HN Books @HNBooksMonth

An awesome book that points out the hidden motives behind what people do: Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson sheds some light on this phenomenon.

It seems like one of the ways people try to show their love for others is by acting like "money is not an issue when your life is on the line" which results in a tremendous amount of spending per healthy day of life generated (poor QALY trade off).

https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

A great book to realize that the reasons people give for what they do are not the real reasons is Elephant in the Brain

https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

A great book to realize that the reasons you give for what you do are not the real reasons is Strangers to Ourselves

https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Ourselves-Discovering-Adapt...

⬐ BurningFrog

Yes, I learned much of this from Elephant In The Brain. Biggest shock to my belief systems this century.

May have to read Strangers to Ourselves as well.

Our brains are complex things, with many independent actors.

There are pragmatic parts that determine what actions would best serve your interest. These parts mostly make the decisions.

There are other "press secretary" parts that come up with good sounding motivations for these decisions. You will believe those reasons, and state them with conviction.

You may then be lying, if the press secretary lied to "you", but you don't consciously know that. Apparently evolution has favored that model, and here we are.

I learned this reading "The Elephant in the Brain" (https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...)

Yeah, this is just how the human brain works.

The big thing to understand is that we lie about these things to ourselves, so we can easier lie about them to others. Unconscious parts of your brain lies to the conscious part!!

I learned this here: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

I'll also agree that my height analogy is overly restrictive. People can and do change their minds, though it's rarely a rational process.

The book that gave me much of my cynicism on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

One realization that's helped me a lot:

Yes, people talking self serving nonsense are lying. But they're primarily lying to themselves!!!

Essential book: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

TED talk version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V84_F1QWdeU

⬐ joe_the_user

Yes, people talking self serving nonsense are lying. But they're primarily lying to themselves!

When we're talking this kind of phenomena, we certainly using language at a very high level of abstraction. But the "color" of how one expresses one's self matters even more. What "primary" means here is key, for example.

People talking self-serving nonsense often believe what they're saying, maybe more than someone taking a rational position ('cause rationality involves some self doubt).

The main question, in a sense is "are these people 'out to get us'?". On the one hand, one can give the defense, "they aren't consciously trying to put their interests ahead of yours and aren't trying to deceive you" but there's the other factor that this sort of strategy can be the very best strategy for people putting their interests ahead of you and /or deceiving you, which makes them your most effective enemies.

I mean, if you dig deep down, the terrible people "are victims too". Does that mean you shouldn't blame them? Well, the terrible people need to be defeated and punished appropriately, in a judgmental way, to prevent them from doing the stuff we don't like and to fill those who might consider it with fear (still non-judgmentally).

⬐ BurningFrog

> On the one hand, one can give the defense, "they aren't consciously trying to put their interests ahead of yours and aren't trying to deceive you"

Almost. There needs to be a "consciously" before each "trying".

Because they are trying to deceive you, but the conscious part of their (or, just as much, our) mind doesn't know it.

It helps to think of the brain as dozens of more or less independent units, most of which are unconscious.

The common metaphor is:

If you think of the brain as something like the White House, the conscious part ("me") assumes it is the President. In reality it is the Press Secretary, tasked with coming up with arguments for why what the real decision makers decided is a great idea.

I'm unlikely to write a book, but here are a few more tidbits that come to mind.

Re the above -- I don't mean to imply that any of this is malicious or even conscious on anyone's behalf. I suspect it is for a few people, but I bet most people could pass a lie detector test that they care about their OKRs and the OKRs of their reports. They really, really believe it. But they don't act it. Our brains are really good at fooling us! I used to think that corporate politics is a consequence of malevolent actors. That might be true to some degree, but mostly politics just arises. People overtly profess whatever they need to overtly profess, and then go on to covertly follow emergent incentives. Lots of misunderstandings happen that way -- if you confront them about a violation of an agreement (say, during performance reviews), they'll be genuinely surprised and will invent really good reasons for everything (other than the obvious one, of course). It's basically watching Elephant In The Brain[1] play out right in front of your eyes.

Every manager wants to grow their team so they can split it into multiple teams so they can say they ran a group.

When there is a lot of money involved, people self-select into your company who view their jobs as basically to extract as much money as possible. This is especially true at the higher rungs. VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too. You might think -- don't hire them. You can't! It doesn't matter how good the founders are, these people have spent their entire lifetimes perfecting their veneer. At that level they're the best in the world at it. Doesn't matter how good the founders are, they'll self select some of these people who will slip past their psychology. You might think -- fire them. Not so easy! They're good at embedding themselves into the org, they're good at slipping past the founders's radars, and they're high up so half their job is recruiting. They'll have dozens of cronies running around your company within a month or two.

