichlid, the elaborate underwater nests of a pufferfish, and the painted face and butt of the mandrill:

Perhaps most famously, sexual selection is how we get the train of the peacock. But it’s also how we get the plumage of almost any flamboyant bird, as well as the flap on a peacock spider:

And let's not forget the decked-out bachelor pads of the bowerbird. These may not be especially beautiful by human standards, but they’re the closest thing to deliberate art found outside our species:

Again, in the animal kingdom, most of these feats of beauty are made by the male in order to win the freely-conferred affections of a female.

Note that the examples I’m providing here are forms of static visual beauty. That’s what’s easy to show on a web page. But it leaves out all the songs, dances, smells, and other attributes and behaviors that can’t be rendered as JPEGs. These forms of beauty are just as important to animals and are equally shaped by sexual selection. And the process is similar: preexisting perceptual biases in the female (Desire) player become an evolutionary target for the male (Beauty) player. For instance, a slight preference for certain sounds in the female nightingale’s auditory cortex is what induces the male nightingale to evolve its famous songs.

The media may be different, but the mechanics are the same. Within a given generation, female Desire players chase male Beauty players. But across generations, male traits evolve to target female preferences.

Human beauty games

But what about us? Do we also play beauty as a kind of mating dance?

We are animals, after all. And so it’s not surprising that we can pattern-match some of our activities to sexual selection driven by female choice. But it seems just as often to go the other way around, where women compete as the Beauty players vis-à-vis male Desire.

Sexual selection does sometimes occur in a monogamous species (ours being more or less deserving of the label). In such cases, males and females play both roles, Desire and Beauty; each makes a display for the other to admire and choose. Hence the ornaments and the eye for ornament among both sexes in the black swan and the crested auklet. And perhaps in our species as well.

But try as we might to pin a mating agenda on all human beauty production, it doesn’t always fit. Heterosexual men enjoy beautiful things made by other men, just as women enjoy performing for other women.³ Even very young children have an aesthetic sense. All in all, we spend too much effort producing and appreciating beauty outside of mating contexts:

Again, these are just a few forms of beauty that can be appreciated as static visuals. Other forms include songs, dances, poetry, novels, and pretty much any other thing that’s considered an art form. A few forms that are less often referred to as “beautiful” (but still, I think, fit the bill) include perfumes, Swedish massages, and elegant mathematical proofs.

So if not sexual selection alone, what occasions all these varied and refined forms of beauty in our species?

I’ve thought about this quite a bit over the years. And increasingly I’m convinced that much of what makes humans unique — including our taste in beauty — is our hunger for prestige.

I’ve written a lot about prestige status in the past, so I don’t want to belabor the point for long-time readers. But allow me a few words, briefly, to get us all on the same page.

Prestige is a form of social status, and the best way to understand it is to contrast it with dominance. Together, these two phenomena make up most of what we think of as social status. Dominance is based on fear (who can hurt me?), whereas prestige is based on attraction (who can help me?). Dominance, of course, is found throughout the animal kingdom: alpha males, pecking orders, hierarchies, etc. Prestige is a bit harder to spot, but tends to arise in species that coordinate their efforts in small groups — for example, wolves, lions, meerkats, and birds like the Arabian babbler. But no one does prestige like Homo sapiens. For reasons that are out of scope for this essay, human life allows enormous returns to cooperation, unprecedented (apart from the social insects) in the animal kingdom. And much of this cooperation is mediated by prestige.

Here’s what’s important for beauty: Prestige — like pollination and sexual selection — is a game of attraction in which Beauty players compete to attract free-choosing Desire players. Just as the flower blooms for the bee, and just as a peacock angles for the eye of the peahen, so do humans compete for the attentions and affections of our peers. And just as this game produces incredible ornaments in petals and feathers, so does it yield spectacular results in the media we control:

This is one reason we tend to find so much beauty in contexts governed by prestige, e.g., in museums, galleries, temples, palaces, and monuments, as well as in our homes (architecture, decor) and on our persons (body art, fashion). Even money — a distillation of prestige — probably evolved out of objects, like seashells and shiny metals, collected in part for their beauty.

By way of an archetype, consider a powerful nobleman in feudal Europe, circa 1500, trying to govern his lands and expand his influence. On the one hand (dominance), he’ll want to strike an imposing figure, both in the way he carries himself and in his projected presence. But no man rules by dominance alone; every leader finds use for the carrot as well as the stick. So on the other hand (prestige), our feudal lord will also benefit by putting his friendlier qualities on display.

Consider, in particular, the nobleman’s dining hall. Here he will host a variety of guests, all of whom he might hope to influence in some way. And the more time they spend in his venue (rather than, say, dining with his rivals), the more favor he’ll be able to curry. But all of his guests have other choices for where to spend their time, so he must provide a venue that people positively enjoy. And one of the best strategies here is to make and display beauty. The food and drink, of course, must be exquisite. But he’ll also commission rich tapestries for the walls and elegant chandeliers for the ceiling. Perhaps he’ll even hire musicians and dancers to entertain people before and after the meal. His guests are like honeybees, so he must be like a flower.

Pop Quiz

We’ve now seen how three entirely different ecologies — plant fertilization, sexual selection, and prestige status — give rise to games of multiplayer beauty. I hope these have given you an intuitive grasp of the phenomena in question. But just in case, here’s a little quiz to make sure we’re all on the same page.

In what follows, I’m going to show a series of images. Each image depicts something that the average person might see as “beautiful” or in some way appealing. Tastes vary, of course, but for this exercise, we’re not asking whether each thing is beautiful. Instead, we’re taking its beauty as given and asking why it’s beautiful — i.e., whether its beauty arises from single-player or multiplayer dynamics. In other words, are we attracted to it because we learned to appreciate it unilaterally (single-player), or because it was specifically designed for us to appreciate (multiplayer)?

Alright, here we go.

Blue sky: single or multiplayer beauty?

A: Well, the sky didn’t become blue in order to appeal to humans. It just exists — and so we must have learned to appreciate it on our own, perhaps because it heralds a warm, sunny day. Therefore, this is an example of single-player beauty. The environment is fixed and we’re playing solitaire.

Cave painting: single or multiplayer beauty?

A: multiplayer beauty. The painter was (we presume) deliberately trying to make something that would appeal to his or her fellow cavepeople.

Grand Canyon: single or multiplayer beauty?

A: single-player. Canyons weren't sculpted for our pleasure.

Purebred cat: single or multiplayer beauty?

A: multiplayer. Unlike their wild cousins, purebred domestic cats have been selected specifically to appeal to their human owners. In this case, the agent playing Beauty isn’t necessarily the cats themselves (although we could model it that way), but rather the human breeders who are trying deliberately to breed cats that appeal to other humans.

Grapes: single or multiplayer beauty?

A: multiplayer. Fruit wants to be eaten and evolved as a Beauty player purposely to appeal to frugivores (like us).

Carrots: single or multiplayer beauty?

A: hard to say. Carrots are tubers, which traditionally evolved as a strictly functional (single-player) plant organ — a store of energy buried in the ground. If we find them attractive, then it says more about us than about the carrot plant. And in general, vegetables are less intentionally beautiful than fruit. But nowadays vegetables are bred for shelf appeal, and orange carrots in particular were cultivated fairly deliberately, suggesting a multiplayer dynamic.

Crystals: single or multiplayer beauty?

A: another edge case. In their native habitat, crystals arise entirely on their own, without any coupling to a Desire player. But their native habitat is buried deep in a cave, or else locked inside a geode — i.e., out of sight. So when regular people like you and me actually lay eyes on a crystal, it’s typically because someone else — a human Beauty player — went and dug it up, knowing it would appeal to us. In other words: a crystal by itself is just a fluke product of nature, but a crystal found and put on display is, like many acts of curation, a deliberate attempt at beauty.

(In this view, there’s no difference between an artist who makes art and one who finds art. Photography, for example, often undermines this distinction. Is a scene captured on film "made" or "found"? Mu.)

Dandelion head: single or multiplayer beauty?

A: neither. The fact that we find this part of a dandelion beautiful is largely a coincidence — a spandrel. Certainly the dandelion head didn’t evolve for us: it’s a device for scattering seeds on the wind, not a lure for us (or any animal) to engage with it. Nor, I think, did we evolve any special eyes for the dandelion. Instead, dandelions give off perceptual cues (like symmetry and repetition of form) that happen to coincide with strategies used by bona fide Beauty players for which we may have coevolved an appreciation.

Note that this shouldn’t in any way tarnish our appreciation of the dandelion. Whatever the underlying cause, it still tickles the beauty centers in our brains. But insofar as we’re calling attention to the game mechanics that underlie beauty, it must be noted that there’s no coupling between our desire circuits and the dandelion form. Neither is chasing the other.

In fact, the same can be said for our relationship to flowers more generally. Flowers are playing multiplayer beauty with pollinators, clearly, but why they happen to appeal to us is a fascinating open question.

OK, last one.

Tree branches and leaves: single or multiplayer beauty?

A: It has to be single-player... right? A tree is a strictly functional life form; it’s not trying to appeal to anyone. We often find trees beautiful, but they don’t grow because of us.

But what if a tree is planted deliberately in a garden? Then it starts to seem more like an act of multiplayer beauty — a human making something for other humans to appreciate.

In fact, this tree is a bonsai:

So yeah, definitely multiplayer.

One of the main takeaways here is that the real world is messy, and single- and multiplayer beauty aren’t always easy to distinguish. Often the two mechanics are happening simultaneously, and we can see one or the other depending on which frame or level of analysis we choose to apply. As a final frame-shift, consider approaching the images above as photographs. From that perspective, they’re all products of a multiplayer game (where photographers act as deliberate Beauty players). But these nuances not­with­stan­ding, I maintain that the two mechanics — single- and multiplayer beauty — are analytically distinct, and can (and should) be understood separately.

Alright, thanks for playing. Back to our regular program.

Independent vs. Correlated Desire

Now that we have a handle on beauty as a multiplayer game, I want to illustrate what these concepts are capable of. Specifically, I want to show some of the questions that can arise from this framework.

To that end, let’s compare and contrast a honeybee and a fine art collector. Two very different creatures, and yet both are Desire players in games of multiplayer beauty. Both are attracted, by way of their aesthetic sense, to deliberate Beauty products — flowers in the case of bees, artworks in the case of the collector. And both hope to be rewarded for their pursuit of beauty, whether in nectar or in money/​prestige.

That said, bees and art collectors face very different incentives vis-à-vis other Desire players in their respective games.

Specifically, the honeybee gets to make its choice (of which flower to pursue) entirely on its own, without regard for what the other bees are doing. A bee’s only concern is whether a flower has nectar, not whether any other bees are also attracted to it.⁴ In contrast, an art collector must not follow her own instincts in isolation, or she risks investing in something that has no market value. Instead, in the fine art world, it pays to have broadly the same tastes as everyone else (unless you’re buying art for personal consumption, e.g., to hang in your bedroom).

Let’s say that pollination is a game of Independent Desire whereas art collection is a game of Correlated Desire. The distinction is whether the rewards that accrue to a Desire player depend on what the other Desire players are doing. Here again are some cartoons:

What about sexual selection? Is it driven by Independent or Correlated Desire?

This turns out to be quite the contentious issue, and the literature is split more or less down the middle.

To illustrate the two camps, let’s take the concrete question of why peahens (female Desire players) are attracted to peacocks (male Beauty players):

One story goes like this:

A peacock’s tail serves as an honest signal of his genetic fitness and therefore his quality as a mate. In order to grow something so big and bright and highly-ordered, the peacock must be a hearty specimen with good genes. And thus the benefit to the peahen is fairly straightforward: by choosing a beautiful mate, she’ll tend to have healthier, heartier offspring — who will, in turn, leave her more grandchildren.

In this story, peahens are playing a game of Independent Desire. Each gets to choose the mate she considers the healthiest (i.e., most beautiful), without regard to what her peers are doing.

The other story goes like this:

A peacock’s tail is not an honest signal of his fitness. Whatever heartiness is required to produce the tail is cancelled out by the hassle of lugging it around — so males with small, drab tails are just as good at surviving as males with big, bright ones. Instead, a peahen who desires flashy tails is rewarded because other peahens also desire those tails — and therefore the sons that she makes with her beautiful mate will tend to be desired when it’s their turn to reproduce.

In evolutionary biology, this is called runaway sexual selection. And if it sounds circular, well, that’s because it is. In runaway selection, the initial female desire is entirely arbitrary, but it gets fixed within a population simply because everyone else is doing it. Think of it as a self-reinforcing popularity loop. There may be no reason for the initial popularity, but once bright tails become popular, they can remain popular indefinitely (because any female who mates with an ugly/​unpopular mate will have ugly/​unpopular sons). This is a game of Correlated Desire.

So then, in the case of peafowl, which is it? Did the peacock’s tail evolve in response to Independent Desire (honest signaling) or Correlated Desire (runaway selection)?

At the risk of being a wet blanket, I suspect it’s a bit of both. So instead of trying to adjudicate, I’d like to make some general remarks about how to determine which type of game is being played, Independent or Correlated Desire.

On the Desire side, games of Correlated Desire reward herdthink. In sexual selection, we see this as mate choice copying, where females watch other females to see which males they choose, then copy the most popular choices.⁵ In the human realm, herdthink shows up as mimetic desire, where people want things largely because other people want them as well.⁶

But what about the Beauty side? Do the forms of beauty that evolve in the two types of games differ in systematic ways? Perhaps, although I don’t know how strong the effect is. In games of Independent Desire, beauty solves a concrete problem: how to induce a Desire player into a relationship with a Beauty player. And thus there are constraints on the forms that such beauty can take. For example, a flower has to be bright and stand out from the background in order for pollinators to see it from afar. However, in games of Correlated Desire, the objects desired by the herd can take on more arbitrary forms, resulting in a kind of hollow or degenerate beauty — things that are desired only because everyone else desires them (or is thought to desire them), rather than for their intrinsic qualities. (See for example much of contemporary art and architecture.) In these cases, beauty can persist because of the network effect (self-reinforcing popularity), but there’s nevertheless something fragile about it. Biology nerds may recognize this as the lek paradox, while economists will see some of the problems with fiat currencies (e.g., that governments often have to prop them up by artificial means). In both domains, the desire will be more stable if the object in question has even a touch of intrinsic value: gene quality in the case of sexually-selected ornaments; rare metals in the case of money.

Beauty and goodness

Here’s an interesting question (the last one we'll consider today): Is a Venus flytrap beautiful?

I don’t mean beautiful to us, but rather to the insects it eats. Is the flytrap using beauty to attract its prey?

Or what about the sundew (another carnivorous plant)?

There are nuances here, but I’m going to argue that carnivorous plants don’t — in fact, can’t — use beauty to attract their prey.

To understand why, consider again the flower and the honeybee. The flower is playing an iterated, positive-sum game with the bee, and beauty is crucial to the relationship. Specifically, the flower wants to stand out, because having bold colors and a distinctive shape makes it easier for the bee to find it — to remember that the flower was a good collaborator in the past and to recognize it later down the road.

Now think about the flytrap. In contrast to the flower, it’s decidedly not playing a positive-sum game with the insects that visit it. So the more it stands out, the easier it will be for insects to learn to avoid it — the very opposite of what it wants. And thus it doesn’t benefit from calling visual attention to itself, from being beautiful.⁷

More generally, predators and prey exist in the wrong game-theoretical relationship, i.e., one of exploitation. This is not conducive to beauty. Instead, beauty arises from a collaboration between a Beauty player and a Desire player.

Fun fact: many carnivorous plants also make flowers. But note that they take pains to keep their two activities separate. Their flowers look nothing like their mouths, and they hoist the flowers high up off the ground (away from their sticky parts) so their pollinators won’t accidentally get eaten. Like any agent interested in sustained collaboration, they learn not to prey on their partners:

If this analysis generalizes — and I think it does — the conclusion is startling: Beauty is typically good. More precisely, the Beauty role works best for agents pursuing win-win interactions with Desire players.⁸ Agents with “bad” intentions (those who intend to hurt the Desire players) generally don’t benefit from investing in beauty and calling attention to themselves. Instead they try to hide and blend in.

The main exception to this rule, and it’s a significant one, is the existence of mimics and counterfeits. These players — we might consider them a third player type, the Cheat — copy the distinctive forms worked out by honest Beauty players in their pursuit of Desire. But whereas an honest Beauty player somehow provides a benefit to the Desire player, the Cheat does not. For example, one orchid species masquerades as a bellflower — but only the bellflower rewards its pollinators with nectar. The orchid just mooches off of their productive relationship.

