Wednesday, 18 September 2019

How do people learn to cook a toxic plant safely?

quote [ And humans ritualistically copy in a way that chimps do not. Psychologists call this over-imitation.

It may seem like the chimps are the smart ones here. But if you are processing cassava roots, over-imitation is exactly what you should be doing. ]

You'll eventually get there by not dying!
[SFW] [environment & nature] [+4 Insightful]
[by Paracetamol@7:49pmGMT]

Comments

Franger Sanger said @ 6:48am GMT on 19th Sep [Score:2]
The always-excellent blog Slate Star Codex examined the cultural value of imitation in a lot more depth in this post reviewing a book-length study of cultural evolution. The article's great, and unlike the entire rest of the internet (SE excluded) the comments are even better. There's a wealth of interesting thoughts and data to be found there about how collective intelligence is inherently conservative. This makes it highly reliable but also resistant to change, and thus many facets of cultural knowledge keep being imitated long after they start failing due to wide-level economic or social changes. Evolution is often too slow in the modern globally connected world.

I think this is the danger of cultural evolution theory. Successes are easy to identify while failures aren't also seen as a by-product of imitation and traditionalism. With humans so hotwired to staunchly defend inherited behaviours, this leads to harmful or even violent resistance to novel behaviours that adapt to faster paced socioeconomic changes. Those who become disenfranchised by cultural knowledge's slowness to evolve then get told by conservative thinkers that their problems are their own fault, and that doubling down on the failing cultural behaviours is the only solution. Ignorance adds insult to injury.

The most effective antidote to cultural evolution when it turns toxic is the scientific method, one of cultural evolution's finest achievements. Creating new knowledge using data and rigorous testing is like a quantum superpower. It can bypass a thousand generations of evolution by running a thousand parallel simulations at once rather than relying on the single test tube that is a society.

tl;dr ->
You still have to jack off a horse like your forefathers did, but do it a thousand times and you'll figure out how to get the horses to take matters into their own hooves. Your descendants will enjoy self-stimulating equines while also knowing where to stand to avoid the continuous semen explosions.
Paracetamol said @ 6:35am GMT on 20th Sep
Well, looks like you put more work and thought in your comment than I did on the original post!

I call for +1 trigger mods.
Franger Sanger said @ 7:10am GMT on 20th Sep
The Slate Star Codex post primed my thoughts, but your post pulled the trigger.

I like the idea of yelling "TRIGGERED!" at someone because you've made them think for a bit and then engage in rational discourse. We'd need a corresponding trigger warning:

*WARNING* contains ideas that may activate long-dormant frontal lobes, causing increased civility that is incompatible with tweetlong brainfarts.
Paracetamol said @ 6:18pm GMT on 20th Sep
Thinking about this a little longer, some sort of positive Flamebait mod, like +1 Discussion might suffice. People would mark cool threads this way. But who knows what a tool like this could become in the hands of the enemy?
rylex said @ 8:30pm GMT on 18th Sep
so we were born to be robots and mindlessly repeat without understanding. good to know, this explains why everyone I work with seems to be borderline retarded
Hugh E. said @ 2:27am GMT on 19th Sep
You'll eventually get there by not dying!
Unless you believe in an afterlife, isn't that true for, well, everything?

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