Modern Wisdom - #995 - Lionel Page - Born to Lie: How Humans Deceive Ourselves & Others

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

Lionel Page is a professor at the University of Queensland and an author. Why is human communication so complicated? For something we rely on every day, you’d think it would be simple, but language, tone, and context make it one of the most complex skills we have. So what makes communication so difficult, and what are some practical ways to get better at it? Expect to learn just how much of our lives are filled with strategic games, what most people do not understand when they think about human reasoning, why human communication is so complex, why we rely so heavily on ambiguity and innuendo, if coalitions and social connection are so important why do some people feel tension socially, if democracy is better understood as a coalition game than a truth-seeking exercise, and much more… Sponsors: See me on tour in America: ⁠https://chriswilliamson.live⁠ See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Timestamps: (0:00) What Do We Use Reason For? (5:13) Why Do We Deceive Ourselves? (15:11) Does Deception Damage Our Reputation? (24:33) Why Social Games are Hard to Navigate (34:05) The Sydney Sweeney Controversy (39:37) How Venting Masks Judgement (46:41) Communicating is More Complicated Than a Chess Game (01:01:33) Why We Feel the Need to Belong (01:13:49) Using Coalition Psychology to Understand Politics (01:26:40) Are We Aware We’re Playing Psychological Games? (01:39:38) Find Out More About Lionel Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do most people not understand when they think about human reasoning and how it works? Yeah, look, reason is, you know, the faculty to form judgments, solve problems, be rigorous. We tend to think of it as, that is, it's here to help us solve actual problems with, you know, facts, with reality. A good image that you can have for reason how, what it is is, you know, the movie, the Stanley Kubrick movie 2001, the Space Odyssey. And you have this bunch of apes, and they're pretty useless. And then suddenly they wake up one morning, and there's this monolith, this black monoliths. And once they touch it, certainly kind of reason fall upon them.

And then they discover that if they use a bone, they can use it as a tool, and they can use it as a weapon. And then the movie, you know, use this as a starting point for what makes humans. Humans use reason to solve problems. And you know, you can think that reason help us. to scientific things, find the truth, send rockets in space, et cetera. But if you think about you and me, you know, normal humans, how do we use reasons? I mean, we rarely really solve actual problems. You know, when is the last time I kind of invented something or solve a practical problem?

I mean, it happens, right? But it's not super frequent. But what we do most with reason is not really that, most often. Every day we use our reason to reason with other people. that is we have most of the problems we face in our lives. There are social problems. There are problems when we interact with other people. It's not something that the computer doesn't work,

that the dishwasher doesn't work. It's solving how do I get my friends to do what I want, how to get my friends to understand me, how I get my boss to give me a raise, etc. These are the problems we face. And we use reason. So we are reasoning, but we are not reasoning like scientists to solve problems. We're reasoning like lawyers to convince other people.

And the key aspect, I think, one of the interesting theories which came in the last 10 years about, you know, what is reason, is that reason is this. It's not here to solve problems. It's here for us to convince other people. And once you take this approach, it really explains a lot of, you know, people, you have a big literature on people being irrational, making lots of mistakes, etc. But then when you think, wait a minute, maybe we're not actually designed to be scientists. We're designed to be lawyers. And so some of the mistakes are by design. you know, confirmation bias, you look at the information which is convenient,

you ignore the information which isn't inconvenient. Well, that's what you do if you want to win your case, not if you want to find the truth. So that's the way reason really works. In that case, if human reasoning is more about persuasion than it is problem solving, is our capacity for problem solving just a byproduct of the fact that we're here and capable of convincing and persuading other people? Yeah, look, there's a good question. I mean, we have some ability, you know, we have some ability to problem solve it.

The anthropologists of psychologists looked at that. They found that, you know, we're pretty useless. Lots of the solutions we have, there are solutions that were given, that there are social solutions, that we know how to do things because we've been told how to do. You know, you might remember in Australia there were kind of a British, British people like traveling in Australia and they lost themselves. And they were kind of, you know, the locals who had their customs,

et cetera, they're able to survive with the land. And these guys had just died because, you know, they didn't know. They don't know where to find water. They don't know how to find food, et cetera. And we individually, we really rarely find and solve problems. We kind of inerate the problems, which have been accumulated, the solution which have been accumulated by past generations. So we solve problems, but really not frequently.

what we do most often is just we use all the solutions that we near it. We're told how it works and we do it. So is it right to say that our reasoning is self-serving in that way? Yeah, yeah. You know, I think that's one of the biggest insight we get is that when we talk about reason

with a big R, we tend to think of philosophers, of mathematician, you know, that's a kind of iconic picture of reasoning, et cetera. But really when we, what we do, you know, if you think about from an evolutionary point of view, that's not being hyper-rational like that and very rigorous, is not the best way of winning arguments.

You know, if you go in debating, you know that debating, you have tricks. You know, you're not here to find the truth. You're here just to win your case. And that's the way our mind works, you know. So when you debate with other people, when you try to convince other people, you're going to, you know, just put a nice angle,

a nice spin to what you say. You're going to avoid going into areas where you think that you may be in trouble, et cetera. And we do it naturally, right? We don't need to necessarily strategize. We do it naturally. Often we're convinced that that's a right way, that what we say is right, right?

And that's the way our reason works is to, you know, completely being self-serving for us to find the best way of convincing other people. But we also need to convince ourselves, right? This is where self-deception comes in, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this idea that we self-deceive and that it's a strategic, it works strategically to convince others.

It's an idea put forward by Robert Trivers in the 70s, the biologist's robot trivers. And the problem he describes is, okay, you know, why do we self-deceive? And we know that we self-deceive. We know that we're ever-confident. People tend to think that they are smarter, more handsome, nicer than, you know, than other people, et cetera. You have a lot of data.

people, you know, are you a good driver? Like, I think 90% people say they are better driver than average. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's just not possible. I mean, and everybody, if you ask college professors, you know, I think 90% will say they are better professors than their colleagues, right? So it's at every, every level, you know, you have this kind of thing. So, okay, so why do we, why do we self-deceive and why do we have all these kind of

flattering views about ourselves? So one possibility is that we just like it, you know. I mean, you know, I like thinking I'm good. So I choose to shape my beliefs and to form belief that I'm better than I am because I just enjoy this feeling. The problem with this explanation is that there are costs of being overconfident, of having wrong beliefs. So, you know, if I think I'm stronger than I am, maybe I'm going to go into fights.

I shouldn't go into. If I think I'm a better climber, I'm going to climb a mountain, which I shouldn't climb. If I'm feeling a better diver, I'm a better swimmer, I'm going to dance. dive in the river, I shouldn't swim. So there are real risk. But so, you know, from an evolution point of view, if we are all overconfident, there must be a reason. And it can't be in our mind because evolution doesn't select our mind to be happy, you know,

that it selects us to be successful. So if we all tend to be a bit of a confident, there must be because of our cost, there must be benefits. And the benefits, Robert Truvers says that because we all try to convince each other, you know, there is always a risk that if I kind of. lie, if I blatantly lie when I try to talk to you, you'll find out, and there are costs

I'm losing reputation, etc. And maybe, you know, also, you find out with that, I'm not being honest. So, one way of limiting this cost or one way of not being found out is actually to believe my own stories. You know, like, you know poker players, when they play poker, they have their sunglasses.

What do they have sunglasses? Because they don't want to leak cues of the their emotions, the feeling. So maybe instead of having sunglasses, one way to play poker if you want to bluff and be convincing is to really believe that when your game is not great, actually it's a great game. So it's not possible in poker because it's just very obvious.

You see the game. But in the game of life, your cars is not that clear. And so if you start believing that the hands that you have is stronger than it is, you might actually be able to bluff in a way. You bluff, but you believe your own bluff, and that's convincing because you don't leak cues that you're bluffing. What are some of the other ways that self-deception creeps in that people might not notice, some of the more subtle ways?

Some of the most subtle ways. I think, you know, I remember when I, because I worked on self-deception and I published papers on self-deception. And I talked to a journalist, and the jury says, oh, yes, some people self-deceive. And it was like, no. No, no, this is not it. It's, we all self-deceive.

So, you know, it's the design, by design, we are all doing that, is that you forget the truth. Forget the, you know, we have the view that we view the world and we reason with the world. No, we have to think that just, you know, being always a bit self-serving, if it works, if you can get a small advantage by believing your own stuff and you can push, you know,

convince other that, you know, you deserve a bigger share, you know, you're not guilty of this, of that, et cetera. It's going to be beneficial. So I think the key insight is that we really see the world with rose-tinted glasses. And, you know, that explains a lot of things. You have a lot of conflict in social situations where you hear, well, there's two sides of the story. Well, why is there two sides of the story?

Well, there's two sides of the story because everybody is seeing the story, trying, you know, like a lawyer, trying to see the point which is favorable, maybe ignoring or don't playing the points which are not favorable. And that's why you have two sides because there's only one reality, right? But they're always two sides because we are not...

