New book: Kluge, the haphazard construction of the human mind
Hamlet: “what a piece of work is man…how noble in faculty”
Bertrand Russell: “it’s been said man’s a rational animal…all my life I’ve been searching for evidence that could support this”
Argues man is the RATIONALIZING animal (not the “rational animal”) – searching for reasons to explain why we do what we do
Default thinking is that natural selection leads to human optimalism
But how to reconcile with the manifest clumsiness of the human mind?
Visual system evolving for a billion years
But distinctively human things – like talking, rational deliberation – these are much more recent (eg, 50-100K years ago)
Hill climbing metaphor – issue of local maxima
Evolution won’t necessarily lead to superlative adaptation
Human spine is a kluge – but not best way to support bi-pedal creature, leads to back pain / fragility – eg, multiple columns would be better solution
Evolution builds kluges because it has no foresight nor hindsight – it’s effectively blind
Evolution is always in a hurry – shipping deadline of “now”
Darwin didn’t say “survival of the fittest” – what he meant was fittest of the available options
It’s really “Descent with modification”
Bird’s wing is a modification of the forelimb of all 4-legged creatures – wasn’t designed from scratch as best possible wing
Concept of “evolutionary inertia”
Genes are conserved
Evolution is a tinkerer using spare parts
Kluge is about 3 things
1. Limits of human mind
2. Where they came from
3. What we can do about them
Computer memory – there’s a master map of where everything is stored – like a series of safe deposit boxes
Stored once, saved forever
Human memories are nowhere near as reliable – there’s no master map
Human memory balances 2 things: RECENCY and FREQUENCY
That’s why you often forget where you put your keys, where you parked your car
That’s why pilots use checklists to make sure they do all the required tasks
Evolution didn’t bless us with an erase feature
Brain uses a broadcast system to retrieve info and memories – doesn’t know where individual memories are
Memory is context dependent – if you study while stoned, you might be better off taking test while stoned
Even your posture (eg, seated or standing) can affect memory recall (!)
Seems to apply to rat + maze experiments too
Eyewitness testimony is particularly subject to these memory errors
Shooting incident with 30 eyewitnesses where the witnesses cannot agree about what happened
Framing: “estate tax” versus “death tax”
Garbage in > garbage out
We take biased samples of data and reason from those limited samples
Confirmation bias – eg, religious beliefs, presidential elections
Depression – being depressed means you’re more likely to have depressing thoughts, negative spiral – normal brains have ability to stop this process
Languages have lot of ambiguities – “the spy shot the cop with the revolver”
Moral dilemmas – trolley problem – a person’s judgment can be affected by how messy the experimental room is!