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wilkox comments on If epistemic and instrumental rationality strongly conflict - Less Wrong
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Imagine I told Robin Hanson I liked the way chocolate tastes. Do you think he'd reply: "Yes, you probably think you like the taste of chocolate – but isn’t it more plausible that you mainly care about eating calorically dense foods so you can store up fat for the winter? Doesn’t that have a more plausible evolutionary origin than actually caring about the taste of chocolate?" Of course not, because that would sound silly. It's only for abstract intellectual desires that someone can get away with a statement like that.
If evolution "wants" you to eat calorically dense foods it doesn't make you actually want calories, it just makes you like the way the foods taste. And if evolution "wants" you to appear to care about truth to impress people the most efficient way for it to accomplish that is to make you actually care about the truth. That way you don't have to keep your lies straight. People don't think they care about the truth, they actually do.
I know that that's Hanson's quote, not yours, but the fact that you quote it indicates you agree with it to some extent.
This is like saying "if evolution wants a frog to appear poisonous, the most efficient way to accomplish that is to actually make it poisonous". Evolution has a long history of faking signals when it can get away with it. If evolution "wants" you to signal that you care about the truth, it will do so by causing you to actually care about the truth if and only if causing you to actually care about the truth has a lower fitness cost than the array of other potential dishonest signals on offer.
Poisonousness doesn't change appearance though. Being poisonous and looking poisonous are separate evolutionary developments. Truth seeking values, on the other hand, affect behavior as much as an impulse to fake truth seeking values, and fake truth seeking values are probably at least as difficult to implement, most likely more so, requiring the agent to model real truth seeking agents.
For one thing, if some people have actual truth-seeking values competing with people who have false truth-seeking values, the ones looking for actual truth have a good chance to find out about and punish the ones who are falsely seeking truth. This means fake truth-seekery needs to be significantly more efficient/less risky than actual truth seeking to be the expected result of a process that selects for appearances of truth seeking.
The only reason making some frogs look poisonous works is because there are already a lot of poisonous frogs around whose signal most definitely isn't fake. Faking signals only works if there are lot of reliable signals in the environment to be confused with. So there must, at the very least, be a large amount of truth-seeking humans out there. And I think that a site like "Overcoming Bias" would self select for the truth-seeking kind among its readership.
I don't know if any studies have been done with truth-seeking, but this is definitely the case with morality. The majority of humans have consciences, they care about morality as an end in itself to some extent. But some humans (called sociopaths) don't care about morality at all, they're just faking having conscience. However, sociopaths only make up about 1/25 of the population at most, their adaptation is only fit if there are a lot of moral humans around to trick with it.