And we believe that all side is a real one, right? That's what we do. But so I think it's pervading. So when you say all the subtle thing, I think it's everywhere. You think about, you know, if you're in a couple and you think about how you negotiate, who does what,

how you split the chore in the household, there's a lot of conflict and people think, if you ask couples, there's an interesting study, and you ask couples, what percentage of the housework you do? And the sum is always higher than 100%. Right?

So it's maybe that the woman says I do 80% and the men says, I do 30%, right? But the total is more than 100%. So I think it's everywhere. I was thinking about, you know, you've alluded to

self-deception being people perhaps thinking that they are better than average, but better can appear in a lot of different ways that we might not see. I have to assume that the desire to be seen as a victim, even if you haven't been particularly victimized, is a type of self-deception. And this is to make yourself better, but that betterness is couched in terms of your moral position. Oh, I am somebody who is more moral. I am more deserving. And that's you purposefully putting yourself down, right? On the surface, it's, I've put myself lower as I've been victimized, but that is actually just a second order 4D chess move to try and get yourself to morally be seen as somebody who is hired, somebody who is worthy of more. Totally. Yeah, you know, like,

that's one fascinistic aspect with these social games is that, you know, they're really rich. And so how to sometimes, as you say, victimize, like sometimes some of the rules of fairness means that if you are like victimize, you know, if you have been,

if you have suffered some penalties either by some other people, by society, et cetera, you can claim some retribution, right, as this principle of fairness that we use. And so as a consequence, if these principles of retributions

are commonly agreed, then it becomes potentially beneficial to be a victim, not necessarily to be actually a victim, but to be seen as a victim to benefit from that. And so, you know, self-deception here works as well. But you know, you could think obviously about people in like the modern social spheres who think they have all like problems of being victimized to claim kind of social recognition.

But even in the family, you'll have like the kids, you know, they say, you know, I'm the victim here, my brother hit me, et cetera. So they will ask for you to recognize our victim to be compensated. So it's everywhere. As soon as you have a rule which tells you that, which we agree, which means that if you have been, if you have suffered of something, you can be retributed, in particular if you've suffered from somebody who may be suffered, can be retributed, you will have an interest. potentially in being the victim, yeah, different way. Okay, so do you think that we're lying to ourselves

more effectively than we lie to others? I think we're better at self-deception than we are at other deception? I'm not sure. I'm not sure who you would compare. I think you lie to yourself, not you have to lie to others. I mean, you see,

because when you lie to other, Lying is risky. Oh, that's such a, I already know exactly where you're going. Yeah, the fact, the first thing, the fact that you have deceived yourself precludes the need for you usually to deceive others. Exactly. You know, you have a saying in Seinfeld where one of the protagonists says, it's not a lie if you believe it. And so this is the thing. If you want to convince others and if believing your own,

story is convincing and helps you convince others, then you don't have to lie. And in a way, it's advantageous because lying is risky. If I go out of my way and I say, you know, this stuff which is white is black, and you find out, well, you know, I'm, you're like, I'm going to lose your trust. Maybe you're not going to work with me anymore, et cetera. So, but if I, if I have kind of reasonable, like, I have, I keep plausible denial denability. Like, the stuff is, white, but I only gathered information which would induce me to think it's black. So if I tell you, well, you know, from what I see, it's black. And you tell me, no, I know, it's not. But like I said, oh, oh, well, sorry, you know, that's what, that's what I looked at,

I looked at this information. So that's what I believe. So I kind of keep plausible inability. You know, I, I will keep, you can't, it's harder for you to pinpoint that I really kind of purposely try to deceive you. Yeah, it's not a lie if you believe it. Okay, how much is the fear of losing your reputation, the thing that keeps people trustworthy then? You just mentioned there that are recursive judgment of others, this sense. Well, how reliable is Lionel when he's taught? Like, he got that thing wrong about that thing being white previously. Yeah, yeah.

So is, I know that, that you know, and you know that I'm going to keep track of you. Is that the thing that keeps us trustworthy for the most part and almost hems in how much deception and self-deception we deploy? I think it is, yeah. You know, if you look at the kind of, you look at the fundamentals of cooperation between humans. So human, you know, I think you have to set out what characterize humans is that we're not like birds like Robbins,

where we have no interest in interacting with each other. So robins, you know, they do their own stuff. They don't talk to any other robin and they find a mate once, so that's it. And we're not like ants. And they live, you know, they kind of almost clones because they share 75% of their genetic material. So they are between siblings and clones. So they kind of always agree naturally on what to do. We are in this kind of in between, which is complex, where we share, we have a lot of interest in common,

but we're also always a kind of part of conflict. And so we have to negotiate this with each other. And so when you see that, the keys, how do agents like us who have somewhat aligned incentives, some line interest, but not fully aligned interest, cooperate. And what we can see is that one of the most insightful thing from game theory get is that once you repeat interactions, then you can really use the possibility of gaining from,

because we have some shared interest. the procedure from giving the future to police the interaction in the present. So in the present, you could always have kind of an incentive not to be cooperative because, you know, you can take benefits. So, you know, I could lie today because, yeah, if you trust me, you know, I'm going to get an advantage. But what you can see is that if we have the prospect of interacting a lot, and then you, if tomorrow, if we say that we agree to cooperate all the times, but if I lie and if you find out I lie, you stop believing me in the future.

So there's a cost now. The cost is that I lose this opportunity to cooperate with you in the future. And when you extend this insight to the population, well, you're a lot of people, then the thing which policed us is this recall track, this recall that we have, this reputation. So the reputation is really this record that we have that all the people can shake to see whether I did abide by the rules which ensure that cooperation is sustained. And I think it's key. You know, you say, is it a key thing?

I think this is a thing. That is this is the way it works. That is reputation is what makes us comply with the rules of cooperating now because if we don't, then all record is tainted. And then all those people will know that. And as a consequence, they will not cooperate. And then we have a cost. We have the shadow of the future, which applies some pressure in the present.

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Okay, so all of this, it presumably is what makes human communication so complex that it's not a simple task to try and do. Yeah, you know what? It's fascinating to, communication comes to us very easily. You know, we chat and we talk about things, etc. Like, it seems normal.

But think about it. Computers were able to beat Granch's master like, you know, 30 years ago. Big Blue was in 1995, I think, beating Kasparov. But it's only only in the last two, three years that we get computers. eventually able to speak like you and me. You know, before when you were talking to a computer, you felt it was artificial.

You felt that, you know, it was not very deep. It was predictable, et cetera. And now only with the new language models, you feel like you're able to speak. You can still perceive the artificial nature of it sometimes, but it looks very natural. So you needed 30 years of computer programming progress to reach this level. It tells you how difficult.

called communicating, talking like you and me what we're doing now. It's actually very complex, much more complex for a computer than, you know, playing chess at the level of Casparov. And what the complexity is at several levels. One thing you have to think, but what is communicating?

Communicating is when I say something, I am providing information, and information is me giving you something which is going to change your beliefs. If I say something and it doesn't change in any way your beliefs, it's useless. it's kind of boring. So it's only if you have your beliefs

and I provide something which is novel, change your beliefs, that it is useful to you. It could be, I could tell you, oh, Chris, you know, I've made this guy. It's very nice. It's information. I could tell you what I tell you now

about what I know. I could talk to you about the weather or whatever, but I'm giving you something which is information. Then that's the basics. Then if you want to look at how communication works, there would be plenty of way we could do that. There's plenty of things I could tell you. I could give you information about, you know, I could talk to you about the dictionary, but I'm not talking to you about

the dictionary now. So what we do, there's a linguist and psychologists, a cognitive scientist, who have written a book about it, is that we try to be relevant. And relevant, they define relevance as we try to provide the most information, which is changing your beliefs in the most useful way to you, with the minimal cost for you to treat it. So when I talk to you, I'm going to try to give you the most useful information to you, which are going to change your beliefs in a way that you find useful. But at the same time, giving a message,

which is the least hard for you to process. And you can see what is relevance when you violate it. So what is violation of relevance? Well, first, I could talk to you and give you information which is useless. So, you know, I could talk to you about things you are not interested in. You'd find me boring. Or I could be talking in a way which is not easy for you to process. I could

speak very longly and very technically, and that would be, you know, and even if what I say is right and useful too, but I would not make it easy for you to access. So these are the violation of relevance. And what we do, we try to do that all the time. This is amazing, you know, this principle of relevance. It's not just when we talk about something technical.

It's every situation in our daily lives when we communicate, we very quickly communicate a lot of information in the minimal amount of words. So I'll give you an example, for instance. suppose that, you know, John and Jane they are thinking about what to do in the weekend and John says, oh, what about going to play tennis and Jane says, I'm tired.

So now, if you think about it, Jane's answer seems like if you're a robot, if you're a computer, you'd be like, wait a minute, like Jane didn't say whether she wanted to or not to play tennis. She said she's tired. So she seems like she's not answering. I'm sorry that you're tired, but can we get back to talk? talking about tennis.

Yes, that's exactly. And so how does it work? So obviously, John is going to understand what she means, right? But that she did, she doesn't want to play tennis. So how does John understand? Well, John has done it first. Jen is going to give the minimal amount of information, which is I'm tired.

