Of Two Minds

Related: Robin Hanson's A Tale of Two Tradeoffs.

The design of social minds involves two key tradeoffs, which interact in an important way.

The first tradeoff is that social minds must both make good decisions, and present good images to others.  Our thoughts influence both our actions and what others think of us.  It would be expensive to maintain two separate minds for these two purposes, and even then we would have to maintain enough consistency to convince outsiders a good-image mind was in control. It is cheaper and simpler to just have one integrated mind whose thoughts are a compromise between these two ends.

When possible, mind designers should want to adjust this decision-image tradeoff by context, depending on the relative importance of decisions versus images in each context.  But it might be hard to find cheap effective heuristics saying when images or decisions matter more.

The second key tradeoff is that minds must often think about the same sorts of things using different amounts of detail.  Detailed representations tend to give more insight, but require more mental resources.  In contrast, sparse representations require fewer resources, and make it easier to abstractly compare things to each other.  For example, when reasoning about a room a photo takes more work to study but allows more attention to detail; a word description contains less info but can be processed more quickly, and allows more comparisons to similar rooms.

It makes sense to have your mental models use more detail when what they model is closer to you in space and time, and closer to you in your social world; such things tend to be more important to you.  It also makes sense to use more detail for real events over hypothetical ones, for high over low probability events, for trend deviations over trend following, and for thinking about how to do something over why to do it.  So it makes sense to use detail thinking for "near", and sparse thinking for "far", in these ways.  [...]

The important interaction between these two key tradeoffs is this: near versus far seems to correlate reasonably well with when good decisions matter more, relative to good images.  Decision consequences matter less for hypothetical, fictional, and low probability events.  Social image matters more, relative to decision consequences, for opinions about what I should do in the distant future, or for what they or "we" should do now.  Others care more about my basic goals than about how exactly I achieve them, and they care especially about my attitudes toward those people.  Also, widely shared topics are better places to demonstrate mental abilities.

Thus a good cheap heuristic seems to be that image matters more for "far" thoughts, relative to decisions mattering more for "near" thoughts.  And so it makes sense for social minds to allow inconsistencies between near and far thinking systems.  Instead of having both systems produce the same average estimates, it can make sense for sparse estimates to better achieve a good image, while detail estimates better achieve good decisions. 

(And obviously, "The Elephant in the Brain" is basically an extended survey of the empirical evidence for these kinds of theses.)

Curated.

I've been interested for awhile in a more explicit "social reality" theory and sequence. The original sequences certainly explore this, as does a lot of Robin Hanson's work, but I feel like I had to learn a lot about how to meaningfully apply it to myself via in person conversations.

I think this is one of the more helpful posts I've read for orienting around why social reasoning might be different from analytic reasoning – it feels like it takes a good stab at figuring out where to carve reality at the joints.

I do think that in the longterm, as curated posts get cached into something more like Site Canon, I'd want to see some followup posts (whether by Val or others) that take the "mechanical vs social thinking" frame from the hypothesis stage to the "formulate it into something that makes concrete predictions, and do some literature reviews that check how those predictions have born out so far."

I agree that lots of biases have their roots in social benefits, but I'm unsure whether they're really here now "because we predict it’s socially helpful to be biased that way" or whether they're here because it was socially helpful to be biased that way. Humans are adaption executers, not fitness maximizers, so the question is whether we adapted to the ancestral environment by producing a mind that could predict what biases were useful, or by producing a mind with hardcoded biases. The answer is probably some combination of the two.

You might have gone too far with speculation - your theory can be tested. If your model was true, I would expect a correlation between, say, the ability to learn ball sports and the ability to solve mathematical problems. It is not immediately obvious how to run such an experiment, though.

I'm surprised by your post and would have expected different post based on how it started.

One ability our social mind evolved is the ability to care. Caring producing a certain kind of ability to pattern match that's often superior to straight mechanical reasoning. David Chapman wrote the great post Going down on the phenomenon to drive deeper into that dynamic as it applies to science.

Curiosity is also a very important mental move that doesn't come out of the need to coordinate physical movement but that's more social in nature.

"Why, then, is there systematic bias?... But the rest of the time? It’s because we predict it’s socially helpful to be biased that way."

Similar thoughts led me to write De-Centering Bias [LW · GW]. We have a bias towards biases (yes, I know the irony). True rationality isn't just eliminating biases, but also realising that they are often functional.