In general, though, cheaters can only exist in a world paved by honest players, and the extent to which they can cheat is limited by the success of the strategy they exploit. Without the bellflower to reinforce pollinators, the orchid would have nothing to gain by making a nectar-free flower. And when mimicry becomes too easy, the entire niche collapses, cheats and honest players alike. And thus, in the limit, beauty tends to be good.

Wrapping up

Well there’s a lot more to say, but I’ve gone on long enough.

For those of you interested in exploring further, I’ve left some threads to pull on in the addendum below (“To ponder”). For everyone else, I hope I’ve demoed how to approach beauty as an ecological phenomenon. It’s not about debating whether a given object is or isn’t beautiful. Nor is the goal to identify the Platonic essence of beauty. Instead, it’s about exploring the ecologies in which beauty grows.

___

Thanks to Nick Barr, John Nerst, and Charles Feng for feedback on a draft of this essay, and to Forrest Bennett and Diana Huang for some great conversations about beauty.

To ponder

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they seem worth thinking about:

• What explains the common strategies used by Beauty players in their production of beauty? E.g., clean lines, smooth surfaces, symmetry, repetition of forms, intricacy, elaboration, rich colors, strong contrasts. Are there underlying principles here? In particular, I'm intrigued by the idea of beauty products as proofs-of-work.
• Why are flowers, which evolved to attract insects and other small animals, so attractive to us? Why do we find flowers beautiful? Three possible answers: (1) Coincidence. (2) “Standing out” is the main factor, and both pollinators and humans appreciate when something stands out. (3) Both pollinators and humans use similar standards for evaluating proofs-of-work, because these standards are somewhat universal. Of these, (3) is the most interesting, but I can’t rule out (1) or (2).
• What happens when you introduce Desire players with an appetite for novelty? How does that change the gameplay?
• Are deep sea creatures objectively uglier than their shallow-water counterparts?
• Why are desserts, relative to main courses, more often a vehicle for beauty? (I’m not sure there’s a good answer here, but it seems tantalizing.)
• Why does it feel morally wrong to see beauty emerging from evil places, like the architecture and pageantry of the Third Reich?
• How do the different sensory modalities influence how beauty is expressed in them? In particular, sight, sound, and smell can operate at a distance, whereas taste and touch can only operate up close. For a game based on attraction, this seems relevant. C.f. Denis Dutton’s remark: “Beauty is nature’s way of acting at a distance.”

Endnotes

¹ Bees are actually one of the more generalist pollinators, visiting many different flower species. But at any given time (e.g., during a foraging session), they tend to specialize.

² I couldn’t find a direct estimate of angiosperm biomass, but this paper argues that terrestrial plants account for 80 percent of Earth’s biomass, and a number of sources (e.g., here, here) suggest that angiosperms dominate within the plant kingdom.

³ Caveat: these activities could be a way to learn, for the ultimate purpose of attracting a member of the opposite sex. There’s a lot of precedent for this among birds.

⁴ In fact, the bee might prefer to have desires that are anti-correlated to the desires of other bees, to avoid competition. Thus the more general formulation of this distinction is that Desire players can experience either a positive or negative network effect from other Desire players. And when the sign is negative (as in pollination), Desire players experience crowding and therefore incentives to speciation. This is one reason angiosperms have radiated more than any other clade of plants.

⁵ It’s not that we would never see copying in a game of Independent Desire. For example, younger females (who have underdeveloped tastes) might watch older females (with better-developed tastes) in order to learn from them. But all else being equal, if the game is one of Correlated Desire, we should expect more copying among the Desire players.

⁶ I’m using Girard’s term here, but to be honest I’m not sure if his analysis of it lines up with mine.

⁷ Perhaps this helps explain why flytraps, despite their name, don’t particularly prey on flying insects. Animals who roam the air have too many choices, too much freedom. Instead, flytraps mostly prey on crawling insects, a category that, in one estimate, accounts for 95 percent of their diet. These are land-based creatures who (relative to their winged counterparts) don’t do as much steering with their eyes, who just kind of grope around until they accidentally stumble into the wrong place.

⁸ This is actually an instance of a much more general rule, namely, that signals can only evolve (as a stable feature) when there’s an overlap of interest between sender and receiver.

Photo credits

Most were blatantly copied from random Google image searches. The two I remember are: (1) blue sky (Alex Machado), (2) orchid/bellflower (Olivier Pichard via MinuteEarth).

The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life — my first book, coauthored with Robin Hanson — is now widely available.

You can find the ebook version on Kindle, Google Play, and iBooks. It's also out in hardcover from Amazon, Target.com, and other online retailers. (Cheapest we've seen is on Alibris). And today, I'm thrilled to announce, it can be found on shelves in actual brick-and-mortar bookstores:

[HT: Jeffrey Yu.]

This was a years-long journey — including more than a year and a half since finishing the manuscript! — and I'm extremely proud of what Robin and I have produced. I'm also grateful to readers of this blog. Without your support and encouraging comments, I doubt I'd have had the confidence to write a whole flippin' book.

And now, to help launch the most substantive thing I've ever written, I give you the least substantive thing: a listicle.

10 reasons to read The Elephant in the Brain

1. It's entirely new material

For longtime Melting Asphalt readers, I'm pleased to report that the book is entirely new material — well, aside from a few dozen paragraphs that I couldn't help reusing.

2. So far, readers seem to like it

The book is currently pulling 4.5 stars on Amazon and 4.4 on Goodreads. People on Twitter generally have nice things to say about it. Our publisher, Oxford University Press, used a "peer review"–like process in deciding whether to publish it, and all seven of our academic reviewers were positive. (Thanks, whoever you are!)

Our blurbs were great. Jason Brennan describes it as "the most comprehensive, powerful, unified explanation of human nature and behavior to date." Scott Aaronson calls it a "masterpiece." Steven Pearlstein, a columnist at WaPo, gave us our best blurb by describing the book as a mashup of "Charles Darwin, Dan Kahneman, and Malcolm Gladwell." You can read more here.

Other endorsements from early reviewers:

• Tyler Cowen chose it for his "best books of the year" list.
• Patrick O'Shaughnessy says it's "phenomenal."
• Naval Ravikant says it's a "fantastic read."

So yeah: I'd say the book is off to a good start.

3. It will change how you see yourself

Julia Galef once proposed a three-stage model for sophistication in thinking:

• Stage 1 is naive realism: "X is true."
• Stage 2 is recognizing that we lack perfect access to reality: "I think X is true (but I could be wrong)."
• Stage 3 is recognizing that we lack perfect access to our own minds: "I think I think X is true (but I could be wrong about my belief)."

The Elephant in the Brain is all about Stage 3 and the sobering realization that our minds aren't just hapless and quirky, but downright devious.

So where can we turn when our own minds are lying to us? A: We have to triangulate ourselves from theoretical priors and behavioral data. That's what Robin and I attempt to do in Part I.

4. It will change how you see the world

After examining the inner landscape, the book then turns outward for Part II. The idea is that there are large areas of social life in which we're all deluded about our motives, and as a result, we systematically misunderstand these areas. We typically treat school, for example, as if it were entirely about learning, or charity as if it were entirely about helping, or politics as if it were entirely about governance, when in fact there are significant hidden motives that explain many large-scale features of these institutions. It's only by confronting our hidden motives that we can begin to see what's really going on in the world.

5. The book is chock full of explanations

Robin and I discuss many complex and counterintuitive human behaviors, but we always try to get at the "whys" behind them. And we aim for real causal explanations, not just weaselly associations or correlations.

That said...

6. It's not all true!

Of course, we tried our best to provide only true explanations. But, in the spirit of bold inquiry, we almost certainly overstretched our case in a number of areas. And we're hoping that you, dear reader, can shed light on some of these mistakes and help us see more clearly.

More broadly...

7. The book is part of an open-ended discussion

In Part II, we provide "hidden-motive" explanations for 10 areas of social life:

Body Language, Laughter, Conversation, Consumer Behavior, Art, Charity, Education, Medicine, Religion, and Politics

But as Robin points out on his blog, there are many other areas in need of similar treatment, and we hope other people will join us in finding and illuminating them.

As part of the discussion, here are some early reviews from people in the blog­o­sphere: Don't Break the Vase, Joyous and Swift, Chimp Manager.

8. The book draws from many of my intellectual heroes

The main sources of inspiration were Geoffrey Miller, Robert Trivers, and Robert Kurzban, all of whom provided excellent "giant shoulders" to stand on. But I'm pleased that Matt Ridley, Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, and Dan Dennett also make a few key appearances in the book.

On a more personal note, Robin himself has long been an intellectual hero of mine. To put it in context: he's probably responsible for more of my worldview than anyone else alive today. If you're not familiar with Robin, he's a "professor of economics at George Mason University" — but that label hardly does him justice. He's more of a polymath, having published in fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, cosmology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, physics, politics, and sociology. His weird, wonderful mind seeks deep principles and unifying explanations everywhere, but in a way that's somehow uncorrelated with the approach everyone else is taking (for good and for ill!).

So it was a real treat for me to get to work with Robin on this project — and the result, I think, is firmly in the Hansonian tradition.

9. The book itself is an experiment

When I first approached Robin to see if he wanted to write a book with me, I described it as an "alternative to a PhD." You see, I had already been in grad school once, and knew I didn't want to return for a traditional five-year doctorate. But a book seemed like a comparable project. Both involve intensive research and a long written summary of that research, and both yield a credential of sorts. I'm not going to be "Dr. Simler" at the end of this project, but I'll still have something of substance to put on my byline.

Of course, I realize that a book doesn't meet the same standards of academic rigor as a doctoral dissertation, and I'm under no pretensions that this project makes me an expert in anything. That said, the decision to do a book instead of a PhD has many advantages, and I'm surprised more people don't take this path. In part, I hope the book can light the way for others.

10. Yes, there's an "elephant in the book"

Naturally, we've buried it in one of the later chapters [cheesy grin].

* * * * *

Alright, that's it. Thanks for putting up with my self-promotion. Truly, though, I would be honored if you choose to read this book. And if you write about it anywhere on the web — your blog, Twitter, a review on Amazon or Goodreads — please get in touch and let me know.

One reason, quite simply, is that they bore me. Honesty good. Violence bad. My eyes glaze over. Empathy, rah! Racism, boo! Please, don't we know this already?

The other reason I've eschewed sermons is that I've never properly understood them. They live in one of those dark, uncharted regions on my map of human social behavior. Until recently, I mistook them for a grandiose form of nagging. "Now children," the preacher says, in a voice dripping with smarm, "be nice to each other." But this is off-putting: I don't want to be nagged, and I sure as hell don't want to be nagging others.

I've since come to realize that nagging is a cartoon model of how sermons are supposed to work. As a social phenomenon, they are incomparably more interesting than a parent admonishing a child. In fact, they bundle together a good number of my favorite social dynamics:

[Caution, here be spoilers]
Signaling, third-person effects, network effects, and common knowledge.

So today I want to explain how I've come to understand sermons and why I think they're a worthy subject. It still bothers me that so many of them are boring and devoid of first-order surprise — but we'll return to that in a minute.

Sermons

The archetypical sermon is what a preacher delivers from the pulpit: fire, brimstone, "love your neighbor," yada yada yada. But I'm not specifically interested in religious sermons. Instead I want to investigate the broadest, most general-purpose version of the phenomenon — the "Platonic ideal" (if you will) of a sermon. This will be much closer to what Phil Hopkins calls "mass moralizing." It's the kind of thing I can imagine an alien or AI society converging on: a pattern that emerges spontaneously under a few simple game-theoretic conditions.

As I will use the term, then, a sermon is any message designed to change or reinforce what a group of people value. It might take the form of explicit exhortation, full of shoulds and shouldn'ts, oughts and mustn'ts. Or it may be entirely implicit, like the story of a selfless act that saves the day. Commencement speeches, TED talks, presidential inaugurations — whatever else they may be, all of these are at least part sermon because they attempt to change or reinforce our values en masse.

Moving beyond speeches, we also find 'sermons' in such unconventional forms as movies, charity balls, national monuments, and corporate mission statements. A sermon can be as elaborate as a parade or as straightforward as stating, "I believe in diversity" to a small roomful of people. Even ads can function as sermons. When Apple says, "Think different," it's urging us to value iconoclasm not unlike how a priest might ask us to celebrate chastity or compassion.

Now, to really get our heads around why sermons are interesting, it pays to contrast them with lectures. Both take roughly the same form: a one-to-many broadcast. But they have different functions (moralizing vs. imparting knowledge), and — please bear with me here — in order to fulfill these different functions, they require different topologies. Whereas a lecture addresses its "many" as a collection of individuals, a sermon addresses its "many" as an integrated community or flock: a network of listeners whose relationships stand to change by listening to the sermon:

Incidentally, you can literally see this topological difference when comparing a classroom to a church. In a sparse lecture hall, students will frequently sit apart from each other (but for the odd pair or threesome) — whereas in church, sparse or otherwise, congregants are encouraged to shake hands and introduce themselves to their neighbors:

But why? What's the crucial difference?

Suppose you and I are listening to a physics lecture. Although we share the same goal — learning physics — we're pursuing it more or less independently from one another (and from all other students in the lecture). If you happen to fail the class, it's no skin off my nose, and vice versa.

In contrast, suppose we're listening to a sermon — on the virtue of kindness, say. In this case, I do have a stake in whether you learn the lesson, because unlike physics, if you fail at kindness, I'm going to suffer. Put differently, there are positive externalities to the act of listening to a sermon. When you internalize a sermon's message, I stand to benefit, and vice versa.

An interesting corollary is that, as the audience shrinks, lectures degrade gracefully, whereas sermons get weird. Suppose Feynman's physics lectures were never recorded, and you were (somehow) the only person in attendance as he was delivering them. In other words, he's lecturing to an audience of one. Well, you might feel sad for everyone else who's missing out — but at least you'll learn some things, and Feynman is probably happy to teach you. (It might even be a competitive advantage for you to learn directly from the master.) But if you were somehow the only person at the Lincoln Memorial when MLK delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech... uh... awkward. Why is he using that voice when it's just you? Why is he wasting so much inspiration on a single listener? When you hear a speech like that, it only makes sense if you're sharing the experience with hundreds or millions of other people.

A simple sermon

Now, let's take a very simple sermon and examine it under the microscope.

Here's one that's as close to the Platonic ideal as we're likely to find (this side of the heavenly spheres):

Helen stands on a soapbox in the town square. "Friends, gather round!" she shouts through a bullhorn. "I have an important message for you. Peace is good! Peaceful people are virtuous and we should celebrate them. People who commit violence are evil and we should punish them. I implore you all, put down your weapons and be peaceful to each other!"

I think we all understand, at least intuitively, the effect this sermon is likely to have. If people appreciate what Helen is saying, they'll gather around her, continue listening, and become slightly more peaceful as a result.

But how, exactly, does this transformation occur?

One model that I've already dismissed is the nagging model: that the speaker uses her authority (moral or otherwise) to goad or coerce people into changing their behavior. This model sounds plausible if you're picturing the kind of sermon delivered in a medieval church, with a congregation held captive by an exceptionally powerful clergy. But if, instead, you imagine a presidential inauguration or commencement speech — or Helen's soapbox sermon in the town square — heavy-handed coercion stops making sense. Certainly some nagging takes place during some sermons, but it can't explain why people so often flock to hear them, happily and voluntarily.

Perhaps a more interesting model, and certainly a less patronizing one, is persuasion: that the speaker makes an argument which convinces her audience to change their behavior. Again, I'll grant that there's a role for persuasion in understanding how some sermons work, but I don't think it's nearly as big a role as many people think. Simple verbal persuasion — changing listeners' minds merely by exposing them to ideas — is too weak to have the kind of effects that sermons seem to have. Ideas by themselves, without carrots or sticks, are rarely persuasive enough to overcome entrenched (crony) interests.

(I realize not everyone shares this prejudice of mine, but we can save that full discussion for another day.)

So then, how are we to make sense of Helen's sermon in the town square? How does it induce people to be more peaceful? I have a model I'd like to propose — one that (no surprises here) makes heavy use of external social incentives.

Here are the main components (in bold):

To start with, Helen's sermon functions as a personal advertisement of her good qualities. By preaching, Helen essentially advertises that she's a peaceful person — or that she's at least trying to be peaceful. (If she preaches peace but doesn't practice it, she'll justly be called a hypocrite.) In other words, she's virtue-signaling, but not in a bad way. And other people will be drawn to her, then, in part by the promise that she'll behave well toward them.