John will say, okay, they will be, we have an understanding. That's what Shane is doing. So John will think, okay, if Jen said that she's tired, it has to be relevant to what. I was saying about tennis. So it has to be relevant. So why is it relevant? Well, people being tired usually don't want to play tennis.

So she is indicating she doesn't want to play tennis with me. That's what she said that. But then if you think about it, Jen has to anticipate that this is the way John is going to interpret her. So she understands that John is going to expect her to say that. Well, because she thinks that he's going to understand. You have this kind of recursive mind reading. I know that you're going to think that's that's what I want to say. And when you start understanding that,

that we're doing this, you know, you're putting your shoes into the other person, putting his shoes into yours, you realize, okay, that's really, really complex. That's why computers sound silly relative to us, because they don't do that. So they sound, you know, they sound a bit off. Until the large language models, which are better now,

but before they were sounding artificial, they were unable to do this kind of easy interactions when what is understanding each other is doing this kind of requisite. mind-witting. Yeah, and I suppose the fact that it's taken so long, and it, you know, the entire corpus

of every written word, and now even synthetic data, the AIs are having to create fake new source data to retrain themselves on 35, or 30 years after we were able to be beaten at chess,

it kind of explains. So, one question on that. I keep on learning about the importance of coalition building, of communication, of solving social problems, of theory of mind, I need to be able to work out what John means when he asks Jane and what Jane meant with that. And John and Jane were friends last week, but not this week. And you scaled that up to a Dunbar number of 150. How likely do you think it is that human consciousness, like the sense.

sense, the phenomena of being a me, of having a sense that I am here, of being able to model your mind, reflect on my own, my own motivations, that kind of metacognitive process. How much of that do you think is just a byproduct of us having to be able to navigate our way through complex social games and communication? Well, I think, you know, there's this social brain hypothesis, which is like, you know, why do we become so intelligent? And that is dealing with social interactions. And I think that's the key to understand

why we are as intelligent as we are and why we think the way we do, it's because of the fact that we have to deal with social interactions. So when you compare us to other apes, et cetera, what the big difference is the complexity of our social network. So if you look at apes like chimpanzees, for instance, they have some coalitions like two, three, But, you know, we have very large coalitions.

We have, like, you look at your Facebook, you have, like, hundreds of people at work. You may have, like, you know, dozens of people, et cetera. And so, navigating this is really, really complex. I mean, you know, I think one thing that everybody will understand is that when you play video games, you see a big difference between playing versus a computer versus playing versus players. You know, when you play with this as a computer, usually quickly you learn that the computer has this kind of predictable way of doing. so when you play Super Mario and you arrive at the bus

you know, first time you get smashed but then after you say when it's a roo the fireball you hide yourself in the corner and then after you jump on it again and it works all the time but when you play against other players no because if it works once

the other players learn and then you have to expect that you have to anticipate their next move knowing that themselves they try to anticipate your next move so what you have is that the complexity of playing with other people is way, way more difficult to solve as a problem

than the complexity of playing with either objects or even low awareness animals. So this challenge that we face, I think it has likely put a tremendous pressure on our cognition to be, for us to be smarter. And most of what we do, kind of resolves around solving and being successful at this social problem.

problems. Yeah. Okay. So what's the difference in strategies that we use when we're being cooperative than when we're being in conflict? Because yeah, sure, self-deception, we're going to believe most of the things that we say. That makes it easier to lie. But we can't do that all the time. We have to be more collaborative and more sort of honest and aligned with certain people and more adversarial and more in conflict with others. So how does cooperation and conflict? How did those two things change? How does the way do we show up change?

I think I tend to talk a lot here about self-decision conflict because often we kind of minimize it or don't talk about it as much. But I think we should emphasize that in our social interactions, cooperation, I mean, we should appreciate how much cooperation there is. most of what we do in life in society, right, is we abide by a lot of social rules about conventions, about how to do things. You know, you go out and you drive,

you're in the U.S., so you drive on the right side of the road, right? I mean, the strives, so I drive on the left. And, I mean, you're going to do that 100% of the time, right? I mean, at least in the U.S., some other countries, it's random. But if you do that, and everybody does that, so there is regularity, and this is cooperative,

it benefits everybody. I mean, sometimes, you know, you could benefit from breaking a few rules and some people do, but if you go on the road, most people respect the rules. And you can extend this insights to all the areas of your life. You go at work and people do work. They don't, you know, most people don't embezzled the company and run away in another country with the money, etc. So cooperation is really, I appreciate how much cooperation there is and we comply with rules most of the time. And I think maybe one image that you could have is that if you think about a football soccer match

or whatever sports you prefer, there are rules. And the rules are applied. That is, people follow most of the time the rules. But at the same time, it would be wrong to say that people really follow fully the rules. Yeah, you know, because if you think about football, for instance, you know, people pull your shirt. They are kind of tried to go over the line without being, you know, just enough. enough for the referee not to blow the whistle, et cetera. So that's what we do in life.

So there are rules, and mostly we follow them. But, you know, if we can get some advantage by not following exactly or by going just close to the line, then we will have a tendency to do that. And self-deception here is going to help us because we can do that while convincing ourselves that we're not. So if we are called up, it says, oh, I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't know I was doing anything wrong. So we are mostly cooperative, but there is always a potential element of conflict which often would try to rationalize our behavior with self-deception, trying to get some advantages. It seems to me that communication would never really be fully cooperative, that even the most

cooperative team, two-people team, would always be ever so slightly in conflict. Yeah, yeah, no, you're talking about it. I mean, once again, I really stress the aspect of corporations. So I think we need to appreciate how much cooperation there is in communication. But at the same time, you're totally right that there was, you know, we're not ants. There was always an element of conflict. Conflict is a big word, but it just means that we don't want the same thing. It could be as much as, you know, somebody wants to talk a long time and somebody else wants to talk less, right?

And there's a negotiation you have. Like if you are with your uncle who talks to you at a wedding forever, you know, you want to do something else as kind of a conflict here. And so conflict is everywhere. And I think it explains, once you appreciate that, it explains a lot of the kind of thing which seems weird or mysterious in communication. For instance, in his book, you write about it in several books, but I don't remember the, maybe the, I think his book on Language in 94,

Stephen Pinker talks about why we use. And I think is the food for or food books, a more recent book. Well, we use indirect speech, which is we use ambiguous statements or in windows. For instance, when you are your date, at the end of a date, you might say, you know, do you want to go up or have a drink, right? You don't want to say something more explicit. So the question is, why do you do that? Because when you said you want to go up to have a drink, it's pretty, you know,

it's pretty clear what's involved, but you're not going to say, you know, to be more explicit. So, or he gives an example about, you know, somebody trying to bribe a policeman and say, oh, you know, I would like for us to find a way to solve it here. And he gives his wallet and there's a bill sticking out of the wallet. So he's not saying, do you want $50 and, you know, let me go. He says something ambiguous. So an ambiguity is everywhere. So, for instance, you know, when there's conflict in the office, usually it's not open.

People are going to drop hints that they're not happening. with you, right? They do, they can be passive-aggressive. They're not going to say, you know, I'm not happy because of that. So why do we not say things clearly and explicitly? Well, it's because of this conflict element. Because if there is a conflict, by not saying something, I can in a way convey the message without, with keeping plausible deniability if things go wrong. Okay, so if I say, for instance, do you want to go up and my date says, no, I can pretend that I was just going to, you know, invite for a drink. So you can play the game where we pretend that nothing more was involved.

If I tell the policeman, I would like, could we solve this here and I don't offer a clear bribe, the policeman may not be able to have a case to put me in jail, you know, as an attempt for bribery. And in the office, if there is a conflict and I get angry and says, you know, what are you implying? And say, I'm not implying anything. So you keep plausible deniability. And so this is why our communication is so rich

because often we don't say what we mean, but we convey it indirectly. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the US. They are the driving force behind Jimshark and Skims and Allo and Newtonic. And that is why I've partnered with them because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they're best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared with other leading commerce platforms.

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to Shopify.com slash modern wisdom or lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. I was listening to Rob Henderson talked to Louise Perry about the Sydney Sweeney advert. So Sydney's... Oh yeah, but the jeans? Yeah, did this ad for American Eagle and everybody got upset about it. And what was interesting was the way that women sort of criticized Sidney Sweeney was not the way that if you were a robot you would probably predict it wasn't she is being sexually overt and and has big boobs and is a potential intracultural rival

for some other high value partner that I would like to get with and she is going to set an unrealistic standard of beauty that is going to be difficult for us all. No, no, no, no, no. It was none of that. It was all couched in moral terms. It was she's pushing eugenics. She once attended a Trump rally.

