Proximate and ultimate; intended and emergent order

Excellent point from Steve Stewart Williams in The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve.

One more point: As soon as we start applying functional explanations to the mind, it’s important to draw a clear and careful distinction between proximate explanations and ultimate explanations. A proximate explanation is one that focuses on the immediate causes of behavior. An example would be “People have sex because they enjoy it.” An ultimate explanation is one that focuses on the evolutionary function of behavior: the effects for which the behavior was selected. An example would be “People have sex because sex results in the production of offspring.” These explanations – enjoyment and reproduction – are not inconsistent with one another. Indeed, the latter explains the former; we have sex because we enjoy it, but we evolved to enjoy it because sex results in the production of offspring. The reason the proximate/ultimate distinction is important is that people make a pastime of mistaking ultimate evolutionary explanations for everyday psychological ones. Critics of evolutionary psychology are among the worst offenders. A fairly standard criticism of the field goes like this: “Evolutionary psychologists claim that we have sex in order to have children, but that’s just not true – most of the time we have sex just for fun. In fact, often the last thing we want when we have sex is children!” From what I’ve said already, it should be clear that this is simply a misunderstanding. When evolutionary psychologists argue that sex is about making babies, they’re talking about the evolutionary function of the behavior, not what people want. The critics have failed to distinguish the ultimate from the proximate, the evolutionary mode of explanation from the psychological.

The generalized form of this error is the idea that, according to evolutionary psychologists, people have an innate motivation to pass on their genes, and that we’re all constantly scheming about how we might achieve this. As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out, though, “If that’s how the mind worked, men would line up outside sperm banks and women would pay to have their eggs harvested and given away to infertile couples.” Rather than having a very general motivation to propagate our genes, humans have a portfolio of more specific motivations – motivations to eat and drink, to run away from predators, to have sex and care for our young. Collectively, these lead us to act as if we’re trying to propagate our genes, but without any strategizing on our part and without us having gene propagation as an actual, literal goal. To be more precise, our basic drives and motivations led our ancestors to act in ways that typically propagated their genes in the environment in which our species evolved. These motivations may or may not accomplish this goal in our current environment. I’ll say more about this soon. At this stage, the thing to remember is that, although we’re gene machines, we don’t have a built-in motivation to pass on our genes, at either a conscious or an unconscious level.

Great points which tie into Hayek's Knowledge Problem and the concept of emergent order. As Wikipedia notes,

The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were the first to seriously develop and inquire into the idea of the market as a spontaneous order. In 1767, the sociologist and historian Adam Ferguson described the phenomenon of spontaneous order in society as the "result of human action, but not the execution of any human design".

I have always loved that summary - "result of human action, but not the execution of any human design."

As a management consultant, this has been an issue across my career, helping clients balance the tactical and strategic, balancing the micro and the macro, and unshackling oneself from the chains of deterministic thinking.

The great majority of the time, clients have a known pain point and they want to solve it by implementing a point solution. Too high personnel turnover? Raise wages! Frequent product returns? Improve manufacturing process! Sales are down? Cut the price! Too high accident rate? Deploy safety training!

Occasionally the point solution is indeed the appropriate response to the pain point. But that is often coincidental.

The more complex the system, the broader the scope, the greater the consequences, the more likely it is that it warrants investigating the ultimate cause over the apparent proximate cause.

High personnel turnover? Sure, it might be wages. It might also be career expectations. It might be a dangerous work environment. It might be salary structure (fixed versus at risk, benefits, etc.). It might be a toxic culture. It might be commuting distances. It might be variable work hours. People have a range of motivations for why they work beyond just compensation. If you want to bring down turnover on a sustained basis, you need to understand those deeper causal elements in order to craft a more appropriate solution.

If the ultimate cause of turnover is bad management behavior and you raise wages significantly, you typically get a temporary reduction in turnover but then it reverts to mean. You end up with a higher labor cost and still have the too high turnover, all because you fixed what you thought was the proximate cause without exploring the ultimate cause.

This reality is unpleasant. The client wants you to solve a "simple" problem with a "simple" solution. As soon as you start going after ultimate, deeper causal elements, the client will see you as simply chasing an expanded scope. And indeed, there are all sorts of charlatan consultants who simply seek to maximize revenues.

But the reality remains that not all, and in fact, most intractable problems appear proximate in nature but have causal elements that are far removed.

And the solutions are rarely deterministic fixes but rather are more fundamental in terms of system design, incentive structures, culture, etc. More interesting, more effective, but also less deterministic.