The Elephant in the Brain

On Art:

• The impracticality of Art – with the aim to advertise survival surplus (a fitness display).
• Artistic discernment – as an ability to distinguish good from bad that requires a lot of effort to calibrate judgments.
• Handicap principle – that live performance or unautomated work impresses much more due to a smaller margin for error.

Other aspects:

• Higher standards – virtue shouldn’t transcend our biology or it will become an impossible standard. Goals to strive for and as yardsticks to judge us and others.
• Information – can be sensitive in the sense it can threaten our self and social-image.
• Rationalization – made-up half-truths without any conscious intention to deceive.
• Hill-climbing analogy – a programmed pursuit of higher social status as a hill, that sometimes might be volcano-shaped. A step that feels “up” might knock you down.
• Conspicuous consumption – buying things for the sake of showing off, to flaunt wealth.
• Prussian school system – a compulsory state-sponsored system aimed at obedience and domestication.

On cooperation:

• Mixed-motive games – where two or more players interests overlap but also partially diverge. Overlap creates an incentive to cooperate, divergence makes them somewhat at odds with each other.
• About ego and the mask it lends to us, that once fitted – becomes a new face.
• Synchro-solidarity affect – if you get people acting in synchrony (even by performing silly synchronized moves) they are more likely to cooperate.
• Strategic ignorance – when accurate beliefs are hidden and lead to suboptimal decision-making.
• Cost-benefit structure of conversations – insights into opportunity cost of acquiring information and insight into speech as an act of showing off.
• Humor – as a way to set the mood dial to “play,” binds people and weakens norms.

Perfection as a mark of being cheap – in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.