Cognitive Thrift 64 – Jocks vs. Nerds
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’ve talked a lot in this particular interview. We’ve talked about a new field or discipline called cognitive economics or cognitive thrift. One of the themes you have brought to the fore with evolutionary history and human history is ‘jocks vs. nerds,’ which seems to reflect high school experiences. Can you elaborate?
Rick Rosner: I was born in the 60s. I was going to high school in the 70s, back then it is junior high and high school in the 70s. Back then, nerds were seriously socially handicapped by being nerds. Jocks were super cool. I wanted to be super cool and I did a lot of thinking about how to be, and failing at trying to be, and resenting that people couldn’t see my inner qualities.
Basically, I was every kid in every freakin’ John Hughes movie and high school movie in the 70s about the sensitive kids that wins the girl because of his inner qualities, which is not the way it works at least in the 70s.
Anyway, the dynamic seems to be one that is reflected in and rooted in game theory seems to be a running theme throughout the history of life. Where stable behavior, the fit organisms in stable niches are rewarded for standard behavior, and organisms less fit, less fit organisms, or organisms less fit at changing niches in order to go for any kind of payout have to go for the gamble of aberrant behavior or divergent behavior, different behavior.
And standard behavior is cognitively compact. Everything’s been worked out or most things have been worked out, and it doesn’t take as much thinking as effective divergent behavior and thinking. Divergent different behavior is a risk, which means that it’s only for the desperate. For less fit organisms, gambling on a new way to get what they need or organisms under pressure, niche pressure.
But over all of evolutionary history, organisms will develop some capacity for flexibility of thought and behavior. That kind of pressure shows up too much. The pressure to change for organisms not to have or not to develop the ability to change. Eventually, you get to primates and us, who have embraced cognition and change as a niche of its own.
Where we’re free to look for regularity, exploitable regularity wherever we can find it. In early evolutionary history, divergent thinking is on a very small, almost non-existent scale, and it may not or probably does not work that well most of the time, but now we are creatures who niche is based on constantly changing our minds.
I want to note that the writer George Saunders had the same idea at the expression of joy at information gained at little expense. Same as I, not that I’m stealing from him. It’s just that we came up with the same idea. He should be cited for that.
Another point is the idea that appropriate stress. One possible reaction of stress in an organism, especially a higher organism is higher thought. Things, if you’re under pressure and standard behaviour hasn’t worked, it may make or we may have or evolved creatures may have tendencies to think more fluidly, where standard behavior is the default mode, but the default mode under stress is not working is fluid behavior and thought.
One very iffy clue is life supposedly passes in front of your eyes when you’re in mortal danger. I don’t know how well substantiated that is, but perhaps if true that that is some kind of desperate last ditch information dump that you might be able to pull anything or something out of that to save yourself when nothing seems to be working, or it can be seen as the extreme expression of – if normal stress unlocks locked up thought then maybe extreme stress unlocks everything.
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