Bayesian Investor Blog

Book review: The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin by Keith E. Stanovich.
This book asks us to notice the conflicts between the goals our genes created us to serve and the goals that we as individuals benefit from achieving. Its viewpoint is somewhat new and unique. Little of the substance of the book seemed new, but there were a number of places where the book provides better ways of communicating ideas than I had previously seen.
The title led me to hope that the book would present a very ambitious vision of how we might completely free ourselves from genes and Darwinian evolution, but his advice focuses on modest nearer term benefits we can get from knowledge produced by studying heuristics and biases. The advice consists mainly of elaborations on the ideas of being rational and using scientific methods instead of using gut reactions when those approaches give conflicting results.
He does a good job of describing the conflicts between first order desires (e.g. eating sugar) and higher order desires (e.g. the desire not to desire unhealthy amounts of sugar), and why there’s no easy rule to decide which of those desires deserves priority.
He isn’t entirely fair to groups of people that he disagrees with. I was particularly annoyed by his claim that “economics vehemently resists the notion that first-order desires are subject to critique”. What economics resists is the idea that person X is a better authority than person Y about what Y’s desires are or ought to be. Economics mostly avoids saying anything about whether a person should want to alter his desires, and I expect those issues to be dealt with better by other disciplines.
One of the better ideas in the book was to compare the effort put into testing peoples’ intelligence to the effort devoted to testing their rationality. He mentions many tests that would provide information about how well a person has overcome biases, and points out that such information might be valuable to schools deciding which students to admit and employers deciding whom to hire. I wish he had provided a good analysis of how well those tests would work if people trained to do well on them. I’d expect some wide variations – tests for overconfidence can be made to work fairly well, but I’m concerned that people would learn to pass tests such as the Wason test without changing their behavior under conditions when they’re not alert to these problems.