- Jan 2024
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Local file Local file
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The systems involvedare complex, involving interaction among and feedback between manyparts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are diffi-cult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved.
Perhaps the evolution to solve AI-resistance (mentioned in https://hypothes.is/a/-JjZurr3Ee6EtG8G_Sbt8Q) won't be done at the level of the individual human genome, but will be done at the human society level genome.
Political groups of people have an internal memetic genome which can evolve and change over time much more quickly than the individual human's genes would work.
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- Apr 2022
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Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.
Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".
Explore this area more deeply.
Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?
How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?
What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?
What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?
What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?
total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?
Tags
- hypercycle
- culture
- comparative anthropology
- group think
- evolution
- anthropology
- imitation > innovation
- Joseph Henrich
- anti-intellectualism
- relationships
- evolution spirals
- follow the herd
- anti-science
- urban vs. rural
- imitation
- anti-vaccines
- spatial relationships
- city vs. town
- identity
- human evolution
- Big History
- WEIRD
Annotators
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- May 2021
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journals.plos.org journals.plos.org
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Systems for encoding, transmission, and protection of essential knowledge for group survival and cohesion were developed by multiple cultures long before the advent of alphabetic writing.
Focusing in on the phrase:
essential knowledge for group survival
makes me wonder if we haven't evolutionarily primed ourselves to use knowledge and group knowledge in particular to create group cohesion and therefor survival?
Cross reference: https://hyp.is/LWtjtLhjEeuTqHPwUUMUbA/threadreaderapp.com/thread/1381933685713289216.html and the paper https://www.academia.edu/46814693/The_Signaling_Function_of_Sharing_Fake_Stories
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