Many behavioral-evolutionary biologists would suggest that humans may be quite heavily optimized both for deceiving other humans and for resisting being deceived by other humans. Once we developed a sufficiently complex language for this to be possible on a wide range of subjects, in addition to the obvious ecological-environmental pressures for humans to be smarter and do a better job as hunter gatherers, we were then also in an intelligence-and-deception arms race with other humans. The environmental pressures might have diminishing returns (say, once you’re sufficiently smarter than all your predators and prey and the inherent complexity of your environment), but the arms race with other members of your own species never will: there is always an advantage to being smarter than your neighbors, so the pressure can keep ratcheting up indefinitely. What’s unclear is how long we’ve had language complex enough that this evolutionary arms race has strongly applied to us.
If this were in fact the case, how useful this set of traits will be for resisting deception by things a lot smarter that us is unclear. But it does suggest that any really effective way of deceiving humans that we were spectacularly weak to probably requires superhuman abilities — we presumably would have evolved have at least non-trivial resistance to deception by near-human mentalities. It would also explain our possibly instinctual concern that something smarter than us might be trying to pull a fast-one on us.
Many behavioral-evolutionary biologists would suggest that humans may be quite heavily optimized both for deceiving other humans and for resisting being deceived by other humans. Once we developed a sufficiently complex language for this to be possible on a wide range of subjects, in addition to the obvious ecological-environmental pressures for humans to be smarter and do a better job as hunter gatherers, we were then also in an intelligence-and-deception arms race with other humans. The environmental pressures might have diminishing returns (say, once you’re sufficiently smarter than all your predators and prey and the inherent complexity of your environment), but the arms race with other members of your own species never will: there is always an advantage to being smarter than your neighbors, so the pressure can keep ratcheting up indefinitely. What’s unclear is how long we’ve had language complex enough that this evolutionary arms race has strongly applied to us.
If this were in fact the case, how useful this set of traits will be for resisting deception by things a lot smarter that us is unclear. But it does suggest that any really effective way of deceiving humans that we were spectacularly weak to probably requires superhuman abilities — we presumably would have evolved have at least non-trivial resistance to deception by near-human mentalities. It would also explain our possibly instinctual concern that something smarter than us might be trying to pull a fast-one on us.