In addition to advertising herself as peaceful, Helen also says (through her sermon) that she values peace in others, which implies that she's going to preferentially reward people for acting peacefully around her. Let's call this personal reinforcement. At minimum, she's offering her own friendship for those who are peaceful, and threatening enmity toward those who are violent. This incentivizes people to be peaceful in her presence, and in turn draws yet others into the fold.

As she endorses peace herself, Helen also seeks third-party endorsement from members of the audience. Note that she doesn't say, "I like peace," as if it were a subjective preference. Instead she says, "Peace is good," as a statement of objective fact. Audience members are thereby invited to endorse her sermon (e.g., by cheering, applauding, nodding along, or simply sticking around) or else reject it (e.g., by booing, heckling, or simply walking away). Everyone who sticks around and continues to listen respectfully is thereby acting to amplify the message. By their mere presence, the audience says, "We, too, value peace." And this density of peaceniks makes the environment even more attractive for others to join.

Meanwhile, since all these people are showing up, there's an important precondition that needs to be met: the value being preached needs to exhibit a network effect. In other words, the value needs to be such that the entire group benefits from each new person being added to it.

Peace certainly satisfies this criterion. Peaceful people get along smoothly with other peaceful people, while violent people gum up the works. P–P interactions are more productive and mutually beneficial (positive sum) than either P–V interactions or V–V interactions. In other words, when it comes to peace, the more the merrier.¹

This isn't the case with all values that one might conceivably "preach" to an audience. Suppose Helen promoted height instead of peace. "Being tall is good! Being short is bad! Everyone should wear lifts!" While this could conceivably function as a self-help lecture — arguably, some individuals should wear lifts — it makes for a terrible sermon. Specifically, there's no benefit for a whole group to convene to celebrate height, because groups don't typically benefit by preferring tall people and excluding short people. Height, unlike peace, doesn't have a network effect.

Diagrams

A proper sermon, then, is an attempt to cultivate a network effect around a shared value — and the preacher herself acts as a seed around which the network crystallizes.

Thinking about this visually has been really helpful to me, so I wanted to share a few images I made to convey the dynamics I have in mind. The core idea is that a sermon warps the social fabric in ways that encourage virtue and discourage vice.

To start with, here are a bunch of people milling around the town square, more or less minding their own business:

At some point, Helen (in green) gets on her soapbox and starts preaching about peace:

Soon, everyone becomes attuned to how peaceful or violent everyone else is; it becomes an especially salient factor in the town square. In the diagram below, lighter is more peaceful; darker, more violent:

As Helen continues preaching, the space around her becomes more rewarding to those who act peacefully and less rewarding to those who commit violence (for the reasons we discussed above). Thus, peaceful people start to pool around her, within earshot, while violent people steer clear. Additionally, some listeners may make an effort to change their behavior and act more peacefully than they would otherwise. The net effect is that the audience becomes statistically more peaceful than the rest of the town square:

Having been drawn together, people will then be eager to form and strengthen relationships with others inside the sermon bubble. Friends who already know each other will be happy to learn that they share a common value, while strangers can feel good about meeting each other under the auspices of peace. Even if audience members don't make contact during or after the sermon, they'll at least take note of the other faces in the crowd, the better to recognize them later down the road. ("Didn't I see you at Helen's sermon? You must be one of the good people.") However it happens, the result is a stronger network²:

A minimal success for Helen would be to make a peace-loving friend. A maximal success would be if her sermon catalyzed an entire movement, not unlike those launched by Gandhi or MLK. In practice, of course, most sermons are far too weak to summon a coherent superorganism. But this is nevertheless the kind of thing sermons are attempting to do:

However large the audience, eventually it will disperse. But the boost to these relationships will linger for days or weeks, potentially even a lifetime. All of which is astonishing: with just a few choice words, a preacher can create social capital out of thin air.

Common knowledge

Now, there's one final component to a sermon that I neglected to mention earlier. (It's meaty enough that I wanted to save it for its own section.) In addition to the other components — personal endorsement from the preacher, third-party endorsement from the audience, and network effects — a sermon also needs to produce higher-order or common knowledge.

This means it's not sufficient for everyone in the audience to hear and grok a sermon individually, as it is with a lecture. Instead, for maximal effect, everyone has to know that everyone else has heard and grokked the sermon as well. The more thoroughly this kind of knowledge saturates within a community — everyone knowing that everyone else knows that everyone else knows that... everyone understands the sermon — the stronger the resulting network.

Why?

I think it largely comes down to the difficulty of enforcing standards. Sure, Alice and Bob might both individually endorse the importance of forgiveness, say. But if Alice doesn't know that Bob also endorses forgiveness, it's much harder to hold him to it. If she sees him being vengeful, she might think, "Well, he just doesn't know any better." From Bob's perspective, he's less likely to misbehave if he attended the sermon and knows that Alice saw him there. His awareness of her awareness will give him second thoughts about acting badly. In addition, moral communities often benefit from upholding a so-called meta-norm: an injunction to punish anyone who doesn't punish others for their transgressions. As you can imagine, this kind of recursive rule requires commensurately recursive knowledge in order to get off the ground.

The need for a sermon to generate common knowledge helps explain a lot of typical features:

1. Sermons are usually delivered in public, where people can listen together. Gossip, though it also aims to convey moral information, is conducted in private, and therefore fails to generate the same kind of network effect as a sermon.
2. Sermons can't be shy; they benefit from being conspicuous.³ There's a reason Helen stands on her soapbox and uses a bullhorn. The whole point is to reach people and give them confidence that others have heard the sermon as well. To this end, it's important for a sermon to be clear and loud, but also entertaining, memorable, quotable, etc. All else being equal, a boring sermon is less effective than a captivating one.⁴ When the audience is half-asleep, it breaks the common-knowledge spell.
3. Sermons need to be repeated. This is because real human beings — unlike the hyper-rational archetypes contrived for use in logic puzzles — need to hear a sermon more than once in order to understand it, remember it, and infer all its consequences. Even if you can understand a sermon after hearing it for the first time, others might need more time and repetition. Nothing becomes common knowledge in a large population without a fair bit of harping. This helps explain why preachers often repeat key phrases within the same sermon, and why churches return to the same themes year after year after year.
4. Generally, a sermon shouldn't be elitist; it should appeal to the widest tastes and/​or lowest common denominator. The more people it reaches, the better — so it should strive not to alienate anyone, and its message should be easy and palatable enough for most listeners to digest. If a lecture on quantum mechanics is so difficult that some students struggle to comprehend it, that may actually be a feature — but for a sermon, inaccessibility is almost always a bug.
5. A sermon feeds on audience participation. At a minimum, people need to show up in order to see and be seen by each other; their attendance itself is an important form of endorsement. Beyond that, cheers and applause help generate common knowledge of how strongly different parts of the sermon are endorsed. The louder and longer the cheer, the more obvious it is that everyone's on board — and that they all know it. Songs, group chants, and call-and-response patterns all help generate this kind of common knowledge. Laughter also works extremely well, as long as it's not the divisive kind of laughter (e.g., the audience laughing at the speaker).

Now, at least two of these features are in tension with each other. As we've seen, the ideal sermon is both captivating and repetitive. But repetition is boring. Instead of holding the audience's attention, a repetitive sermon risks alienating it.

I suspect most of my readers are like me, in that we gravitate toward novelty and recoil from repetition. (Are you also bored by sermons, or is it just me?) Part of my problem, I suspect, is that I fixate on the wrong things. I'm constantly asking myself, "Did I know this already?" and coming up disappointed, when instead I should be wondering, "Who else is in the audience, and did I already know that they knew this?" In other words, a sermon might be entirely obvious, redundant, and boring at the object level, while at the same time generating novel, valuable information at higher-order levels.

And yes, a sermon I've heard a dozen times might still be boring, but at least I find comfort in knowing that it isn't pointless.

One especially repetitive type of sermon that I've recently come to appreciate is the wedding. Aside from its effect on the couple at the altar, each wedding also serves to reinforce the institution of marriage among everyone in the audience. Remember, marriage isn't just a promise between two individuals. It relies on a whole complex of norms⁵ supported by an entire community.

Over the course of our lives, each of us attends a good number of weddings (including those on TV and in movies), and all that preaching really adds up. But imagine a world in which weddings weren't nearly as common. Suppose 'marriage' was as exotic to you as the relationship between serf and feudal lord. Sure, you might understand the basic outline of the institution, but you'll be hazy on specifics and you won't really feel the moral weight of it in your bones. In such a world, would you instinctively know to treat other people's marriages as sacred? Would you urge your married friends to stick out their rough patches? Would you hold stigma in your heart for someone who casually broke off their own marriage, or who attempted to seduce a happily married partner?

Every wedding sermon delivers more or less the same message: love is wonderful and marriage is a serious, lifelong commitment. And we need this repetition; it's the very care and feeding of the institution. Every wedding, no matter how uninspired, replenishes higher-order knowledge and reinforces the network effect. And simply by attending, the guests are celebrating not just the happy couple, but also the very idea of marriage itself.

Sermons in strange places

One of my favorite sermons of all time is a blog post: In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization by Scott Alexander over at Slate Star Codex. You should go read it when you're done here (the end is near, I promise!), but the actual content isn't relevant to our concerns. What's important is the format.

Now, ordinarily, a blog post isn't a great format for a sermon — but then Slate Star Codex is no ordinary blog. It happens to be everyone's favorite blog, at least in my little corner of the internet. Whenever I meet someone new and learn that they're a fellow reader, I think, "Ah, this is my kind of person." The discussion section for each post brims with substantive comments that routinely number in the hundreds, occasionally in the thousands. Like weekly church service, SSC is a place to see and be seen, and therefore a place to generate higher-order knowledge.

I'm pretty sure I would read Slate Star Codex even if no one else did. But when one of his posts delivers a moral message, I'm especially glad so many other people are reading it along with me. And since Scott is such a clear and charismatic writer, people typically read the whole thing (and often remember it!), even when it's a long and complex argument. He pools attention exceptionally well, and uses it not just to educate, but to help his readers connect over shared values.

This is the same way that a book or movie can function as a sermon. It's not necessary to physically sit next to others while you're experiencing it, as if you were in the pews at church. Instead, there's something of an ad hoc forum that develops 'around' the work in question — think dinner-party discussions, water-cooler talk, and subreddits full of gushing fans — analogous to the earshot-zone around Helen in the town square. Wherever people bond over shared values sparked by a piece of art, there's a sermon in action.

So if a movie, book, or blog post can function as a sermon, what about a tweet?

Absolutely. After the recent spate of demonstrations by white nationalists, Barack Obama tweeted:

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion.

This quickly became one of the most popular tweets of all time. In just a few days, it racked up 1.7 million retweets and 4.6 million likes. And yet, of all the people who liked and retweeted it, how many of them actually learned something new? Everyone in that audience already knows that racism is wrong. But what people may not have realized is how many others stand against racism alongside them — as well as, perhaps more importantly, which particular others stand with them. This is a valuable service, not to be shrugged off as obvious or redundant.

I picture each of these viral tweets as an impulse flashing across a graph of users. Every like and retweet is an endorsement, a tiny cheer for a miniature sermon. And each endorsement, in its small way, enhances the relationship between two or more people, uniting them as champions of the same cause. As one of these tweets propagates, the network tightens along its wake — almost imperceptibly, to be sure, but the effects add up. Taken altogether, tweets, like sermons, bring people together.⁶

And this, I'm a bit sad to report, is why outrage is so contagious. Outrage is like the angry, pitchfork-wielding cousin of the more conventional, respectable type of sermon. But it's a member of the sermon family nonetheless, and therefore subject to all the dynamics we've discussed here today.

On the internet, we love to share the outrage du jour, while older forms — just as popular in their heyday — include effigy burnings and public executions. These are roughly the double-negative of a positive sermon: By raging against a vice, you elevate its opposing virtue; by condemning Evil, you celebrate Good. And although outrage has some serious downsides, like all sermons, it can be very effective at bringing a moral ingroup closer together.

A final thought

If there's any kind of lesson in all this, it's mostly some advice I want to give myself.

The lesson is simply: speak up.

It's OK to slip into advocacy now and then, so long as you do it tastefully. If it sounds high- or heavy-handed — or anything like nagging — you're doing it wrong. Just explain why you care about a particular value. The goal isn't to change individual behavior (at least not directly), but rather to cultivate a network effect. And who doesn't like a network effect?

Moreover, there's no need to preach the very highest or most important ideals. Peace, love, and compassion have been glorified ad nauseam; they're already fully saturated as common knowledge. A better approach is to focus on values that are underappreciated — whatever you would personally like to see more of, both in yourself and the people around you. Preach the network effect you wish to join in the world.

Perhaps a metaphor will help. Delivering a sermon, I think, is a bit like planting a flag and setting up camp. It's an invitation to others: come, join me, it's safe and friendly around here. One strategy is to settle in with a big camp that will accommodate hundreds (or hundreds of millions) of people. Or maybe you'd prefer to huddle around a small campfire with a few close friends. That's nice too, as long as there's reason to gather.

Where do you want to hang your hat and lay your head? Is it good for others to join you? There's your sermon; let them hear it.

———

Further reading:

• That Slate Star Codex sermon on niceness and civilization.
• Robin Hanson on mass moralizing.

Endnotes:

¹ Peace has its limits, of course: a tribe can't be so peaceful that they forget how to fight other tribes.

² Note that not everyone benefits from Helen's sermon. In particular, the strong, aggressive, or dominant types might prefer if Helen had never stood on her soapbox, because they'll either be left out in the cold or be forced to behave more peacefully than they're otherwise inclined to.

³ Note from the Etymology Fairy: conspicuous derives from the Latin com-, meaning together, plus specere, meaning to observe (cf. spectacle). What is conspicuous is something that is easily noticed, and therefore noticed by everyone. A more Germanic construction might be "togetherseen."

⁴ Actually, it's not entirely true that boring sermons are necessarily less effective than captivating sermons, because there's a costly signaling dynamic going on. In some cases, we can get greater commitment to our shared values by attending a boring sermon, because those who are willing to endure the boredom are the real die-hards. In other words, boredom is sometimes a feature rather than a bug.

⁵ A "normplex," perhaps?

⁶ Not every tweet functions as a sermon, of course. Many tweets are educational, for example, and these have a different effect on the social fabric.

Credits up front: This essay draws heavily from Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong, Slate Star Codex, Robert Kurzban, Robert Trivers, Thomas Schelling, and Jonathan Haidt (among others I'm certainly forgetting). These are some of my all-time favorite sources, so I hope I'm doing them justice here.

—

For as long as I can remember, I've struggled to make sense of the terrifying gulf that separates the inside and outside views of beliefs.

From the inside, via introspection, each of us feels that our beliefs are pretty damn sensible. Sure we might harbor a bit of doubt here and there. But for the most part, we imagine we have a firm grip on reality; we don't lie awake at night fearing that we're massively deluded.

But when we consider the beliefs of other people? It's an epistemic shit show out there. Astrology, conspiracies, the healing power of crystals. Aliens who abduct Earthlings and build pyramids. That vaccines cause autism or that Obama is a crypto-Muslim — or that the world was formed some 6,000 years ago, replete with fossils made to look millions of years old. How could anyone believe this stuff?!

No, seriously: how?

Let's resist the temptation to dismiss such believers as "crazy" — along with "stupid," "gullible," "brainwashed," and "needing the comfort of simple answers." Surely these labels are appropriate some of the time, but once we apply them, we stop thinking. This isn't just lazy; it's foolish. These are fellow human beings we're talking about, creatures of our same species whose brains have been built (grown?) according to the same basic pattern. So whatever processes beget their delusions are at work in our minds as well. We therefore owe it to ourselves to try to reconcile the inside and outside views. Because let's not flatter ourselves: we believe crazy things too. We just have a hard time seeing them as crazy.

So, once again: how could anyone believe this stuff? More to the point: how could we end up believing it?

After struggling with this question for years and years, I finally have an answer I'm satisfied with.

Beliefs as employees

By way of analogy, let's consider how beliefs in the brain are like employees at a company. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it'll get us 70% of the way there.[1]

Employees are hired because they have a job to do, i.e., to help the company accomplish its goals. But employees don't come for free: they have to earn their keep by being useful. So if an employee does his job well, he'll be kept around, whereas if he does it poorly — or makes other kinds of trouble, like friction with his coworkers — he'll have to be let go.

