Melvin's digital garden

The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

Talk by Robin Hanson

Review on nintil

  • evolutionary explanations for our behaviours, we are largely selfish but generally unaware
  • our cognition is biased and imperfect, “weakly self-deceived” (eg. confirmation bias, self-serving bias, social desirability bias)
  • large scale social patterns as in education or healthcare can be explained in a substantial part by these biases