Overcoming Sincere Prestige Bias

Humans suffer two big but under-discussed biases, which together make us overly favor people we see as prestigious and sincere. First, humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution, wherein we copy each others’ behaviors, and this wouldn’t work if we copied from random others. So it couldn’t get going without our first big clue on who to copy: prestige. Which has become so entrenched that we greatly over-emphasize prestige now even when better alternatives are now available.

Second, selection to win in forager talky collectives induced key humans errors: to think they are great at reading others’ motives, to think that motives matter more than they do in complex modern worlds, and to feel overconfident in knowing which are in fact the better motives. These induce us today to like idiot story plots, to be overly paternalist, to overly trust salespeople and prestigious professionals.

This is my best explanation of why we today don’t use more betting market estimates and incentive contracts to buy medicine, lawyers, teachers, coaches, therapists, and other professional services, especially prestigious ones. We are too easily persuaded that such folks are sincere and thus can just be trusted, especially when prestigious. Add in a strong inclination to see bettors or folks with incentive pay as greedy and insincere, but to not apply such skepticism to salary-paid professionals.

Turns out, this is actually a much bigger problem that I’d realized. Our civilization will likely fall due to cultural drift, to be replaced by a new civ that rejects much of what we hold dear about ours. This fall can be blamed on our overly trusting prestigious and sincere cultural activists, who tell us how to change key values, norms, and status markers. And on our being overly trusting of key values that tell us to block capitalism from taking over more areas of life, and making them more adaptive.

If we had been distrusting enough re our values, and re our judgments of sincerity and prestige, and thus willing to buy professional services via bets and incentives, we might now be ready to demand strong concrete evidence of adaptiveness before changing key values. For example, we might be willing to move to a new firm, or neighborhood, which seemed unusually adaptive, and adopt its local values. But we are not so ready, and do not so demand; so our civilization will fall.

Humanity will not reach the stars until we become more hard-headed and adaption-favoring in our values. I’ve previously said that underneath it all our values are actually about adaption, I’ve predicted that our distant descendants would directly and abstractly value adaption (modulo self-deception), and I now make this prediction: our descendants who overcome cultural drift will in effect value adaption far more. Plausibly directly and abstractly so, though perhaps a bit indirectly.

Note that I do not say adaption must be our only value. I instead say you can’t make any value last long unless it is part of a pretty adaptive package. So you must ensure that your descendants are pretty adaptive, if they are to preserve stuff you value. It is like being told your city is being invaded, and you have one hour to pack one suitcase. Yes it matters what you pack. But it matters even more than you pack and leave soon.