Similarly, we can think about beliefs as ideas that have been "hired" by the brain. And we hire them because they have a "job" to do, which is to provide accurate information about the world.[2] We need to know where the lions hang out (so we can avoid them), which plants are edible or poisonous (so we can eat the right ones), and who's romantically available (so we know whom to flirt with). The closer our beliefs hew to reality, the better actions we'll be able to take, leading ultimately to survival and reproductive success. That's our "bottom line," and that's what determines whether our beliefs are serving us well. If a belief performs poorly — by inaccurately modeling the world, say, and thereby leading us astray — then it needs to be let go.

I hope none of this is controversial. But here's where the analogy gets interesting.

Consider the case of Acme Corp., a property development firm in a small town called Nepotsville. The unwritten rule of doing business in Nepotsville is that companies are expected to hire the city council's friends and family members. Companies that make these strategic hires end up getting their permits approved and winning contracts from the city. Meanwhile, companies that "refuse to play ball" find themselves getting sued, smeared in the local papers, and shut out of new business.

In this environment, Acme faces two kinds of incentives, one pragmatic and one political. First, like any business, it needs to complete projects on time and under budget. And in order to do that, it needs to act like a meritocracy, i.e., by hiring qualified workers, monitoring their performance, and firing those who don't pull their weight. But at the same time, Acme also needs to appease the city council. And thus it needs to engage in a little cronyism, i.e., by hiring workers who happen to be well-connected to the city council (even if they're unqualified) and preventing those crony workers from being fired (even when they do shoddy work).

Suppose Acme has just decided to hire the mayor's nephew Robert as a business analyst.[3] Robert isn't even remotely qualified for the role, but it's nevertheless in Acme's interests to hire him. He'll "earn his keep" not by doing good work, but by keeping the mayor off the company's back.

Now suppose we were to check in on Robert six months later. If we didn't already know he was a crony, we might easily mistake him for a regular employee. We'd find him making spreadsheets, attending meetings, drawing a salary: all the things employees do. But if we look carefully enough — not at Robert per se, but at the way the company treats him — we're liable to notice something fishy. He's terrible at his job, and yet he isn't fired. Everyone cuts him slack and treats him with kid gloves. The boss tolerates his mistakes and even works overtime to compensate for them. God knows, maybe he's even promoted.

Clearly Robert is a different kind of employee, a different breed. The way he moves through the company is strange, as if he's governed by different rules, measured by a different yardstick. He's in the meritocracy, but not of the meritocracy.

And now the point of this whole analogy.

I contend that the best way to understand all the crazy beliefs out there — aliens, conspiracies, and all the rest — is to analyze them as crony beliefs. Beliefs that have been "hired" not for the legitimate purpose of accurately modeling the world, but rather for social and political kickbacks.

As Steven Pinker says,

People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.

In other words, just like Acme, the human brain has to strike an awkward balance between two different reward systems:

• Meritocracy, where we monitor beliefs for accuracy out of fear that we'll stumble by acting on a false belief; and
• Cronyism, where we don't care about accuracy so much as whether our beliefs make the right impressions on others.

And so we can roughly (with caveats we'll discuss in a moment) divide our beliefs into merit beliefs and crony beliefs. Both contribute to our bottom line — survival and reproduction — but they do so in different ways: merit beliefs by helping us navigate the world, crony beliefs by helping us look good.

The point is, our brains are incredibly powerful organs, but their native architecture doesn't care about high-minded ideals like Truth. They're designed to work tirelessly and efficiently — if sometimes subtly and counterintuitively — in our self-interest. So if a brain anticipates that it will be rewarded for adopting a particular belief, it's perfectly happy to do so, and doesn't much care where the reward comes from — whether it's pragmatic (better outcomes resulting from better decisions), social (better treatment from one's peers), or some mix of the two. A brain that didn't adopt a socially-useful (crony) belief would quickly find itself at a disadvantage relative to brains that are more willing to "play ball." In extreme environments, like the French Revolution, a brain that rejects crony beliefs, however spurious, may even find itself forcibly removed from its body and left to rot on a pike. Faced with such incentives, is it any wonder our brains fall in line?

Even mild incentives, however, can still exert pressure on our beliefs. Russ Roberts tells the story of a colleague who, at a picnic, started arguing for an unpopular political opinion — that minimum wage laws can cause harm — whereupon there was a "frost in the air" as his fellow picnickers "edged away from him on the blanket." If this happens once or twice, it's easy enough to shrug off. But when it happens again and again, especially among people whose opinions we care about, sooner or later we'll second-guess our beliefs and be tempted to revise them.

Mild or otherwise, these incentives are also pervasive. Everywhere we turn, we face pressure to adopt crony beliefs. At work, we're rewarded for believing good things about the company. At church, we earn trust in exchange for faith, while facing severe sanctions for heresy. In politics, our allies support us when we toe the party line, and withdraw support when we refuse. (When we say politics is the mind-killer, it's because these social rewards completely dominate the pragmatic rewards, and thus we have almost no incentive to get at the truth.) Even dating can put untoward pressure on our minds, insofar as potential romantic partners judge us for what we believe.

If you've ever wanted to believe something, ask yourself where that desire comes from. Hint: it's not the desire simply to believe what's true.

In short: Just as money can pervert scientific research, so everyday social incentives have the potential to distort our beliefs.

Posturing

So far we've been describing our brains as "responding to incentives," which gives them a passive role. But it can also be helpful to take a different perspective, one in which our brains actively adopt crony beliefs in order to strategically influence other people. In other words, we use crony beliefs to posture.

Here are a few of the agendas we can accomplish with our beliefs:

• Blending in. Often it's useful to avoid drawing attention to ourselves; as Voltaire said, "It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." In which case, we'll want to adopt ordinary or common beliefs.
• Sticking out. In other situations, it might be better to bristle and hold unorthodox beliefs, in order to demonstrate that we're independent thinkers or that we don't cow to authority. This is similar to the biological strategy of aposematism, and I suspect it's one of the key motives driving people to conspiracy theories and other contrarian beliefs.
• Sucking up. Being a yes-man or –woman, or otherwise adopting beliefs that flatter those with power, is an established tactic for cozying up to authority figures. Similarly — though we don't think of it as "sucking up" — we often use beliefs to demonstrate loyalty, both to individuals ("My son would never do something like that") as well as to entire communities ("The Raiders are definitely going to win tonight").[4] Just as we bow, kneel, and prostrate before rulers and altars, we also have means of humbling ourselves epistemically, e.g., by adopting beliefs that privilege others' interests over our own.
• Showing off, AKA signaling. We can use our beliefs to show off many of our cognitive or psychological qualities: intelligence, kindness, openness, cleverness, etc. I'm sure Elon Musk impressed a lot of people with his willingness to entertain the mind-bending idea that our universe is merely a simulation; whether he's right or wrong is largely incidental.[5]
• Cheerleading. Here the idea is to believe what you want other people to believe — in other words, believing your own propaganda, drinking your own Kool-aid. Over-the-top self-confidence, for example, seems dangerous as a private merit belief, but makes perfect sense as a crony belief, if expressing it inspires others to have confidence in you.
• Jockeying for high ground. This might mean the moral high ground ("Effective Altruism is the only kind of altruism worth doing") or some kind of social high ground ("New York has so much more culture than San Francisco").

It's also important to remember that we have many different audiences to posture and perform in front of. These include friends, family, neighbors, classmates, coworkers, people at church, other parents at our kids' preschool, etc. And a belief that helps us with one audience might hurt us with another.

Behind every crony belief, then, lies a rat's nest of complexity. In practice, this means we can never know (with any certainty) what caused a given belief to be adopted, at least not from the outside. There are simply too many different incentives — too many possible postures in front of too many audiences — to try to calculate how a given belief might be in someone's best interest. Only the brain of the believer is in a position to weigh all the tradeoffs involved — and even then it might make a mistake. When discussing specific beliefs, then, we must proceed with extreme caution and humility. In fact, it's probably best to stick to stereotypes and generalizations.

What's the point?

Now, in some sense, all of this is so obvious as to hardly be worth stating. Of course our brains respond to social incentives; everyone knows this from first-hand experience. (Don't we?) In another sense, however, I worry that the social influences on our beliefs are sorely underappreciated. I, for one, typically explain my own misbeliefs (as well as those I see in others) as rationality errors, breakdowns of the meritocracy. But what I'm arguing here is that most of these misbeliefs are features, not bugs. What looks like a market failure is actually crony capitalism. What looks like irrationality is actually streamlined epistemic corruption.

In fact, I'll go further. I contend that social incentives are the root of all our biggest thinking errors.

(For what it's worth, I don't have a ton of confidence in this assertion. I just think it's a reasonable hypothesis and worth putting forward, if for no other purpose than to draw out good counterarguments or counterexamples.)

Let me elaborate. Suppose we weren't Homo sapiens but Solo sapiens, a hypothetical species as intelligent as we are today, but with no social life whatsoever (perhaps descended from orangutans?). In that case, it's my claim that our minds would be clean, efficient information-processing machines — straightforward meritocracies trying their best to make sense of the world. Sure we would continue to make mistakes here and there, owing to all the usual factors: imperfect information, limited time, limited brainpower. But those mistakes would be small, random, and correctable.

Unfortunately, as Homo sapiens, our mistakes are stubborn, systematic, and (in some cases) exaggerated by runaway social feedback loops. And this, I claim, is because our lives are teeming with other people. The trouble with people is that they have partial visibility into our minds, and they sometimes reward us for believing falsehoods and/​or punish us for believing the truth. This is why we're tempted to participate in epistemic corruption — to think in bad faith.

Responsible usage

Before we go any further, a brief warning.

One of my main goals for writing this essay has been to introduce two new concepts — merit beliefs and crony beliefs — that I hope make it easier to talk and reason about epistemic problems. But unless we're careful, these concepts can do more harm than good.

First, it's important to remember that merit beliefs aren't necessarily true, nor are crony beliefs necessarily false. What distinguishes the two concepts is how we're rewarded for them: via effective actions or via social impressions. The best we can say is that merit beliefs are more likely to be true.

The other important subtlety is that a given belief can serve both pragmatic and social purposes at the same time — just like Robert could theoretically be a productive employee, even while he's the mayor's nephew. Suppose I were to believe that "My team is capable and competent," for example. This has pragmatic value, insofar as it contributes to my decision to stay on the team (vs. looking for a new one), but it also has social value, insofar as my team is more likely to trust me when I express this belief. So is it a "merit belief" or a "crony belief"? Mu. When labels break down, it's wise to taboo them in order to get back in touch with the underlying reality — which in our case, looks something like this:

When we call something a "merit belief," then, we're claiming that its pragmatic value far outstrips its social value. And if we call something a "crony belief," we're claiming the reverse. But it's important to remember that the underlying belief-space is two-dimensional, and that a given belief can fall at any point within that space.

With that in mind, I think it's safe to proceed.

Identifying crony beliefs

Now for the $64,000 question: How can we identify which of our beliefs are cronies?

What makes this task difficult is that crony beliefs are designed to mimic ordinary merit beliefs. That said, something in our brains has to be aware — dimly, at least — of which beliefs are cronies, or else we wouldn't be able to give them the coddling that they need to survive inside an otherwise meritocratic system. (If literally no one at Acme knew that Robert was a crony employee, he'd quickly be fired.) The trick, then, is to look for differences in how merit beliefs and crony beliefs are treated by the brain.

From first principles, we should expect ordinary beliefs to be treated with level-headed pragmatism. They have only one job to do — model the world — and when they do it poorly, we suffer. This naturally leads to such attitudes as a fear of being wrong and even an eagerness to be criticized and corrected. As Karl Popper and (more recently) David Deutsch have argued, knowledge can't exist without criticism. If we want to be right in the long run, we have to accept that we'll often be wrong in the short run, and be willing to do the needful thing, i.e., discard questionable beliefs. This may sound vaguely heroic or psychologically difficult, somehow, but it's not. A meritocracy experiences no anguish in letting go of a misbelief and adopting a better one, even its opposite. In fact, it's a pleasure. If I believe that my daughter's soccer game starts at 6pm, but my neighbor informs me that it's 5pm, I won't begrudge his correction — I'll be downright grateful.

Crony beliefs, on the other hand, get an entirely different treatment. Since we mostly don't care whether they're making accurate predictions, we have little need to seek out criticism for them. (Why would Acme bother monitoring Robert's performance if they never intend to fire him?) Going further, crony beliefs actually need to be protected from criticism. It's not that they're necessarily false, just that they're more likely to be false — but either way, they're unlikely to withstand serious criticism. Thus we should expect our brains to take an overall protective or defensive stance toward our crony beliefs.

Here, then, is a short list of features that crony beliefs will tend to have, relative to good-faith merit beliefs:

• Abstract and impractical. Merit beliefs have value only insofar as we're able to make use of them for choosing actions; we need some "skin in the game." If a belief isn't actionable, or if the actions we might take based on the belief (e.g., voting) don't provide material benefits one way or the other, then it's more likely to be a crony.
• Benefit of the doubt. When we have social incentives to believe something, we stack the deck in its favor. Or to use another metaphor, we put our thumbs on the scale as we weigh the evidence. Blind faith — religious, political, or otherwise — is simply "benefit of the doubt" taken to its logical extreme.
• Conspicuousness. The whole point of a crony belief is to reap social and political rewards, but in order to get these rewards, we need to advertise the belief in question. So the greater our urge to talk about a belief, to wear it like a badge, the more likely it is to be a crony.
• Overconfidence. Related to the above, crony beliefs will typically provide more social value the more confident we seem in them. (If Acme hires the mayor's nephew, but seems constantly on the verge of firing him, the mayor isn't going to be happy.) Overconfidence also acts as a form of protection for beliefs that can't survive on their own within the meritocracy.
• Reluctance to bet. Betting on a belief is just as good as acting on it; both mechanisms create incentives for accuracy. If we're reluctant to bet on a belief, then, it's often because some parts of our psyche know that the belief is unlikely to be true. Hence the challenge: "Put up or shut up."

But perhaps the biggest hallmark of epistemic cronyism is exhibiting strong emotions, as when we feel proud of a belief, anguish over changing our minds, or anger at being challenged or criticized. These emotions have no business being within 1000ft of a meritocratic belief system — but of course they make perfect sense as part of a crony belief system, where cronies need special protection in order to survive the natural pressures of a meritocracy.

J'accuse

Now for the uncomfortable part: wherein I accuse you, dear reader, of cronyism.

Specifically, I charge you with harboring a crony belief about climate change. I don't care whether you subscribe to the scientific consensus or whether you think it's all a hoax — or even whether you hold some nuanced position. Unless you're radically uncertain, your belief is a crony.

"But," I imagine you might object, "my belief is based on evidence and careful reasoning. I've read in-depth on climate science and confronted every criticism of my position. Hell, I've even changed my own mind on this topic! I used to believe X, but now I believe Y."

Here's the problem: I'm not accusing your belief of being false; I'm accusing it of being a crony. And no appeal to evidence or careful reasoning, or even felt sincerity, can rebut this accusation.

What makes for a crony belief is how we're rewarded for it. And the problem with beliefs about climate change is that we have no way to act on them — by which I mean there are no actions we can take whose payoffs (for us as individuals) depend on whether our beliefs are true or false. The rare exception would be someone living near the Florida coast, say, who moves inland to avoid predicted floods. (Does such a person even exist?) Or maybe the owner of a hedge fund or insurance company who places bets on the future evolution of the climate. But for the rest of us, our incentives come entirely from other people, from the way they judge us for what we believe and say. And thus our beliefs about climate change are little more than hot air (pun intended).

Of course there's nothing special about climate change. We find similar bad-faith incentives among many different types of beliefs:

• Political beliefs, like whether gun control will save lives or which candidate will lead us to greater prosperity.
• Religious beliefs, like whether God approves of birth control or whether Islam is a "religion of peace."
• Ethical beliefs, like whether animals should have legal personhood or how to answer the various trolley problems.
• Beliefs about the self, like "I'm a good person," or "I have free will."
• Beliefs about identity groups, like whether men and women have statistically different aptitudes or whether certain races are mistreated by police.

Since it's all but impossible to act on these beliefs, there are no legitimate sources of reward. Meanwhile, we take plenty of social kickbacks for these beliefs, in the form of the (hopefully favorable) judgments others make when we profess them. In other words, they're all cronies.

