We can introspect without sharing the results of our introspection, but then the title for this post should not be “Humans aren’t fitness maximizers”. That’s a general claim about humans that implies that we are sharing the results of our introspections to come to a consensus.
That is an interesting point. We could, in principle, be exhibiting behavior perfectly consistent with IGF-optimization, and yet, if we were to look carefully, find out that what we really truly care about is something different.
In any case, people are not perfect liars, so the IGF-optimization hypothesis also predicts that most people will answer NO in the privacy of their own minds.
Indeed
Saying and thinking socially acceptable things is instrumentally convergent, and any theory of human values that is reality-adjacent predicts that mostly everyone says and thinks socially acceptable things, and indeed that is what we mostly observe.
Indeed, and yet even in the presence of powerful coercian that acts on both our outward behavior and our inward reflections, it is still possible to find the courage to look directly at our own true nature.
That is an interesting point. We could, in principle, be exhibiting behavior perfectly consistent with IGF-optimization, and yet, if we were to look carefully, find out that what we really truly care about is something different.
Indeed
Indeed, and yet even in the presence of powerful coercian that acts on both our outward behavior and our inward reflections, it is still possible to find the courage to look directly at our own true nature.