Politics Thread!

[KlaxonCow]

When you're so stupid, you wrap-around and accidentally become a genius.

[Little stoned kiwi]

But that's why people say socialism doesn't work. It's done incorrectly by idiots plastering over doing capitalism incorrectly.

[zip accident]

But that's why people say socialism doesn't work. It's done incorrectly by idiots plastering over doing capitalism incorrectly.

It strongly depends on what you define socialism as.

If socialism is everybody playing nice and getting along just because everybody is nice, no that won't work, because Natural Selection.

We need rules and regulations to stop the rich becoming richer at the expense of the poor, and we need people to enforce those regulations, and "who watches the watchers" is a very, very hard problem. Democracy is a feeble attempt at an answer, but then Trump. As soon as you start trusting people, they start taking the piss.

Capitalism is no better, if you're not very rich.

[Little stoned kiwi]

We need rules and regulations...

That's doing capitalism correctly. And socialism correctly. And democracy correctly.
People who say rules and regulations are the problem are idiots.

[KlaxonCow]

If socialism is everybody playing nice and getting along just because everybody is nice, no that won't work, because Natural Selection.

You really, really, really need a refresher in evolutionary theory.

Can evolution by natural selection be "red, in tooth and claw" with horrible things like the parasitic wasp - that paralyses a "host" into which it implants its young, whom eat the host from the inside out, transforming another creature into an unwilling "egg" for its offspring?

Yup, totally. This is an unguided "good enough" process, so whatever works, works. And that's all that's involved.

But, equally, this same process has evolved love. Parent animals sacrificing themselves for their young. It's also evolved the social animals - ants and bees - where they operate and survive as a collective, where only the queens reproduce.

And there's many combinations of animals that you can stick in the same field as each other - a horse, a donkey, some sheep, maybe throw in some crows - where there's zero prey / predator relationship going on, and they'll neutrally ignore each other.

Because, again, this is an unguided "good enough" process. So whatever works, works. Whether that's negative (parasitic wasp), neutral (most animals ignoring each other) or positive (love, social animals).

Natural selection is not sentient and it has no end goal, and no "moral sense" whatsoever.

And, of course, it is a biased human view to dub love as "positive" and the parasitic wasp as "negative". Klingons, on the other hand, might be more appreciative of nature's inherent violence and might think it's even a good thing, over some namby-pamby "love" nonsense.

In the grand scheme of human history, our capacity for immense social cooperation - on a level that no other animal can come close to achieving - has, without doubt, been our "super power" all along.

The sheer scale and complexity of our "hives" - the cities we build ourselves to live in - is an un-fucking-believable scale of social cooperation. Even more so, when you consider how, no, we don't all like each other or remotely agree, yet are capable of aligning ourselves to the "enlightened self-interest" of collectively obeying social conventions, rules and laws, etc. to make this whole insanely sophisticated "society" thing work at all.

This is long before we consider the "open source" nature of scientific development that, together with the internal social cooperation of space agencies, is able to land men on the Moon.

No, no. We needn't go that far. Whilst businesses might externally fight "tooth and claw" with each other in a capitalist society, they're internally cooperative. Besides a bit of "office politics" backstabbing for a promotion, businesses operate internally within a hierarchy, with a specialisation of roles, to collectively deliver goods and services.

The grand irony that perhaps one of the best examples of our capacity for social cooperation and collective action is our armies - which we use to wage war on each other. But, if you ignore the external conflict for a moment, and look at the internal structure of an army then it's social cooperation par excellence. Hierarchy, collective action, loyalty, having each other's back, etc. in as close to its purest form as humans can ever manage.

And, yes, the "war without tears" analogy of competing businesses as distinct "countries" at war with each other... but yet, internally, they are absolutely cooperative in nature, just like armies.

Then, blowing the lid on the original Platonic "Noble Lie" that is money, it's a system designed to turn greed into social good. Because money only has value in the exchange, so Tesco do, indeed, get rich... by selling me and my local community food. To afford his penis rockets, Bezos delivers goods to my doorstep.

To make their money, they have to exchange goods and services for it. Their greed for greater wealth means greater supply of goods and services to wider society.

It's the classic original Platonic "Noble Lie" - that while everyone thinks having more money benefits them and even, mythologically, makes them "inherently superior" people, then they will get jobs and found businesses and, through internal social cooperation, provide increasing goods and services to the betterment of society.

That's always been the sneaky trick from day one. Let the rich think they're awesome for their vast hordes of wealth - as long as every penny was earnt in exchange for goods and services to wider society, that stash of "debt tokens" represents all the "favours" they've done for society.

Unfortunately, this system breaks down - and will ultimately collapse, that we might have to blow the lid on the underlying lie - when you have outsourcing, robots, computers, AI and automation entering the picture, as the "balanced exchange" it once was becomes dangerously unbalanced (and, by the way, will just collapse, one day, with the destruction of the money system itself, unless corrected for - but, hopefully, we can stumble towards the Star Trek "Age of Abundance" first and then we can happily just leave the money system to collapse and good riddance to it, as it was only a "sticking plaster" to trick rich people into doing social good anyway).

But, yeah, stop looking at only the "red, in tooth and claw" parts of evolution and nature - because, yes, for sure, there are a wealth of horrors and nightmares involved - and correct for your "selection bias".

This is like someone who prays every night, only tallying up "the wins" - when their prayers were answered - and completely ignoring that 90% of the time their prayers go completely unanswered. And their life turned to shit in the meantime. Because, after all, that's why they're praying for things every night in the first place.