So then: is it hopeless? Is "believing things" a lost cause in anything but the most quotidian of domains?

Certainly I've had my moments being wracked by such despair. But perhaps there's a sliver of hope.

Better incentives

Conventional wisdom holds that the way to more accurate beliefs is "critical thinking." Lock yourself in a room with the Less Wrong sequences (or the equivalent), study the principles of rationality and empiricism, learn about cognitive biases, etc. — and soon you'll be well on your way to a mind reasonably free of falsehoods.

The problem with this approach is that it addresses the symptom (irrationality) without addressing the root cause (social incentives).

Let's return to Acme for a moment. Imagine that some clueless (but well-meaning) executive notices that Robert and a handful of other workers aren't getting fired, despite their shoddy work. Not realizing that they're cronies, the exec naturally suspects the problem is not enough meritocracy. So he launches a campaign to beef up performance standards, replete with checklists, quarterly reviews, oversight committees, management training seminars, etc., etc., etc. — all of which is more likely to hurt the company than to help it. The two most likely effects are (1) the cronies get fired, and the city council comes down hard on Acme, or (2) the other execs, who are clued in to the cronyism, have to work even harder to protect the cronies from getting fired. In other words, Acme suffers more "corporate dissonance."

Now if our executive crusader understood the full picture, he might instead direct his efforts outside the company, at the political ecosystem that allows strong-arming and corruption to fester. If he could fix Nepotsville city politics, he'd be quashing the problem at its root, and Acme's meritocracy could then begin to heal naturally.

Back in the belief domain, it's similarly clueless (if well-meaning) to focus on beefing up the "meritocracy" within an individual mind. If you give someone the tools to purge their crony beliefs without fixing the ecosystem in which they're embedded, it's a prescription for trouble. They'll either (1) let go of their crony beliefs (and lose out socially), or (2) suffer more cognitive dissonance in an effort to protect the cronies from their now-sharper critical faculties.

The better — but much more difficult — solution is to attack epistemic cronyism at the root, i.e., in the way others judge us for our beliefs. If we could arrange for our peers to judge us solely for the accuracy of our beliefs, then we'd have no incentive to believe anything but the truth.

In other words, we do need to teach rationality and critical thinking skills — not just to ourselves, but to everyone at once. The trick is to see this as a multilateral rather than a unilateral solution.[6] If we raise epistemic standards within an entire population, then we'll all be cajoled into thinking more clearly — making better arguments, weighing evidence more evenhandedly, etc. — lest we be seen as stupid, careless, or biased.

The beauty of Less Wrong, then, is that it's not just a textbook: it's a community. A group of people who have agreed, either tacitly or explicitly, to judge each other for the accuracy of their beliefs — or at least for behaving in ways that correlate with accuracy. And so it's the norms of the community that incentivize us to think and communicate as rationally as we do.

All of which brings us to a strange and (at least to my mind) unsettling conclusion. Earlier I argued that other people are the cause of all our epistemic problems. Now I find myself arguing that they're also our best solution.

_____

Appendix

Yes, I've sunk to writing an appendix to a blog post. Click here to read it, especially if you're interested in these two questions: (1) What actual evidence do we have that our brains are engaging in cronyism? and (2) Why don't we simply lie (instead of internalizing crony beliefs)?

_____

Thanks to Mills Baker and Robin Hanson for their comments on previous drafts of this essay.

Further reading:

• Robin Hanson, Are Beliefs Like Clothes? Probably the original statement of the dual function of beliefs.
• Sarah Perry, The Art of the Conspiracy Theory. Key quote: "The conspiracy theory is an active, creative art form, whose truth claims serve as formal obstructions rather than being the primary point of the endeavor."

Endnotes:

[1] beliefs. Pedantic note for philosopher-types: When I talk about "beliefs" in this essay, I'm referring to representations that make up our brain's internal map or model of the world. Beliefs aren't always true, of course, but what's important is that we treat them as though they were true. Beliefs also come with degrees of certainty: confident, hesitant, or anywhere in between. Sometimes we represent beliefs explicitly in words, e.g., "Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States." Most of our beliefs, however, are entirely implicit. When we sit down at a desk, for example, we don't have to tell ourselves, "There's a chair behind me"; we simply fall backwards and expect the chair to catch us. The point is, I'm using "beliefs" as an umbrella term to cover many related concepts: ideas, knowledge, convictions, opinions, predictions, and expectations; in this essay, they're all getting lumped together.

[2] accurate information. To be maximally precise, we don't need our beliefs to be accurate so much as we need them to be expedient. If a belief is accurate but too complex to act on, it's a liability. That's why we adopt heuristic beliefs: quick and dirty approximations that are accurate enough to produce good outcomes. Expedience may also explain some of our perceptual biases, like when we hear a strange noise in the woods and jump to thinking it's a person or animal. Statistically, strange sounds are more likely to be caused by wind or a falling tree branch. But when the outcomes (of false positives vs. false negatives) are so skewed, it can behoove us to believe a likely falsehood.

[3] Robert. I've taken the liberty of naming our crony after the three Roberts famous for their writings on self-deception: Trivers, Kurzban, and Wright.

[4] showing loyalty. Note from the Etymology Fairy: the English words truth, faith, and veracity all derive from roots meaning "to trust." As in, "You trust me, don't you?"

[5] Elon Musk. Actually he may have lost respect, on net, for making the simulation argument. Either way, I'm pretty sure he (or his brain) thought it would impress people.

[6] unilateral rationality. There is an argument for teaching rationality to individuals in isolation, which is that our minds may be so thoroughly corrupted by social incentives that they can't reason effectively even in the absence of those incentives — in which case, rationality may fix the corruption, but at the cost of some serious social side effects.

Growing up I was a very science-minded kid — still am — and from an early age I learned to accept the basic meaninglessness of the universe. Science taught me that it's all just atoms and the void, so there can't be any deeper point or purpose to the whole thing; the kind of meaning most people yearn for — Ultimate Meaning — simply doesn't exist.

Nor was I satisfied with the obligatory secular follow-up, that you have to "make your own meaning." I knew what that was: a consolation prize. And since I wasn't a sore loser, I decided I didn't need meaning of either variety, Ultimate or man-made.

In lieu of meaning, I mostly adopted the attitude of Alan Watts. Existence, he says, is fundamentally playful. It's less like a journey, and more like a piece of music or a dance. And the point of dancing isn't to arrive at a particular spot on the floor; the point of dancing is simply to dance. Vonnegut expresses a similar sentiment when he says, "We are here on Earth to fart around."

This may be nihilism, but at least it's good-humored.

Now, to be honest, I'm not sure whether I'm a full-bodied practitioner of Watts's or Vonnegut's brand of nihilism. Deep down, maybe I still yearn for more than dancing and farting. But by accepting nihilism, at least as an intellectual plausibility, I've mostly kept the specter of meaning from haunting me late at night. [1]

Now, if this were the final word on the subject, I'd be perfectly content. Unfortunately, some of my favorite writers of recent years — Sarah Perry and David Chapman, in particular — can't seem to shut up about meaning. Together they've written two books about it, and more blog posts than I care to link to. Even Venkat Rao has dipped his toes in the pool. So I'm forced to accept that either I have bad taste in who I've been reading, or there's more to meaning than I've historically given it credit for.

The way these writers talk about meaning intrigues me. They speak of it as something that can be "experienced," "invested," "manufactured," or "destroyed." I've long struggled to make heads or tails of such metaphors — and yet these are solid, STEM-y thinkers, people I trust not to take me too far off the rails.

What follows is my attempt at figuring out what people mean when they talk about meaning. In particular, I want to rehabilitate the word — to cleanse it of wishy-washy spiritual associations, give it the respectable trappings of materialism, and socialize it back into my worldview. This is a personal project, but I hope some of my readers will find value in it for themselves.

As always, there are caveats. I have a degree in philosophy, but haven't read any of the classic literature on this subject, so I'm almost certainly reinventing the wheel. And although I lean heavily on what I've gleaned from Sarah, David, and Venkat, I'm not sure any of them would endorse what I've written here. You might want to think of it as my own funky synthesis — and if it comes up short, that's entirely my fault.

Now, onward.

Meaning for materialists

How to begin?

Supposing there's no ultimate, objective, metaphysical thing called meaning, we might instead approach it as a certain feeling or perception that people have toward the objects, events, and experiences in their lives, or toward their lives as a whole.

We're all of us, nihilists included, familiar with this feeling. We all know that a wedding, for example, feels more meaningful than a random Wednesday at the office. Or that a letter from an old friend holds more meaning than an electric toothbrush (even though the latter is more useful). We feel meaning when standing in front of a national monument, but not when waiting in line at a grocery store. Music, for reasons I'm only maybe beginning to make sense of, almost always feels meaningful, and probably more so to the average teenager than to the average 50-year-old. (Actually, I suspect teenagers perceive more meaning in almost everything.)

So: meaning isn't a substance, but rather a feeling. In this way, it's a lot like beauty. Both are more-or-less subjective experiences that we perceive in response to external cues. [2] In both cases, people generally agree about which kinds of things elicit the feeling, while at the same time leaving plenty of room for individual and cross-cultural variation. Both meaning and beauty are experiences we seem to crave, and the fact that all humans have these cravings suggests that they're adaptive. And just as we can appreciate beauty without getting too philosophical about it, so too can we appreciate meaning without requiring it to rest on some ultimate, metaphysical foundation.

One especially important feature of meaning is that it's highly contextual. My wedding is meaningful to me, but not so much to you. An inside joke can be meaningful to one community but completely irrelevant to another. Similarly, events in a dream often feel intensely meaningful, but typically lose most of their meaning when we wake up to real life.

In the context of a play, Chekhov's gun is meaningful if and only if it's fired in the final act. If the gun is never fired (or is otherwise irrelevant to the plot), then it's meaningless — not a prop, but mere set dressing. And just as we find narratives unsatisfying when the elements in them don't pay off later, so too do we appreciate when things pay off meaningfully in our lives and the other contexts we care about. Otherwise it's just one damn thing after another.

The meaning of a given thing can also change over time, as David Chapman points out in the case of an extramarital affair. As the affair is taking place, it feels laden with meaning. But years later, long after the two lovers have parted ways, most of the meaning seems to have dissipated. Presumably, if they'd left their spouses and re-married each other, the affair would have retained much of its meaning.

* * * *

Alright, time to shift gears.

So far I've been waving my hands in the general direction of meaning, without trying to put too fine a point on it. Now I'd like to venture a more explicit hypothesis about what, exactly, underlies our perceptions of meaning. Please forgive the mathy tone here:

A thing X will be perceived as meaningful in context C to the extent that it's connected to other meaningful things in C.

Let's take a moment to reflect on this statement and draw a few corollaries.

First, what kind of connections are we talking about? Typically they will be causal: X influences Y. Sometimes they will be epistemic: X justifies or explains Y. But they might also be narrative connections or even mere coincidences. Regardless, the more densely or strongly connected something is to the rest of the meaning "soup," the more meaningful it will be perceived to be.

Sarah gives a helpful metaphor: meaning is pointing. So the more arrows issuing out from something, the greater its meaning [3]:

We can also gauge meaning by asking the counterfactual question: "How much of an effect would removing X from C have on the other meaningful things in C?" The greater the effect, the more the meaning.

By these measures — connectedness, pointing intensity, effects of removal — the Constitution is far and away the most meaningful document in the United States. The structure of our government (and many other institutions) owes more to the Constitution than to any other document. If the Constitution never existed, or if it was changed even slightly, the U.S. would be a very different place for all its inhabitants. Similar logic tells us that, in the context of a growing startup, early hires are more meaningful than later hires, largely because they have more influence on how the company develops. Even at the later stages, however, hiring and firing are more meaningful activities than stocking the kitchen or painting the bikeshed.

Second, note the recursion: the meaning of a thing is defined by its connections to other meaningful things. This may seem circular or question-begging, but I think that's precisely the point. Few things are meaningful all by themselves; most derive their meaning from the things they point to. Of course, the buck has to stop somewhere, at some source of inherent or axiomatic meaning. In a religious context, for example, God is the ultimate arbiter of what is or isn't meaningful. Meanwhile, in secular contexts, most people seem happy to accept the premise that human life is inherently meaningful (or something along those lines). Those who insist on pressing further — e.g., by asking why human life is meaningful — must then gaze into the dark abyss.

Third, note that meaning, if defined in terms of connections, isn't entirely a matter of subjective experience. It has some objective qualities, some entanglements with reality. And as such, people can actually be wrong about their feelings of meaning. You might think your job is meaningful, but if a friend disagrees, he probably has an objective basis for doing so. He might tell you, "Actually, your job has no real effect on the outcomes you actually care about." This would be a disagreement about facts, not axiomatic values or subjective feelings.

Finally, if meaning is about connectedness, and especially causal influence, we can see why it's adaptive to pursue meaning. Perceptions of meaning allow us to answer a question we're always asking ourselves, "Why am I bothering to do this?" If an activity feels meaningful, it merits our continued attention and investment. Whereas if it feels meaningless, an appropriate response is to stop doing it — to give up and search for a more meaningful path. To seek meaning, then, helps us avoid dead-ends and retain control over our lives. Just as boredom and ennui are emotions that prompt us to make better use of our time or to look for other opportunities, our perceptions of meaning (or lack thereof) prompt us to think about the deepest, longest-term impact of our actions, and to steer toward better outcomes.

It's important to remember, though, that we can get duped into perceiving meaning where it doesn't actually exist. As in many other areas of life, we can't always pursue the outcomes we want directly. Instead we evolved to pursue a set of cues that give us the subjective sense of meaning. These cues typically correlate with real meaning, but have the potential to lead us astray, and in clever hands can even be used to exploit us. A charismatic CEO, for example, waxing grand and eloquent about the company's mission, can create a strong sense of meaning in his employees — but all too often it's illusory, the reality less "world-changing" than the rhetoric.

Memento mori

As we all know, the prospect of death throws meaning into high relief. It forces us to consider a broader context in which "we" no longer exist. All those things that were meaningful in the context of our lives will retain little or no meaning once we're gone.

So then, what does matter, as they say, "in the grand scheme of things"?

It might be helpful to think in extremes. The least meaningful life, for example, is the causal dead-end — a person so inessential and irrelevant that the world doesn't so much as bat an eyelash when they die. A hermit who spends his whole life alone in the woods, perhaps. Or someone who toils in utter obscurity, leaving no children and no other mark on the world.

On the other hand, the most meaningful life is the one on which everything depends: the fate of humanity, Good triumphing over Evil, etc. We love hearing stories about characters who experience these epic heights of meaning: Harry Potter, Ender Wiggin, Frodo Baggins. Or consider Jesus's life and his death on the cross, which arguably hits harder on the human "meaning bone" than any other narrative ever constructed. First of all, he saved everyone. Where once there was certain damnation, Jesus gave us a chance at an eternal life in Heaven. Second, his coming was long-prophesied, implying a relevance not just to the future but also the distant past. Finally, he suffered excruciating pain [4] in his dying act, highlighting the difference between a meaningful life and a pleasurable one. (More on this in a moment.)

Now we can't all be Jesus or Harry Potter, of course. But if meaning is pointing, then the meaning of one's life must reside in the arrows that point outward from it, influencing the external world. That's why we so often talk about meaningful activities in generic terms like "connecting with others," "paying it forward," "having an impact," "leaving a legacy," or participating in something "bigger than oneself."

None of this is to say that Alan Watts or Kurt Vonnegut are wrong, or that we must do something meaningful with our lives. But to the extent that our brains were built to seek meaning, we won't be able to quench our thirst by dancing around or making fart apps. So we're left with a choice: either we strive to make a meaningful difference in the world, or else learn to face the void without flinching, and to find peace in simple being. [5]

The experience machine

One of the best ways to look at meaning is to contrast it with pleasure. Consider this dramatically oversimplified formula:

Life satisfaction = pleasure + meaning

"Pleasure" here is what hedonists traditionally try to maximize. It includes health, comfort, and all manner of enjoyable sensory, aesthetic, and cognitive experiences, along with the absence of pain, misery, and suffering. Even beauty, for the hedonist, gets rolled up into the pleasure term.

Now we could imagine defining "pleasure" in such a way as to include "meaning." After all, it feels good to experience meaning in one's life. So why break meaning out into its own separate term?