Her family is like central, southern American flag waving, truck driving, country music, listening Hicks. And it was at no point. was the actual thing that was the issue being pointed at. It was all, she's a bad person. And I said that me and Rob were at dinner last night, singing your praises. By the way, we've managed to get 35 minutes in and I haven't plugged your substack. Can everyone go and subscribe to optimally irrational on substack, please, because it is one of the best things. And it is criminally undersubscribed. It is Bitcoin at $1. So everyone can go and subscribe to that now. And

you can get most of the stuff for free. The interesting thing, women have a failure of a theory of mind, cross-sex mind reading failure here, I think, they think that by derogating Sydney-Sweeney's morality, other men will think, well, that's a beauty standard that is unreasonable. She's a bad person. Given that she's a bad person, I should not find her attractive. Now, maybe it's some introssexual competition that they think, if if men see that lots of other women do not consider sydney to be a good person they might not be attracted to them i'm going to just lay it out for the women that that are listening that's not true men are not going to not find sydney sweeney attractive just because other women don't find her a good person however if you are um leonardo decaprio and lots of other similarly valued men if Keanu Reeves and Hugh Grant and Jared Leto and a bunch of other

Hollywood A-listers were to say, I know that you fancy Leonardo DiCaprio, but he's a bad man, he's morally unjust. I do think that that would impact women's assessment of this. It's sort of male competition theory that men's judgment of other men is kind of a big mediator of how women find that man to be attractive. This is David Putz's stuff. I just thought it was really interesting. You know, when you're talking about ambiguity, deniability, you have this first level, which is it's not about her looks. It's about eugenics. It's about being right of center. It's about not caring about normal people, et cetera, et cetera. And then the reverse wouldn't be true. I just thought that was a really interesting setup. But I might be totally wrong. It's a fresh, it's a fresh theory, okay?

I get the idea of intrastexual competition and there are psychological research showing that I don't remember the details but I've seen papers where you know when you put a beautiful woman she's more likely to get criticized or to be the target of gossip etc and that kind of makes sense

I mean not because I want to be clear that it's not because women are bad it's like you know men have all the problems and other type of competitions It's just intracial competitions on both sides. In the case of Sweden, I could definitely see how this kind of plays role

because, yeah, I think also because of what you said, I think also in the case of the ad, which I saw, I guess it breaks a bit of the codes, the political codes. And in the US at the month, you know, for the last

years, it was very big about you know, gender roles, etc. It's kind of, it says, well, there's two things. First, it's overtly kind of sexualizing the body of a woman. And two, it's talking about genes, which is about biology. And I think these two things, it's kind of, you know, hurts the kind of political, ideological setup on part of the U.S. on the left.

So I can see how that could trigger this kind of reaction. I don't know anything about Sydney, Sweden, Sweden, what, a political allegiance or whatever. But I could see how people would try to, you know, would react like a, as you said, the coalition, if you perceive it's at being from the out group, from, you know, against your group, and then people get very mean. And that can also blend, as you say, with intracosexual competition. But I could see how, you're trying to dig something on her, on the family, whatever. That's, that's, yeah, that's the coalitional mindset. The other ambiguity, innuendo, plausible deniability thing, like the perfect example of this, I think, is venting. So some of the great research done around venting.

Again, this isn't for me to lay it at the feet of women. Guys have, like, intersexual competition between men and women. But women are a bit more interesting around this. They're just more complex when it comes to their. Is that more complex, yeah. Introsexual competition games and the way that they communicate. so on and so forth. But venting is so fucking fascinating, dude. I just find it's maybe the most interesting style of human communication. I'm talking to you. I'm Christine, you're Lisa, and we're

talking about our friend Roberta. And I say, I'm so worried about Roberta, Lisa. She's just sleeping with all of these guys. And I'm really worried that she's going to get her heartbroken. And I keep trying to warn her about it, but she just doesn't seem to listen to me. And okay, like, on the surface, I'm being a good person, I'm being cooperative, I'm caring, I'm being compassionate for my friend. But under the surface, what I'm doing is talking totally openly about Roberta's sexual exploits. I'm implicitly putting myself on a high moral pedestal by saying, I would never, that is not part of me. And it's all couched in, if Roberta ever finds out that I told you, I'm just so worried about you. I didn't, you know, this is, I care. I care.

So, so good. So I think I can give you the reason why you have these difference between men and women. And basically the key difference is our network of friends. How our network of friends work? Men have large networks of friends, or you say large coalitions, and they have loose ties, weak ties. You know, you have a lot of friends.

You don't, and one friend you cannot talk to him for two years, and when you see him back, Hey, mate, you know, how it's going? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's because, well, that's one man. I'll tell you maybe because why afterwards. And women, they have tighter networks. Small networks, a few friends, and with a lot of investment, you know.

They took a lot. They invest a lot. And so there is also gossiping, which you are talking about, because you manage reputation. You want to learn about reputation. You manage your own reputation. So friendship, friendship for women is much more intense in terms of, you know, the investment in each particular friendship partnership. And I think the reason for that is that men and women had to solve different problems

in our ancestral times. So when you read a fascinating book by evolutionary psychologist Sarah Herdery on mothers in ancestral times, one thing that appears is that it's very hard to raise kids. Now you've got, you get a kid at the hospital, and then you've got the nurse, and then after you go to the kindergarten, you know, and drop the kid at the kindergarten, super easy. But, okay, ancestors, they didn't have that. And, you know, you need to

collect food. There's no supermarket to find the food, and you need to collect food with this stuff, which is just sucking the energy out of you. And so the survival of children likely was much higher when you got help. So there's a lot of what we call allot parenting. That is, a mother gets health from her family, in particular from a mother, but also from other

mothers. Sometimes, you know, other mother's helping to breastfeed your kid when you can't. And so, you know, for that you need, if you want to give your kid to other women, you need a lot of trust because the kid is a huge stake, right? So you want very strong bones with a few people who give you a lot of help. So, you know, you can't ask somebody who you barely know to take your kid and breastfeed your kid, right? So this is small network, tight bones.

Men's on the contrary. Most likely, you know, they didn't have this problem. They were engaged more in kind of occasional collective work, occasional warfare, occasional hunting, which is in big groups. And in this case, the defection of one person is bad, but not as dramatic. You know, if this woman drops your kid on the ground, that's terrible. If this guy doesn't show for the hunt, it's a bad guy,

but, you know, you're not going to die for that. And so I think that's why we have these kind of men friendships are much lower maintenance, right, than a female friendship. But I think it's natural, it's kind of a reflection of the kind of different social problems we had to solve once this had to solve. Well, I think the way that men, the way that men and women compete, you know, overt versus covert, the, I think the blast radius as well of male success versus female success, people would assume, I think, that guys are more. more competitive in a way because the status games are more overt. You can see how this works. But I use this example of Leonel Messi.

So if you are the reserve gold goalkeeper on the team that Leonel Messi plays for, you might think, well, I mean, I am so far in the shadow of the, I'm not even the guy that is in the goal. while the other guy that's the superstar is at the other end scoring in the opposition's goal. But the sort of blast radius of goodwill of you being attached to Leonel Messi is so great in the same way as he is a hunting party of eight me, you and six of our friends that go, and you're the one that's really fast and Robert's the one that's really strong, and another one's the one that's really great at creating a spear.

And I'm like, I'm the second best carrier or something. And I'm like, well, I'm not exactly the top guy, but the fact that I'm associated with this coalition of men kind of raises me up in the standing overall. The blast radius seems to be wide. I'm not convinced that the same thing is true for women. I'm not convinced that a single successful woman who is in your coalition has the same kind of,

of blast radius. So, look, yeah, I don't know, okay, I don't know work about that, but if you think at a kind of anecdotal level, it seems to me, and I think there's research on that, but I don't know any specific, but you know that

you see that in movies, that you have these girls, the groups of the cute girls hanged together. You know, they are like, and so you would wonder if it was, you know, if there was too much competition from being close to the top girl,

why would you want to be together? You'd want to be separate. I think I'm not sure. Actually, I'm not sure. Okay, so that's why ambiguity and innuendo is useful because plausible deniability? In particular, plausible deniability, a thing that Pinker says is when you negotiate the relationships.

You know, like for instance, when you're dating, you negotiate the relationship, from friendship to more than friendship. And so you want to keep your options open in case it doesn't work out. When you are with a policeman, you negotiate a relationship whether you're in the law

or outside of the law, right? So you want to keep your options about it. So when you negotiate relationships in particular, you want to keep plausible deniability. There is a, you know, one thing in Stephen Pinker's book, I love, is he referenced the movie Harry when Harry met Sally.

So for your young listeners, it's an old movie from the, And Harry basically, he met Sally and he sees a friend of his current girlfriend and he hits on her. I think he says, you're very attracted. And she calls him out. She says, how could you hit on me while you're my friend? And he said, oh, I didn't hit on you. He says, oh, well, maybe I did.

And so what? You know, I take it back. And she said, you can't take it back. It's out there. And it sounds there because now the difference is that if it's not ambiguous, once he had knowledge that he has done it, when he admits that he has done it. Then it's in the open. He can't anymore pretend he has not done it

because now everybody knows. She knows that he did it. He knows that she knows, she knows, et cetera. So, you know, this is common knowledge. And so you want typically to avoid this. This is risky common knowledge. You know, an open overture is risky. So being ambiguous helps prevent this kind of thing.