Tally everything up. The good, the bad and the ugly. The negatives (war, parasitic wasps, etc.), the neutrals (which, by far, is the most massive of the categories, as most things do not mix or react at all) and the positives (love, charity, social cooperation, etc.).

Because when you look at it all, humans are the pinnacles of social cooperation. Like, even in the midst of our most brutal wars, the internal cooperation of armies and businesses feeding supplies to those armies, and the overall coordination and structure of it. On both sides.

Even in our very worst moment there, we're still demonstrating a sheer scale and sophistication of social cooperation that's un-fucking-believable compared to any other animal. Indeed, yes, we're so damned good at it, that we can easily take this all for granted and not even realise how insanely good we are at it.

As we organise a rebellion, everyone focuses on the point of friction - that there is a rebellion afoot - and fails to acknowledge the immense organisation behind it, and the immense organisation of the status quo to resist the rebellion. This is, like, 99% social cooperation but we're all staring intently at the 1% disagreement, because that's the anomaly. The exception. The bit we're not used to seeing, in our otherwise blissful society of social cooperation and rule following. We stare into the black hole of conflict because it rightly scares us - that's not our natural state. And why are we waging those wars? A (sometimes desperate) attempt to drag ourselves back to the normality of our mundane social cooperation.

It's like how the daily news is nearly all bad news stories. But this makes abundant sense - if there's a serial killer out there, then we need to know it to avoid getting killed. If the economy's in the gutter, then we need to know it to plan our finances going forward and maybe tighten those belts.

And whilst it's nice to know that a local resident used a ladder to rescue a cat from a tree, it's not imperative - like all the bad news - for you to know this. So, yes, the daily news becomes nearly all bad news stories, as those are the anomalies and the exceptions that it's important for you to know about (largely to avoid them, or to cope with them) and these push out the "good news" stories, which are nice. But they're not anomalous, so you generally don't need to know about them to deal with the anomaly, as with all those "bad news" stories.

But it absolutely can create this horrible cognitive bias of thinking the world is nothing but anomalies and bad news. When, actually, 99.9% of the people 99.9% of the time are just peacefully - and politely - living their lives. Like, even in the midst of a war zone, it still remains true - most Londoners in the Blitz or Ukrainians facing Russian drone attacks, are just trying to "keep calm and carry on".

When Darwin (and Wallace, the forever-forgotten co-discoverer of Natural Selection) unveiled Evolution by Natural Selection, there absolutely was an emphasis on its cruel nature - "red, in tooth and claw" - and highlighting the horror of the parasitic wasp.

But this was because they had to counter Edwardian / Victorian Christian notions of nature as being "God's theme park" for their enjoyment and amusement. That hymn "All Things Bright and Beautiful" being the perfect theme song to this religious worldview - that God had created this lovely pleasant "garden" for humans to tend to and enjoy, which was all lovely and harmonious.

So the Darwinian response to "All Things Bright and Beautiful" has to be, okay, but what about all the things that are dark, ugly and horrific? Where does that fit into God's wonderful plan, eh?

Thus, there is an emphasis on the nasty bits of Natural Selection to counter - to snap people out of the delusion of - the notion that it's all some wonderful "Garden of Eden" out there.

And, in overly-religious America that denies evolution, this point still needs to rammed home to them, until they finally get it:



But let's not get too sadomasochistic and "horror movie" about it all.

Natural Selection has created innumerable instances of social animals, social cooperation, instincts of kinship, and invented this thing called "love" as well (and that's all of the versions of it: Eros, Agape, Philia, Storge, Ludus, Pragma, Philautia and Mania - yeah, English only has the one word, so Greek which makes the distinction between love of many different types is often used).

In fact, mammals are named after the mammary glands. Nursing babies. Because this is the defining characteristic that mammals produce milk, in order to nurse and raise their young.

We all respond to cute little animals - because our instincts to nurse and protect the young are so strong, they happily cross species boundaries and we'll protect and nurse animals that have no useful genetic relationship to us at all. And, actually, that instinct can be seen across all mammals that there are tales of other animals actually protecting our babies too.



Stop focusing on the negative only. Recognise that there's not even just as much, but actually vastly more, positives.

And that, in the overall, Natural Selection is, of course, entirely netural. It's not sentient. It has no goals nor objectives. It's not a thing - but an abstract process - that has no capacity for emotion or morality, one way or the other.

[zip accident]

If socialism is everybody playing nice and getting along just because everybody is nice, no that won't work, because Natural Selection.

You really, really, really need a refresher in evolutionary theory.

Can evolution by natural selection be "red, in tooth and claw" with horrible things like the parasitic wasp - that paralyses a "host" into which it implants its young, whom eat the host from the inside out, transforming another creature into an unwilling "egg" for its offspring?

Yup, totally. This is an unguided "good enough" process, so whatever works, works. And that's all that's involved.

But, equally, this same process has evolved love. Parent animals sacrificing themselves for their young. It's also evolved the social animals - ants and bees - where they operate and survive as a collective, where only the queens reproduce.

And there's many combinations of animals that you can stick in the same field as each other - a horse, a donkey, some sheep, maybe throw in some crows - where there's zero prey / predator relationship going on, and they'll neutrally ignore each other.

Because, again, this is an unguided "good enough" process. So whatever works, works. Whether that's negative (parasitic wasp), neutral (most animals ignoring each other) or positive (love, social animals).

Natural selection is not sentient and it has no end goal, and no "moral sense" whatsoever.

...

Stop focusing on the negative only. Recognise that there's not even just as much, but actually vastly more, positives.

