Humans suffer two big but under-discussed biases, which together make us overly favor people we see as prestigious and sincere. First, humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution, wherein we copy each others’ behaviors, and this wouldn’t work if we copied from random others. So it couldn’t get going without our first big clue on who to copy: prestige. Which has become so entrenched that we greatly over-emphasize prestige even when better alternatives are now available.Second, selection to win in forager talky collectives induced humans to think that they are great at reading others’ motives, to think that motives matter more than they actually are in complex modern worlds, and to feel overconfident in knowing which are in fact the better motives. These induce us today to like idiot story plots, to be overly paternalist, to overly trust salespeople and prestigious professionals.This is my best explanation of why we today don’t use more betting market estimates and incentive contracts…
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