How Our Nature Obscures Modern Perception

An Excerpt from ‘The Case for Bitcoin’ book by Andrew Barisser

Trusting math goes against the grain of our natural instincts. Evolution has shaped us to greatly value personal interactions over highly formalized, abstract constructs. It is still true today; the vast majority of our interactions revolve around social dynamics of one kind or another. Humans are incredibly fine-tuned to recognize emotions in others. Our historic evolutionary fitness hinged quite a lot on being able to read other people. So it is no wonder that our mindset is, and has always been, about measuring trust in people and the organizations they build.

Humans are, in fact, social geniuses. We’re masters at the tasks that mattered over evolutionary time: language, reading other people, etc. It’s just natural to us. Just ask someone who works in speech recognition or AI how difficult it is to reverse engineer what we do effortlessly. Stupid people solve problems intuitively that the smartest people in the world cannot solve explicitly.

But while humans are socially brilliant, we’re terrible at alien abstractions like math. We weren’t meant to do it. There was never an evolutionary need for it. We only accomplish math, and many similarly abstruse pursuits, because we’ve cobbled together parts of the brain built for other purposes and jury-rigged them for another. I can only speculate, but it is likely that we use a vastly convoluted set of neural pathways, meant for entirely different things, to ‘emulate’ formalisms like math. It’s like when you run a Playstation on your desktop computer with an emulator. The desktop is much more powerful than the original Playstation. But because the Playstation was built for a different architecture, it wasn’t meant to be run on a desktop. The desktop can only emulate the Playstation by mimicking what the Playstation would do. But this process, a computer simulating the actions of another computer abstractly, is incredibly inefficient. It’s like if I wanted to add 2+3, but to do so I had to translate the words into Chinese, add them in Chinese, and then translate 5 back into English. I suspect that, those areas that we all struggle with, the notoriously hard subjects like physics, math, computer science, etc., are those systems for which we have no instinctive go-to pathway. So we muddle through with makeshift, Rube-Goldberg-like neural architectures.

If evolution has ill-prepared us for many of the most valuable skillsets today, it has also provided a weak intuition for parsing the consequences of new technology. Our instincts, though hallowed over time, don’t necessarily coincide with external reality, particularly as technology takes us further from what is evolutionarily familiar. We see this conflict in many fields in which gut feelings are deeply at odds with what is known, technically and scientifically, to be true. Fact and primordial hunch are often deeply unreconciled.

Our evolutionary starting point is an arbitrary bias for what we ought to value. While we are comfortable, through long experience and natural preference, to being impressed by the trustworthiness of people and institutions built by people, trusting math feels alien. Our evolutionary biases do not intelligently inform us when confronting categorically novel concepts. These biases suffer from a 50,000 year lag; the modern era moves far too fast for us to count too much on our intuitions. What feels right in our gut just might not be pertinent in an age of mathematical certainty.

Our gut is wrong about many things. Our gut tells us that relativity and quantum mechanics are ludicrous. Every intuition we possess screams against modern theories: molecular thermodynamics, the scale of the universe, the uncertainty principle, non-Euclidean spacetime, they all instinctively feel implausible. Absolutely no one sane professes to believe these things instinctively in their bones. And yet we have proven scientifically that they are quite real. Our feeble minds were built for a very limited set of circumstances, in which knowing the true nature of things was not necessary. It’s like HAL-9000 knowing nothing about circuits. He is composed of them, they make up reality, but conceivably he was not built to grasp that. We humans are the same. And even while scientific evidence exists in huge amounts, most people live with an aversion to the implications of these non-intuitive theories. We walk around pretending that relativity, and quantum mechanics, and mind-bogglingly complex biochemistry are not occurring every millisecond. Such thoughts are too much for us. We have an innate bias against concepts that do not resonate with common experience and our evolutionary past. This leads us to be chronically misinformed about the nature of reality.

As Richard Feynman put it, “The ‘paradox’ is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ‘ought to be’”. And yet such things are foisted upon us by necessity.

The same basic human failing carries over to math, cryptography, and computers. We should force ourselves to overcome our natural aversion to math, to think around our own inadequacies, to fully comprehend the consequences of technologies that have already arrived. In this book I argue that, with modern cryptography, and then with Bitcoin, we have entered a new paradigm in which the old assumptions no longer hold. Our instincts may not be right. They were shaped in Africa more than 50,000 years ago; we are hardly equipped to parse the quantitative, abstract world of technology in which we now live.