And that, in the overall, Natural Selection is, of course, entirely netural. It's not sentient. It has no goals nor objectives. It's not a thing - but an abstract process - that has no capacity for emotion or morality, one way or the other.

The eusocial insects are fierce. Army ants are dangerous, wasps are a significant predator on flies (and thus a net good for humans) as well as being a pain when they sting you.

Natural Selection certainly isn't moral. I'm more than halfway convinced that morality is a human hallucination.

The world is good to/for us because WE are adapted to IT, it is by no means adapted to us (except the biosphere, that's adapt or die).

Kin altruism works (that's your parents saving their kids, the eusocial insects), otherwise altruism is almost always negative for the giver.

I liked the Dawkins cameo in your Tyson video.

[Little stoned kiwi]

Morality is a human hallucination, for sure. We all have our own moral framework and it's not determined by divine justice or order in the universe. It's barely related to natural selection apart from collective groups with complimentary frameworks surviving. Some people choose to be cunts, for sure. There are arguments that has a time and place as an individual and roles in a group for survival.

All you can do as an individual is be the change you want to see in the world. That can feel overwhelming and futile when there are people that choose to be cunts, but that's their choice and their burden.

[KlaxonCow]

I'm more than halfway convinced that morality is a human hallucination.

Oh, don't worry, I'm 100% wholly convinced, as a matter of self-evident fact, that there's no such thing as objective morality and it is just a construct of the human mind.

But - and this is the crux of the argument I'm making - Natural Selection evolved within us a sense of morality. It also evolved a sense of love within us - and, not to give the full Greek list again, that's not just romantic love, but also familial love and friendships and the more universal "brotherly love" and so forth.

Humans are a social species, and we can also see that Natural Selection has evolved a carrot-and-stick set of emotions to fuel our sociability - loneliness as the stick, and the usual dopamine and serotonin (or, as I like to call them "a dose of the happy chemicals") as the carrot.

As human beings, what is our primary "super power"? Yes, it's language. We have evolved spoken language for social communication (and this is innate - as babies rather miraculously pick up languages from just hearing them being spoken - whereas written language is not innate, as we actually have to learn to read and write; that is, to equate visual shapes with the sounds of language, as a cheat-y way to encode our innate spoken language in non-auditory ways).

And, yes, with a nod to Douglas Adams and his sentient "Puddle of Doubt" - where the puddle is convinced that the hole was made for it, rather than that rainwater finds a level, due to gravity, and rather it adapted to the hole - the things we consider "morally good" are defined by that which serves our continued survival:



BUT this is the whole and entire point I'm making here.

Natural selection has bred a thing called "morality" in our brains. Why would it do that unless it had a survival advantage to us?

Natural selection has bred within us the innate ability of spoken language - social communication - for a social species, that also has the "carrot" of dopamine hits for social interactions and the "stick" of that terrible feeling of loneliness for failing to be sufficiently social. Why would it do that unless it had a survival advantage to us?

Humans are natural story-tellers. We love a good story - particularly if it contains a moral or wisdom within its narrative - and have told each other stories around the campfire from caveman days to Shakespeare to the bright lights of Hollywood.

These are "meme" packets. Morals and wisdom and good advice, passed on in the format of a good yarn. In the format our brains are good at encoding things in - narrative stories about people and events - because that's what our memories have evolved to store, so we can keep track of who people are, what's going on and remember our own narrative histories.

Indeed, if you've seen those "memory experts" who advise memorisation techniques, then it's all about creating a story. Put the items on your shopping lists in locations along a familiar route and visualise them at these locations.



The version of this I learnt is the bus ride (but I guess public transport is used less in America that they might not have too many familiar bus routes in their heads). So you imagine taking the bus - the commute to work, for example - and then, at the first bus stop, there's a big yellow duck carrying a toilet onto the bus. Just picture that duck getting on the bus with the toilet and, after buying their ticket, they've come upstairs (it's a double decker bus).

So the first thing on my shopping list is toilet duck. Then, at the next bus stop, there's that Dulux paint dog getting on, and he's covered in red paint. Okay, so I also need to get a tin of red paint (doesn't have to be Dulux, of course, but that's just to give me a memorable character that says "paint").

You get the gist. You convert your shopping list into a story, with characters and locations - and you're using the familiar bus route from your commute to work, as a series of familiar locations you already know in sequential order.

And we do this because our memories are designed for - and good at - remembering stories about people and events. Our lives are the people we meet and the events that occur to us, so human memory is really good - purpose-built - for that type of memorisation. Which is why these memory experts all say "convert the thing you need to remember into a sequential story of people and events", such as the bus ride and the mad characters getting on the bus representing the items on your shopping list.

(Rote learning is also good. I mean, it's boring. But it works. After all, if I say "eight eights are..." then "sixty four" magically appears in your head, as you learnt your times tables by rote. This one's far easier to explain: Our brains are neural networks and if you keep reinforcing the axons over and over and over, then you create permanent connections between your neurons that are very, very hard to break, even after half a lifetime. This is also the mechanism behind brainwashing, but that's another story.)

Social humiliation and being socially shunned are amongst our strongest emotions. We all want to look good in a social settings. Curry people's favour. Have a laugh with mates over a pint down the pub.

Oh, here's another one. Grab a towel, scrunch it up and then throw it on the table. Now, look for the face. Keep looking. There it is. Do you see the face? The way those two shadows are like eyes and that line is like their nose. Scrunch it back up and throw it down again. And, there you go, there's another face. Do you see how those lines are kind of like a mouth and eyes?

Pareidolia. This is where our brains - pattern matching machines that we are - sees meaningful patterns in completely random shit. Because we're looking for patterns then if anything, by coincidence, comes close to a known pattern then - bang! - we see it.

