Individuals often have good reasons to indulge in delusions, such as re superstition, astrology, religion, or their own personal destiny. But society usually has less of a reason to indulge them in its policy analysis. For example, we shouldn’t be funding larger institutions of research to elaborate astrological theories. And even if people find value in their folk physics, folk econ, or folk psych, researchers shouldn’t be working to extend these frameworks, though we might want to understand them to better understand behavior.
A dramatic example of this is folk morality, which says:
There are general stable moral rules saying how everyone everywhere should behave. (Though some depend on context.) It would be best if everyone knew them, and tried hard to obey them, regardless of how well local societies rewarded that. Our stories tell us that the universe rewards such obedience, stories we believe, even if we say otherwise. The universe has been slowly revealing moral truth to us, letting our beliefs converge to it, and making our ancestors were more wrong than us. Other cultures are also more wrong, for unspecified reasons.
But in fact, experts should understand that real morality is evolved:
Humanity’s superpower, cultural evolution, doesn’t work unless cultures have different and changing moral rules, so selection can pick more adaptive versions. Evolution selects against habits of obeying rules beyond levels at which societies reward that; the universe does not add rewards. The universe only speaks on morals via evolution. Human are built to just accept morals they are taught, and of their elites, and can’t point to supporting evidence to convince outsiders. Instead of converging, morals just keep varying, with many pretty random drivers of change. When cultural evolution is broken, as it is now for us, morals change even faster, drifting into maladaption.
Cultural evolution has selected for cultures promoting folk morality, just as it selected for cultures promoting superstition, astrology, and religion, and folk physics, econ, and psych. But even so, experts should use expert, not folk versions, of key fields when advising policy. Thus experts who advise re humanity’s current broken cultural evolution process should keep evolve morality, not folk morality, firmly in mind.