[HN Gopher] Against Automaticity ___________________________________________________________________ Against Automaticity Author : simonsarris Score : 36 points Date : 2023-08-22 18:39 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (carcinisation.com) (TXT) w3m dump (carcinisation.com) | munificent wrote: | I think the huge blindspot in American understanding of human | behavior is individualism, the idea that you there is a model of | human behavior that makes sense in some complete way even if that | human were living perpetually alone on and island. | | To me, that's like trying to understand a single worker ant | without knowing anything about ant colonies. How can this | creature be sterile yet survive as a species? Why is it | constantly gathering food it does not eat? How does it defend | itself from predators? | | So much of human behavior that is perplexing or seemingly | irrational makes obvious sense once you consider that humans are | a species that evolved to live in an environment primarily made | of _other humans_ , some of whom are friend and some of whom are | foe. And, further, a species that _can 't survive_ without a | tribe of friends, and whose greatest threat to survival is | members of other tribes. And, most vexing of all, a species where | distinguishing friend or foe is next to impossible just from | surface attributes. | | Once you imagine the evolutionary pressure of a species in that | environment, a whole lot of human behavior falls into place. | delocalized wrote: | I appreciate the flaws pointed out in specific studies in this | article, but the detour into phenomenology at the end (a | philosophy on the subjectiveness of reality) gave me a bit of | whiplash. It seems that the author here writes "we are not so | irrational that a little nudge suddenly changes our whole | character" and derives "so everyone's own reality is their | definition of rational." | | A more logical antecedent in my opinion is "we are influenced | mostly by concrete priors, rather than minute nudges in | behavior." | Vecr wrote: | If I accept everything about the studies in here, that really | only means people can be rational if they try to be and in put in | the effort to get the right information for what they want to do. | That's also limited by what you can remember to think about at | the time or successfully encode into plans and notes. The problem | is, lots of people don't put major effort into doing so. They | drink alcohol, they get addicted to opiates, they have massively | high time preferences (possibly due to previously mentioned), and | they take massive risks. People may generally be rational, but | running up to someone you think is insulting you, attacking them, | and having no escape plan is probably not helpful for achieving | your goals, but a lot of people do it every day. | Tao3300 wrote: | > An important motivation of the rationalist movement, as I saw | it, was that we were all very irrational beings, and had to | struggle to become more rational. My argument in this essay is | that we are actually very rational, but managed to convince | ourselves, for a variety of (perfectly rational) reasons using a | variety of tactics, that we were helpless idiots. | | Exactly my reaction when I saw how much energy LessWrong wasted | on _Torture vs. Dust Specks_. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-08-23 23:00 UTC)