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Carrion Luggage #1096000 added August 27, 2025 at 10:10am
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It's Not What You Think
From MIT Press Reader, an article with a title that caught my attention without being overly clickbaity.
It is, fair warning, a book ad. As I've repeated numerous times, though I hate ads, I tolerate movie ads before movies and book ads on a site devoted to writers and readers.
Now, before I get into the text of the article, I want to try to explain why the picture in the header pissed me off. To understand what I'm saying, you'd have to click on the link to view the picture; embedding it here would be too much work.
In brief, the photo's a take on the famous March of Progress  artwork, which has, in fairness, been parodied quite a lot in the 60 years since its creation. At the "head of the pack," as it were, is a dude immersed in his mobile phone.
I did say the illustration is 60 years old. In those 60 years, we have learned a great deal about evolution in general, and human evolution in particular. We have learned enough to render that illustration obsolete. So the first part of what pisses me off is that, apparently, people still see human evolution as a linear path, which it absolutely was (and is) not.
The second thing that annoys me about it is that it seems to be mocking the idea of "ascension" (which, again, has been refuted by science) by the cell-phone guy assuming a posture similar to one of humanity's ancestors. This, of course, ignores all of the great human achievements that enabled the production of mobile phones in the first place. Okay, fine, I get mocking things; I do it quite a lot. But the implication, at least in my interpretation, is that we're "devolving," which is utter nonsense, as evolution doesn't have a direction.
And, finally, I'm goddamn sick and tired of people complaining about other people using their phones. Okay, sure, if someone's carrying on a loud conversation on one in a public place, or watching TokTik without an earpiece, complain away. But a person absorbed in what they're doing has no obligation to look at you, or even acknowledge your presence, so leave them in peace.
Whew. Anyway.
The article doesn't start out by improving my mood:
We have long regarded humans as the most rational of animals.
Snort.
But as polymath Bertrand Russell noted, we spend our lives looking for evidence of that claim and find little.
The relevant thing about Russell wasn't that he was a polymath (though that's cool). The relevant thing is that he devoted a huge chunk of his life attempting to discover a self-contained logical system, one in which everything can be explained back to first principles (the "first principles" in this case apparently echoed Descartes' philosophy of the reality of one's consciousness). In the process, he discovered that no such meaningful logical system exists, or can exist. So, my take on this? No, we're not rational. We cannot be rational.
We blame others for our mistakes, rationalize after the fact, and make impulsive choices even when patience would yield better rewards.
Well, whose fault is that? Certainly not mine.
Also, while it may sometimes be true that patience can yield better rewards, humans tend to die at an alarming rate, and what's the point of waiting for something maybe-better when you could get hit by falling space debris tonight?
Some behavioral imperfections appear uniquely human. One is what the evolutionist Bill Hamilton referred to as the nonadaptive strategy of malevolence: harming others with no form of benefit for oneself.
Like many things that we once thought were "uniquely human," I'm pretty sure some nonhuman animals do that, too. It's just that we don't know as much about their motivations, so we can't say for sure.
After all, only humans insult strangers online or back incompetent leaders out of blind loyalty.
Despite what some might believe, the reason "only humans insult strangers online" is that there are only two kinds of entities online: humans, and human-programmed scripts.
Though we behave like know-it-alls, we are easily manipulated and taken in by charlatans of all kinds.
Overly generalized.
We prefer a product that is 80 percent lean to one that is 20 percent fat, and an unnecessary item that costs $9.99 seems cheaper than one that costs $10.
My all-time favorite example of that is when a fast food chain came out with a 1/3-pound burger at the same price as a quarter-pounder. Turned out people didn't want to pay the same price for less meat. Yes, I meant to type that; they honestly thought 1/3 was less than 1/4, because 3 is less than 4, and "why do I have to learn this math stuff that I'll never use?" I didn't believe it myself, at first, but then I looked it up, and it seems that's really what happened (though I suspect there was a secondary effect caused by "quarter pounder" being a much more fun thing to say than "one-third pound burger").
We are willing to get into our cars, stand in lines for hours, and squish into horrendous shopping centers to save a pittance on a special offer for snacks dripping with sugar and fat.
Oh, fuck right off with that "we" bullshit. Not all of us do that. Come on, I'd only do that for a special release of beer.
The article devolves (pun intended) into a questionable abyss of evolutionary psychology, during which:
A great deal of the data from developmental psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience confirms that, for adaptive reasons that no longer exist, our minds have evolved a strong tendency to distinguish between inert entities, such as physical objects, and entities of a psychological nature, like animate agents. We thus are dualists and animists by nature. As a result, we attribute purposes and intentions to things, even when none exist, and imagine hidden motives and conspiracies where there are none. For us, stories always have a purpose, which can be evident or hidden.
This is not the sick burn some might think it is.
We are, in short, belief machines, and we manufacture a lot of those beliefs. And when belief comforts us or helps us make sense of a chaotic world, we cling to it, no matter how irrational. We’re even willing to endure ridicule, as in the case of flat-earthers who set out on a cruise to reach the ends of the earth.
Thus is the article title explained. I'd been wondering about that.
The rest of the article/ad/excerpt is fairly brief, and I've already taken up too much space on this. In summary, two things:
1) I wouldn't take anything here as absolute fact;
2) I've come to the conclusion that humanity is neither good nor evil, but we contain multitudes of both with everything in between;
3) No, I'm not always rational or logical, like when I expect to have two things in a summary and end up with three. |
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