Two Monkeys Were Paid Unequally: Excerpt from Frans de Waal's TED Talk

There's proof and proof. No one has managed to prove other humans experience emotions, or even exist. Given a hypothetical model of a continually manipulated memory and consciousness you could even argue that you can't prove that you yourself have emotions (you might merely have the mistaken belief that you experience them). To take a more pragmatic approach to proof (good enough but not absolute) Humans and some animals experience emotions. At the very least most Mammals. Probably not all animals. A trickier proposition would be whether all vertebrates do, that's a different level of debate entirely. If you can't take things like the Monkey fairness tests as a sign of emotions [VIDEO] then you have a standard of proof that a lot of humans wouldn't meet.

Wouldn't be happy, I think you mean in your last sentence. You're almost certainly right. Resentment is built into our DNA: [VIDEO] Of course, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be better people than shitty, jealous little monkeys.

Happiness is relative. Humans (and animals) value "fairness" even if they are objectively better off. There is a famous experiment where two monkeys are given a cucumber every day. They are both happy. Then one of them starts getting grapes (sweeter than cucumber). The monkey that doesn't get the grapes rejects the cucumber in protest. [VIDEO]

This is not unique to humans. Check out: [VIDEO] It takes a lot of effort to learn not to resent accomplishments of people you’re “competing” with even if they’re friends and you’re not directly competing with them. It’s a learned behavior to feel good for them instead. There’s probably a selected reason for this, but it’s possible to overcome it (or at least be aware of its affect). It’s better to frame life success on something else - like what you want to learn or the type of person you want to be.

A lot of people in the US right now are experiencing long-term financial strain. Those on the political right typically follow media streams which have convinced them that this is the result of regulations and taxes; those on the left follow media streams which have convinced them that it's the result of too much wealth being concentrated in the hands of too few people (and implicitly, that it's a result of policies from the political right). Corporations have the resources to navigate tax loopholes that allow them to avoid paying their fair share of social responsibility, and any number of free market worshippers will regularly appear to say, "but of course, they have a responsibility to their shareholders to do so." As a result of those two things together, corporate tax cuts are not popular on the left. If there were any evidence that high corporate tax rates were the root cause of financial strain for the average family in the US, or corporations weren't putting so much effort into dodging taxes, I suspect the left would care a lot less about whether they received tax cuts or not. As it is, the situation has turned into monkeys and cucumbers ( [VIDEO] -- skip to 1:23 if you're in a hurry), and the left keeps seeing gifts laid at the feet of corporations in the name of trickle-down economics while social programs keep struggling for funding and more people keep needing social programs.

Somewhat interesting: Bananas contain the ingredients necessary to produce dopamine. I can see how this all plays out as a way for some apes to get some bananas. Even social structures, fairness and other things (I love this video - two monkeys getting unequal pay [VIDEO] ) can be explained by a dopamine system that just likes to give us bananas and sex. And it's incentivized to conserve energy because this is better for survival (also called lazy) - interesting is that humans have some tendency to do stuff that don't necessarily is conserving energy. Maybe this is what makes us successful: Sometimes we invest excessive energy to try new things which happens to let us survive better through innovation (which leads to genetics that encode this behavior). I like it, although it isn't necessarily what I call my meaning of life (I'm a dualist, because materialism is too damn dry). I like bananas, though (and yes, the role of bananas may be exaggerated here). Thought long about it. From a materialistic standpoint there are only quantitative differences between a organism which has a sensor, some type of memory and an actuator and human beings, although they sure look different. Still following the same principles. When I further simplify, we are all just energy (and matter, which is just a form of it) following some first principles hallucinating our consciousnesses trying to evade the eventual entropy that we'll reach nevertheless because this is how the universe works. - - - Coo

Understanding power law distributions is a real eye opener. They're everywhere in nature. I don't know about how other people feel, but after learning about power law distributions and then seeing them everywhere I now just think "well, thats just how nature works." That and the normal distribution. I often meditate on people's obsession over fairness. The best I can come up with is that it is a hardball negotiating tactic to get more than you otherwise would through creating leverage by making others feeling uncomfortable and betting that they're not going to be able to tolerate the uncomfortable state. That comes from watching both Frans De Waal's Capuchin monkey experiment below and from observing my toddler. [VIDEO] Then you consider all of the power Laws in the universe. Almost nothing is fair. Unfairness seems to be the default. Consider the animal kingdom is full of homicidal behavior. Life is very rough. Yet we expect "everything should be fair and everyone should be nice." At some level that just isn't commensurate with reality. I also find there is an extreme intolerance, at least if feels that way to me, maybe it's just an extreme frustration, of inefficiencies in nature. An article pointing out that some talent is being underutilized and this is a travesty! Ok, I'm in agreement it would be nice if it could be maximized, I guess. But I think it's ludicrous to expect a system that has optimize for the whole to optimize for local cases too. Imagine you have to design

> you will realize that concepts like "fairness" or "caring" simply doesn't exist outside of human brains. Here's the well known capuchin fairness experiment. [VIDEO] [LINK]

> That sounds like a case against wealth inequality, since there’s no increase in happiness for the very rich. Not necessarily. Inequality seems to bring unhappiness independently of wealth. You may have more than others. But if you get way less for your work than others, most people will be unhappy. That is why millionaires want more when they see the billionaires. This video helps to illustrate my point: [VIDEO]

