Why Your Brain Hates Other People

  • The strength of us vs. them
    • Dividing the world into Us and Them is deeply hardwired into our brains
    • Not just a human characteristic - other primates make similar distinctions
    • Us vs. them characterizations can be made extremely quickly (50ms)
  • The nature of Us
    • People who comprise the ingroup are seen as more wise, more moral, more worthy, etc.
    • Being a member of an ingroup carries with it moral obligations to help other members of the ingroup
    • Seeing outgroup members lose appears to activate the same dopamine pathways as seeing ingroup members win
  • The nature of Them
    • The initial feeling that characterizes the outgroup as bad is pre-rational
    • Rational cognitions about outgroups can be emotionally and subconsciously manipulated
      • Emotions about foreign countries can be manipulated by subliminally flashing images of fearful people
      • Activating disgust (by making people sit near smelly garbage) makes them more socially conservative
      • Women are more hostile to outgroup men when they’re ovulating
      • Even a small visible reminder of the existence of the outgroup can make members of the ingroup more hostile
  • The Heterogeneity of Them
    • Our brains treat different outgroups differently
    • Anger, disgust, and ridicule are all emotions that we feel towards outgroups
    • Not every outgroup triggers all three emotions
  • Cold and/or incompetent
    • We classify outgroups along two axes: emotional warmth and competence
    • Warmth: is the individual or group benevolent or malevolent
    • Competence: is the individual or group competent at carrying out their objectives
    • The axes can be primed independently
    • Each combination of warmth and competence produces different emotions
      • High warmth/high competence: ingroup pride
      • Low warmth/high competence: envy/resentment
      • High warmth/low competence: pity
      • Low warmth/low competence: disgust
    • Outgroup categorizations aren’t static, and the most interesting reactions occur when people see an outgroup move from one category to another
      • High warmth/high competence to high warmth/low competence: protectiveness
      • High warmth/high competence to low warmth/high competence: betrayal
      • High warmth/high competence to low warmth/low competnece: disgust and bafflement
      • Low warmth/low competence to low warmth/high competence: fear
      • Low warmth/low competence to high warmth/low competence: (temporary) acknowledgement
      • Low warmth/high competence to low warmth/low competence: gleeful gloating - most efforts of genocide/ethnic cleansing start by turning a low warmth/high competence outgroup into a low warmth/low competence one
  • Multiple Us-es
    • We constantly shift which category we consider most relevant when considering ingroup/outgroup distinctions
    • Racial classifications can be overridden by other group affiliations
    • Looking for a particular feature or characteristic seesm to prevent us from making ingroup/outgroup distinctions as quickly
    • Rapid recategorizations can occur even in times of great stress (i.e. war)
      • Masonic symbols can trump Union/Confederate distinctions in the Civil War
      • WW 1 “Christmas Truce”
      • Knowledge of classics brought together British and German officers in World War 2
  • Lessening the Impact of Us/Them-ing
    • Contact - needs to be done carefully, can make ingroup/outgroup distinctions worse if done poorly
    • Approach the implicit - show people their biases and they’re more likely to override their implicit ingroup/outgroup considerations
    • Replace essentialism with individuation
    • Flatten hierarchies

Lying On The Ground

  • Saturation
    • People have trouble maintaining the same activity for hours at a time
    • This is true of even “fun” activities like Netflix or video games
    • The problem with getting off-schedule is less about not doing work as it is about getting sucked into dark spirals that waste time
    • Doing things that aren’t work but are ways of resetting are valuable for breaking those spirals
  • Cultivating Feeling
    • Feeling is a loose label used for the category of things that involve getting in touch with your body’s sensations
    • How can we be more generative and synthesize existing information by putting in mental effort?
  • Really boring activities, like lying on the ground can help reset hedonic treadmills so that even relatively unpleasant work becomes not so unpleasant
  • A lot of the reason various unhealthy behaviors hare compelling is because they have variable rewards

What Do We Really Want

  • People’s desired attitudes affect behavior more than their real attitudes
  • People are likely to seek out information that confirms their desired attitude
  • When presented with flawed evidence for or against their desired attitude, people are more likely to accept the evidence that favors their desired attitude
  • People are willing to change the objects of their desired attitude in order to make those objects easier to like (i.e. adding cream and sugar to coffee)
  • However, there are limits - at some point we can’t force ourselves to like something that we wish we’d like

How Social Is Reason

  • Humans, and only humans perform abstract reasoning
  • But what is the evolutionary reason for humans to have this ability?
  • Many argue that abstract reasoning improves individual cognitive performance, thus allowing individuals that have it to better adapt
  • However, Mercier and Sperber argue that the primary purpose of reason is persuasion
  • Logic exists because it’s effective at getting other people to agree with the person using logic

Ems Evolve

  • Bostrom worries about the future as being like “Disneyland Without Children”
  • The future might be populated by many agents, but all of whom lack some defining characteristic X, which makes us human
  • While this is mainly seen as a concern for a future with ems, this is also a concern with biological evolution (on a longer timescale)
  • Two scenarios in which X is lost
    • Case A: single step in which X is lost
      • Maybe X is inherently unobservable, so we don’t know we have to preserve it
      • Maybe people only care about X when they’re thinking abstractly, so they don’t take actions to preserve it
      • Both of these can be fixed by conducting research into what makes us human, and then ensuring that those parts are preserved in any uploading technology
    • Case B: X is slowly eroded over a long period of time
      • Can we coordinate to ensure that no one starts down the slippery slope of losing their humanity?
        • Humanity coordinated to ban CFCs and stop acid rain
        • Global coordination has been significantly less successful at stopping global warming or preventing nuclear proliferation
        • Success requires widespread agreement on what X is, plus easy and cheap detection and enforcement
        • With ems, detecting violations will be difficult, as an em with slightly less X will behave almost identically to an em with 100% X
          • Will need to be able to inspect virtually all software
        • Maybe we can limit ems with reduced X to a limited portion of the population (much like we handle crime in today’s society)
      • Failure scenarios
        • Dispute over what X is and whether it should be preserved
        • If even a small number of ems don’t have X, it’s possible for them to outreproduce a larger initial population of ems that do have X
        • Everyone values X, but X-less ems are used for labor
          • Less of a concern with UBI that ensures that people have a decent life even if they don’t perform labor
        • All work/no fun
          • End up sacrificing X to ensure that our descendants will be a significant fraction of the future population
          • Doesn’t seem like a very urgent failure mode
          • Instructions for fun appear to be small in comparison to the instructions for intelligence
          • Relatively low cost of preserving fun makes it more likely that there will be a global agreement to preserve fun
  • How urgent is it?
    • Do we need to implement a program to find and preserve the essential characteristics of humanity?
    • If X is lost as a result of uploading, we do, but it is unlikely that initial uploads will lose X
  • Enforcement
    • The age of ems can be postponed by banning uploads
    • However, the first uploads will probably be recognizably human, so this isn’t a good reason to oppose uploading