And the most major bit of "pareidolia" that humans experience is seeing faces and people in things. Including, for example, a colon and a close bracket looks like a smiley face on its side.



Because we're social animals, we've got some major mental circuitry in our heads for reading other people's faces and interpreting their emotions. And it's such a big "pattern matching" circuit, that it's really very sophisticated that it can pick up "facial signals" from things that are, in fact, nothing remotely like faces at all.

It's not just that you're seeing faces in all those inanimate objects. No, you can also tell me their emotional states from their facial expressions too. Other than... well... they're inanimate objects and there are, in fact, no faces nor emotional states there at all.

Hopefully, you're very much beginning to get the gist of what I'm saying here.

Humans are social animals. Natural selection has shaped us, in multiple ways, very much for that singular purpose. We're the social specialists - we have language, that social "super power", that no other animal has.

And, yes, the puddle has adapted to the hole. The hole has not adapted to the puddle.

So, look at the animal. Look at what Natural Selection has selected for us. Look at what biological attributes we now possess - in abundance - that Natural Selection selected for, because it aided our continued survival on this planet.

It sculpted a social animal, par excellence - and look where we now find ourselves, above and beyond the rest of the Animal Kingdom, because Natural Selection kept selecting "bigger brain, more social, bigger brain, more social" over and over, until we learnt how to speak. Until, when one of us worked out how to make and use tools, we could simply tell the others how to do it.

Look at how we structure ourselves. Look at how, whilst there might be competition between businesses, those businesses are internally "socialist" to the nth degree. Hierarchies, managers, do what your boss tells you, "teamwork makes the dream work", daily meetings, shared calendars, etc., etc. - the problem with the "dog eat dog" notion of capitalism is that, umm, that's only true externally - between companies - but, internally, all the dogs within a single company have formed a "pack" - dogs are pack animals - and we're all working cooperatively to go on the hunt together.

This is what I mean. You can look at the parasitic wasp and, to our moral sense, it's horrifically bad. You can see how awful and cruel and "evil", by our moral sense, nature can be.

But, at the same time, Natural Selection selected for love. It selected for possessing a moral sense. It selected for us being social animals, who quite naturally form and abide by a collective "social contract", more or less.

Yes, indeed. Look at the animal and tell me what you see.

Whereas, the idea that humans are "noble hunters"?

Bollocks. Where are our weapons? Where are our talons, our claws, our razor-sharp teeth? If we're "hunters" then why do we have absolutely no biological equipment - no natural weapons - for that purpose?

You adopt a little kitten. You feed it, so it never need starve. But cats are natural hunters - so, when that kitten grows up, it'll drag in a dead bird into your kitchen and offer it to you. "Look, I have hunted our next meal". Ah, yes. Very good, little kitten. You've done well for "the pack". But let me just clean this up and here's a bowl of cat food for you instead.

If we're hunters, then why do we not wake up every morning with a blood lust to go hunting in our very souls? If we're hunters, then why do we have to learn how to do it, and it's not all just innate and instinctive?

When humans go "hunting", we cheat like hell. We have no natural weapons, so we cheat and bring along shotguns. We don't run that fast, so we cheat and sit on the back of horses - Tally ho! We have no senses nor instincts for tracking a scent, so we cheat and bring along the hounds.

We're shit hunters. Nothing about us is remotely useful for hunting. Besides that we have big brains and, thus, have worked out ways to cheat like hell. Bring along the hounds, they can do the scent thing for us. Bring along the horses, because they're actually fast enough to keep up. Bring along the shotguns, because our big brains have invented weapons far and above anything nature's dreamt up - the prey stands zero chance.

And look at our biology. We've clearly learnt to use our big brains to extract ourselves out of any prey / predator relationship. Because, in hand-to-hand melee combat, we're a fucking joke.

I mean, we stand on two legs. We're bipedal - and top heavy in terms of weight distribution - making us horridly unstable. That's a really stupid thing to do, if you want to go toe-to-toe with a quadruped that has sharp claws.

Standing up on two legs, we're exposing our completely unprotected digestive system and genitals - and, for females, that completely unprotected bit is also where you incubate your baby. Well, that's sensible. It's right there, unprotected. Just walk up to us and give us a short, sharp shock with a kick in the knackers, and we're instantly disabled.

No fucking engineer would ever design a "predator" in this way. As I say, on that front, we're a ridiculous joke, frankly.

Be wary of self-flattery. We humans love to flatter ourselves with obvious bollocks. The "noble" hunter-gatherer?

Bollocks. We're scavengers, just like all the other omnivores.

Ever noticed that really rather obvious connection?

Humans are omnivores and we're clever bastards. What other animals are omnivorous?

Well, there's pigs. There's rats. There's dogs. There's bears and raccoons. Birds - the descendants of dinosaurs - are also omnivorous; have you ever seen a Corvid solving puzzles, as they're really quite clever bastards?

(Yes, there are exceptions. Dolphins are clever bastards but strictly carnivores, while elephants are also very smart while being herbivores. And while cats aren't as clever as dogs, they're not too shabby in the brains department for carnivores.)

But, generally speaking, being omnivorous and intelligent often go hand-in-hand. Because scavengers eat whatever they can get their hands on - you can't be fussy, and just eat whatever's available. Hence omnivorous.

And the intelligence angle is because, to be a scavenger, you have to be quite clever. You have to adapt. Today, we're gathering berries. Tomorrow, we're fishing. The day after, we're going spear hunting. The day after that, we're going to hide behind these rocks and when the mother leaves the nest to search for food, we're going to raid the nest for eggs. And you're opportunist - that lion's left quite a lot of meat on that kill. Okay, lads, you distract it over there and I'll run in and nick the corpse. We're eating steak tonight, boys.

