Elephantinthebrain.com Website Review

The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life Kevin Simler & Robin Hanson Now available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats. powerful, unified explanation of human nature and behavior to date.” — Jason Brennan, Professor of Business, Georgetown University “This book will make you see the world in a whole new light.” Human beings are primates, and primates are political an*mals. Our brains are therefore designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better. And thus we don’t like to talk — or even think — about the extent of our selfishness. This is “the elephant in the brain,” an introspective blind spot that makes it hard to think clearly about ourselves and the explanations for our behavior. The aim of this book is to confront our hidden motives directly — to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights. Then, once our minds are more clearly visible, we can work to better understand human nature: Why do people laugh? Why are artists se*y? Why do we brag about travel? Why do we prefer to speak rather than listen? Beyond our personal lives, unconscious motives also lurk within large-scale social institutions such as art, charity, education, covert agendas alongside their “official” ones. The existence of big hidden motives can upend the usual political debates and cast fatal doubt on many polite fictions. You won’t see yourself — or the world — the same after confronting the elephant in the brain. KEVIN SIMLER is a writer and software engineer currently living in San Francisco, CA. You can read more of Kevin's work at his blog, ROBIN HANSON is an as*ociate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research as*ociate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a PhD in social science from Caltech, master's in physics and philosophy from U. Chicago, and