[HN Gopher] Against Automaticity
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Against Automaticity
        
       Author : simonsarris
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2023-08-22 18:39 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (carcinisation.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (carcinisation.com)
        
       | munificent wrote:
       | I think the huge blindspot in American understanding of human
       | behavior is individualism, the idea that you there is a model of
       | human behavior that makes sense in some complete way even if that
       | human were living perpetually alone on and island.
       | 
       | To me, that's like trying to understand a single worker ant
       | without knowing anything about ant colonies. How can this
       | creature be sterile yet survive as a species? Why is it
       | constantly gathering food it does not eat? How does it defend
       | itself from predators?
       | 
       | So much of human behavior that is perplexing or seemingly
       | irrational makes obvious sense once you consider that humans are
       | a species that evolved to live in an environment primarily made
       | of _other humans_ , some of whom are friend and some of whom are
       | foe. And, further, a species that _can 't survive_ without a
       | tribe of friends, and whose greatest threat to survival is
       | members of other tribes. And, most vexing of all, a species where
       | distinguishing friend or foe is next to impossible just from
       | surface attributes.
       | 
       | Once you imagine the evolutionary pressure of a species in that
       | environment, a whole lot of human behavior falls into place.
        
       | delocalized wrote:
       | I appreciate the flaws pointed out in specific studies in this
       | article, but the detour into phenomenology at the end (a
       | philosophy on the subjectiveness of reality) gave me a bit of
       | whiplash. It seems that the author here writes "we are not so
       | irrational that a little nudge suddenly changes our whole
       | character" and derives "so everyone's own reality is their
       | definition of rational."
       | 
       | A more logical antecedent in my opinion is "we are influenced
       | mostly by concrete priors, rather than minute nudges in
       | behavior."
        
       | Vecr wrote:
       | If I accept everything about the studies in here, that really
       | only means people can be rational if they try to be and in put in
       | the effort to get the right information for what they want to do.
       | That's also limited by what you can remember to think about at
       | the time or successfully encode into plans and notes. The problem
       | is, lots of people don't put major effort into doing so. They
       | drink alcohol, they get addicted to opiates, they have massively
       | high time preferences (possibly due to previously mentioned), and
       | they take massive risks. People may generally be rational, but
       | running up to someone you think is insulting you, attacking them,
       | and having no escape plan is probably not helpful for achieving
       | your goals, but a lot of people do it every day.
        
       | Tao3300 wrote:
       | > An important motivation of the rationalist movement, as I saw
       | it, was that we were all very irrational beings, and had to
       | struggle to become more rational. My argument in this essay is
       | that we are actually very rational, but managed to convince
       | ourselves, for a variety of (perfectly rational) reasons using a
       | variety of tactics, that we were helpless idiots.
       | 
       | Exactly my reaction when I saw how much energy LessWrong wasted
       | on _Torture vs. Dust Specks_.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-08-23 23:00 UTC)