Unlike the flattering "noble hunter" nonsense, this exactly fits our profile. We're scavengers. Heck, we still scavenge to this day - we don't wake up with the urge to hunt, but we do wake up with the urge to raid the fridge for whatever scraps are left.

In our evolutionary history, there was a bottleneck. A famine. A drought of food. And we adapted by becoming scavengers. Which, by the way, can include going on the hunt. But it's also picking nuts and berries, and going spear fishing or just stealing the kills or eggs of other animals. Frankly, that's the point. There's a dearth of food about - you become omnivorous to take advantage of whatever's available and you become smart to spot the opportunities. To know when there's nothing to hunt, so we're gathering nuts and berries today, folks. But if you spot any bird's nests - opportunist - then we can try raiding them for eggs.

And, indeed, in such a prolonged famine, social cooperation is definitely a plus. Same thing that wolves and dogs do - you hunt in packs. Twenty of us, armed with spears? We can surround and hunt down that lone bison, no problem. And a human "pack" is devastatingly effective, as we can actually shout orders at each other. Being able to talk is a massive tactical advantage.

A milestone on the way to becoming smart enough to realise that if we dig a big trench around this field, then we can actually trap the animals - and, for crops, keep other animals out of our food - and we've just invented farming. The lazy, but much more effective, way. "Hunter-gathering for Dummies".

Yes, Natural Selection. Absolutely.

But look at exactly what kind of creature that Natural Selection favoured. A social species, that hunts and gathers in packs. Which has emotional states like love, and loneliness and gets a dopamine hit from doing charity and have folks say "please" and "thank you" to you.

We humans evolved out of the Animal Kingdom. Away from "red, in tooth and claw". To build "hives" we call cities, of tremendous sophistication. To compose laws, based on our innate moral senses - and, as we have progressed, to become ever-more moral beings that have finally worked out that, for example, slavery's a bad idea.

Don't just look at the bad. Tally up the good, the bad and the ugly.

Natural selection evolved love. Now, why on Earth would evolution go and do something so silly, eh?

[zip accident]

I'm more than halfway convinced that morality is a human hallucination.

Oh, don't worry, I'm 100% wholly convinced, as a matter of self-evident fact, that there's no such thing as objective morality and it is just a construct of the human mind.

But - and this is the crux of the argument I'm making - Natural Selection evolved within us a sense of morality. It also evolved a sense of love within us - and, not to give the full Greek list again, that's not just romantic love, but also familial love and friendships and the more universal "brotherly love" and so forth.

Humans are a social species, and we can also see that Natural Selection has evolved a carrot-and-stick set of emotions to fuel our sociability - loneliness as the stick, and the usual dopamine and serotonin (or, as I like to call them "a dose of the happy chemicals") as the carrot.

As human beings, what is our primary "super power"? Yes, it's language. We have evolved spoken language for social communication (and this is innate - as babies rather miraculously pick up languages from just hearing them being spoken - whereas written language is not innate, as we actually have to learn to read and write; that is, to equate visual shapes with the sounds of language, as a cheat-y way to encode our innate spoken language in non-auditory ways).

And, yes, with a nod to Douglas Adams and his sentient "Puddle of Doubt" - where the puddle is convinced that the hole was made for it, rather than that rainwater finds a level, due to gravity, and rather it adapted to the hole - the things we consider "morally good" are defined by that which serves our continued survival:



BUT this is the whole and entire point I'm making here.

Natural selection has bred a thing called "morality" in our brains. Why would it do that unless it had a survival advantage to us?

Natural selection has bred within us the innate ability of spoken language - social communication - for a social species, that also has the "carrot" of dopamine hits for social interactions and the "stick" of that terrible feeling of loneliness for failing to be sufficiently social. Why would it do that unless it had a survival advantage to us?

Humans are natural story-tellers. We love a good story - particularly if it contains a moral or wisdom within its narrative - and have told each other stories around the campfire from caveman days to Shakespeare to the bright lights of Hollywood.

These are "meme" packets. Morals and wisdom and good advice, passed on in the format of a good yarn. In the format our brains are good at encoding things in - narrative stories about people and events - because that's what our memories have evolved to store, so we can keep track of who people are, what's going on and remember our own narrative histories.

Indeed, if you've seen those "memory experts" who advise memorisation techniques, then it's all about creating a story. Put the items on your shopping lists in locations along a familiar route and visualise them at these locations.



The version of this I learnt is the bus ride (but I guess public transport is used less in America that they might not have too many familiar bus routes in their heads). So you imagine taking the bus - the commute to work, for example - and then, at the first bus stop, there's a big yellow duck carrying a toilet onto the bus. Just picture that duck getting on the bus with the toilet and, after buying their ticket, they've come upstairs (it's a double decker bus).

So the first thing on my shopping list is toilet duck. Then, at the next bus stop, there's that Dulux paint dog getting on, and he's covered in red paint. Okay, so I also need to get a tin of red paint (doesn't have to be Dulux, of course, but that's just to give me a memorable character that says "paint").

You get the gist. You convert your shopping list into a story, with characters and locations - and you're using the familiar bus route from your commute to work, as a series of familiar locations you already know in sequential order.

And we do this because our memories are designed for - and good at - remembering stories about people and events. Our lives are the people we meet and the events that occur to us, so human memory is really good - purpose-built - for that type of memorisation. Which is why these memory experts all say "convert the thing you need to remember into a sequential story of people and events", such as the bus ride and the mad characters getting on the bus representing the items on your shopping list.