Okay. So could we look at ambiguity as sort of a... a communication style, a type of deception that we've sort of normalized? I'm not sure if it's a kind of deception. It's kind of, you know, it's one of this rich aspect of communication. That is, I can say something. You know, I talked before about recursive mind rating. You can think of recursive mind rating as we have different levels of beliefs.

So one in the beliefs is, you know, you might believe, I might believe that you, you something, then you might believe that I have this belief. So, for instance, like, maybe, let's say, we are talking about where to go in holiday, and I want to go in Brazil. And so that's a fact. You might think, oh, Lionel wants to go in Brazil, so you have a belief on me. And then I can say, oh, Chris believe that I want to go to Brazil. I have a belief on your belief, right?

And you can climb this chain of beliefs, right? And it gets obviously very easily complicated. And then now, what you can do is when you say ambiguous thing, is that you can say something which are going to change your first sort of beliefs but keeps ambiguity at the higher levels. So if I'm passive-aggressive, for instance, I'm allergic to think that I'm annoyed at you, but you're not sure that I know, that you know, etc.,

so we keep the ambiguity on the top. But I can still manage to let you know I'm not happy, but then now do you know that I know that you know that I'm not happy? Maybe not. You see? And so when you tell me, are you unhappy? I can say, no, I can't. No, you thought there was an answer.

happy? No, I was not unhappy. What's poltering? I'd never heard of that term before. Yeah, poltering is another interesting concept. There was a paper published a few years ago on this. It's,

you know, one aspect of this rich aspect of communication. Because we work with this communication works with us trying to be always relevant. You can actually manipulate that to say something and use the fact that people are going to interpret it. So you can say something you expect he's going to interpret it in your favor, but actually

you're introducing people in error. So I give you an example, which I wrote in the post. Suppose Jen and Jack are, you know, a couple, and Jay says, I'm going to do a cake for your birthday. And then the last minute, she doesn't have enough time. So she go at the bakery and she brings a cake. And Jack says, oh, what a great cake. And, and Jack says, oh, what a great cake. she said, oh, thank you. Well, what is she said when she says, thank you, she must know that Jack, because of his information, assumed she did it. So when she says, thank you, she just implied that she did the cake, okay? But, so this is paltering, saying thank you for what a great cake is not a lie, right? But partnering is saying something true. Thank you,

as you know, she's, she's not lying saying thank you, but which is inducing the other person in mistake, in error, right? Now she's leading, Jake to believe that she did the cake by saying thank you. So paltering is this. You can actually deceive people by saying the truth. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Function. Did you know that your annual physical only screens for around 20 biomarkers, which leaves a ton of gaps when it comes to understanding your health, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage

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That's interesting. Yeah, I, it's so funny, man, when you think about the complexity and how it's not the first order thing, it's not the second order thing, it's five levels down, it kind of becomes easier to work out why chess is actually a simpler game than just having a conversation and fully understanding what it is that a human means. Yeah, exactly. This is exactly that. Because, you know, a computer, you're playing chess in a kind of much larger,

much complex, much more complex, like strategic space. You have to, a computer would have to form a belief about, you know, the world, form a belief about your beliefs. And now having a model of you running the same stuff. So he needs to have a model, and then a model of you running the same model. Yes, yes, yes, yes. But then should be another one. Yes, yeah.

Well, that's why I clunkily tried to explain about my consciousness theory of mind thing that in order for me to be able to understand what you're thinking, we both need to have a theory of mind because if we were just automaton, we would be predicting each other, which I don't think allows enough with the level of complexity that we've got, like motivation, reason, conflict, cooperation, all of these things start to fit in. and you know exactly and you know in a way the way the computer programming solve the problem is kind of cheating this thing of what is LLM what are the large language models now just large language models

have been trained on human production so in a way the computers really never started solving cracking the code of communication from scratch they just modeled it yeah they just imitate so they're like all the humans talking and basically you can think about when you ask a question to chat GPT

He's trying to find the best answer using all the corpus of human discussion and matching, it's not exactly what it's doing, but you could think of it as trying to find the kind of interaction, the kind of answer that human have produced in this kind of setup. So it's more like an imitator. It's doing more than that, actually. But really, it's using the corpus of human as a primary source to do what it does. So it's not like the chess computers.

You know, the chess computers, they put the rule of chess. And they put some algorithms to estimate the values of position in the future. And then they use brute force to be able to compute like 10, 20 positions ahead. That's not what the LLM does. It doesn't start from scratch. It shows the human language or ability to communicate to try to imitate it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, which is not the same, right? It's the equivalent of a P-Zombie type scenario. It is. And you can see, once you understand, what communication is, as I said, you can see where LLM still fail. For instance, one thing that you have with chat GPT is it is very psychophantic.

It's always telling you you're great. Yes, yes, yes. And also, it never says, oh, that's a good question. I'm not sure. I don't know. Dude, one time out of 10, nine times out of 10, it usually is sycophantic but accurate.

And one time out of 10, it is completely confident and absolutely wrong. Exactly, exactly. So if you ask me a question, because I'm trying to be relevant, I don't want to give you a wrong answer. So I will try to assess the quality of my information relative to the information you already have. I'm already going to tell you something if I think, I know something that you don't that is useful to you. If I don't, I say, well, I'm not sure I know, you know, I have anything to say on this. But the chat GPT is not designed for that.

It's designed to predict the kind of answer word afterwards. that would be in a conversation. And so it doesn't have this mind-reading ability. He doesn't go and say, oh, Chris, you ask this question. Actually, you shouldn't ask this question. That's the wrong question. The real question you want, because I know what you want. You have this problem.

You have this question. You should have this other question. This is the answer. That's what you mean do. But charge if you can do that. In what other ways, you mentioned seduction earlier on, would you like to come upstairs for a drink? what other ways is seduction a communication gain?

Well, you know, it's a, it's seduction is really, you have, I was talking about like the negotiation of the relationship, like the relationship stages, friend or not friend. It's all about that, right? So you have, I mean, nowadays actually it's interesting because things have changed a bit with the online data, you remove a lot of ambiguity about the status of what you're doing.

In the past, when you meet in a bar, when you meet with friends, initially, your friends, and then there's a kind of step by step you break the ambiguity step by step. So you say something which is a bit nicer or a bit warmer than you would move anybody else and you see how the other person reacts

and the other person either doesn't react and so maybe you don't go further or maybe the other person react and then you can continue. And that's the way the ambiguity is progressively by his small steps which are safer, progressively reduced until the point where there's not much ambiguity remaining that you can break it. So that's the old style.

And I guess this is still happening. But the thing is that with modern dating, because you have online dating, you start from the kind of more openly explicit point of view that we are here to consider whether we are a possible match, which... for my generation must be a bit, a bit strange, but yeah, that's the way it works. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess this shows just how important coalitions and social connection is to humans. It's fundamental.

It is fundamental. You know, for now, for several levels. I mean, at a deep level, if you look at the past, I mean, our ancestors were not living, it was not like total anarchy, but it was not. super peaceful. There's a lot of evidence of, there's a lot of people dying from violent deaf

and usually, even within a community, the violent deaths comes at the head of other people from the community. Like basically, you imagine, you know, you piece off half the tribe, one day you don't wake up. They come during the night and they deal with you.

So, and that happens a lot. Which means that when you think about it, then internal politics is key when you want to be with a strong group of friends, you don't, your reputation matters. You don't want to feel that you are the outside, et cetera. And

all psychology is really tuned to do that. That is to track where are the groups, in which group I am, what is my standing in the group, you know, are people happy with me, etc. And when we fail, when we kind of you know, fold on in reputation and when

people are people up and stuff at us, etc. This can be very anxiety-inducing because we are really social spaces. And so you know, if, why do getting, you know, when our friends, if our friends are not happy with us, that really can really upset us because that's really, we feel, oh, I'm losing, I'm not in this group anymore.

And you have social experiments. Very simple social experiments when you have, like, somebody, there are people throwing the bulls, and they throw the ball at you and you throw the ball at all that. It's on computer. So two people throw the ball at each other, and sometimes they saw the ball at you and you saw the ball back at them. And what they do is that after,

So, well, they get the two other people to stop throwing the ball at you. You know, it's a mean experiment. And what they found out is that this very simple experiment, like kind of induced anxiety in the respondent, because it's a game. It's like, why they're not sending the ball to me? You can exclude this very simple game. So the feeling of exclusion and the monitoring,

but where we stand in which group is something which is, yeah, very deep in our psychology. Yeah, so I guess the thing that's interesting, or that I can't work out is why it is that people feel in tension socially, that why it is that there's a friction between autonomy and connection. So if it's just that coalitions are really important, social connection is lifeblood to humans, but we also want this degree of independence. I suppose that goes back to what you said.