One reason is to highlight how people are often forced to choose between meaning and pleasure; the two experiences seem to trade off against each other in interesting ways. Having children, for example, seems to reduce one's pleasure, at least in the short run, while contributing greatly to one's sense of meaning. (More here.) In the extreme case, martyrs are willing to endure torture and die for the sake of something larger than themselves. And sure, a martyr is a tragic figure — but vastly more tragic is he who suffers and dies for no purpose whatsoever:

But the bigger reason to separate meaning from pleasure is that pleasure is a strictly subjective experience. You can close your eyes and bliss out as hard as you like, and the pleasure you experience will be no less valid because it's "just in your mind." Meaning, on the other hand, is entangled with external reality, making it possible to be wrong about it. And thus the pursuit of true meaning requires an outward orientation to the world.

To drive this point home, consider the "experience machine," a thought experiment originally dreamt up by philosopher Robert Nozick. (Sarah discusses this at length in her book, Every Cradle is a Grave.) The experience machine is a virtual reality life-simulator designed to make you feel happy and fulfilled. A neuroscientist puts you in a tank, hooks your brain up to some electrodes, and starts feeding you wonderful experiences. There are obvious parallels here to the Matrix (although Nozick proposed it some 25 years before the movie). Perhaps the biggest difference, though, apart from the happiness factor, is that the experience machine is designed for a single occupant. It's just you in there, all by yourself. Everyone you interact with "inside" the machine — your friends, family, etc. — will all be simulated.

Now, suppose you're given a choice between (A) continuing life as normal, or (B) plugging yourself into the experience machine. Your choice is completely binding. If you choose the machine, you'll live out the rest of your days in virtual reality rather than base-level reality. It'll be like a perfect dream that you never wake up from.

When confronted with this choice, some people say they'd gladly choose the machine. Many others, however, are put off by the prospect of living in a simulated reality, no matter how utopian. Why?

One reason is that a life in the machine has no meaning, at least from the perspective of someone standing outside it. To choose the tank would be to render your real life a causal dead-end; you'd become as irrelevant as a brain-dead patient on life support. So if you actually care about things in the real world — the lives of your children or other family members, for example — you can't in good conscience abandon them for the machine.

Of course, what you'd experience in the machine might make you feel as meaningful as Jesus or Harry Potter. But at the moment you're presented with the choice, your eyes are wide open, and you know the machine is an illusion. And many people would sooner suffer in reality than live a lie, however beautiful it may be. This is why meaning can't be modeled as simply another piece of the "pleasure" package.

Meaning creation and destruction

Now that we have a tentative grasp on meaning, we can start to reason about different forces in the world and how they act on it. Specifically, some forces create or enhance meaning, while others seem to erode or destroy it.

Children. This is an easy one: children create meaning for their parents because (in most cases) they outlive their parents and become part of their legacy.

Helping others. Another easy one. Every action you take to benefit someone else is an arrow pointing outside yourself and influencing the external world. And because other lives are "inherently" meaningful, you get full meaning-points for helping them.

Community. Consider the difference between a solitary hermit and someone living in a dense, tight-knit community. The hermit has little influence on anything outside himself, while community members abound in connections and relationships — arrows pointing at other meaningful things. All else being equal, then, community creates meaning.

Fame. This one's a bit trickier. It's tempting to say that fame is "empty" or "hollow," and that therefore it doesn't contribute to meaning. Which I suppose is true if we're talking about fame by itself, or fame for its own sake. But I think it's more accurate to say that fame enhances meaning, perhaps by acting as a scaling factor. The more people who watch and listen to you, the greater your influence; every impression is another arrow pointing outward from your life. Now, if your work is meaningless to start with, then multiplying it by fame won't get you any extra meaning. But if your work does influence the world in a meaningful way, then you'll want it to reach as many people as possible. And even if you'll never meet your audience, still you might feel the call to perform, e.g., by publishing anonymously or posthumously.

Network centrality. Joining a community and seeking fame are just two examples of a more general way to maximize meaning: pursuing network centrality. Patrick O'Shaughnessy gives us a dramatic illustration: Why do Americans remember Paul Revere for his famous ride, but not William Dawes for taking a similar ride the very same night? Because Revere already knew people in each of the towns he visited, so when he galloped in with the big news, he only had to tell one person, who then told everyone else in the town. Dawes, meanwhile, just knocked on strangers' doors. Thus Revere's influence spread much farther and wider, and so his ride (and his life) ended up being more meaningful.

Ancestors. Your ancestors — parents, grandparents, and beyond — are meaningful to you in at least two different ways. First, they represent meaning that was spent on you (or, as Venkat says, invested in you); they gave up optionality and made other sacrifices in order to produce you. This creates a kind of debt, but one that mostly has to be paid forward. Second, ancestors bring people together in community. Without your parents' influence, for example, you wouldn't have a relationship with your siblings. Or picture a large extended family gathered around a set of grandparents, the matriarch and patriarch who engendered, both literally and figuratively, such a tight-knit community. Even dead ancestors, especially if they were forceful in life, can create a Schelling point for coordination among their living descendants. This is one reason they're worshipped in many cultures.

Religion. All religions create copious amounts of meaning for their adherents. One way is, again, by fostering community: providing a space and an excuse for congregation, prescribing rituals that get people in sync, and otherwise working to promote network effects. Many religions also advance narratives that give their members a privileged role in the world — God's "chosen people," soldiers in a cosmic battle, etc. These stories may be nonsense, of course, but for true believers, the perception of meaning is real enough, and to lose it or give it up can be extremely difficult. I imagine it's pretty gut-wrenching to trade heaven for oblivion: to recognize that the dead are simply gone, forever, and that we too are destined to die and be forgotten. Is it any wonder why people cling to religion as a source of meaning?

Progress vs. decay. Imagine getting in at the early stages of a venture that promises to be big and important — like a startup company, Genghis Khan's early army, or ISIS in the eyes of its recruits. Expansive open branches, increasing possibilities: it's a heady dose of meaning, right? Economic progress works the same way, although the growth rate is usually small enough that it dilutes the meaning to a less intoxicating dose.

Now imagine being involved in a venture that's rapidly falling apart, like a business on its third round of layoffs, crumbling toward bankruptcy. "Why am I bothering here?" we might ask ourselves. "What's the point?" That's the sickening dread of meaninglessness, helping us steer away from dead-ends (we hope). And again, a shrinking economy produces the same effect, although it plays out more slowly and feels more like a gradual erosion of meaning.

My heart goes out to everyone stuck in a doomed part of the economy. In material terms — i.e., their access to sensory pleasures and creature comforts — their lives rival those of ancient royalty. But cheap goods and indoor plumbing can't make up for the sinking sense that their prospects are dwindling, their communities evaporating, and that their actions and lives are losing meaning day by day.

Space colonization. Perhaps this is a subset of "progress," but it's important enough to deserve its own paragraph. The prospect that humans might someday spread out through the galaxy (and beyond?) creates meaning on an epic scale. It implies that our species isn't doomed to extinction within a single lonely gravity well. There's hope for us yet. And if our future is indeed in the stars, then what we do today, here on earth, will have cosmic consequences. When nerds wax romantic about spaceflight, or about science in general, they're celebrating meaning in their own special way.

Meaningful careers vs. bullshit jobs. For many of us, a career is a significant source of meaning. Through 80,000 hours of work, we're able to have a non-negligible impact on the world. We might build something of lasting value, help a lot of people, or make a name for ourselves in the history books or textbooks. There's a reason people often put their professions on their tombstones.

Not all jobs are equally fulfilling, however. If your work is low-impact and routinized — i.e., if you're easy to replace — it's only natural to wonder, "What difference would it make if I quit?" In other words, you'll feel a dearth of meaning.

Karl Marx called it alienation, the way the industrial era disconnects its workers from reliable sources of meaning. This happens especially but not exclusively in factories, where workers are disconnected from the final product, from other workers, and from consumers. Even in a white-collar setting, a corporation runs better when its employees are fungible, and thus it's incentivized to push toward becoming a bureaucracy. This contributes to economic efficiency (yay!) and shareholder profit (yay?), but it slowly sucks meaning out of the workplace.

Now factory jobs may be unpleasant, but at least they're fundamentally worthwhile: someone has to work the assembly lines, or the products won't get made. But David Graeber goes further and says many modern jobs are actually bullshit:

Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.

I'm not sure I agree with everything Graeber says in his essay. But certainly a lot of jobs, firms, and even entire industries are zero-sum in nature (or worse: exploitative), and I can only imagine how demoralizing it would be to sink so much personal effort into them. Of course, workers can always choose to give up some pay for a more meaningful workplace, and many of them do. But our consumerist culture doesn't make that tradeoff easy for people, perhaps to our collective detriment.

Science

Let's end where we began, shall we? — by asking what science has to tell us about the meaning of human life, our significance in the context of the entire universe.

(I don't mean to imply that science has better or more important things to say about meaning than any other discipline. I just happen to be fond of science, so please, humor me.)

As we all know, science tends to undermine traditional sources of meaning. It rejects the notion of a soul that carries on after death. It subverts mythological plot arcs that provide a special role or purpose for our species. It tells us that we were descended not from gods, but from apes (and ultimately from bacteria!), and that we arose simply because we're good replicators; we are, as it's often said, "pond scum" on the surface of an obscure rock. As if that weren't enough, science regrets to inform us that the inevitable fate of the universe is entropic heat death — that we and all our creations will eventually dissipate, like ashes scattering in the wind.

This is none too promising. But what science taketh away, it can also giveth back — kind of.

Yes, science tells us that we're rounding error in terms of size and energy consumption. But in terms of complexity, we're huge. As far as we know, we and our societies take the prize for being the most complex structures the universe has yet evolved. And thanks to our ingenuity, there are more things deserving of study on the surface of one planet (Earth) than in the entire rest of the known universe.

I don't mean to boast, but we're kind of the life of the party here.

And though we're small and powerless now, there's cause for optimism. We may yet colonize Mars, build a Dyson sphere, or spread our wings and populate the galaxy. And if we do, it'll be because we're the only creatures (again, as far as we know) with the ability to accumulate knowledge in a scalable way. We've trained this learning engine — our minds augmented by culture — on everything we can get our hands on: dirt, rocks, flowers, squirrels. Using telescopes, we've trained it on the night sky, and using microscopes, we've trained it on the tiniest bits we're made of. We've even been able to learn things about the distant past and make guesses about the distant future. All our progress, from medical to moral, we owe to this art. And we're currently using it to learn how our own minds work, so that we might build faster, more powerful, and more sensitive minds to extend the reach of our thought.

Alan Watts gives it some poetic oomph, as always:

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

So there is a distinguished place for us in the cosmos. I'm not sure it's worth much in terms of ultimate purpose. But it sure beats the old "pond scum" story, at least in one nihilist's opinion.

_____

Thanks to Jesse Tandler for a good conversation along these lines.

Endnotes

[1] specter of meaning. Then again, I'm only in my 30s. I have a feeling the specter will return with a vengeance in later decades.

[2] subjective experience. Random speculation: meaning is perceived largely by the right hemisphere of the brain.

[3] arrows. One can imagine using graph theory to define meaning in a rigorous way. Anyone care to take a stab?

[4] excruciating. Note from the Etymology Fairy: ex- + crux, from the cross.

[5] striving vs. being. Other options include palliation (drugs, TV, video games) and self-deception — both very popular.

Of all the remarkable things about our species — and there are many — perhaps the most striking of all is our ability to band together and act as a united, coherent superorganism. E pluribus unum. From many, one.

A few superorganisms in action. (Top: human towers of Tarragona, fire department, NASA. Bottom: Amish community, rowing team, ISIS.)

I don't mean anything particularly high-minded by "superorganism." It's just a fun way to refer to a cooperative enterprise. Co-, together + operari, work. Acting in concert. Coordinating individual behavior in pursuit of shared goals.

Superorganisms, in this sense, include such mundane arrangements as law firms, soccer teams, city governments, and party planning committees. In fact, most of the groups we care about are superorganisms. A mere crowd, on the other hand, isn't a superorganism. It's just every man for himself — all pluribus, no unum.

If an alien film crew chose to feature our species in a nature documentary, they'd have plenty of spectacular superorganisms to choose from. Perhaps they'd spotlight the U.S. military, the most powerful superorganism ever to arise on our humble planet. Or the Catholic Church, a superorganism that's managed to survive, with awe-inspiring continuity, for nearly two millennia. Meanwhile, impressive at smaller scales, the Boston Symphony Orchestra coordinates muscle movements to a precision of millimeters and milliseconds. And improv troupes like the Upright Citizens Brigade manage to arrange themselves into compelling scenes at the drop of a hat, all without any explicit coordination. Then there's the superorganism responsible for the stable, secure, 20-million-line codebase that powers much of the world's computing infrastructure — a loose affiliation of some 5,000 individuals, mostly strangers, who have somehow managed to assemble one of the most intricate artifacts ever built. As you might have guessed, I'm referring to the developers of the Linux kernel.

When thinking about our ability to form superorganisms, it's tempting to dwell on the most extreme examples. These feats of coordination are so impressive, we can't help but wonder how they're accomplished. Unfortunately, if our goal is to understand what makes superorganisms tick, the extremes are all red herrings. We should be asking ourselves the opposite question: How do we achieve the simplest and least impressive feats of coordination?

In other words, what's the minimum viable human superorganism?

In what follows, let's try to build one from the ground up, with an eye toward a generic and scalable architecture.

Building a superorganism

First we'll need some basic building blocks, i.e., individual organisms. By definition, a superorganism needs at least two individuals. But if we restrict ourselves to such a small, specific number, we'll risk developing an architecture that won't scale. Two people, for example, can rely on simple reciprocity — I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine — to coordinate their behavior. If we want a solution that will generalize, then, we should target 10 or 100 individuals, maybe more.

Now this is important: we have to assume that these individuals are entirely self-interested — that they don't fundamentally care about the superorganism (or any other individuals) unless it's somehow in their own interests. If we develop an architecture that doesn't serve its members' self-interest, it will inevitably break down as individuals realize they're better off not participating. On the other hand, if we develop an architecture that succeeds in benefitting all or most of its members, there's almost no end to what we'll be able to accomplish.

Alright, now we need some reason for these selfish individuals to work together. Something they can accomplish more effectively as a team than as separate individuals. (Otherwise, what's the point?) In other words, we need a shared goal.

In some cases, the goal might be stated explicitly: "Let's do X!" But having an articulated goal is neither necessary nor sufficient. Many superorganisms manage to achieve goals without ever stating them explicitly. The Catholic Church, for example, amasses wealth and power as well as any superorganism, even though such goals aren't part of its official charter. And on the flip side, a superorganism can't impose a goal simply by fiat. A publicly-traded corporation is welcome to say that it wants to "make the world a better place," but when push comes to shove, the company will prioritize shareholder value, the rest of the world be damned.

The more general case, then, is that a superorganism's goals must arise from shared incentives. When individual members of the superorganism would benefit (on net) by achieving X, then X becomes a de facto goal, regardless of whether it's officially articulated.

Now let's pause for a moment to take stock of what we've gathered and what's missing. So far we've rounded up some (selfish) individuals and made sure they have a shared goal arising from shared incentives. To make it concrete, let's imagine these are 100 neighbors living out in the countryside, with the goal of building a fence around their neighborhood to keep out wild animals. Given that all 100 neighbors will benefit from having the fence, what's preventing them from just building the bloody thing?

The issue, of course, is the free-rider problem. Why should I pitch in and break a sweat when I could kick back and let everyone else do the work? That way, I'll reap all the benefits without paying any of the costs. Of course, if everyone thinks this way, no fence will get built. But what's a selfish agent to do? I'm not going to build the whole thing myself. I'd sooner build a fence around just my own property.

This is not an academic objection. It's existential. Would-be superorganisms fall apart all the time due to the free-rider problem. Every failure to take collective action, every tragedy of the commons — including global climate change — arises because of the free-rider problem. It's the issue at the heart of every superorganism. "As we all know," writes Peter Turchin, "selfish agents will never cooperate to produce costly public goods. I think this mathematical result should have the status of 'the fundamental theorem of social sciences.' "

And our task, remember, is to find the minimal technique that can overcome the free-rider problem.

I'll tell you what isn't minimal: any kind of governance structure. The appeal of a government is that it can monitor and police everyone, rewarding hard workers and punishing slackers, thereby incentivizing each individual to cooperate. The problem is that it begs the question. For a government to act coherently, it needs to be a superorganism itself. And who will govern the governors? It's an infinite regress.

