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.
