There is something powerful about environment and what it does to our minds. For the author, giving up the monitor is totally valid and may work for many people. I can often convince myself to chance a habit by adding a simple extra physical step. This is harder on a computer. It takes discipline to not just end up with dozens of windows and even more browser tabs in some roles. I just aggressively close windows when starting a new task or thinking. Most likely you don't need whatever you are closing :)
Forcing short responses will hurt reasoning and chain of thought. There are some potential benefits but forcing response length and when it answers things ironically increases odds of hallucinations if it prioritizes getting the answer out. If it needed more tokens to reason with and validate the response further. It is generally trained to use multiple lines to reason with. It uses english as its sole thinking and reasoning system.
Trivers mapped the evolutionary algorithms, but modern network neuroscience maps the actual hardware running those algorithms right now. When Trivers talks about "self-deception for social advantage," he's describing a highly weighted survival prior that was genetically selected for over millennia. But he doesn't have the real-time mechanics. Today, Friston’s predictive processing and the tri-network model show us exactly how that prior executes in the tissue: the Default Mode Network simply ignores contradictory sensory data from the insula because updating its rigid self-model costs too much metabolic energy. Humans are not running elaborate plots, our brain is just minimizing free energy and avoiding prediction errors in the present moment.
Trivers work is not useful for explaining psychological suffering or real time behavior in a local family environment. We know a lot more than we did in the past. He basically could not separate out what our DMN is and used an elaborate narrative that fit at some macro level but falls apart when looked at closely. He gets the cost right. But we can now say with confidence the mind is not divided in the way he proposes. The narrative creates this division in the reader’s mind, but it is not real. Illusion.
Pinker is really falling for the narrative and ideas here and spends a lot of words in a topic that modern neuroscience pretty easily explains. To push back at Pinker’s conclusion: A rigid self identity with priors that are not updated also explains Triver’s many conflicts and social outcomes. The dude (Trivers) ended up being a creep FWIW.
>... Humans are not running elaborate plots, our brain is just minimizing free energy and avoiding prediction errors in the present moment.
It is crucial to recognize that this is still one interpretation under a theory constrained by a certain framework, and not an absolutely solved and settled mechanism as indicated by the choice of words.
The Epstein “academics” were all running an h-index pumping citation ring — to sell narratives that would be lucrative for various industries and interests. Chomsky, Ito, Trivers, Pinker… they will all be forgotten, and the world will be better for it.
I used to like some of Pinker’s ideas, but yeah. This whole article is just unprincipled garbage in 2026. Neuroscience caught up. Advocating Trivers’ now is nonsense. Interestingly many thinkers of that same era (e.g Krishnamurti, Bohm) were staring right at the modern neuroscience lens and explaining it pretty accurately in the same era Triver’s wrote his essays.
Yes? Right now it is relatively expensive to search video. As embedding tech like this advances and makes it even cheaper it just increases the ability to search and analyze every movement. “Locate speech patterns that indicate dissident activity using the dissident activity skill”
Probably a similar problem to AI. Using AI for the sake of AI in an engineering workflow probably wastes time right now. Using technology in the classroom for the sake of using technology is probably similar. Is it really creating access, opportunity, saving time. All that? I am skeptical. I have had similar experiences with my children over time. There was a layer of technology that made sense for education. Probably peaked when I was in school in the 90s.
My daughter got a 0/20 for a test that she sat and did. Now she's not a complete idiot so this was suspicious. I asked about it and they said that it was likely that she didn't get any questions right. I asked for them to provide me with a copy of the exam paper so I could independently verify that.
Magically she got a 17/20 grade updated but no paper appeared. I pushed it further and was told it was resolved. I raised a formal complaint immediately and they did a full investigation. The conclusion was there was a defect in the system used for tracking progress and it was losing information imported from the exam system. They had to manually enter over 200 student papers again due to this.
No one had noticed or actioned it or saw it was a serious issue until I raised a formal complaint.
When technology is in the loop it's very difficult for anyone to take personal accountability as demonstrated.
My partner is currently in an online college program for computer science. The platform and way they have structured it feels like actual computing hell. There is so much friction compared to what I know a more seamless learning experience online should be like.
It is very interesting when you explore the neurological mechanics of this. A narcissist is rigid thinking dialed up to 11. It is essential a special and pathological “skill” their brains have learned. They do not have to update their priors or spend metabolic energy on almost anything their life. Their brain figured out the best way to survive and conserve energy was to avoid costly updates to their beliefs. Repeated over years and that system becomes deeply myelinated, a core identity. Unwinding that is a feat.
Some people just have a more narrow set of rigid beliefs (e.g. religion, work skills, etc).
Agreed on your neuro take. It would seem that the rigidness is somewhat reinforced by the pervasive mechanism of digital feedback. As we now can see clips of stupid behavior being propagated online as easily as opening our eyes and tap a screen, the rigid behavior of an overt narcissist is now on display as a model for lesser equipped minds to absorb. The narcissist acquires a visually recognizable position of power through their actions, and this makes them highly desirable by those lacking control in their own life. The audience is global... And where the terrain is fertile.. the said audience also votes for their model.
Social media is a toxic stew of identity based narrative reinforcement. Custom tailored to your specific, and I mean really specific, narratives. Does your identity revolve around religion A, hobby B and C, political views D? The algorithm will feed you exact pro-narrative pro-identity content. Did you react to the rage bait style things that we tried out on you? Awesome, now you are getting even more toxic nonsense streamed to your brain. It is genuinely scary. It just creates and strongly reinforces it. It is like we created a way to chunk memetic hazard into a series of small unidentifiable pieces. The net result? No one would be like "If you open this door you become an extremist and will have really rigid identity beliefs" who would open that. But clicking thumbs up or like on a "funny" political meme? Sure why not.
so .. i guess.. if technology is meant to trigger our impulses then the world is slowly going towards the direction dictated by the impulses that form the largest cluster, pulling the whole environment in their direction. Just like a carriage with many horses that cannot be controlled if a group of horses decide to pull right and go into the ditch. So we will have to endure the fall of everything just for the impulsive unevolved people to learn their lesson. Kind of a grim view... but seems like it right now.
I don't think it is generally hopeless like that. I think some people will funnel in that direction. We are humans. Our consciousness is the original hacker. It took over the hippocampus and used a mostly spatial 3D storage system for our RAM, which is kind of funny when you think about it. We haven't evolved nearly as fast as this technology and many people will point to that and say we have bypassed evolution in the sense that our brains are not equipped to defend against something like social media. And it is true, the layer of indirection is not something our consciousness works well with. But I think it cuts both ways. Deep down, the human mind is still a machine primed to keep you alive from getting eaten by a tiger. It loves not having to spend energy and there is very good evidence of how all that works (Friston's free energy principle, our memory as bayesian priors, our consciousness as a machine using those priors to run something like thousands of monte carlo simulations to figure out what priors match the simulation the best). But it is a messy machine. It is often wrong and will choose higher energy paths. And, I think... something in most of us is just hard wired for certain kinds of "authentic" experiences. I don't know, I have a little window of optimism about where this all ends and that although we are weak to social media, social media is weak to some fundamental aspects of our machinery that map towards authenticity (this is a very vague argument, but I could point to a lot of evidence around this and how we react to nature and other things that can't exist in social media that do exist in the physical world). For example, why do small children often love rocks? No real reason. They are just interesting particularly because of their non-utility in industrialized society. They are novel. The brain has no real category or survival use for it. But there is a kid with a pocket full of rocks after a day at the park.
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