This tendency manifests itself greatly in the public’s perception of Bitcoin. There is a widespread distrust of Bitcoin, surpassing that of other, equally new technologies. It is Bitcoin’s greatest strength, its decentralized nature, which also inspires the greatest public worry. Our bias towards trusting people and institutions severely handicaps our appreciation of decentralized trust. Trust based on mathematics, with no central authority, is totally at odds with our experience. Our natural inclination is to ask ‘Who?’ when we should be asking ‘How?’ Those who, have asked ‘How?’ with Bitcoin have discovered a treasure trove of innovation and raw cryptographic power. The majority, who persist in wanting to know who is in charge, have found no one.

‘How?’ is the question Bitcoin is best equipped to answer. Everything is open-source and publicly available at no cost. At any time you may inspect how Bitcoin works in every detail. The only limit is your own technical ability. Many of the smartest people in the world have delved into these details. Bitcoin has been stress tested by clever hackers many times; none have succeeded in breaking it. Bitcoin excels technically. But it requires a lot of skill and perseverance to recognize this.

Bitcoin is the first institution ever built with no human masters. No person is at the helm. There is no individual with the power to change the network. Only the community as a whole, acting in consensus, has the power to change anything. The lack of central human authority is disconcerting to our sensibilities. We want someone to look to. We want a face to associate with the idea. But Bitcoin refuses us this. Bitcoin exists outside of us.

Bitcoin, having no human master, is intensely alien. It is human instinct to become suspicious at such a foreign concept. This is almost universally the common first reaction. I felt it when I first learned of Bitcoin. It felt wrong. It seemed at first as if such a thing could not possible be real. Only by painstakingly learning about the sophistication under the hood were my doubts quelled.

The inhumanity of the Blockchain suggests that it can have no legitimacy. Why should we relegate arbitration to an algorithmic judge, and not a human heart? Facts with no fact checkers, authority without authorities, the Blockchain is a dizzying departure from normalcy. It feels wrong to set a system off on its own course with no human administration, like a sailing ship with no crew. There is no precedent for this: a thing made by people, but no longer controlled by them.

But our feelings are misplaced. A system governed by open rules will work better than one in which humans’ slippery fingers control the levers. It is a very hard step to acknowledge one’s own inadequacies, let alone one’s species’. But our history proves that humans cannot abide too long by their promises. The temptation to cheat, to bend, to obfuscate, is too strong over long time periods. Humans are too fickle to be trusted. We’re too shaped by our recent evolutionary past to have pure intentions. The old metrics, of trusting men with long beards, and institutions with marble facades, and the reverence of certificates, and the pronouncements of experts, are simply too weak. All the dressing up of respectability cannot cover the ultimate blemish, namely, that humans are not to be trusted.

So we’ve made do, up to now, with elaborate systems of credentials, titles, and ways of assigning authority. Within the space of a few years, they may work alright. And for lack of a better alternative, we’ve even started to believe in that facade of trust. Institutions impress us. Experts overawe us. We pretend that institutions’ promises will endure, or that today’s expert consensus won’t be ridiculed by tomorrow’s changing fashions. But yesterday’s heresy is today’s orthodoxy. We would be foolish to think that the status quo must remain, or that any human guarantee could be immune from such upheavals. No human institution is truly constant.

But now there exists a competing paradigm. While most facts must still be perceived through the flawed human lens, others may be registered directly. Cryptography is the finest example of a truth untouched by human hands. A cryptographic signature means so much more than any man’s word. An encrypted text will withstand any siege. Mathematics is foolproof in a way human promises can never be.

Let us embrace that. Let us change the definition of trust and respectability, from an individual’s eminence to a key’s complexity, or a protocol’s security. Make what must be human decentralized, bound by a common, trustless protocol, so that as many human hands must touch the levers as possible. A new way of achieving consensus has arisen. It leans on mathematics, and crowds, and openness. It has no face. We should not let that frighten us. We should stifle the part of us that wants to be reassured by venerable old men. That’s the old way talking. Instead let’s dig deeper, into truths that, perhaps we have not evolved for, but can nevertheless grasp.

If you enjoyed this, check out the full book: The Case for Bitcoin.