Thanks for writing this, Dan, and thanks for using the word “Pinsofian.” My thesis in A Big Misunderstanding has some boundaries and exceptions, as nearly every thesis does, and you’ve done a great job of articulating them here. We’re probably more aligned in our thinking than not, but there are nevertheless a few parts of your post I’d push back on:

1) Mismatch is increasingly being recognized by evolutionary psychologists to be overrated as an explanatory approach—I’ve talked about it with a few guests on Evolutionary Psychology (the Podcast), in particular with Daniel Nettle and Josh Tybur, and my sense is that the idea is losing steam in the field. The story about humans gorging on junk food is too simple: it has been complicated by research by Daniel Nettle and colleagues (and a moment’s reflection will make you realize that we obviously have mechanisms for curbing overconsumption of food and craving nutrients that we lack). The story on obesity may have to do with adaptively storing energy in the form of fat when we receive cues of future food insecurity, as Nettle has argued (and he has some data on this), but plenty of questions remain. The story about ancestral, small-scale, egalitarian groups has also been challenged by Manvir Singh, who has argued that ancestral hunter gatherer groups were considerably more variable in structure than is commonly assumed, with some societies being very large and very unequal. Perhaps the main purpose of our big brains is to figure out how to achieve our adaptive goals in novel contexts, so even if conditions are novel right now, our brains will very often be up to the task of figuring things out. In any case, even if mismatches were a big issue, it is unclear whether intellectuals would be much better at getting over them than the masses. After all, intellectuals have their own highbrow versions of junk food and misinformation.

2) The point about humans being overly zero-sum in the modern world is a good example of mismatch being overapplied, in my opinion. Yes, we can create wealth together, but we can also form groups to hijack the state apparatus to direct resources or privileges toward our groups, and people correctly see that. Also, status is zero-sum, and money is a status symbol, so it is arguably not a misunderstanding for people to view money as zero-sum. Moreover, the state has interwoven itself so much with capitalist wealth production that we should no longer view capitalism and politics as separate entities (Randall Holcombe has argued this in his book Political Capitalism). Our zero-sum mentality is exactly what we should expect in the zero-sum political system we currently inhabit, where Republicans and Democrats cannot win at the same time, and where the winner gets to coercively enforce its will on the loser. It would be better if our political system were not so high-stakes and zero-sum, but given that it is, we should not be surprised that the masses are rationally responding to it. Creating paranoid myths about conspiring outgroups is not stupid in this context: it is a good strategy for mobilizing one’s group and gaining power (not to mention signaling various things to others). Just look at how well the ignorant, conspiratorial mindset worked out for Trump and his cronies. And the left has surely gained many political victories by exploiting conspiratorial mindsets historically. I agree that political elites can sometimes push these narratives on the gullible masses for their own benefit, but it’s important to remember that the masses often benefit from these narratives too: political coalitions can rise to power as a group, with both leaders and followers sharing in the victory.

3) I too feel optimistic about the positive trends in health, wealth, and safety that have occurred throughout history, as documented by Pinker and others. But I don’t think we should attribute these trends to any kind of conscious, overarching motivation for enlightenment that we can redouble by giving more power and status to intellectuals. These trends must be explained in mechanistic terms, with exogenous (rather than endogenous) causes, like any other phenomenon in economics or social science. Ironically, viewing these positive trends as the product of conscious intent is the very same error of overattributed intentionality you accuse the masses of falling prey to. So I don’t think the world became better because intellectuals got together and decided to help us all out of the goodness of their hearts. The world became better in the same way the world changes in any way at all: by people rationally responding to their incentives. In this case, I think the relevant incentives have more to do with global markets than with the good intentions of intellectuals. You seem to agree on the importance of markets for explaining positive trends, citing the insights of Adam Smith and others, but then write that “for this progress to be possible, societies require a critical mass of people to appreciate these insights.” I actually disagree here: societies can get richer without anyone knowing or caring about Adam Smith. People do things that put cash in their pockets. No abstract theories from intellectuals are required for this to occur. Smith’s insights only emerged after the wealth-creating properties of markets were well underway, so he (or any other thinker) cannot take credit for producing them. I think the same is true of many other positive trends that intellectuals like to take credit for.

4) I agree with the point about people sometimes making catastrophic mistakes based on errors and misjudgments. But it is important to remember that we are talking about the design of human nature—not the wisdom or folly of specific humans. Predators often fail to catch their prey, and prey often fail to evade their predators, but this doesn’t mean that predators or prey aren’t well-designed for chasing or evading each other. Deadly failures at the individual level and impeccable design at the species level are not mutually exclusive. Political revolutions often devour their children, but plenty of animals devour their children for adaptive reasons. The devouring does not necessarily make those animals, or their devoured children, irrational.

5) We can argue over the semantics of what it means to have a “genuine” motivation to fix the world. Regardless of semantics, we seem to agree on this much: whenever people claim to be trying to fix the world, it is mostly because of deeper motives for esteem, prestige, admiration, etc. The important point here is that if we want to understand this world fixing business, we have to delve deeper into the prestige economy that gives rise to it. And once we delve deeper into that prestige economy, we will discover some grounds for pessimism. Because what gets a person prestige can often be disconnected from what actually fixes the world. Oftentimes people can damage the world and get lots of prestige for it. The key point here is that it is the appearance of world fixing to a prestige-granting audience, and not objective world fixing in reality, that intellectuals are pursuing. And insofar as the prestige-granting audience has a hard time knowing what actually fixes the world, or is (rationally) politically biased in their assessments of what fixes the world, then intellectuals’ prestige striving will often be uncorrelated with objective improvements in the world. Intellectuals’ prestige striving may even in some cases be negatively correlated with improvements in the world. That is the broader point I was trying to make in my post, and that is why I am more pessimistic about the world-improving power of explicit world-improving motivations. The lack of depth to these motivations is precisely what should make us skeptical that they will always lead to good outcomes, or that they are the main causes of everything good in the world.

Thanks again for your post and for the shoutout. Hopefully this was some good food for thought for you and your readers. Looking forward to reading more from you, as always.