Yudkowsky quote
Sep. 26th, 2010 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleVery insightful:
People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back - providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
I would also add that our intense, evolved response to political questions, which comes so reflexively to some of us, is now the equivalent of boxing with thin air. The reactions that worked in a tribal environment have hardly any effect at all in a modern mass democracy. No wonder we tend to suffer something akin to an extinction burst when the intent of these primitive instincts is repeatedly frustrated.
One of the depressing things about being committed to numbers and data is the necessity of stabbing everyone in the back.
People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back - providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
I would also add that our intense, evolved response to political questions, which comes so reflexively to some of us, is now the equivalent of boxing with thin air. The reactions that worked in a tribal environment have hardly any effect at all in a modern mass democracy. No wonder we tend to suffer something akin to an extinction burst when the intent of these primitive instincts is repeatedly frustrated.
One of the depressing things about being committed to numbers and data is the necessity of stabbing everyone in the back.
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no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 04:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 07:24 am (UTC)Thing that really irks me: When Gore was un-appointed to be president, all the Conservatives called anyone who didn't agree with them, "crybabies." I must have gotten a least a half-dozen e-mails with a baby crying SFX attached whenever I posted anything online.
Then, Conservatives got their man re-elected, and he certainly had a hand in bringing the economy to a screeching halt.
So the yearly score for this decade is: Conservatives 8 years, Liberals, 2 years.
From the fucking moment that O'bama assumed office, these same people who called me a crybaby, started to cry themselves.
I got news for them: This country ain't a one-party system! And if they want something like that, they should consider moving.
[/rant]
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 06:05 pm (UTC)Including yourself (if you're an honest and compentent scientist :-).
"The great tragedy of Science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact" -- Thomas Huxley, English Biologist