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Ways to do these things have been around for decades, but it's not in the interest of the producers of homes and employers to do them. Look into some of the in

by fnid2 16y ago

Ways to do these things have been around for decades, but it's not in the interest of the producers of homes and employers to do them. Look into some of the inventions by R. Buckminster Fuller. He invented a house that cost thousands, easily transported, made of aluminum, and sturdy, but it never caught on. Probably because he didn't spend time marketing it, but the mobile home and large home manufacturing companies did. Evolution contradicts the desire for smaller. Consider Peacock tails, the longer they are and the fuller they are, the more likely they are to mate, because peahens like them -- even though rationally, they increase the likelihood of death to predator. Turns out the offspring are in fact stronger, because it takes a lot of strength to maintain those long tails. Similarly, it takes a lot of "strength" to maintain a large expensive home and accumulate a lot of unnecessary stuff and the chicks dig it. A guy with a fast car, excessive spending, and flashy clothes will go home from the bar with a girl before the geek with meek clothes and spending way below his means -- even if he is 1000x smarter than the flashy guy. It simply takes too long to evaluate intelligence and that increased time to analyze the male by the female means the males could die. Thus, it is a mathematical certainty that the world will continue towards excessive shows of strength rather than the rational conservative opinion that leads to storage of wealth -- which usually only happens after a mate is found. tl;dr -- The world will continue getting dumber.