We're not quite ants, but we're not quite Robbins. And we're in this sort of messy middle zone. and even us do you want to be how many times have you somebody asked your partner do you want to talk or do you want to be on your own I don't know it's like they actually don't know it's I kind of want to talk but I kind of need to sort this out on my own do you need a hand I want to have autonomy I want to have independence but I also want to be able to rely on people I want to be able to open up there's a friction between autonomy and connection which is difficult to navigate yeah it's a good point

I've not talked about, you know, this before you ask a question, but I guess the way I feel it is that when you ask for autonomy is kind of a more superficial level, that I want autonomy now, I want, you know, sometimes something now. But the belonging to the group is kind of for good, right? So I want to feel that I belong, that I'm safely in a group, that tomorrow if I come back, there will be the group. Now, if tomorrow, yeah, today, maybe, you know, I want to be a bit on my own and because, as you say, we're not ants, so I don't want to, you know, always my life should be always shaped by everything from the group. But I think there is this kind of,

the primary thing is that I want to feel confident that I'm part of the group. And if this is getting threatened, or if I worry that it's threatened, I'm going to be stressed about it. Okay. Well, what does coalition psychology tell us about our anxiety to belong then?

We need, we can't bear to be left out if we feel like the group is pulling away from us how does coelational psychology sort of tie in with that need to belong? Well, I think it explains why we have this need to be. So I said, you know, I gave you the kind of extreme version about why we need coalition not to be picked up and not to be at risk in ancient times.

But really, coalitions are useful for plenty of things. In the case, for instance, mothers, you know, being with a tired group of other mothers, it helps provide support and insurance. If you're in a big group, you can do things that you could not do, like, for us, like moving house, you move so fast, et cetera.

You can do it on your own. So coalitions are useful for plenty of things. And I think our coalition of psychology is that we always care about being in a group. We cares about your thing. We care about being in a group and or standing in the group. Our standing is how all the people,

people see us in the group. And you know, when you unpack a group, there's always an internal hierarchy. So it's not like it's like a fractal. If you think of a fractal, you know, it's a kind of Russian dolls. You know, you open a Russian doll, there's an old Russian doll. Okay.

So coalition is like that. So you have a group of friends and from the outside, it's, oh, these are the group of friends. Okay, but you go inside. And actually, in the group of friends, there's kind of an inner circle and outer circle. One thing you can see very quickly, very nicely, very nicely, interestingly, I think, is the game show Survivor.

So you watch a game show Survivor. Officially, it's a game show on surviving in the jungle. But actually, most of it is not. Most of it is a coalition game because you have a group and they tell you, at the end of the day, you'll have to eliminate one of you, okay? And so all it kind of run on the anxiety of being excluded massively.

So, you know, they are in a group, and they know that at the end of the day, one of them is going to be out. And what's very interesting in the show is that right where you see that there's an inner hierarchy, people say, oh, I'm safe, I'm in the top tree. There's the top tree in the group?

How do you know what's the top tree, right? And so there's a top tree, and there's the loose two, and there's the bottom two, for instance, right? And so the bottom two, they say, they know that they are on the chopping block. So, you know, we have this psychology. We quickly go in a group and we feel,

oh, in this single group, there's this guy, they're a tight bone, they are respected by others. they're unmovable, you know, they're part of the group. But me, I'm kind of, I'm in between. I'm not sure. Maybe they could live their life with me, right? And so if you're like that, you're stressed, et cetera.

So this is the way we, or psychology is shaped. We really care about these things. And that drives a lot of what we do. Well, surely you can't have a flimsy coalition. One of the things that you need is commitment. So what are the ways that, what are the ways that coalitions test loyalty? So, I mean, you're dead right. When, you know, a key challenge for coalitions is the, you need loyalty.

You need the commitment that people are going to work for the coalition. You know, if you're on a football team, you need the confidence that everybody's going to put, you know, to work their best to try to win the match. If you're in an army platoon, you need your confidence that, you know, people will have your back when you run toward the front line, etc. So what you have is that here we have a problem in GEN theory, it's a problem of that you have two potential situations.

One situation where people trust each other and all go and work for the group. So the football team gives us 100%. And the army platoon all run in the same direction at the same time. And you have the other situations where if I don't trust that you and others will do that, why would I do that?

So maybe I don't. I don't run and you don't believe you don't trust that people will run. so we are ineffective. So it's also a possibility. And to move us from the situation where an ineffective group to the situation we run as a unit, we need the confidence, each other,

the shared confidence that we believe that we think we're a unit and we work as a unit. And how do you get that? You get that with social identity. So the groups work like they have this kind of bone, this feeling that we are a team, and I know we're a team, I know you know we're a team.

we share the team's logo, we share the team hats, you know, the team t-shirt, we share the team song before the match, you know, et cetera. And that explains a lot, again, about the human psychology. We think things which are described as irrational. Like you go to the football supporters, spend a lot of money on the signs for their football team, they sing during the match. Sometimes they sing during the match. I don't even watch the match.

And you think that's a bit surprising. But that's because of psychology gives a lot of weight on caring about signs of loyalty, displaying signs of loyalty, because being seen as a good group member, being trusted as a good group member, you want to signal, you want to tell everybody, hey, you know, guy, I'm a part of your team, and, you know, I'm clearly, I'm not going to defect any time. So this explains a lot of what we do. We always want to show and we're worried about signs that people could think, oh, maybe they all think I'm disloyal, you know, I'm not going to, et cetera. So we care about that a lot.

Yeah, I had it in my head this idea around, especially during sort of 2020, when the purest beliefs you needed to adopt your entire ideology wholesale, that what people were doing with some of the more extreme political beliefs that people were being asked to raise a hand in support of was that it was less about we think that this particular new policy is something which is really effective and more this is a test of fealty it's like are you prepared to put reason to the side and actually in that way the more ridiculous the political belief the stronger the show of your loyalty to the group because you've had to suspend even more of your reason and your rationality in order to know does that does that make sense no that total makes

sense actually it more than makes sense there are people writing on this you can think that beliefs or beliefs is what's in your head so it's you know whether beliefs I believe yes but at least size of claims that you hold the beliefs of the group they are important to signal loyalty and I think you're totally right that you know within the group there's a competition to there's also kind of competition to look good within the group. So one thing that you could have

in particular in political group, and you can see that, you know, it's not just on the left, on the left, on the right, you see it in different ways, is that if I want to claim, which is a bit more extreme, which is a border of, you know, I may tread of a bit of credibility, that is I say something which is extreme

or maybe the factual evidence is not super strong. But I show to my group that I care so much about, you know, the message of my group that I'm willing to say something which is that instead of if on the contrary I'm like oh you know I'm not sure on one hand on the other hand people think like

Lionel is not reliable one of the group has some doubts yes yeah well so you have the consequence of the fact that this can give kind of a premium to exaggerations right at the margin because there's this kind of competition for people to I am even more committed

I look at how committed I am I hope oh you only hold that version of the belief. Allow me to show you how much reality I'll suspend in service of this thing. But this is why I, you know, when you combine the need for coalition building with public displays of something that looks like loyalty and you put it online on the internet and then you sprinkle algorithms in, this kind of explains almost all of political polarization as far as I can see. As soon as you see most of the political polarization as being one of two things. First is algorithms online can get you to click on stuff in one of two ways.

The first way is to become better at predicting what you will click on. And the second is nudging your preferences to make you more predictable and more easy to work out. So algorithms work in two ways. It's not just becoming better at reverse engineering what Lionel wants. It's making Lionel more predictable so that my alga works better. So this naturally pushes people out to the edges because if you're in the middle, you go left on one thing, you go right on the next thing, you go right on the one after that and left on the one after that. It's like, no, if you just push people out to the edges, that's more predictable. So that's the first thing. But the second thing is, as soon as you realize that if you don't adhere to your coalition's beliefs on this thing, you pay probably more

than two costs, but you pay two very high costs. The first one is you are seen by your own side as an unreliable ally. Well, you know, Lionel was with us on immigration, but he wasn't with us on gun rights. So what do we think is going to happen when the school reform comes in or the taxation change or what's going to happen with socialised health care? I need to keep an eye on him. We're going to ostracize him a little bit. He's not going to be part of the inner sanctum. So that's the first cost that you pay on that. But on the other side, the opposition sees you as having flawed thinking, as not being committed to the cause, as not being actually that much of a steadfast. They can see the gaps in your coalition and they can see that you

were a weak part of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. So I think what you have is that in every, in any kind of political situation, political system, you have different competing incentives. One, you have the loyalty coational incentives, which drive polarization, which is, I care about

being seen in my groups. And then you have the repuditional credibility incentive which are present in communication games, right? So these are the stuff where if I tell you something, if I'm not diligent in the information that provide to you, if I'm putting forward claims,

that you find out are false, et cetera. I'm going to lose credibility. Now, the question is, what do people care more about? In the good situation, in the public sphere, people care more about the credibility. So, you know, yes, you have loyalties to your coalition, but nonetheless, you don't want to say trackpot's theories, you know, because you worry that, you know,

you're going to lose your credibility. I think the problem, when it gets very polarized, is that then you, you know, the coalitional instances re-Trump everything. So now saying something which is false but is in favor of your coalition, then you don't have much cost anymore.

