When Robin Hanson is interviewed about The Elephant in the Brain, he is often asked “Are you saying that status accounts for all of our behaviour?”. His reply is that he+KevinSimler aren’t arguing that the hidden motives are the only motive, but that they’re a far more common motive than we give credit for in our normal discourse. Here’s an example of him saying this kind of thing on the 80k podcast:
As we just said the example that, in education, your motive isn’t to learn the material, or when you go to the doctor, your motive isn’t to get well primarily, and the hidden motives are the actual motive. Now, how could I know what the hidden motives are, you might ask? The plan here, that’s where the book is … In each area, we identify the usual story, then we collect a set of puzzles that don’t make sense from the point of view of the usual story, strange empirical patterns, and then we offer an alternative motive that makes a lot more sense of those empirical patterns, and then we suggest that that is a stronger motive than the one we usually say.
Now, just to be clear, almost every area of human life is complicated, and there’s a lot of people with a lot of different details and so, of course, almost every possible motive shows up in almost every area of human life, so we can’t be talking about the only motive, and so the usual motive does actually apply sometimes. Actually, you could think of the analogy to the excuse that the dog ate my homework. It only works because sometimes dogs eat homework. We don’t say the dragon ate my homework. That wouldn’t fly, so the usual story is part of the story. It’s just a smaller part than we like to admit, and what we’re going to call the hidden motive, the real motive is a bigger part of the story, but it’s still not the only part.
When Robin Hanson is interviewed about The Elephant in the Brain, he is often asked “Are you saying that status accounts for all of our behaviour?”. His reply is that he+KevinSimler aren’t arguing that the hidden motives are the only motive, but that they’re a far more common motive than we give credit for in our normal discourse. Here’s an example of him saying this kind of thing on the 80k podcast: