Cognitive Thrift 44 – Dynamic Non-Mechanistic Machines
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That comprehension is based on us as dynamic non-mechanistic machines rather than some spiritual thing.
Rick Rosner: Generally, yea! The spiritual understanding has its place, but in terms of living longer it helps to have medical understanding of expertise.
As we living longer, our tolerance for risk goes down, and it’s probably better for a low-risk and tolerant society that you have fewer assholes in charge, but if you go back to WWII where you need a bunch of risk takers. A bunch of bold – you have existential threats in the form of Nazis that want to kill or enslave everyone who doesn’t fit a certain genetic profile or racial profile.
You need people who are going to blow up bridges where Nazi trains are going to cross, and you need people to join the resistance, and to contain Hitler for WWII. You reach the point where you need 1,000s of guys to storm the beach and the hell blown out of them.
And you get more guys. I’m sure more women could have done it too, but things were set up that way then to drive 100s of miles to work their way across Europe, and getting blown up along the way to eventually reach Hitler’s bunker.
So, I’m sure a lot of the guys…
I imagine an evolutionary sheriff that is kind of lazy and people come in to complain about there are gay people and trans people and it goes against nature, and if you look at the history of humanity and other animals.
Humanity seems to be doing fine reproductively. People have different sexual orientations. Historically, the Romans had boyfriends and girlfriends until the 19th century there really much of an idea of homosexuality.
People, and so I think things are fine the way they are, and he goes back to looking at a magazine. We were also talking about boldness and intrepidness and assholery. Historically versus now with lower risk tolerance.
People talk about going back in time to kill Hitler and you got to wonder. Is it better to kill Hitler or put a bomb in his neck and say that he’s a good way – he’s got a good handle on the German people in the 30s and he’s a terrible guy. Maybe, you cure his syphilis so he doesn’t go as crazy as he eventually goes.
You say that as long as you don’t go about the genocide of the Jews, or if you do and about anyone that you don’t like we will blow the bomb up in your neck. We’ll make good on some of the oppressive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles and you can lead the German people, but just not towards genocide and oblivion.
People tried to appease Hitler. Chamberlain, they believe him when he said he wouldn’t take over Europe. He lied and did it. That doesn’t mean that – the takeover of Europe required bold action that killed tens of millions of people, except if you look at superheroes and the culture is built around superheroes now.
People are just starting to notice that superheroes are by their bold action causing a lot of collateral damage. Much of what – it’s not that super, much of the time superheroes are not saving the world they are stopping other superheroes or other supervillains from messing up the world.
Heroes was a very frustrating American TV show where the heroes didn’t do any saving of the world. They only fought other heroes and stopped them from wrecking the world or killing other heroes – so bold and intrepid action has kind of a history both in reality and in pop culture of causing a lot of damage. And we may end up moving increasingly away from it as our lifespans go up and we learn more about how to work around our – some of our – evolved aggression.
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