This reasoning does offer an explanation for why big brains might have evolved, to help walk the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Still it seems like the basic puzzle remains: why is this hypocrisy unconscious? Why do our conscious minds remain unaware of our subconscious signaling?
There’s some evidence that the usual method of interacting with people involves something sorta like emulating them within our own brain. We think about how we would react, adjust for the other person’s differences, and then assume the other person would react that way.
It’s plausible that the evolutionary pathway to developing an internal model of other people’s minds involved bootstrapping from one’s awareness of one’s own mind. This would work well to the extent that there was psychological unity of humankind. In our evolutionary environment, people who interact with each other were more similar to one another than they are today.
I don’t understand many of the decision theory posts on Less Wrong, but my impression is that the settings in which one is better off with timeless decision theory or updateless decision theory than with casual decision theory are situations in which the other agents have a good model of the one’s own internal wiring.
This together with one’s model of others being based on one’s model of one’s own mind and the psychological unity of humankind would push in the direction of the conscious mind adapting to something like timeless/updateless decision theory; based around cooperating with others. But the unconscious mind would then have free reign to push in the direction of defection (say, in one-shot prisoners’ dilemma situations) because others would not have conscious access toward their own tendency toward defection and consequently would not properly emulate this tendency toward defection in their model of the other person.
The analysis given here is overly simplistic; for example quoting myself
The conscious vs. unconscious division is not binary but gradualist. There are aspects of one’s thinking that one is very aware of, aspects that one is somewhat aware of, aspects that one is obliquely aware of, aspects that one could be aware of if one was willing to pay attention to them, and aspects that one has no access to.
Generalizing From One Example & Evolutionary Game Theory
Back in April 2010 Robin Hanson wrote a post titled Homo Hypocritus Signals. Hal Finney wrote a comment
to which Vladimir M responded. This post is a short addendum to the discussion.
In Generalizing From One Example Yvain wrote
It’s plausible that the evolutionary pathway to developing an internal model of other people’s minds involved bootstrapping from one’s awareness of one’s own mind. This would work well to the extent that there was psychological unity of humankind. In our evolutionary environment, people who interact with each other were more similar to one another than they are today.
I don’t understand many of the decision theory posts on Less Wrong, but my impression is that the settings in which one is better off with timeless decision theory or updateless decision theory than with casual decision theory are situations in which the other agents have a good model of the one’s own internal wiring.
This together with one’s model of others being based on one’s model of one’s own mind and the psychological unity of humankind would push in the direction of the conscious mind adapting to something like timeless/updateless decision theory; based around cooperating with others. But the unconscious mind would then have free reign to push in the direction of defection (say, in one-shot prisoners’ dilemma situations) because others would not have conscious access toward their own tendency toward defection and consequently would not properly emulate this tendency toward defection in their model of the other person.
The analysis given here is overly simplistic; for example quoting myself
but it rings true to me in some measure.