From the founders's perspective the org is basically an overactive genie. It will do what you say, but not what you mean. Want to increase sales in two quarters? No problem, sales increased. Oh, and we also subtly destroyed our customers's trust. Once the steaks are high, founders basically have to treat their org as an adversarial agent. You might think -- but a good founder will notice! Doesn't matter how good you are -- you've selected world class politicians that are good at getting past your exact psychological makeup. Anthropic principle!

There's lots of stuff like this that you'd never think of in a million years, but is super-obvious once you've experienced it. And amazingly, in spite of all of this (or maybe because of it?) everything still works!

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

⬐ nodesocket

Thanks for the great insight, but I also have to admit it is incredibly disheartening and bleak. I truly think silicon valley is not a good place for the human psyche as a whole. Quite honestly it breeds negativity, envy, imposter syndrome, which all turn into depression.

It's cliche, but some of the happiest people are farmers, construction workers, or people who physically work on tangible things. Also, I feel people in the bay area compared to the south where I now live are perpetually unhappy and outraged. There is more to life than work. Simple and a slower life is not such a terrible thing.

⬐ rdco

>some of the happiest people are farmers

Farmers and soldiers have notoriously high suicide rates. One explanation is that it's caused by a lack of control. From that perspective, it's certainly frustrating to watch your company succumb to inefficiencies (e.g. politics), but as a white collar worker, it's much easier to solve than for farmers. White collar worker can move laterally to a new job or upward, but farmers are looking at selling the family farm (social/career implosion) or controling the weather (impossible).

>Simple and a slower life is not such a terrible thing.

Agreed.

⬐ JBlue42

For some reason, your post reminded me of this bookmark I go back to:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/05/09/daniel-pink-drive-r...

"In Drive, Pink goes on to illustrate why the traditional carrots-and-sticks paradigm of extrinsic reward and punishment doesn’t work, pointing instead to his trifecta of intrinsic motivators: Autonomy, or the desire to be self-directed; Mastery, or the itch to keep improving at something that’s important to us; and Purpose, the sense that what we do produces something transcendent or serves something meaningful beyond than ourselves."

⬐ sharmi

Wow, that is so depressing on so many levels but thanks for calling it out and educating us clueless ones.

⬐ coffeemug

It's more helpful to look at it as a social scientist. This is what can be empirically observed about the behavior of a large group of humans under these very specific conditions. It's not good or bad in the same sense that chemistry isn't good or bad. It just is, and can actually be quite fascinating if you look at it from that light!

It's also magical that given all this, everything still works! The products get shipped, the people get paid, the world benefits! Think of it this way -- human behavior is much weirded than one would naively expect, and we manage to self-organize to accomplish all this crazy stuff! Isn't that pretty cool?

⬐ ericd

I'd say that it's also a big part of the reason so much of what get shipped is incredibly mediocre, though, and why small teams of dedicated people that manage to ship generally seem to ship the highest quality products.

⬐ ido

I've first hand experienced teams of 4 people achieve higher output (both in quality and velocity) than teams of a dozen+.

⬐ pjc50

> professional money extractor

It's strange how SV geeks as a class will generally skew libertarian and wheel out lots of free market arguments, but haven't read Coase nor thought about how this applies within an organisation. Of course they're money extractors, that's what you've selected and that's what your culture prizes - you were just hoping they'd turn the money-extraction skill only against people outside the organisation. It's not even necessarily a bad thing, every successful startup needs a bit of this to get money from investors and make their first sales of a not-really-existing product.

⬐ mikekchar

I think this is very true, but it's worth pointing out to people. A lot of people don't think it through. You get technical people who are really passionate about their work. Additionally, they want to get rich. They think SV is the perfect marriage -- do amazing technical work and get rewarded with riches. The reality is that the money attracts a lot of people who are completely uninterested in anything but money. It's obvious if you think about it, but many people don't think about it.

⬐ itronitron

>> People overtly profess whatever they need to overtly profess, and then go on to covertly follow emergent incentives.

This is a universal truth, and it is probably the main reason why a company needs a well defined mission, vision, and core values. They provide a way for individuals' emergent incentives to align toward a common goal.

⬐ joshenders

nailed it

⬐ ido

    There's lots of stuff like this that you'd 
    never think of in a million years, but is 
    super-obvious once you've experienced it. 
    And amazingly, in spite of all of this (or 
    maybe because of it?) everything still works!

I think it's because like with many other issues, we are not really in such a resource-constrained environment as the free-market advocates will make you believe ("every company below peak efficiency will quickly and ruthlessly have their lunch eaten and go out of business").

According to the first link I could find (https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...) in 1945, 37% of American GDP (and almost 90% of government spending) was spent on the war. And yet basically everyone was still housed and fed with 1945 tech on only the remainder.

There's a lot of fat for these inefficiencies to feed on before (and if) they kill the organism. That's also why there are so many bullshit jobs around that the world would actually be a better place without.