nopassrecover 16y ago
I agree with everything you say but question "it simply takes too long to evaluate intelligence". It's not like we are house flies with a day to find a mate. I think maybe the problem is intelligence (and other characteristics) are often hard to evaluate. Added to this, the intelligent meek geek isn't getting the girl because he isn't bold, but cognitive dissonance convinces him that there must be something wrong with the selection process, not himself.
- caffeine 16y ago
  We share common ancestors with houseflies who have a day to find a mate. We were at one point small furry proto-mammals who mated almost exclusively by smell and aggressiveness. It no longer takes too long to evaluate intelligence. But when our mate evaluation systems were being designed, there were fewer available dimensions to optimize over. A woman's opinion of a man's smell still correlates strongly with both her menstrual phase and their mutual genetic suitability.
  - nopassrecover 16y ago
    On the other hand, attraction to flaunted success doesn't seem like it would have very strong evolutionary roots.
theorique 16y ago
"A guy with a fast car, excessive spending, and flashy clothes will go home from the bar with a girl before the geek with meek clothes and spending way below his means -- even if he is 1000x smarter than the flashy guy. It simply takes too long to evaluate intelligence and that increased time to analyze the male by the female means the males could die." This presupposes that women are selecting specifically for intelligence - or, said slightly differently, that maximizing (rather than merely satisficing) for intelligence is a better evolutionary strategy. Is that true in practice?
- fnid2 16y ago
  Some women are selecting for intelligence, but they are rarer and more difficult to find and the increased acquisition costs also reduce the probability of creating offspring. When the law of large numbers takes over, it's all probabilities. Consider life itself, which are more numerous: Intelligent species or unintelligent species? The same math applies to the human species itself.
- Psyonic 16y ago
  Women heavily select for intelligence when choosing egg donors. Eggs from high SAT donors go for many times more than normal. Then again, choosing an egg donor is much more cerebral than choosing a man. Not nearly as hormonal as sex.
ajj 16y ago
"It simply takes too long to evaluate intelligence...". True. But even if intelligence is evaluated, it might not be in the interest of the female to go with the most intelligent mate. What she prioritizes will be a combination of wealth, smartness, and other factors that will make her happy and her offspring "fitter", obviously often in a subconscious way. Btw, I agree with all you are saying. I just thought I should support it, since even evaluating that someone is intelligent in our definition does not necessarily make them a good mate in the evolutionary sense.
joeyo 16y ago
Evolution contradicts the desire for smaller. This is not strictly speaking true. There are ecosystems that favor smaller animals/traits. Islands, for example.
hugh3 16y ago
Look into some of the inventions by R. Buckminster Fuller. He invented a house that cost thousands, easily transported, made of aluminum, and sturdy, but it never caught on. Probably because he didn't spend time marketing it, but the mobile home and large home manufacturing companies did. Or else it didn't catch on because people didn't like living in them. I assume you're talking about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house Evolution contradicts the desire for smaller. Consider Peacock tails, the longer they are and the fuller they are, the more likely they are to mate, because peahens like them -- even though rationally, they increase the likelihood of death to predator. This kind of crazy peacock behaviour is the exception rather than the rule among animals, though, which is why peacocks are so noteworthy. If pigeons had vast feathered tails too you might have a point. Similarly, it takes a lot of "strength" to maintain a large expensive home and accumulate a lot of unnecessary stuff and the chicks dig it. A guy with a fast car, excessive spending, and flashy clothes will go home from the bar with a girl before the geek with meek clothes and spending way below his means -- even if he is 1000x smarter than the flashy guy. You sound very convinced that intelligence is what women should be selecting for, rather than being one of many traits that is nice to have in a potential partner. Personally I'd work hard to live in a big fancy house and drive a cool fast car even if there were no women in the world, because I just like 'em.
- Psyonic 16y ago
  At least you think you would. I'm not saying you're wrong, or that I know you better than you know yourself (I definitely don't), but sometimes its hard to separate what you "like" from what is culturally sexually driven. Or rephrased, why do you like them? How did that come to pass? They came from the culture, which values them for reasons that benefit sexual reproduction, etc. If that wasn't an issue, society likely wouldn't value them, they'd stop being a status symbol, and you may no longer "just like them." We all like to think our personal likes and desires are entirely our own creation, but this is a fantasy. Edit: the fast car you still might like, as it has utility (getting places quickly), but a house beyond a reasonable size has little utility beyond status.
- jaytee_clone 16y ago
  "Personally I'd work hard to live in a big fancy house and drive a cool fast car even if there were no women in the world, because I just like 'em." Why yes, isn't that a great design? You don't even need to rationalize about what attracts a mate, you just like to do it by default, and most women just happen to be attracted to that by default also. Certainly your chance of reproducing and passing down these default settings will be much greater than someone who has to rationalize about attractions, don't you think?
uspatentpending 16y ago
tl;dr -- Evolutionary forces are far more complex and do not always select for strength over intelligence. Evolution != bigger && stronger. If this were true, why aren't there still brontosaurus-sized creatures on land? The truth is evolution selects the best adaptation for the specific ecosystem. Depending on the ecosystem, this could mean all sorts of adaptations, including more advanced intelligence and less advanced physical prowess, which is what happened with humans. Your assertion that it takes too much time to evaluate intelligence is also not realistic. People spend years selecting mates, and there is nothing wrong with this. The average lifespan is 72-76 years and a good portion of that is fertile. We have plenty of time to select a mate and still have children to progress the genes.
- giantfuzzypanda 16y ago
  > The truth is evolution selects the best adaptation for the specific ecosystem. Evolution is completely random.
  - run4yourlives 16y ago
    No it isn't. Where did you get this idea?
domokun 16y ago
I don't think evolution has a whole lot to do with this. Evolution takes place on a much longer time frame, so we're mostly talking about cultural norms here. Furthermore, whatever "trait" leads to accumulating sports cars and mcmansions is not heritable. There's something called the Matching Hypothesis in sociology that basically says people end up pairing with those on the same "level" (in whichever way that person's culture defines status). i.e. an 8 takes home an 8-ish from the bar, or rich guy gets supermodel. But most everyone ends up matching up with some one else, and flashy-guy isn't improving his gene pool by mating with brain-dead hottie, so I don't think nature is the culprit here. (However, less educated (for simplicity, let's equate that to less intelligent) people do have a higher birth rate. So the world is getting dumber, but for different reasons! :) ) @euro, we need to work on changing cultural norms (more education, more sustainability, less consumerism) like you suggest in order to better the world.
- kevinelliott 16y ago
  And how can we communicate the desire for more education, more sustainability, less consumerism in order to better the world without reeking of progressive utopianism in our message? Sincerely doing this may very well benefit society and allow us to focus on the really amazing progressions in society and technology (like space colonization), but it's going to upset a whole lot of people who have invested time, money and energy to protect their anti-progressive infrastructures along the way. I'd very much like to see us focusing on improvement of our societal and economical infrastructures (education, sustainability, personal growth, pursuit of happiness and purpose, medical & technological advancement, etc) than to stay victims of our "evil" infrastructures (overly influential political lobbyism, corporate en-slavery of its workforce, and greed/thirst for financial domination). But this isn't something that can happen until there are several societal shifts, and perhaps some cultural memory loss. (Please note that my use of progressive and anti-progressive are apolitical references and should not represent actual values of political parties or interests!)
  - realitygrill 16y ago
    someone needs to study how to hack memetics
jaytee_clone 16y ago
The world will continue getting dumber... until we re-program our genes so that we won't perceive excess as attractive... We can also improve a few other human limitations such as keeping meaningful relationships with more than 150 people. It's hard but it will happen eventually, or our species will die out before we get there, who knows.
mkramlich 16y ago
"The world will continue getting dumber." on same topic: recommend you see the movie Idiocracy

by fnid2 16y ago

nopassrecover 16y ago

I agree with everything you say but question "it simply takes too long to evaluate intelligence". It's not like we are house flies with a day to find a mate. I think maybe the problem is intelligence (and other characteristics) are often hard to evaluate. Added to this, the intelligent meek geek isn't getting the girl because he isn't bold, but cognitive dissonance convinces him that there must be something wrong with the selection process, not himself.

