Max Bennett: recommendation

Transcript context

…And I think that's a very natural phenomenon. I think any intelligence system is naturally incoherent. I think it's impossible to have a single monolithic intelligence, which is monomaniacally, you know, focused in in a particular direction. But but anyway, wanna just slightly rewind a little bit to what we were saying. So the the first animals, they they had quite simplistic, social games that they were playing. So they were interested in strength and submission, and it was a fairly fixed interface. And what was really interesting is that deer, for example, they lock horns, don't they? So it's predictive. They don't actually have to have a fight because that would be, you know, evolutionary, evolutionarily not a smart thing to do. So, so the social game they play, even though the game is fixed, it's predictive, which is fascinating. And then you are telling the story of, I think, monkeys and macaques, how they have this really interesting virtual social game where strength and social status diverged. So your social status actually became this virtual thing that was based on grooming and pruning and lots of completely unrelated things, and it was entirely possible for, a very weak macaque to have a significantly higher social status than than a big, strong 1. So that's really fascinating. But then we get into I mean, maybe a broader question is we are still very social creatures ourselves. We have, Facebook, for example. And could you just arguably you know, could you cynically argue that Facebook or, you know, all socializing is just a kind of arms race to improve our social status? So when we're kind of posting on Facebook, in a way, it's like the deer locking horns. It's us playing these status games without having to have a fight with each other. I think there is an aspect of human behavior that can absolutely be explained by this. There's a great book called The Elephant in the Brain. Oh, yes. It's a great book called The Elephant in the Brain that talks about how much of human behavior can be explained by this sort of status seeking behavior. And the reason why it's so hard to study is because it's what they call, I think, a cognitive taboo or an intellectual taboo, where we don't want to admit it to ourselves. So we self delude ourselves into believing we're doing things for virtuous reasons because it makes it easy. It's more convincing. If I know that I'm doing something to deceive someone, it's easier to tell that I'm doing it. If I genuinely believe that I'm doing these things to help the world, but subconsciously, of course, they're actually just benefiting me, it's more convincing to other people. So their argument is primates evolved this sort of self deceit to make them more convincing, and this really accelerated with language in humans and all that. So I think it's definitely, it's very likely to be the case that the core thesis of their book is right, that a lot of human behavior is this sort of subtle status seeking, which I do think has, not to go on a sort of tangent here, but I do think has sort of social political theory implications here, where, know, how do we make sure that society doesn't devolve into just a hedonic treadmill where, you know, the interesting thing about social status is it's always definitionally a scarce resource. Because it's just a ranking game. So so unlike physical resources where it is possible for all of us to live better than kings did 1000 years ago, kings or queens did 1000 years ago. We can all have better access to medical care, all have better access to information, all have better access to food. Social status is always a 0 sum game. Unless someone can conceive of a better way to to do it. But I think in most cases, it's a 0 sum game. And this is problematic because if if over time, most of our actions become pursuing social status, then we're gonna forever be in this sort of game. Now, I don't think personally that we're doomed to this. I think there are absolutely better virtues in the human psychology where not everything we do is based on pursuing social status. And I think you can conceive of dynamics where humans are doing things for other reasons, not just to to gain status. But I think it's absolutely fair to say that a surprising amount of human behavior is status seeking, and maybe a depressing amount. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I agree with you, and and I don't necessarily want to get too philosophical on that. But, yeah, that that book was, Will Storr's Status Games, where he said that there were 3 meta status games that we played. Yeah. I think he gave, yeah, the virtue game, the dominance game, the success game. So, you know, I might be playing the success game. I want to have the best podcast or or whatever. But, but, no, the the reason I bring this up is the difference between humans and animals is they're just playing 1 game. So it's really interesting that they have this memetic social score, but the the game is the same everywhere. Whereas for us, we go 1 level of abstraction up. So the success game to us can be manifest in in a myriad of different ways. It could be successful at playing computer games. It could be, you know, writing books or or making podcasts or or whatever. So it's almost like we we fractionate our our social ranking into a myriad of different games. And I think that's a little bit of a testament to the difference us humans have in general with our metacognition, which is our ability to kind of like create the memetics, you know, in a novel way.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.