Here's another technique that sounds promising. Suppose we have one member of the group who can effectively dominate everyone else. Let's call this the Strong Man architecture. Its appeal is that the Strong Man can be a government unto himself, no infinite regress required. Sounds great in theory, but in practice this architecture fails, because whenever one man is strong enough to rule by himself, he's better off expropriating his subjects rather than cajoling them to work together. The temptation to be a tyrant rather than a leader is just too great. (And why can't everyone else band together to resist his tyranny? Because then they would be acting as a superorganism.[1] There's that damned infinite regress again.)

Bottom line: I know of only one minimum viable architecture for turning individuals into a superorganism [2] — for making sure it's in everyone's self-interest to work together. I call it the Prestige Economy,[3] and it runs on a deceptively simple rule:

Individuals should grant social status to others for advancing the superorganism's goals.

That's it. That's the One Weird Trick that unlocks so much of our species' cooperative potential.

Now I don't expect you to buy this just yet. There's more I need to explain. But first, notice how efficiently this solves the free-rider problem. In a Prestige Economy, people don't work hard because of the benefit they'll get when the superorganism achieves its goals (although it's a nice bonus), but rather because of the status they'll earn from their peers along the way. You're perfectly welcome to shirk your duties in a Prestige Economy — you just won't earn any kudos. And actually, if you shirk too much, others might be incentivized to notice and punish you, if in doing so they'll be perceived as advancing the superorganism's goals.

Consider the fable often used to illustrate collective action problems:

The Bell and the Cat [modified slightly for clarity]

Long ago, the mice held a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, some said that; but at last a young mouse stood up to announce his proposal. "You will all agree," he said, "that our chief danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy approaches us. Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could easily escape from her. I therefore propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when she was about."

This proposal met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: "That is all well and good, but who will bell the Cat?" The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke.

Apparently, even though they've learned to talk [4], these mice haven't learned the trick to incentivizing collective action. If they were running a Prestige Economy, they'd simply offer more and more social status until someone — perhaps an ambitious young male mouse — eventually decided it was worth the risk. Sure, he might die trying to "bell the cat." But if he succeeds, he'll be welcomed back a hero! The other mice will fawn over him, hoist him up on their shoulders, buy him drinks, throw a banquet in his honor, and perhaps even carve out a leadership position for him. (I don't want to make too much of this, but some of the lady mice might also want to have the hero's babies.) So that's the transaction. He's not risking his neck to solve the cat problem. He's doing it for the glory.

One small snag

Now, careful readers may have noticed something wrong with this architecture. In our attempt to solve one free-rider problem, we seem to have created another. Given a Prestige Economy, the issue is no longer how to incentivize people (or mice) to pursue the group's interest, but rather how to incentivize them to grant status to others for pursuing it.

Here's the trouble: the act of celebrating a hero isn't entirely costless. It requires (a bit of) effort and sacrifice — buying the hero a drink, say, or throwing him a banquet. Point is, the hero's perks don't come out of thin air; they have to come from other individuals. And why should I bother to celebrate the hero, when I could just kick back and let the rest of you chumps celebrate him for me? I'll continue to reap the benefits of his heroic deeds, but it won't cost me a thing.

At first this looks like yet another question-begging infinite regress. Another promising architecture spoiled by game theory. But Nature has one more trick up her sleeve, perhaps her most subtle and ingenious trick yet.

Notice that, for humans, celebrating a hero doesn't feel like a costly act. We don't treat it like some annoying duty we're always looking for an excuse to get out of. In fact, we're happy and even eager to celebrate heroes. It just feels right and natural to us. And this kind of enthusiasm is the tell-tale sign of self-interest.

Nature, then, has endowed us with the instinct to celebrate heroes because it ultimately benefits us to do so. Yes, it costs money to buy someone a drink, but we're getting something even more valuable in return: the chance to curry favor with a potential ally. And not just any ally, but one who has proven his worth, shown himself to be the kind of person who's useful to have on one's team. That's why it behooves me to cozy up to the hero. Not because I'm motivated to help provide a public good (status for the hero), but because I'm hoping to make a valuable friend.

This is the magic of prestige status. From my perspective, I'm sucking up to the hero, hoping to cultivate an alliance. But from his perspective, my admiration is his reward. Ultimately, it's this pair of incentives — prestige and celebration, seeking status and currying favor — that binds a superorganism together. They're like the two interlocking sides of a Lego block.

Of course there are other ways to seek (and win) prestige status, outside the context of a superorganism. You might write a PhD thesis, for example, or run a marathon, or learn to play the piano. These individual achievements play a similar role in making you more attractive as an ally. It's not that "helping a superorganism achieve its goals" is the only way to win prestige, just that it's a particularly good way.

I should also note that "Prestige Economy" is only one way to formulate this idea. Other (refactored) formulations include competitive altruism, indirect reciprocity, enlightened self-interest, and the long literature on reputation. And reputation itself goes by many names and takes a variety of forms: honor, respect, status, prestige, karma, credit, esteem, even money. ("Money," as I wrote elsewhere, "is industrial-grade prestige status.") These are all slightly different ways of looking at the same thing.

To summarize, then, here's our recipe for a minimum viable superorganism:

Selfish individuals pursuing shared goals (arising from shared underlying incentives), held together by a Prestige Economy which consists of two activities: (1) seeking status by attempting to advance the superorganism's goals, and (2) celebrating (i.e., sucking up to) those who deserve it.

This architecture is robust. It creates selfish incentives for people to work together and reward others for their hard work.

Now let's take a look at a few real-world superorganisms to see what light our new architecture can shed on how they hang together.

Movements

Most successful superorganisms rely on complicated architectures, with formal roles, charters, bylaws, governance structures, etc. But at least one type of superorganism approximates the minimal architecture we've been describing.

Consider a social movement like civil rights or feminism. Contrary to the naive model, no woman fights for feminism because of the individual benefit she might hope to achieve by making the world better for all women. Whatever impact she (alone) might have on the overall cause is infinitesimal, and it's absolutely dwarfed by the effort she'll have to put in. Without some other source of reward, it's not worth lifting even a finger. She'd be better off free-riding.

Luckily there is another source of reward: prestige. By working on behalf of the feminist cause, she can earn herself a handsome reputation. She might give a rousing speech, for example, or write a persuasive article, or rally a thousand other women to the cause. These are all impressive feats that testify to her worth as an ally. She'll become a hero of sorts, and will be duly celebrated for it. This is how individuals are incentivized to work hard to push a movement forward.

But note that her efforts have to meaningfully advance the cause (or at least appear to), or they won't count as impressive. If she does something "in the name of" feminism that doesn't actually help women — perhaps by blogging something that gets more eye-rolls than retweets — then she won't get credit for it, no matter how hard she worked. Her failure will testify against her value as an ally. Do you want to team up with someone whose work is counterproductive, setting back the very goals she's intending to work towards? Me neither.

Note that these incentives also explain why it often behooves men to be feminists. A male feminist would seem, on the surface, to be working against his self-interest.[5] But again, this is naive. His individual efforts aren't going to tip the scales against his own gender. And in the meantime, as a feminist, he stands to earn meaningful status points from other feminists, male and female alike.

This dynamic underlies every "traitor" to his or her own demographic group: straights who support gays, whites who advocate for racial equality, and billionaires who endorse tax-hiking politicians. Psychologically, people typically support these causes because it's "the right thing to do." But a movement will only succeed when what's "right" starts to align with its members self-interest.

Now, to the liberal sensibility, these side-switchers — men who support women, straights who support gays, etc. — don't seem particularly traitorous. In fact they're celebrated for it, largely because they're seen as switching over to help the underdogs. But when someone switches the other way — abandoning the perceived underdog to seek status from the more powerful, privileged group — that's when hackles get raised. Consider the sting of calling someone an "Uncle Tom," for example, or the liberal disdain for poor people who vote to lower taxes on the rich.

I'm not trying to make a moral argument here. When people abandon their own demographic interests to join an opposing superorganism, the question I'm interested in is why they switch sides (not whether their actions are right or wrong). And the answer, I think, is that they intuitively perceive switching sides to be in their self-interest — a broad, overarching self-interest that includes not just their demographic interests (which they may be undermining), but also, crucially, their reputation among their peers and local elites.

Corporations vs. co-ops

At its heart, a modern corporation runs on the same superorganism architecture we've been describing. In exchange for doing work that advances the company's goals, employees are granted social status, most of it in the form of money. But some compensation also takes the form of good old-fashioned prestige, i.e., the esteem of coworkers (often reified in fancy titles or corner offices). Either way, employees are rewarded for helping the company, regardless of whether it ultimately succeeds or fails in achieving its goals.

Contrast this with the co-op model. Ten people (say) collectively own and operate a pizza restaurant, working there as employees and splitting profits evenly, 10 percent to each.

Without some other accountability scheme, the co-op is bound to fail. It's just too tempting to free-ride. Who wants to do 10 percent of the work (or more) when they could do nothing and still reap 10 percent of the profits? That's right, no one. Game theory is a harsh mistress.

Luckily, lurking underneath the formal architecture of the co-op is a more robust informal architecture: the Prestige Economy. A co-op owner who free-rides earns no status in the eyes of his fellow owners. His reputation takes a nose-dive. At some point, everyone else will make it nasty enough for the freeloader that he'll be pressured to sell his stake back to the group. So a co-op can hang together — not because of its formal architecture, but in spite of it.

Something similar happens when startups compensate their employees with stock options in addition to salary. The naive model says that startup employees work extra hard in order to make their options more valuable. But this is nonsense. Instead, stock options incentivize hard work by a more circuitous route. By granting options to all employees, the company ensures that everyone has a strong shared incentive in the success of the company, which then enables a Prestige Economy to develop. And at the end of the day (literally), it's prestige that keeps people toiling away at the office.

Faceless superorganisms

Now this is all well and good, but it hasn't told us anything we didn't already know. Is there some larger payoff?

For me, the answer is a resounding yes. The superorganism architecture outlined above is the solution to a problem I've grappled with for many years: How can we make sense of shadowy forces like the Man, the Global Elite, the Military-Industrial Complex, or the Deep State? Is it legitimate to model these as superorganisms, pursuing their shared interests with non-zero agency? Or are they mere figments of our imagination, caused by the same quirk of human psychology that leads us to see faces in rocks and gods controlling the weather?

We frequently talk about these entities as if they were superorganisms. In Mike Lofgren's 2014 article on the Deep State, he describes it as "essentially parasitic," with an "appetite" for tax money. He even ascribes tactics to it: "crying 'terrorism!' every time it faces resistance," for example. This is the language of agency, intentionality, and goal-directed action. But is it more than just a metaphor? And if so, how do we explain these superorganisms in terms of individual incentives?

Our minimal architecture provides an answer. I'm not convinced it's the only answer, or even the best one, but it's concrete and specific enough for my tastes. It says that, yes, it's possible for these entities to have real agency. And it's implemented just like any other superorganism: by means of shared interests giving rise to a Prestige Economy.

Note, however, that these shadowy forces are even more hamstrung than social movements like feminism. They're not just headless (lacking formal leaders) and amorphous (lacking clear roles and even clear membership). They're also faceless. I mean this literally: they lack "face" in the Chinese sense, the same sense described by Erving Goffman in Interaction Ritual. They have no official name, no acknowledged members, no honor, no reputation, and no shame. No one acts "in the name of" the Global Elite, for example. When Lofgren criticizes the Deep State and calls for citizens to dismantle it, the Deep State can't offer so much as a peep in its defense. This facelessness is a natural response to a hostile PR environment (no one wants to publicly affiliate with these causes), but it clearly makes it harder to achieve the status of a coherent superorganism.

The cartoon explanation for how these groups manage to act as superorganisms is by conspiracy. (From the Latin con-, together, + spirare, breathe. Breathing together. Whispering in a hallway or smoke-filled back room.) But as Scott Alexander points out, all vast conspiracies, right-wing or otherwise, are plagued by the free-rider problem. The Global Elite can't simply hatch a plot at Davos and expect their members to follow through on it. The benefits to individual actors simply don't outweigh the costs.

Luckily(?), a Prestige Economy can function even in a PR environment that prevents people from explicitly acknowledging their intentions. Remember that a Prestige Economy works whenever individuals celebrate (and attempt to curry favor with) other individuals whose efforts advance the superorganism's goals. Now suppose you're a member of the Global Elite — the CEO of a major bank, say. Next year, at the World Economic Forum, you run into Hillary Clinton, who has since been elected President and helped pass some bank-friendly legislation. Of course she didn't explicitly say, "I'm doing this for the Global Elite" — but you nevertheless recognize her actions as helpful to you and your tribe. Your heart danced a little jig when you read about her new legislation in the paper. And now that you've run into her, you have those warm fuzzy feelings that tell you, "This person would make a good ally." So you try a little harder to curry favor than you would have otherwise.

Clinton understands this, which is why she feels good about passing bank-friendly legislation in the first place. She knows that if she does things that help the Global Elite, she'll get a warm reception among them. Conversely, if she started passing strict bank regulations, she can reasonably expect to get the cold shoulder, or at least a lukewarm reception.

Now, does this give us license to indulge in "conspiracy" theories? Well, it depends, first of all, on the kind of agency we're attributing to these faceless superorganisms. Could the Deep State fake a moon landing? Please. That kind of sharp, focused, project-based agency is reserved for actual organizations. Instead, the kind of agency the Deep State is capable of, if any, is broad and diffuse. Nothing like a blitzkrieg — just gradual, steady encroachment.

Whether we should indulge a conspiracy theory also depends on the social geometry that would be required for the purported conspiracy to function. If it requires the collaboration of people who have no social contact with one another, and who therefore can't meaningfully grant status to each other, then the conspiracy is a non-starter, even if all the individuals might somehow benefit from it overall.

But many of these conspiracies do have the necessary social geometry to permit a (weak) Prestige Economy to develop. Take, for example, the various "Big" industries: Big Pharma, Big Oil, and Big Tobacco. Maybe throw in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the Mainstream Media for good measure. Now these industries aren't entirely faceless. Some are more embraced by the public, and therefore don't have to live in the shadows. Some have formal trade associations advocating on their behalf. But they still make a good case study because they share an important feature in common: executives within each industry spend a lot of time socializing with each other. They see each other at country clubs, cocktail parties, conferences, and industry events. And crucially, every interaction holds the promise of future collaboration, whether it comes in the form of a new startup, cross-hiring between firms, or just one-on-one friendship outside the office. Thus executives are incentivized to seek status and curry favor with one another. And one of the ways they demonstrate value is by advancing the interests of their tribe.

When Mark Zuckerberg launches a campaign to allow more skilled immigrants into the US, it stands to benefit Silicon Valley as a whole and, to some extent, Facebook in particular. But he's not doing it out of cold, calculated, capitalist self-interest, but rather out of soft, social, status-based self-interest. The campaign makes Zuckerberg look good, gives him a better reputation around town. His peers will celebrate him for it. Like the mouse who bells the cat, he's doing it for the glory.

___

Endnotes

[1] banding together to resist tyranny. According to Christopher Boehm, this is the quintessential collective action problem for our species. It's the one that our ancestors managed to solve, the one that set us down the path to becoming what we think of as human. See Hierarchy in the Forest.

[2] only one architecture. For a discussion of other architectures, see Martin Nowak's SuperCooperators. He discusses the Prestige Economy (as "reputation" and "indirect reciprocity") along with other cooperation-inducing mechanisms like kin selection, group selection, and spatial structures. Of these, only indirect reciprocity works as a generic, scalable architecture for cooperation among self-interested individuals.

[3] Prestige Economy. I wonder if it's better to call it a "Status Economy." At issue is whether it's possible to transact dominance (the other form of status besides prestige). I suspect that it is possible to transact dominance, but also that it's much harder. Dominance is the less liquid asset. Prestige works better as currency.

[4] talking mice. If Jean-Louis Dessalles is to be believed, prestige was a prereq for the evolution of language, at least in our species. His book on the subject, Why We Talk, is one of the best I've read in the last five years. I can't recommend it highly enough, especially Part 3.

[5] self-interest for male feminists. It should be noted that there are also selfish reasons a man might want feminism to succeed, e.g., to the extent that it would help his daughter or wife earn more money.

I'll keep it brief.

Blog stats

I published a paltry six full essays this year. Don't get me wrong: I'm proud of them. But still, six. It would be easy to blame my low output on my book project, which took up most of my time in 2015. But the truth is I'm just not very good at this blogging business. I abandon way too many posts, for example. For every draft that makes it all the way to the blog, there's at least one, sometimes two others that fall by the wayside, usually after I've put in 50 to 75 percent of the work.

