A memo to myself last week on this topic: people—even smart ones—still have trouble wrangling the implications of natural selection.

Natural selection does not mean survival of the fittest. It means survival of the good enough.

There was more to it than that, but funnily enough, there's this part:

Dan Luu writes of Twitter and companies generally that they should continue to hire so long as it makes financial sense, and what makes financial sense is defined by an equation where savings at the margin is one component

Understanding this is important, not just for the reasons that Dan mentions in the linked ("I could do that in a weekend!") piece, but because it gives companies a budget for inefficiency.

Companies can make non-optimal decisions. (Deleterious ones, even.a^1 a^2)

Instant death is not really a thing, although most misunderstandings demand that it is (as in the case of the parable of the "non-existent" 20-dollar bill). This is the timeless fallacy.

When i was working this into a starter for a potential standalone piece, i drafted the following passage, hoping to use it as an intro:

This is not a piece about biology. It is not even a piece about humans' understanding of biology. It is a piece about humans and humans' inability to grapple with particularly counterintuitive concepts (like natural selection).

i also jotted down the phrase "cognitive fluency".

This commenter is committing what I call "the timeless fallacy". It's not that far off from people who don't "get" evolution by natural selection—which is odd, because most of the people who commit the timeless fallacy in venues like this almost certainly do understand it.