This is the video that explains the best how the "morality" is natural even in the capuchin monkeys: [VIDEO] So, no to those that claim that, humans aren't special, and no, the good sides of morality don't come from religion, especially not from the modern ones with a "jealous" god (killing homosexuals, or punishing women when not wearsing something, however, if that is considered "morality", indeed provably does come from religion). The whole talk: [LINK]

Competition for resources is only one human behavior. In nature, it is carefully balanced not to disrupt the stability of the well functioning community that all primates must have at all times to survive. Being social animals, another more critical instinct is the need to cooperate. Indeed, eliminating cooperation from a human group will extinguish it faster than eliminating competition (assuming it's even possible). And when people have a choice in the matter, pecking order is based on amount of support the higher up people provide to the group, not the leaders ability to serve himself: people do not knowingly and freely back someone who has no interest in backing them. Also instinctive is the sense of fairness[1] Of course those with an abundance of resources might want to convince others that this instinct is unnatural or somehow harmful. But it is clearly a well established instinct over a wide range of mammals and exists for a reason. And while the meaning of life varies greatly from person to person, I suspect that a life lived solely to maximize one's own resources will be as comfortable as it feels meaningless. I image evolution has made it that way. At least so people will have children but also to work fairly with others. Otherwise we would have wandered completely alone in the jungles and been eaten out of existence by Pliocene tigers. [1] [VIDEO]

HN comments remind me of how monkeys would rather have nothing than see another monkey get more than them. [VIDEO]

> First of all, there is no such thing as "morality". There is absolutely a solid sense of morality baked into (at the very least) primate brains. Give this a read. The science is solid: [LINK] Or this if you're impatient: [VIDEO] > Nothing belongs to nobody. People take whatever they can get away with. What kind of unhinged philosophy are you smoking? Objectivism? Marxism? Freebasing Solipsism?

> people don’t actually care about absolute inequality People care about fairness. Hell, even monkeys care about fairness: [VIDEO] Extreme income inequality is unfair. Jeff Bezos is not 1,000,000,000% "more worthy" of wealth than Richard Feynman—and everyone knows it. Very little about financial capitalism is fair.

Yeah, that's not how human psychology works. You didn't have managers earning $400,000K+ at the Wikimedia Foundation then. :) [VIDEO]

Oh god this hurts. The same sloppy arguing. Ok I was talking about literature. You just expanded it a whole lot, which diffuses the point I was making. I don't think this is a tactic, I just don't think you can focus. Nonethless, "It happens because our art and our philosophy [1] inspires our science and our engineering [2]" You conveniently assume [1] and [2] are divorced and each lies with two entirely divided castes. They are aspects of the same. "Law, government, peace, prosperity, human rights, ethics. These things all spring from the humanities" Oh lord. Law is from human nature. Desire for justice/fairness exists even in monkeys [VIDEO] Peace - this comes from humanities? Justify this. ethics - nothing to do with law apparently, see above. prosperity - nothing to do with science, right. I've had enough of this crap. You can't debate, you don't want to look for common understanding. It's a kind of arrogance.

This is how we're wired as a species, and frankly more than just a species. We don't just look at what we have and what we want, we look at what other people have and ask ourselves why they got it and we didn't. At a basic level it's an instinct that exists in lower primates, and in us as well. [VIDEO] The difference with us is that we can learn and understand the reasons why one person gets a "grape" and the other a "cucumber"... and those answers are often not just unsatisfying, but infuriating.

There's a nice video from a psychological experiment that illustrates it: [VIDEO] I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group. Otherwise complex societies would have never emerged, because assholes exploiting and taking advantage of peers would ruin and doom any group larger than a few individuals.

I think you're right, but historically there have been problems. Frans de Waal has written about how in his field there was a lot of early egregious anthropomorphizing. As people realized how flawed that was, they swung around the other way, to refusing to consider analogous human behavior. But things like de Waal's work demonstrating moral sense in animals is hard to explain in any other way. [1] Even so, it can be tricky. In Bernd Heinrich's excellent "Mind of the Raven" [2], he points to a story where a woman, lost in the wilderness, noticed a raven crying near her and spotted something like a mountain lion creeping up on her. In the news story she gave the raven credit for warning her and saving her life. But Heinrich points out that ravens have a demonstrated history of leading predators to prey, because that way they get the leftovers with much lower risk. So although the woman was correct that the raven understood her danger and was demonstrating advanced social cooperation, her anthropomorphic bias led her to perhaps be dangerously wrong about who the raven was trying to help. So although I think shorthand like, "The octopus is playing" is fine for casual use, I think serious people have to always be challenging those tempting assumptions. [1] e.g., this book [LINK] or this TED talk: [VIDEO] [2] A stellar book, and I recommend it strongly to anybody fascinated by corvids or interested in decoding animal behavior more generally: [LINK]

This experiment, listed in one table and in the references but not discussed elsewhere, would suggest otherwise: [VIDEO] There might be other confounding factors in that experiment, but for the life of me I can't imagine what they would be. My stats knowledge has evaporated over the years so I can't follow exactly what the study is doing to come to their conclusion, but it strains my credulity to suggest that the monkeys in that experiment aren't angry about perceived inequity. I'd be interested to know if anyone can do a TLDR of the study as to why they reached that conclusion in the face of what looks like pretty compelling evidence. Edit: Now I come to think about it, I suppose a counter-argument is that the angry monkey just knows that the experimenter has grapes and they're angry they're not getting them, rather than being angry that the other monkey is getting grapes while they're not. Feels like that argument makes sense given our tendency to anthropomorphise animals, particularly primates.