Carl, unless I say otherwise, all my claims are intended as tendencies, and I expect there to be exceptions.

I point out that being extremely pessimistic is (a) a reason not to try (b) a social defense which argues that no one else could have done better. Surely, one ought to be a bit suspicious here…?

My example was pointing to the deadweight losses of hypocritical behaviour: the distortion of idealistic motives by selfish unconscious drives is a Rube Goldbergian process that efficiently realizes neither selfish nor altruistic aims, nor a weighted average of the two according to their strength. If the two motives are considered and balanced explicitly by an honest agent, then there are Pareto-improving gains to be had by modifying action.

You wrote:
“we can resolve our hypocrisy two ways: we can start really living up to our high ideals, or we can admit we don’t care as much as we thought about those ideals,” but both options will require concrete change.

Second, as I mentioned above, I specifically doubt that the “more honest will tend to have lower expectations about achieving ideal ends” is true across domains because the dishonest will frequently 1) not have made any rigorous estimates about success, or 2) not have thought about efficiency at all, only a ‘fuzzy feeling.’ Honesty reduces self-serving bias in expectations about achievement, but improvements in efficiency make the overall effect ambiguous.

Third, the example incorporated an actual residual desire (10%) for idealism. You seem to be alternating between two characterizations of self-deception: in one, idealistic desires are truly epiphenomenal (#1 in my earlier comment) as in your corporate PRD model, while in the other the desires actually have motivational force, but less than we imagine. The second seems more accurate: the ‘PRD employees’ are like environmental activists hired by oil companies to provide credible defenders, and fed a misleading line by management. If increased honesty/transparency makes it clear that they are wasting their efforts they may leave for Greenpeace, even if they can’t change the company.

Geez, every time I use the word “subconscious” I want to put a disclaimer by it. Hopefully you will forgive me.

“Which pressure wins out can quite reasonably be determined by which side *you* choose to be on.”

I think that the ability to do this varies very widely amongst people, due to differences in intelligence (because proper introspection is hard) and disposition (ADD, depression, and the like make it very hard to win).

You, the battleground, are an ancestrally anomalous case; the pressuring circuitry did not evolve to strategically defeat an aware opponent, but only to influence an unaware one.

For the background theory of mind, it’s a bit old, but see http://www.singinst.org/LOGI/levels/levels.html.

Pdf, the “low motive” behavioral reinforcement / strategy-pressuring architecture certainly influences how all sorts of skills are learned, but it’s questionable whether the system itself can be said to “learn”, especially in a sense that contributes to defeating “high motives” when the two poles of the adaptation are brought into nonancestral conflict by our reflective knowledge of evolutionary psychology. Of course the answer could be, “Yes, it learns” but I’m not sure what evidence there is for that, or what sort of learning would take place. Obviously the system influences what is learned by us, the battlegrounds. Does the system learn how to influence us better? How? What parameters are being adjusted?

Carl, the scenario you paint is one of thousands we could paint. I don’t understand its relevance.