(Rote learning is also good. I mean, it's boring. But it works. After all, if I say "eight eights are..." then "sixty four" magically appears in your head, as you learnt your times tables by rote. This one's far easier to explain: Our brains are neural networks and if you keep reinforcing the axons over and over and over, then you create permanent connections between your neurons that are very, very hard to break, even after half a lifetime. This is also the mechanism behind brainwashing, but that's another story.)

Social humiliation and being socially shunned are amongst our strongest emotions. We all want to look good in a social settings. Curry people's favour. Have a laugh with mates over a pint down the pub.

Oh, here's another one. Grab a towel, scrunch it up and then throw it on the table. Now, look for the face. Keep looking. There it is. Do you see the face? The way those two shadows are like eyes and that line is like their nose. Scrunch it back up and throw it down again. And, there you go, there's another face. Do you see how those lines are kind of like a mouth and eyes?

Pareidolia. This is where our brains - pattern matching machines that we are - sees meaningful patterns in completely random shit. Because we're looking for patterns then if anything, by coincidence, comes close to a known pattern then - bang! - we see it.

And the most major bit of "pareidolia" that humans experience is seeing faces and people in things. Including, for example, a colon and a close bracket looks like a smiley face on its side.



Because we're social animals, we've got some major mental circuitry in our heads for reading other people's faces and interpreting their emotions. And it's such a big "pattern matching" circuit, that it's really very sophisticated that it can pick up "facial signals" from things that are, in fact, nothing remotely like faces at all.

It's not just that you're seeing faces in all those inanimate objects. No, you can also tell me their emotional states from their facial expressions too. Other than... well... they're inanimate objects and there are, in fact, no faces nor emotional states there at all.

Hopefully, you're very much beginning to get the gist of what I'm saying here.

Humans are social animals. Natural selection has shaped us, in multiple ways, very much for that singular purpose. We're the social specialists - we have language, that social "super power", that no other animal has.

And, yes, the puddle has adapted to the hole. The hole has not adapted to the puddle.

So, look at the animal. Look at what Natural Selection has selected for us. Look at what biological attributes we now possess - in abundance - that Natural Selection selected for, because it aided our continued survival on this planet.

It sculpted a social animal, par excellence - and look where we now find ourselves, above and beyond the rest of the Animal Kingdom, because Natural Selection kept selecting "bigger brain, more social, bigger brain, more social" over and over, until we learnt how to speak. Until, when one of us worked out how to make and use tools, we could simply tell the others how to do it.

Look at how we structure ourselves. Look at how, whilst there might be competition between businesses, those businesses are internally "socialist" to the nth degree. Hierarchies, managers, do what your boss tells you, "teamwork makes the dream work", daily meetings, shared calendars, etc., etc. - the problem with the "dog eat dog" notion of capitalism is that, umm, that's only true externally - between companies - but, internally, all the dogs within a single company have formed a "pack" - dogs are pack animals - and we're all working cooperatively to go on the hunt together.

This is what I mean. You can look at the parasitic wasp and, to our moral sense, it's horrifically bad. You can see how awful and cruel and "evil", by our moral sense, nature can be.

But, at the same time, Natural Selection selected for love. It selected for possessing a moral sense. It selected for us being social animals, who quite naturally form and abide by a collective "social contract", more or less.

Yes, indeed. Look at the animal and tell me what you see.

Whereas, the idea that humans are "noble hunters"?

Bollocks. Where are our weapons? Where are our talons, our claws, our razor-sharp teeth? If we're "hunters" then why do we have absolutely no biological equipment - no natural weapons - for that purpose?

You adopt a little kitten. You feed it, so it never need starve. But cats are natural hunters - so, when that kitten grows up, it'll drag in a dead bird into your kitchen and offer it to you. "Look, I have hunted our next meal". Ah, yes. Very good, little kitten. You've done well for "the pack". But let me just clean this up and here's a bowl of cat food for you instead.

If we're hunters, then why do we not wake up every morning with a blood lust to go hunting in our very souls? If we're hunters, then why do we have to learn how to do it, and it's not all just innate and instinctive?

When humans go "hunting", we cheat like hell. We have no natural weapons, so we cheat and bring along shotguns. We don't run that fast, so we cheat and sit on the back of horses - Tally ho! We have no senses nor instincts for tracking a scent, so we cheat and bring along the hounds.

We're shit hunters. Nothing about us is remotely useful for hunting. Besides that we have big brains and, thus, have worked out ways to cheat like hell. Bring along the hounds, they can do the scent thing for us. Bring along the horses, because they're actually fast enough to keep up. Bring along the shotguns, because our big brains have invented weapons far and above anything nature's dreamt up - the prey stands zero chance.

And look at our biology. We've clearly learnt to use our big brains to extract ourselves out of any prey / predator relationship. Because, in hand-to-hand melee combat, we're a fucking joke.

I mean, we stand on two legs. We're bipedal - and top heavy in terms of weight distribution - making us horridly unstable. That's a really stupid thing to do, if you want to go toe-to-toe with a quadruped that has sharp claws.

Standing up on two legs, we're exposing our completely unprotected digestive system and genitals - and, for females, that completely unprotected bit is also where you incubate your baby. Well, that's sensible. It's right there, unprotected. Just walk up to us and give us a short, sharp shock with a kick in the knackers, and we're instantly disabled.

No fucking engineer would ever design a "predator" in this way. As I say, on that front, we're a ridiculous joke, frankly.

