Authenticity heuristic

The evolving landscape of bullshit and the sincerity grifters

The reason we love authenticity more than we love its ethics is because sincerity is true signal. Everything else is noise. And in the game of survival, signal is more important than being good. That’s a simple explanation for why arseholes garner so much attention—they’re perceived to be epistemically informative even if they’re ultimately harmful. In short: They’re hijacking our authenticity heuristic.

Think about it: what’s more useful to you as an organism? A person who is super sweet but full of shit might make you feel nice but they can also get you killed. An arsehole might tick you off, but at least the stuff coming out of their mouth means something (ostensibly). By listening to someone “authentic”, you might learn something about the way the world is, even if it doesn’t feel nice to hear them out.

In a world cackling with uncertainty and wrinkled with confusion, we use the authenticity heuristic to choose who and what to pay attention to. That is, among competing options we will prefer to pay attention to information that is presented as if it were authentic.

“As if” here is important: It doesn’t have to actually be authentic. It just needs to appear that way. They display as if they’re just being their raw selves, representing who we all really are underneath all the charades. But anyone perceptive can see that it’s a refined act. Playing at sincerity has become their grift. Think Andrew Tate.

People can hijack our authenticity heuristic just the same as advertisers hijack our attention with misleading associations, bright colours, and slim, sexy, figures. The most recent politician to do this very consciously, as far as I can tell, is US presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (being “sincere” and telling “hard truths” has just about become his political slogan; not a dumb move).

That said, just because people know that authenticity captures attention and utilise it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad people. They’re just clued in to the shortcuts we’re all using to find useful information scents. But in many cases there are ominous intentions involved.

A rather pathetic example of this newly minted concept shows up in my YouTube ads: A fatherly-looking bloke out sailing with his mates just wants to quickly check in with me and tell me about his cool new AI trading algorithm. He films ‘selfy’ style and talks to me like an old friend; like he doesn’t need my money. He’s just out to help the world get rich for free :). He’s chill, warm, underdressed, and doesn’t seem at all riled up on a sales pitch. But never mind the fact that anyone who actually had a successful AI algorithm for trading would have no reason to sell one. Even now, it’s hard to believe that this bloke is literally trying to steal from me (can I still come sailing though?).

If you’ve followed my research you’ll know I’m really into this basic issue: How do we tell what’s true? Not only when we look outside, but also within ourselves; within the space of our own minds. How do we know when we’re being sincere, or when we’re acting? How do we know when our own ideas are things we actually believe to be true, or simply thoughts we perceive as somehow useful in getting us what we want?

If you’ve done some self-enquiry work, you’ll know that, well, all thoughts are basically bullshit. As soon as we’ve lost ourselves in an identity with thinking (as if we’re seeing through thoughts rather than seeing them); they’re using us and everyone around us. Thoughts co-opt the hierarchy of mind-and-body like a tyrannical dictator. Like those psycho jewel wasps that zombify cockroaches to do their bidding.

There is nothing true or wholesome about a thought believed; which is to say a thought miss-taken for something other than a thought. But it doesn’t make thoughts themselves bad - even too much H2O can kill us.

And so this game of picking up on what information to trust is truly a tumultuous one. Not to mention that the signals are often mixed; our mind might be nodding along while our body screams in protest; or vice versa. And just as we feel we have a handle on the right signals, the game evolves. The salesman changes his tactic; he no longer presents the pretty lady or hypes up the energy. Instead, he relaxes, lets his beard grow out, and talks to you like an old friend. Or he yells at you, calls you a P*$5%Y, and tells you everyone’s coddling you but he’s here telling you how it is. Yeah, alright mate.

Is there any way out of this mess at all? Well, getting off the internet is a good start. Physical humans tend to be easier to read; it’s hard to maintain an act consistently for long periods. But beyond that, I do think there are a few useful signals that are at least harder to manipulate. One is: Vulnerability. The other is: Courage. Both are in some sense one signal. They represent a gut level decision to move with what is right and true—given one’s best guess in the moment—despite the outcry of all material motivations. That’s why they’re hard to manipulate because the costs are too high. Vulnerability also undercuts overconfidence because:

No one honest says s/he knows for sure.

One (potentially costly) example is Sam Harris. Perhaps not the most vulnerable character, but you don’t need to agree with him to see that he sticks to what he actually believes despite massive potential costs. He’ll call out his mates Rogan, Lex, etc. I respect that; it’s courageous.

Again, real authenticity is more likely to carry epistemic signal, even if it turns out ultimately to be false. It’s always a probabilistic game and so even if I might think someone’s wrong about something, if I believe they’re genuine then I want their voice in the game. Ironically, if you chuck the words ‘Sam Harris’ and ‘authentic’ into the X/twitter algorithm, you only get hate. Nuff said.

Anyway, I don’t have this one all figured out (I have nothing figured out, sorry… No wait, yeah I do, buy my book! Subscribe! etc.). But it’s an interesting thing to notice and there’s at least a few easily testable empirical hypotheses here.

You just need a few simple conditions: Information presented as if it were (1) authentic, (2) inauthentic, and (3) a control. Hold everything else constant and see which condition gets the highest truth ratings regardless of the actual veracity of the content. You know where my money is. And damn right you’ll be citing a Substack article if you ever conduct that experiment.

But here’s one more spanner to escalate the collapse of our paper-glass house:

Information framed negatively tends to be rated as more likely to be true. For example, Hilbig (2009; 2011) presented the same trivia statements negatively or positively (such as: “20% of marriages are divorced within the first 10 years” versus “80% of marriages last 10 years or longer”). The former negative framing led to higher truth ratings, despite the information being identical.

It may be then that negative authenticity is especially thrilling to the nervous system: Important, true, and bad. A kind of sweet-nectar-tate-trifecta for our threat-detection apparatus.

So, wise up!

Thanks for reading,

Ruben