In spite of my shortcomings, however, the blog continues to grow at a steady clip. Engagement — as measured by page views, subscribers, likes, tweets, etc. — more than doubled this year.

How is it that I can write fewer posts and yet double my readership? I attribute this to my blogging strategy. As I learned early on from Venkat Rao at Ribbonfarm, it pays to write timeless essays. I don't respond to current events, for instance, which ensures that even old posts from yesteryear are still worth reading. (This is borne out in the analytics: the archives get just as much attention as new posts.) In fact, I've made specific design choices to reinforce this strategy. Instead of putting the publishing date at the top of each blog post, I put it at the very bottom (and in small, light gray text), to avoid calling attention to the post's age. I've also disabled comments, which further contributes, I think, to the sense of timelessness. For better or worse, Melting Asphalt isn't a community. You don't need to come here every day or every week to "be part of the conversation," because there is no conversation — and thus no FOMO. Just a calm space to reflect on ideas, both new and old.

Public feedback

Here are some highlights from the year:

• Melting Asphalt made the front page of Hacker News twice again in 2015 (one, two).
• A rare treat: One of my blogging heroes, Scott Alexander from Slate Star Codex, wrote a thorough response/review of my post on social status. The same post was also blessed by a @pmarca retweet.
• Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList, gave a very generous shout-out on the Tim Ferriss podcast (starts at around the 46-minute mark).
• Cory Doctorow found an old post of mine and had nice things to say about it: "Kevin Simler's 2013 essay on the economics of social status is a great, enduring Sunday sort of longread that should be required of anyone contemplating using the phrase 'reputation economy' in polite society."
• Tyler Cowen found an old post of mine and had less-than-favorable things to say about it. "False claims about music in human evolution," he wrote in his link. (To be fair, the post in question is pretty speculative.)
• Bernie Roth, founder of the Stanford d-school, found an old post about UX and thought it was an "amazingly interesting theory."
• My whole week was made when someone got a "serious neurophilosophy boner" from one of my essays.

Other nice things people are saying:

"[One of the] best finds of the year." — Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Fascinating. Thought provoking. Mind-expanding. Superb. Intense. Fun and weird. Phenomenal. Fabulous. Beautiful. Enlightening. Profound and reflective.

"If you are an intellectually curious person, this is one blog you should read." — Amit

GOOD READ. Highly recommend. #longread, highly worth it. A must read. An amazing find. Love, love, love. Flawed in places but a really great read. Very nicely explained. REALLY AWESOME.

"The richest set of ideas I've encountered in quite some time." — Jon Bratseth

Thanks

Well that's it for now. Thanks for all your support and encouragement. As someone who suffers from occasionally-crippling imposter syndrome, I very much appreciate it.

I'll leave you with this, the entire observable universe in one log-scale image:

I expect most of my readers are already big fans of Scott's blog (as am I). But for those of you who somehow aren't aware of it: SSC is phenomenal. It's one of the most original, insightful, and engaging blogs on the Internet. Please, do yourself a favor and check it out.

Anyway, in my original post I tried to make three main points about social status:

1. It's not a single phenomenon, but rather two: dominance and prestige. These two systems are more-or-less distinct, and it's useful to think about them separately.
2. Dominance can be understood from the top-down, but prestige needs to be understood from the bottom-up — by focusing on admiration, i.e., the way we fawn over people we respect.
3. Admiration evolved to help us curry favor with actual or potential teammates. It's the price we pay to remain in the good graces of prestigious individuals — to earn a spot on their team and/​or keep them happy as a teammate.

(All of this, I hasten to add, is cribbed from Jean-Louis Dessalles.)

Scott seems on board with 1 and 2, less on board with 3. Yes, he says, admiration often seems to work as a way of sucking up to teammates, but there are also a lot of cases where it doesn't make sense:

• David Bowie. When we — Bowie's admirers — lavish praise on him, what exactly are we hoping to accomplish? What group or team are we trying to keep him on, exactly? Are we hoping he stays in the West — rather than taking his musical talents to North Korea, say? Clearly not.
• Elon Musk or Justin Bieber. These celebrities are admired by millions (if not billions) of people. Each admirer stands an extremely slim chance of ever meeting, let alone teaming up with Musk or Bieber. So what's the point of admiring them?
• The Koch brothers. Depending on your politics, you may think poorly of the Koch brothers. If, however, you happened to sit next to them on a plane, you might still treat them with respect, i.e., the way you'd treat a prestigious person you actually like. But why suck up to people you don't actually admire?
• Helen Keller. Keller learned language, and even learned to speak, despite being blind and deaf from a very young age. Certainly this is impressive, and we admire her for it, wholeheartedly — but she's still pretty impaired. By admiring her, are we really trying to court her as a teammate? Presumably we'd be better served directing our admiration at someone with more complete faculties.

I continue to believe that admiration makes sense in each of these cases, and I'll address them more fully in a moment. But the bigger problem, I think, is that I did a mediocre job of explaining Dessalles' theory. So let me try again, using fresh language.

Dessalles' theory of prestige (take 2)

Admiration and prestige-seeking are two complementary teaming instincts.

(By "teaming," here, I'm referring to the game of coalition politics. But politics is a dirty word, and even though we're engaged in political behavior all the time, we don't think of it as "political." So I prefer to use softer language.)

In Dessalles' theory, the teams we care about are groups small enough for everyone to know everyone else and keep tabs on their behavior. We might also call them alliances, cliques, gangs, or coalitions. Even a pair of friends, it should be noted, is considered a "team" for our purposes here; it's just a degenerate team of size two. Each of us, of course, is simultaneously a member of many different (but partially-overlapping) teams.

For the sake of throwing out a number, we might cap a "team" at something like 10 or 20 members. It's not that our teaming instincts completely fail us at larger scales (like firms, nations, or a team like "the West"), but they're designed to work best at smaller scales.

From an individual's perspective, teaming instincts help solve a number of related problems[1]:

• How to join up with a team (ideally a worthy one) and convince them to accept you.
• How to attract other members to the team (ideally people who are competent and useful).
• How to remain in the team's good graces, so as not to get kicked out.
• How to secure for yourself a reasonable share of the team's spoils. Spoils are whatever resources or benefits the team works together to acquire. For a firm, its spoils are its profits. For a prison gang, spoils include physical protection and access to black market transactions. For a coalition of our forager ancestors (especially a sub-group coalition), spoils probably included food, mating opportunities, support from teammates during conflicts with non-teammates, and support during times of illness or injury.

In this context, a person's prestige is the measure of her value to a team (in the eyes of its members). If she has lots of prestige, it's because she's (perceived to be) better at most facets of teaming and teamwork. As a joiner, she'll be more attractive to existing teams. Within a team, she'll be more productive and therefore more worthy of her teammates' admiration. This, in turn, means she'll deserve a larger share of the spoils and will be less likely to get kicked off the team. She will also, simply by being on a team, make it more attractive to outsiders who might consider joining it.

So we seek prestige in order to raise our value on the teaming market, and we admire others as a way of bribing them to join (or stay on) the team. Prestige is our price, and admiration our method of payment.

It's important to note that in healthy, functioning teams, admiration is paid all around. Every teammate admires every other teammate — not equally, of course, but enough to keep the team together. More prestigious team members receive the most admiration, but even the least prestigious members get their share, as long as they remain in good standing.

This kind of mutual admiration, in fact, is the very mechanism by which teams divvy up the spoils. Everyone needs to get paid, somehow, and admiration (commensurate with prestige) is how we do it.

Incidentally, we can reformulate this in the language of friendship rather than teams.

Due to natural variation, people differ in their personal qualities, and some people make better friends/​allies than others. A prestigious individual, then, is someone many others would like to be friends with, someone highly sought after as a friend. And this is where market dynamics take over. A person has only so much friendship to offer; supply is limited. So when the demand goes up, the price has to go up too. Prestigious individuals, then, are those who can command a high price for their friendship.

Now consider the problem of how to make and keep a friend. To earn someone's friendship, you need to make it worth his while. If the two of you are equally prestigious (equally valuable on the friendship market), you can simply barter in kind: your friendship for his. But if he's more prestigious than you, your friendship alone won't pay for his, and you'll have to make up the difference somehow. Those additional payments are what we've been calling admiration.

Back to Bowie (and friends)

I hope the explanation above was clear enough. Now, in light of it, what are we to make of our admiration for David Bowie? If we somehow managed to meet him, why would we be so eager to charm and flatter him?

It's not that we're trying to keep him on Team USA or Team "The West." Instead, we cozy up to him hoping he'll have a spot for us on Team Bowie; we're trying to befriend him personally. Why? Because being friends with a rockstar has its perks: epic parties, beautiful people, the latest designer drugs. Maybe he'll invite us backstage at his next show, for example, where we'll meet some cute girl or guy or get to rub shoulders with influential people.

Bottom line: David Bowie has a lot of resources, especially in the form of social capital, and would therefore make a great friend or ally. That's why we pay him in respect and admiration.

The Koch brothers. Assuming you don't like the Koch brothers, why treat them nicely if you happen to sit next to them on a plane?

Well, first of all, it's possible you'd actually snub them — if you really hated them, or really wanted to signal your righteousness to others. But if you're even slightly open to them as potential allies, as people you might personally befriend, their extreme prestige makes them worth treating well. Who knows what might happen if they take a liking to you. They might buy you a few drinks, for example, or offer you a ride home in their limo, or put you in touch with one of their influential friends who can help you on a project.

When you're nice to people, they tend to be nice in return. And when you're nice to high-status people, their niceness-in-return can be very nice indeed.

Elon Musk and Justin Bieber. Why do millions of people admire these celebrities that they'll never meet in person?

Here's how I would parse the situation.

First we need to distinguish between admiring someone in person, by deferring to them in concrete social situations, and admiring someone from afar, simply by thinking or speaking highly of them. Dessalles' theory applies only to in-person admiration. Long-distance admiration — like the kind we direct at Musk or Bieber — is something else entirely.

One possible explanation for long-distance admiration is that it helps us keep track of people who are worth admiring up close, in case we ever get the chance. And since long-distance admiration doesn't cost much, why not?

But this doesn't explain the intensity of the admiration that Musk and Bieber arouse in us; it doesn't explain why we become such rabid fans. So Scott suggests there might be group-signaling effects here, and I think he's right. By gushing about Elon Musk on my Facebook account, for example, I'm not trying to tee up a friendship with the man himself. (As it happens, we aren't FB friends.) Instead, it's more likely that I'm signaling to other Musk supporters — showing that I'm aligned with them and their values, for example, or that I'm smart and enlightened enough to appreciate Musk's contributions to the world.

In other words, Musk himself — the man on the hill — isn't the primary target of my long-distance admiration, but rather the people down here in my local social circle.

All this group signaling works to create a kind of cult[2] around the admired figure. But note that cult objects aren't always living, breathing humans. We also get whipped into a frenzy of group signaling around:

• Dead people like Jesus, Confucius, and Shakespeare.
• Abstract symbols like "God," "America," and "Apple."
• Concrete symbols like idols, totems, and flags.
• Values or ideals like liberty, justice, and love.

Elon Musk, then, is simultaneously a living person and a symbol representing the ideals of science, entrepreneurship, progress, etc. Insofar as he's a person, we pay respect in the hope of befriending him, i.e., earning a spot on Team Musk. Insofar as he's a symbol, we pay respect to him (or more precisely, to the idea of him) for the same reason we kneel before any altar: to curry favor with fellow worshippers.

In a cult of personality, these two processes overlap and reinforce each other. But I contend that they can and should be analyzed separately.

Helen Keller. Keller has been dead almost 50 years, so most of our current admiration for her is necessarily cultic. But even while she was alive, she was quite prestigious. Was it simply because she had an inspiring life story? Did people simply fetishize her as a symbol of perseverance?

I might have thought so. But after reading her Wikipedia page, a New Yorker piece about her, and Mark Twain's high praise for her, I have to conclude that she was genuinely impressive. She wasn't just a public curiosity — "that blind deaf girl who learned to speak." She was also a prolific author (12 books!), a world-famous public speaker, and an energetic political activist. She campaigned aggressively for radical causes like women's suffrage, birth control, and pacifism, and was influential enough that some people found it necessary to attack her for her views. She even helped found the ACLU.

I'm sure Keller capitalized plenty on her life story, but the point is she was very successful at it, and would have made a valuable ally.

A final thought

As I write this, it occurs to me that loyalty interacts with prestige in a way that illuminates both phenomena.

Within an existing team (including friendship "teams" of size two), your prestige reflects your value to your teammates. More precisely, it's the expected value of all your future contributions to the team — your NPV, if you will.

Now, in light of this, how might you go about increasing your prestige?

One strategy is to improve yourself — by learning new skills, for example — so that you'll be able to accomplish things of greater value. You thereby increase the expected size of your future contributions to the team.

But there's another, complementary strategy: try to increase the expected number of your future contributions. How? By convincing your teammates that you're likely to stick around longer.

The transaction is simple. In return for your loyalty, you earn your teammates' trust. And the interesting thing about trust — arguably, the essential thing — is that it isn't portable. When you leave a team, you can take everything else with you (skills, knowledge, money), but all that accumulated trust stays behind.

In other words, prestige has two components: a general-purpose "global" component and a team-specific "local" component. Global prestige includes everything valued on the outside market: skills, knowledge, money, relationships with outsiders. Local prestige includes everything not transferable to the outside market — trust, relationships with teammates, and team-specific knowledge and skills.

I think this helps explain why loyalty-signaling practices are so powerful, and produce such dramatic effects. Watch how loyalty-signaling can quickly escalate out of control:

1. We begin with an initiate, who wishes to raise his value by demonstrating loyalty to his group. Words aren't enough: he needs to make honest (costly) commitments, i.e., by doing things that make it harder for him to leave the group. Techniques here include: severing ties with outsiders, doubling down on relationships with insiders, and undertaking lifestyle changes (diet, clothes, living arrangements) that make it harder to interact with the outside world.
2. In return for these demonstrations of loyalty, the initiate is rewarded with trust, i.e., local prestige — something that increases his value within the group, but which has no benefit to him if he decides to leave. In other words, his reward for binding himself to the group is... something that further binds him to the group.
3. Unfortunately local prestige, like global prestige, is a zero-sum game. So in order to compete for it, team members need to out-do each other, e.g., with even more extreme loyalty displays. This kind of competition is similar to what we find in any other prestige tournament (art, music, sports, academia, etc.). The main difference lies in the direction competitors are selling themselves for prestige: artists and athletes sell themselves outward, while loyalty-signaling teammates sell inward.
4. Finally, if processes 1–3 are strong enough, most group members will end up fairly committed to the group. They'll draw their admiration largely from other group members, and they'll experience a large drop in status if they ever try to leave. All this, in turn, gives everyone a strong incentive to make sure everyone else remains loyal to the group. The peer pressure that results is likely to be intense.

Religions often take these processes to an extreme. Adherents scramble to signal commitment as a way of jockeying for local prestige. In this context, everyone is anxious to do and say the right things. Schelling points for "proper" beliefs and behaviors are established quickly, resulting in capricious orthodoxies and bizarre ritual practices. And because loyalty is what's at stake, the group will tend to prefer beliefs and behaviors that are costly to maintain and perform. Orthodox Jews spurn food from non-Kosher kitchens. Fundamentalist Christians deny evolution. Christian Scientists refuse blood transfusions. Mormons wear special underwear. And every religion asks for weekly devotion. In each of these "transactions," adherents sacrifice their status with outsiders as part of a calculated gambit to earn greater status among their co-religionists.

And when the conditions are just right — when the incentives to signal loyalty are strong enough, and the countervailing incentives weak enough — a community can undergo something like gravitational collapse. These groups then become perfectly insular communities, social black holes from which escape is all but impossible.

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Recommended reading:

• Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution (David Chapman). A great illustration of prestige (cultural capital) and selling out vs. selling in.
• How to Legally Own Another Person (Nassim Taleb). Loyalty dynamics in employer/​employee relationships.

Endnotes:

[1] teaming concerns. Other concerns include: evaluating potential teams (to decide which ones are worth joining), keeping track of existing team members' contributions, deciding whom to kick out of a team (and when and how), deciding when to leave a team, and of course working together as a team, i.e., leading and/​or following, as appropriate.

[2] cults. I'm using "cult" here in the neutral, non-derogatory sense, meaning "a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object."