And something I think that has happened over the recent years and maybe it's in part because of social media, but I think it's more than that, is that the kind of mainstream institutions which were kind of held in check speech and for, you know, the credibility of what he said, if you think about the mainstream media

or the scientists, universities, et cetera, they have lost their trust from the people and their ability to enforce this kind of credibility cost. And so the consequence is the political, now in the political party in the US, in the political arena, it doesn't cost much to say something which is wrong if you said if you were within your coalition

because there's no sanction. So if something is wrong, it doesn't work, you drop it and you can say something else. else and you can move on. So this sounds a lot like politics, right? I'm aware that we're talking about coalitions, but even the process of politics, not just the coalitions of the groups of people,

the sports teams, the religious groups, whatever. Is it better do you think to understand democracy as a coalition game than a truth-seeking exercise? Yeah, totally. So I wrote about it. And I think it's key to understand what democracy is. So I'm not sure, you know, maybe people have different views of democracy. But when I, you know, heard or looked at democracy initially when I was younger,

you know, you hear a lot about the ideal of democracy, Greece. The Greeks, they had the agora, which is this public space. People meet and discuss and make collective decisions. And in a way, this is often used as an idea. and you judge the modern democracy relative to it. So, for instance, we think, oh, that was direct democracy. So the real democracy is direct democracy. You have an assembly, and they decide together.

Now we have what we have in modern democracy, we have representative democracy. So you vote for people, and in the parliament or in the presidencies, they decide, right? So often this is seen as a kind of compromise, which is an imperfect compromise. because the real ideal democratic stuff is the agorah. And then what we think that people do in this public sphere,

the agorah, is that they try to find the right solution for the city, the right solution for the society. But I think that that is mistaken because, you know, once you understand that what we have is that with imperfectly aligned incentives, there are in groups, groups who have gathered these people who have similar incentives and similar interests and with opposite interests what the key of politics

is not finding the truth for most often it's finding ways to finding compromise between the different coalitions how you split the gains from cooperation so we cooperate in society we create wealth

because there's no crime because there is no war because there's laws and you know companies work etc. How do you split the gains from huge taxation and very limited inequality for us to

a very limited taxation and large inequalities how do you and you know it's not just that it's like should we say that some professions

deserve more because it's harder for instance you know you have all these questions you can think of and that's a debate of politics

and what you do is what you have is that coalitions like it's something which is in politics but it's also in everyday life

when you negotiate about bargaining bargaining is present in all always, you know, interactions, even in a household, for instance. You don't usually bargain in a right row and uncouth way. You don't say, I want more.

You know, you don't go to your bus and say, I want to raise, I want 20%. And why? Because that's what I want. No, you don't say it. I really feel like I'm contributing a lot to this project. I've worked very hard. I think that the team has been carried forward by me.

The future growth of the business really depends. on me and a... Yeah, so what you do is that you're using principles typical of fairness. You say, well, that's fair because of my contribution. I deserve more, right?

I've been here for a long time. You know, I've experienced. All that makes it. I deserve more. And so what we use, we engage with what the game theories can be more calls a game of morals. So there's a game of life.

But instead of fighting and bargaining, like if we're haggling on a street market every day, we haggle on principles in the game of morals. And these principles, you can think of it as kind of general ways to solve all the kind of particular bargaining problems who face in our everyday life. So instead of bargaining in every situation,

like let's say in your household, instead of every night, is haggling on who is going to do the dishwashing. You bargain on general principles and these principles and solves all the individual situations. So that's why our discussions are about fairness, agreements, about principles, and that actually solve the problem. So what you see in politics is that coalitions, like political parties, et cetera, they put forward ideological platforms. And these ideological platforms, they're actually this kind of proposals to change the principles of fairness, which are at the moment the compromise in society.

So they're haggling in the game of morals who change the social contract which holds all the agreed principles of fairness we use in society to tilt how you bargain and who gets what's in in practical situations. That's what politics is.

So it's interesting because once you understand that, you understand that the political arguments there are not a purely idealist. So it's not that people are ideally just ideas which comes from nowhere because they tend to reflect the interests of the coalitions. But sometimes these ideas, these principles, they have to be kind of consistent, they have

to be rigorous, they can't be incoherent, otherwise they can't work and make a case. And they couldn't be self-serving either because it would make, it would be flagrant about what it is that people are doing. Yeah, so if there were two selves, you know, if everything that you do when you put forward principles is just to be self-serving, then people will know that there's no point listening to what you say. Because, you know, there's no information in your principle. The principle, in a way, it's like, you know, another example is like, let's say you start

playing a game, you want to agree on rules, okay? If when you propose to a rule for the game, I know that you always propose the rules which advantage you, I'm going to stop listening to you. So we need to propose a rules, which can be an agreement where we think, okay, we're not sure, you know, tomorrow the rules might be against you. And I know that you're going to abide by the rules. So that's, yeah, you lose credibility if you always just find the principle today, which advantage you and contradicts what you were saying yesterday.

What is a political ideology through this lens then? Because with that perspective, it doesn't exactly feel like democracy is a system where people deliberate to find the common good. What is political ideology? Yeah, so I don't, I mean, when you say people, they don't debate to find the common good. I think it's true. And I think that the idea of common good itself, and maybe it sounds a bit depressing, but it's misguided. There is no common good because we're individuals, we have some converging interest, but not totally identical interests. And so there is not one single common good. Let's say that even if you tell me, let's say we agree that climate change is important and we need to build windmills. Okay, do we put them in front of your house or in front of my house? So, yes, there are good solutions. Some solutions are better than others, but there are always aspects of bargaining.

And so the key is to find an agreement which is going to be sustainable. You know, we find something which is not always always lead people to try to renegotiate, people to complain, et cetera. So we need to find, we need to find, what I say, we need to. What works is finding agreement that people are willing to, live with right that's that's what it is so ideologies is you can think that there are bids from coalitions to say okay you know what i want that's what i want uh and if the coalition is very tiny and we've a bit they can be very extreme because they're you know you have a few people they can

have they can be very different from the rest of the population if you have big coalitions like big parties trying to win elections typically they are mild mild mild different because you know there are too many people for this to be very extreme. But an ideology is a bid to change the social contract in your favor. So if you are maybe on the left, you say, we want more taxation, we want to reduce inequalities, we want these people who work hard in working classes, so high wages. If you're on the right, maybe you say, well, we want less taxes, we want to give more incentives to entrepreneurs to be more successful, et cetera.

And these are nice ideas, but they tend to be aligned more with the interest of those who, you know, voting these bodies and those who vote in these bodies. And you try to move to tilt us, compromise social contract at the moment in one direction or the other. If democracy doesn't seek truth, why is it that people defend it so passionately then? Right. That's an excellent question. I think it is wrong to think that democracy is great because people seek truth. And by the way, you know, we took by the social media.

One big disappointment with social media was that when you go to the internet, people were thinking that some people were thinking it would be a big democracy, a big public sphere, a big agorah,

every city is all going to be talking with each other. We can in a way cut the middleman of the mainstream media, of the politicians, for people to be enlightened and decide collectively about what to do.

And then what you see that people watch cat videos and, you know, the algorithms with them not great content, and they're not interested in politics and people are polarized. So it didn't go at all in the direction people were hoping for. So if democracy is not to find the truth, what it is? Why is it great?

I think democracy is great because for the people, most people, it's the best system to ensure that their interest is represented. What you can think of is any political system is characterized by the size of the body of people who select the leader. And there's a book by political scientists and game theories. We call that the Selectorate. Selectorate is the people selecting the leader. So, for instance, in the USSR, during the Soviet regime,

it was a Politburo. So you have a group of 12, 25 people. If you want to be the next leader, you need the majority in this group. So, okay, that's one version. Another version is when you have a lot of people. And democracy is a selectorite, basically, most of the population, population voting. So it's a large amount of people. What you have is that the coalitional games are going to take place in the select rate.

So the coalition of games in the Politburo, if you know, the history is very cutthroat because most people died. So basically you're elected leader or you die. The second guy, the one who's not elected, has often as a limited lifespan because he's kind of a threat. That's a real mortal game there, yeah. Exactly. And so the guys eliminated often. So the coalition of games are within this thing. In an democracy, the coalitional games are within the large body of citizens who vote.

But what it means is that the leader, the aspiring leader, how many people that this leader has to please? Well, in the Soviet Union, the leader has to please like, you know, 15 people to be elected. In a democracy, the leader has to please 51% of the population. And because coalitions are very flexible and can change a lot, if you want to please 51% of the population, you might need to be able to personally talk to more than 51% of the population, the other contender as well. And so what you have is that everybody's interest tend to be respected

and taken care of because the politicians who... compete to be elected, they care about you because you're part of this electorate. Well, if you are in the USSR, you know, most people are not in the selectorate, but only a tiny portion of people are. And so if you don't matter for the leader, you know, if you're not happy, too bad for you. So I think that's what democracy is good, because very large proportion of people who decide who is elected, very flexible coalitions. So everybody has a chance to be at some point in the majority.

And that means that you matter and the politicians has an interest. even if he's not philanthropist or even if he's not a pure altrucy, he has an interest to care about what you think in order to get your support. What? The thing that sort of ties everything that we've spoken about together today, I guess, is the invisibility of it to us. The fact that there is a thing happening and our awareness of what's actually happening, they sometimes touch up against each other.

