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0 pointsmakeitdouble6d ago0 comments

> Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.

We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons. It feels like they didn't really bother looking for an actual relevant argument.

On one side, did hunters who analyzed the situation before moving actually not survive ? How would someone even prove such a claim ?

On the other side our brains have excelent plasticity and we're constantly surprised at how it can adapt to extremely impacting life events. Is our cognitive stuck to where it was hundred of centuries ago and couldn't adapt to the printing press or the internet ?

We might have social issues and huge problems to solve to better handle our current technical landscape, but going back to Neanderthals to find an explanation is a waste of time and good will IMHO.

There must be better science out there and people actually trying to tackle these kind of issues. What would be the Hank Green like people of these fields to who we should pay more attention?

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8 comments · 6 top-level

altmanaltman6d ago· 1 in thread

No, human knowledge has definitely grown over time and the modern human in the modern society has access to a lot more information. But in terms of evolution, our brains are still pretty much what they used to be back then. That timeline isn't long enough to actually evolve our brain and how it processes things.

A lot of biases are present in our mind precisely due to how biology evolved the systems over millions of years. Humans have been around for only 300k-ish years.

However, you do need to study and research about how the brain works if you want to make these point and a lot of writers just misrepresent/misunderstand things because they don't do their research enough.

I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.

makeitdoubleOP6d ago

It's not a perfect analogy, but I understand the evolution argument as our "hardware" taking time to drastically change, and agree with it. From there, our "software" can IMHO evolve a lot faster, and we're probably able to rewrite how we use the hardware to a very low level. What esports player do in their heads on daily basis never stops impressing me.

> I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.

Thanks ! It's a bit sad D.Kahneman was already of pretty old age when the replication crisis hit the field. I saw a few of his talks from a few years later but don't remember him addressing any of the underlying research being put into doubt.

bodash6d ago· 1 in thread

Given the audience here, I think an adjacent analogy would be “if we were to understand tech today, do we always go back to the beginning of tech?”

Then the answer is more clear as yes and no. Obviously much of our tech today adapts to modern innovations and standards, but it would not be hard to quickly find examples where even the most cutting edge tech are still being affected by the earliest decisions or natural limitations.

makeitdoubleOP5d ago

I've been thinking about it for a while and like the tech analogy a lot.

The interesting part to me is that we have many relics of earlier choices, but the reason they were set that way and the reasons we kept these choices around are completely different.

For instance choosing to start time at 1970 was to work around space limitations IFAIK, but we're still using that norm out of inertia and compatibility concerns.

I think that kind of logic applies to many human things as well, for instance at one point physical differences between men and women had a huge practical impact on the kind of "work" they could optimally do, yet the same kind of labor segregation today would come from a totally different place.

gherkinnn6d ago

> We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons.

Indeed. These hunter-gatherer stories explain anything and predict nothing. Discard at will.

xtiansimon6d ago

> “We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons.”

Sparks my imagination. Like sibling relations when you’re old. You must go back further and further to a time of innocence and ignorance to find agreement and common ground.

dang5d ago

Negativity bias is a well-attested phenomenon, no? and one can derive the rest of the argument from that.

padjo6d ago

Indeed, they have all the intellectual rigour of Kipling's Just So Stories, and should be treated with as much seriousness.

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