Be wary of self-flattery. We humans love to flatter ourselves with obvious bollocks. The "noble" hunter-gatherer?

Bollocks. We're scavengers, just like all the other omnivores.

Ever noticed that really rather obvious connection?

Humans are omnivores and we're clever bastards. What other animals are omnivorous?

Well, there's pigs. There's rats. There's dogs. There's bears and raccoons. Birds - the descendants of dinosaurs - are also omnivorous; have you ever seen a Corvid solving puzzles, as they're really quite clever bastards?

(Yes, there are exceptions. Dolphins are clever bastards but strictly carnivores, while elephants are also very smart while being herbivores. And while cats aren't as clever as dogs, they're not too shabby in the brains department for carnivores.)

But, generally speaking, being omnivorous and intelligent often go hand-in-hand. Because scavengers eat whatever they can get their hands on - you can't be fussy, and just eat whatever's available. Hence omnivorous.

And the intelligence angle is because, to be a scavenger, you have to be quite clever. You have to adapt. Today, we're gathering berries. Tomorrow, we're fishing. The day after, we're going spear hunting. The day after that, we're going to hide behind these rocks and when the mother leaves the nest to search for food, we're going to raid the nest for eggs. And you're opportunist - that lion's left quite a lot of meat on that kill. Okay, lads, you distract it over there and I'll run in and nick the corpse. We're eating steak tonight, boys.

Unlike the flattering "noble hunter" nonsense, this exactly fits our profile. We're scavengers. Heck, we still scavenge to this day - we don't wake up with the urge to hunt, but we do wake up with the urge to raid the fridge for whatever scraps are left.

In our evolutionary history, there was a bottleneck. A famine. A drought of food. And we adapted by becoming scavengers. Which, by the way, can include going on the hunt. But it's also picking nuts and berries, and going spear fishing or just stealing the kills or eggs of other animals. Frankly, that's the point. There's a dearth of food about - you become omnivorous to take advantage of whatever's available and you become smart to spot the opportunities. To know when there's nothing to hunt, so we're gathering nuts and berries today, folks. But if you spot any bird's nests - opportunist - then we can try raiding them for eggs.

And, indeed, in such a prolonged famine, social cooperation is definitely a plus. Same thing that wolves and dogs do - you hunt in packs. Twenty of us, armed with spears? We can surround and hunt down that lone bison, no problem. And a human "pack" is devastatingly effective, as we can actually shout orders at each other. Being able to talk is a massive tactical advantage.

A milestone on the way to becoming smart enough to realise that if we dig a big trench around this field, then we can actually trap the animals - and, for crops, keep other animals out of our food - and we've just invented farming. The lazy, but much more effective, way. "Hunter-gathering for Dummies".

Yes, Natural Selection. Absolutely.

But look at exactly what kind of creature that Natural Selection favoured. A social species, that hunts and gathers in packs. Which has emotional states like love, and loneliness and gets a dopamine hit from doing charity and have folks say "please" and "thank you" to you.

We humans evolved out of the Animal Kingdom. Away from "red, in tooth and claw". To build "hives" we call cities, of tremendous sophistication. To compose laws, based on our innate moral senses - and, as we have progressed, to become ever-more moral beings that have finally worked out that, for example, slavery's a bad idea.

Don't just look at the bad. Tally up the good, the bad and the ugly.

Natural selection evolved love. Now, why on Earth would evolution go and do something so silly, eh?

We are not shit hunters. We, like wolves, can run down anything. In a sprint, any gazelle can escape us, in two sprints, any gazelle can escape us twice. In two dozen sprints, we will kill any identified gazelle. We are the top predator on this planet at the moment, ask the Dodo, ask the Hippo, ask the Tiger, ask the Reticulated Python.

The backstabbers are always out to get us. They are the "nice guys". They're the ones with "the gift of the gab". Look at Trump, he's the "gift of the gab" personified. He does something wrong, it's someone else's fault. He's always got an excuse. Constitution? he's got an excuse.

You can trust people, but the backstabbers will get you, probably even if you trust no-one.

Also, Douglas Adams killed the Earth in the end of his book, apparently his original plan was a Southpark style "They killed Earth" every week, but he didn't get that past the reviewers.

[KlaxonCow]

We are not shit hunters.

No, honestly. We really are. We cheat like buggery, using tools or other animals, to make up for our obvious massive biological deficiencies.

Look at our biology. Where are the claws? Where are the razor-sharp teeth? Where's the exoskeleton? Where's the ability to sniff out and follow the scent of our prey? Why do we not have a burning biological urge to hunt? In a fight, top-heavy bipedalism, with your vital organs and genitals fully exposed, is an extremely shit design - no engineer would ever design a supposed "predator" that way.

We, like wolves, can run down anything.

Okay, as you've left an obvious open goal there, run down a wolf.

And, remember, no cheating. If you catch up to that wolf and somehow outsmart it away from its pack - who will collectively defend it because, as you're failing to pick up, social cohesion is a clear survival advantage - so it's on its lonesome, then you've got to kill it with your bare hands.

No tools. Biology versus biology. And, hey, you're much bigger, so you have the mass advantage here.

In a sprint, any gazelle can escape us, in two sprints, any gazelle can escape us twice. In two dozen sprints, we will kill any identified gazelle.

Well, that's hardly an energy efficient way to go about things.

(And energy does matter, as that's the whole point of killing things and eating them in the first place, of course.)

That's really not the description of a predator. That's the description of a formerly nomadic species that's learnt the wisdom of a determined patience.

We are the top predator on this planet at the moment, ask the Dodo, ask the Hippo, ask the Tiger, ask the Reticulated Python.

