Cognitive Thrift 54 – Calories
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How?
Rosner: To keep it simple, you’re looking for calories. If you’re going off and looking for things that are not in your regular niche or things that not your usual prey, you may fail.
Jacobsen: We evolved to like simple sugars, and fats, because they are calorie dense as opposed to fibers, protein, and slow-burning carbohydrates (complex carbohydrates).
Rosner: Yea, and we evolved to like sugars and fats because they are calorie packed foods, where for most of human history and pre-history calories were relatively scarce, and so we developed a preference for high calorie foods.
Prehistoric people were not running around looking for more and more celery because I think you burn more calories eating celery than you take in, and so we didn’t love celery, but we might love a tree full of apricots where there are a lot of easy calories available.
If you’re doing divergent behavior, it may not pay off. You’re engaging in novel behavior that is untested in the world and the world was not designed for your benefit, and so whatever you are doing might be wrong.
Another cost is misperception, which you’re taking a kind of a step before you even get to thought and strategies you do have to do some preprocessing based on and you have to understand kind of what you’re going to be thinking about.
So if you – there are different levels of understanding the world. You can understand it super analytically, but if you don’t even understand it in terms of sensory perception, then your chances of being correct in what you’re trying to do are even more limited.
You have to be able to think accurately, and think effectively, and odds are lower because standard behavior has been proven to work across hundreds of generations and thousands of years and you’re trying to come up with new stuff and you’re less likely to succeed.
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