Comment by IsaacL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IsaacL | Hacker News Reader

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Is this where you came across the concept of "insight porn"? http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/trying-to-see-...

There's an interesting possibility that our brain actually gives us a neurochemical "hit" every time we encounter a particularly juicy piece of insight porn. The reason for this is evolutionary: insights are basically the recognition of deep patterns that explain seemingly unrelated phenomena, which lets us "compress" our knowledge and so increase our understanding of the world. (It's not that our stone age ancestors were developing scientific theories, but they had many complex things in their environment to predict: the weather, animal behaviour, their own social networks, other hunter-gather tribes, etc).

The pleasure gained from studying mathematics, or listening to complicated pieces of music (esp classical, where complex pieces might be based on simple underlying patterns) are good examples. Humour might be a complementary reward circuit, giving us a psychological hit when we discover something that contradicts our worldview.

(I'm aware that the preceding paragraphs was themselves a piece of insight porn :)

Whenever someone says "There's a possibility X is evolutionary", nowadays, I mentally continue it with "The reason for this is rationalization".

As an aside, what's it called when you come up with an explanation of something to fit the facts the way you want them? Hindsight bias comes to mind, but it's not exactly that. More like a mixture of hindsight/confirmation bias and wishful thinking.

post-hoc rationalisation?

Sounds right, thank you.

It's not scientific, but criticism of this kind of rationalization often applies the term "just-so story", as does the Chabris review that started this discussion. It's borrowed from Kipling, who told fanciful but childishly plausible tales of "How the Camel Got His Hump", etc.

Indeed, I wish I"d gotten a degree in evo bio, as its proponents are able to predict nearly everything about human behavior.

After the fact, of course.

You know how it goes, "explain everything, predict nothing".

Or maybe you don't, because I just made that up, but it fits.

That is an established idea; if you can explain any possible outcome equally fluently, you can't explain anything. I find it a useful cognitive hack; if someone asks you whether X or Y will happen (and for the sake of argument let's discard "none of the above"), instead of asking that question of my brain directly, I try to pretend in sequence that both have already happened, and then explain why. If you can easily explain both, if neither gives you trouble, you don't really know, no matter how convincingly the rest of your brain may be telling you that you have an opinion.

I meant the phrase, not the idea. I agree with you, though. Especially when someone tells me "well, it was obvious that X would happen, because Y", I ask them "what if I was lying and the opposite of X happened? Was that equally obvious? If both are obvious, then neither is".

Yes, that was sloppy of me.

You have to be precise when talking about the effects of biological evolution on our brains. We know our brains were initially created entirely by biological evolution; what's not clear is how direct or indirect the influence of evolution has been on our psychology. That is, does evolution hardwire relatively complex behaviour (as it does in many animals) or does it merely specify high-level learning algorithms? This appears to be the case with humans - we don't have many instinctual behaviours compared with other animals, but we do have an instinctual ability to learn new things. It's interesting to speculate how this ability might have arisen; the ability to learn new things and to spot patterns must have been useful to our distant ancestors, as they're such fundamental traits of human cognition.

This is also why the "nature vs nurture"/"biology vs culture" debate is a false dichotomy: the foundation of human culture is our ability to learn, which is itself a genetic adaptation.

Evolutionary biologists are rightly slammed for having made many strong, wrong predictions. But I think it still has some value, if you just make weaker predictions. Instead of "a is necessary because of such and such living conditions", we think that "a might be more likely then b because of such and such living conditions". From certain assertions to potential hypotheses basically.

Well, there is clearly some things that have evolved the way they have, so I don't think anybody's claiming that there's no merit in evobio. It's applying it to everything that's the problem.

Please don't confuse "evolutionary biologists" with "evolutionary psychologists."

> what's it called when you come up with an explanation of something to fit the facts the way you want them?

That sounds like motivated reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

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