With the exception of the dodo, for obvious reason, I tried asking these animals if humans were the top predator. They were all mute on the subject, as it turns out that they can't fucking talk.

Luckily, they were in a zoo and unable to reach me. Because a charging hippo would definitely kill me. A tiger taking a swing with its claws and then going for the neck with its razor-sharp teeth would definitely have killed me. And whilst a python is an easier dodge, if it had body wrapped around me - around the arms and neck, so I couldn't easily respond - and it was going in for the kill, it would absolutely be able to crush the life out of me.

Again, no cheating. No tools. Biology versus biology. These animals are predators - their bodies are naturally designed to kill.

Humans are the top farmers on this planet at the moment. We used our smarts to side-step the problem of being a bit shit, biologically speaking. We cheated by thinking our way around these problems, exactly so that we didn't have to be vicious predators and the fact that we're clearly not, biologically, didn't pose an impediment to us.

But, by all means, if you think you're actually a one-on-one match for a bear or a wolf or a tiger then, please, put that theory to the test and post the footage on YouTube.

You can trust people, but the backstabbers will get you, probably even if you trust no-one.

Who said anything about trust?

"Enlightened self-interest", my friend. You don't have to like or trust a single one of us - just recognise that, when the tribe does well, we all prosper. And that if another tribe attacks, then having a million well-fed and well-armed colleagues is better than having 3 homeless bums, armed with one spoon between them, who're all half staving to death. If we live in a world of abundance then none of us has to worry about our basic survival ever again.

I'm not asking you to marry or even like the human race. Just recognise we get more shit done collectively, with ease, that would take lone individuals several lifetimes to achieve on their own.

Again, don't look at the competition between companies, but look at the immense cooperation inside of a company. It's internally almost Communist - I don't own my work laptop, nor any of the employees the office we work in nor the equipment in the office. It's all communal property for the purposes of the company making an external profit.

The football game might be a fierce competition, but the football players, who're all wearing the same colour jerseys, are all working together, as a team, to win. If they started turning on each other, within the team, then the other team will make mincemeat of them within seconds.

[zip accident]

We are not shit hunters.

No, honestly. We really are. We cheat like buggery, using tools or other animals, to make up for our obvious massive biological deficiencies.

What you call cheating, natural selection calls surviving.

We, like wolves, can run down anything.

Okay, as you've left an obvious open goal there, run down a wolf.

Pedantry will win you nothing.

And, remember, no cheating. If you catch up to that wolf and somehow outsmart it away from its pack - who will collectively defend it because, as you're failing to pick up, social cohesion is a clear survival advantage - so it's on its lonesome, then you've got to kill it with your bare hands.

No tools.

Why not ask for no eyes? Humans have been using weapons for two million years. Tool use is what we do, it's who we are, saying no tools is stupid. Our arms have evolved for throwing, Chimps have more strength because the lever works better for them that way, they can throw a half brick further than we can, but we will hit a small target at greater range more often. Which pays off for us because KE = mv^2.

In a sprint, any gazelle can escape us, in two sprints, any gazelle can escape us twice. In two dozen sprints, we will kill any identified gazelle.

Well, that's hardly an energy efficient way to go about things.

(And energy does matter, as that's the whole point of killing things and eating them in the first place, of course.)

That's really not the description of a predator. That's the description of a formerly nomadic species that's learnt the wisdom of a determined patience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

Humans are some of the best long distance runners in the animal kingdom;[6] some hunter gatherer tribes practice this form of hunting into the modern era.

...

Other mammals

Wolves,[16][17] dingoes,[18] and painted dogs are known for running large prey down over long distances.

[SuperMappy]

Enough of this serious chat, let's get back to the idiots:



All this freaking genius had to do was check who the names really belong to, donations are public record if I remember correctly. This country is just fucked in the head! The fact she is a black female has zero to do with it. If it was a white male I would still think the same way.

" I never said it was 'that' Jeffrey Epstein ". Give me a huge, massive break lady!

[Harlequin]

All this freaking genius had to do was check who the names really belong to, donations are public record if I remember correctly. This country is just fucked in the head! The fact she is a black female has zero to do with it. If it was a white male I would still think the same way.

" I never said it was 'that' Jeffrey Epstein ". Give me a huge, massive break lady!

To be fair, she did state from the beginning that her list was of people "who also took money from somebody named Jeffery Epstein" "as I had my team dig in very quickly". I assume the digging was probably into those very same public records via a search engine.

I do not consider anything she said in that clip to be intentionally misleading. What might be, however, is her reading the list out at all. It seems about as relevant as listing all the people named J Vance who were in the U.S. when the WTC fell.

I am wondering if those commentators may be interpreting her words via a Trump filter, through which phrases like "somebody you might know by the name of" or "a little thing that exists I like to call" are just extraneous redundant noise emitted as the fat emperor awaits the realignment of his brain cogs.

[SuperMappy]

To be fair, she did state from the beginning that her list was of people "who also took money from somebody named Jeffery Epstein" "as I had my team dig in very quickly". I assume the digging was probably into those very same public records via a search engine.

True, but what's the point of practically yelling about it if it wasn't "that" Jeffery Epstein? If what you are saying is true then, IMHO, she's hoping to spread misinformation.

I like to reiterate that I didn't vote for Trump and I am not defending anyone, I just think this country is on a straight line to hell.

[F-ZeroOne]

Well, looks like Trump may be about to sell Ukraine down the river. Without consulting Ukraine or his European allies - well, okay, one of them he talked to, the rest of Europe that didn't launch a "special military operation" can go hang apparently.