I mean, I remember the first time that I learned about self-deception. And the funniest thing in the world, you're saying, yes, some people are self-deceptive. It's like, dude, you're so self-deceptive, but you're deceiving yourself into believing that only some people are self-deceptive. That's right, yeah. Is there anything else to explain,

other than the deception thing, is there anything else to explain why we're not aware that we're playing these games? Okay, I think that's a fascinating question. You know, we have been talking and saying all these games, what we do, and they are very complex, and we're really good at it, okay? But at the same time, there's a very surprising thing

is that we're often not aware that we're playing these games. I think you have several answers. One answer is that you don't need to know. In a way, nature, evolution, doesn't need to give you the rule book for you to be effective. You know, we are very good at, thrown stones, for instance, and we don't need to know the Newton mechanics behind

it, right? Okay, so we anticipate the trajectory of a, you know, if you catch a baseball a ball of baseball is not you, you're able to, you know, anticipate its movement and catch it, and though, you know, you do that before having done any physics in high school, by telling you the

laws of physics, etc. So in a way, nature doesn't need to give you the rule book for you to be effective. It can just give you the ways of solving the problem. I think that's first answer. So we can be very good because we have the heuristics and the rules to work out in these gaps, even if we don't need the

full understanding about what's exactly it happening. But I think there's also another aspect of it is that often it's even better if we don't know. And it's another strategic aspect. Is that, you know, you have the saying, for instance, sometimes you call people you say, oh, this person is a player. Or you say, this person is very strategic.

And this is actually not a compliment. When you say this person is very strategic or this person is a player, you mean, you know, this person is computing. He's trying to find the best ways of doing, of acting without caring for principles, for instance. Do you want a friend with a strategic or do you want a friend with just loyal and, you know, trustworthy? Maybe somebody who is very strategic is not totally trustworthy because maybe if the calculations do not add up tomorrow is not going to be on the receiving end. You're going to be an enemy and not a collaborator.

Yeah. You know, maybe today is a friend because he finds its advantages, but what about tomorrow? So you don't want somebody who calculate every day whether it's advantage to be a friend with you or not. And so, you know, once this is a deep problem of trust. How can we trust each other, given that we always have options to defect from cooperation? There's always plenty of opportunities

to take some short-term advantage by not being fully cooperative. I could lie a bit, I could not do the right thing, you will not know, et cetera. So how can people trust each other? And one solution is to commit, to be committed to a course of action. So one solution is more than to be committed,

is to be committed credibly and to be able to signal this commitment. I think love is a good example. If you have two, a man and a woman, if each of them were every day being in the relationship but open to checking whether other partners could be better, that would be hell, right? So imagine you're in a relationship.

And then every day, if another guy, if she finds another guy better in the street, she drops you. The problem of this kind of situation is that, you know, that would make it very risky to invest a lot of effort in the partnership. So to invest, you need to trust. that this stuff is going to last long.

But to trust that this stuff is going to last long, you want the other person to be not looking at other options. But looking at other options seems to be rational, seems to be strategic. So how do you prevent that? Well, the solution that's likely given by nature is this strong emotion that we have, which bind us to others,

and which are visible and give visible signs to others that they can trust. So in a partnership between a man and woman, It's going to be love. So people will feel strong emotions of love. And when people are in love, they will purposefully not look at other options. And also, this emotion gives cues signals,

which are, you know, you can see when somebody is besotted with another person, and that's credible. And so you, if you want, that's what you want. You want to be with somebody who is in love with you because you're confident that this person is going to be willing to stay with you for a long time.

in a group of friends that would not be love, that would be friendship, but there's the same kind of stuff. You want some people who are loyal and were with you because they're friends,

not because there's just the short-term advantage. Now, we're still playing these games, but in a way, in nature, the way for us to be playing these games well, maybe to care about

not playing the games in the short term. There is a there is a theory in evolutionary psychology which is more than theory and I think it's a lot of validity that you know you can think of the mind as made of several modules solving problems

that's a general theory from evolutionist psychology but one of the application of the theory is that you know your mind can be in a way could be divided in part of your mind which kind of treat information and part of your mind will make the decision and the trigger of these emotions

when you feel in love, when you feel friendship, etc. could be strategically triggered by one part of the mind and your self-conscious person really really feel these emotions, really is committed, and that makes you better as a player.

It's a bit abstract, but one way I think you can think about it is in the movie, I think in the second, movie of The Matrix, there is the Oracle. And the Oracle talks to Neo and maybe

it's in the first one, I'm not sure. I think the Oracle took to Neo and after a while she has asked, what did you tell him? And she said, I told him what he needed to know. What it means? It means she didn't tell him the truth. She told him what he needed

to know to be effective. And you could think that part of your brain do exactly the same thing. You, you know, from all the information you get, your self-aware person in your mind, only get the information you need to know to be effective. And that means that, yes, our mind, you know, part of our mind is strategic and knows when to trigger the emotions, etc. But it doesn't tell us we don't have an interest to be strategic when we act. We have an interest to be committed and to believe that we're not playing the game. Okay. Humans are better of playing games.

when they don't know that they're games? Yes, because if you don't believe, if you don't think as a player, if you don't think that's strategically in the moment, then you can be a more attractive partner in social cooperation. Yeah. Wow. Do you think we'd be better off if we just realized that life is all games? Look, I'm not sure. I'm not sure we're better of.

I think in a way, you know, sometimes living the dream is better. Maybe it's like in the matrix, you know, I'm pulling you out of the of the matrix. The reality outside is horrible. This is evolutionary theory overall to me. Evolutionary theory, learning anything about evolutionary theory is just a sequence of becoming more and more aware of how little control I have over my desires, how little I author my own thoughts and actions that the thing that I used to take pride in, I shouldn't take pride in because actually it's some thinly veiled status. It's very humbling. My point

is it's very humbling. We did this last time I was talking to you about imposter syndrome. And again, I really appreciate the fact that you sort of lay out on your substack. You just lay out the way that these dynamics work. And I think that it's very good for sort of peering under the hood. But if you were to, when it comes to the way that you operate in your own life, knowing what you know about the fact communication is a game, coalitions are a game, politics are a game, self-deception is self-serving, are there any ways that you have used this information in a practical manner or is it just is it simply something interesting or have you actually adapted your behavior in any way given what you know about this stuff uh i'd like to tell you

that it's um super helpful uh in practice uh i mean you know that's the way i see the world so i can't i can't help it so uh but um the fact that in a way the fact i like the fact that you understand the world as it is, instead of the kind of narratives and stories we tell ourselves or society tell ourselves. But at the same time, the game of the games, you know, knowing, it's like, look, it's like we play football. We play football. If, and if I come and I say, well, you know, I have a PhD in football techniques. So I know really why football works away. It doesn't, it doesn't change that if I want to play football, that's, you know, my PhD in football techniques, it's not necessarily super

useful to score a goal. You know, it might, at the margin, helps me understand that I should shoot that, well, that or the other. But the game is a game, and often, as I said, you don't necessarily need the rulebook to be effective. We are very effective already at playing these games very well. So understanding these games

is mostly useful, I think, intellectually. Also, it's useful often to avoid mistakes and to appreciate my own kind of ISIS, etc. But it doesn't still mean that, you know, the games are the games. It doesn't change. Well, I guess we're at the mercy of this stuff. At least for me, it helps me to have more empathy and a bit more peace around other people. I'm, I wish I could extend that to myself, actually. It's kind of like, I don't know, like some sort of inverse stoicism. where you're able to see other people and say,

ah, you know, like as soon as you learn fundamental attribution error, and you go, the guy that cut me off in traffic, he was probably just late. He's probably not an asshole. And even if he is an asshole,

he's an asshole that's late. So that's fine. Yet, if you are constructed in a way where you're always trying to push yourself to do more, turning that degree of gameplay, self-deception, coalition, dynamic,

intrasexual competition venting, and going, I should give myself a break. I should be easier on myself. That's the final boss of social anxiety, not being kind to other people, being kind to you. Yeah, I agree. And the way I think, understanding all that, in particular self-deception,

often you're like, okay, I want to make that case, but is that case really kind of, you know, the best one or the most accurate one or is it just self-serving. So you know, you become a bit more like critical and aware of the kind of biases that you have. It doesn't make you better at winning the game though. Because self-deception is useful. So if you curb your self-deception, it might actually not make you better at converting others. But yeah, I do appreciate that sometimes, you know, it helps me take a step back.

Good. Needle Paj, ladies and gentlemen, dude, everyone needs to go and subscribe, optimally irrational on Substack. What else? Is there anywhere else that people should go? No, that's it. Oh, well, if they are really interested,

that's here. You got my book, Optimally Irrational, where, you know, I talk about psychology and why the good reasons we behave the way we do, why there's a lot of strange things we do in our lives. There are lots of good reasons behind it. So it's in the book as well. Until next time, hurry up and get writing so we can talk some more.

Thank you, Chris. We're going forward to it. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention, just trying to get through a single page, go to Chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's Chriswillex.com slash books.