caffeine 16y ago
We share common ancestors with houseflies who have a day to find a mate. We were at one point small furry proto-mammals who mated almost exclusively by smell and aggressiveness. It no longer takes too long to evaluate intelligence. But when our mate evaluation systems were being designed, there were fewer available dimensions to optimize over. A woman's opinion of a man's smell still correlates strongly with both her menstrual phase and their mutual genetic suitability.
- nopassrecover 16y ago
  On the other hand, attraction to flaunted success doesn't seem like it would have very strong evolutionary roots.

theorique 16y ago

"A guy with a fast car, excessive spending, and flashy clothes will go home from the bar with a girl before the geek with meek clothes and spending way below his means -- even if he is 1000x smarter than the flashy guy. It simply takes too long to evaluate intelligence and that increased time to analyze the male by the female means the males could die." This presupposes that women are selecting specifically for intelligence - or, said slightly differently, that maximizing (rather than merely satisficing) for intelligence is a better evolutionary strategy. Is that true in practice?

fnid2 16y ago
Some women are selecting for intelligence, but they are rarer and more difficult to find and the increased acquisition costs also reduce the probability of creating offspring. When the law of large numbers takes over, it's all probabilities. Consider life itself, which are more numerous: Intelligent species or unintelligent species? The same math applies to the human species itself.
Psyonic 16y ago
Women heavily select for intelligence when choosing egg donors. Eggs from high SAT donors go for many times more than normal. Then again, choosing an egg donor is much more cerebral than choosing a man. Not nearly as hormonal as sex.

ajj 16y ago

"It simply takes too long to evaluate intelligence...". True. But even if intelligence is evaluated, it might not be in the interest of the female to go with the most intelligent mate. What she prioritizes will be a combination of wealth, smartness, and other factors that will make her happy and her offspring "fitter", obviously often in a subconscious way. Btw, I agree with all you are saying. I just thought I should support it, since even evaluating that someone is intelligent in our definition does not necessarily make them a good mate in the evolutionary sense.

joeyo 16y ago

Evolution contradicts the desire for smaller. This is not strictly speaking true. There are ecosystems that favor smaller animals/traits. Islands, for example.

hugh3 16y ago

Look into some of the inventions by R. Buckminster Fuller. He invented a house that cost thousands, easily transported, made of aluminum, and sturdy, but it never caught on. Probably because he didn't spend time marketing it, but the mobile home and large home manufacturing companies did. Or else it didn't catch on because people didn't like living in them. I assume you're talking about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house Evolution contradicts the desire for smaller. Consider Peacock tails, the longer they are and the fuller they are, the more likely they are to mate, because peahens like them -- even though rationally, they increase the likelihood of death to predator. This kind of crazy peacock behaviour is the exception rather than the rule among animals, though, which is why peacocks are so noteworthy. If pigeons had vast feathered tails too you might have a point. Similarly, it takes a lot of "strength" to maintain a large expensive home and accumulate a lot of unnecessary stuff and the chicks dig it. A guy with a fast car, excessive spending, and flashy clothes will go home from the bar with a girl before the geek with meek clothes and spending way below his means -- even if he is 1000x smarter than the flashy guy. You sound very convinced that intelligence is what women should be selecting for, rather than being one of many traits that is nice to have in a potential partner. Personally I'd work hard to live in a big fancy house and drive a cool fast car even if there were no women in the world, because I just like 'em.

Psyonic 16y ago
At least you think you would. I'm not saying you're wrong, or that I know you better than you know yourself (I definitely don't), but sometimes its hard to separate what you "like" from what is culturally sexually driven. Or rephrased, why do you like them? How did that come to pass? They came from the culture, which values them for reasons that benefit sexual reproduction, etc. If that wasn't an issue, society likely wouldn't value them, they'd stop being a status symbol, and you may no longer "just like them." We all like to think our personal likes and desires are entirely our own creation, but this is a fantasy. Edit: the fast car you still might like, as it has utility (getting places quickly), but a house beyond a reasonable size has little utility beyond status.
jaytee_clone 16y ago
"Personally I'd work hard to live in a big fancy house and drive a cool fast car even if there were no women in the world, because I just like 'em." Why yes, isn't that a great design? You don't even need to rationalize about what attracts a mate, you just like to do it by default, and most women just happen to be attracted to that by default also. Certainly your chance of reproducing and passing down these default settings will be much greater than someone who has to rationalize about attractions, don't you think?

uspatentpending 16y ago

tl;dr -- Evolutionary forces are far more complex and do not always select for strength over intelligence. Evolution != bigger && stronger. If this were true, why aren't there still brontosaurus-sized creatures on land? The truth is evolution selects the best adaptation for the specific ecosystem. Depending on the ecosystem, this could mean all sorts of adaptations, including more advanced intelligence and less advanced physical prowess, which is what happened with humans. Your assertion that it takes too much time to evaluate intelligence is also not realistic. People spend years selecting mates, and there is nothing wrong with this. The average lifespan is 72-76 years and a good portion of that is fertile. We have plenty of time to select a mate and still have children to progress the genes.

giantfuzzypanda 16y ago
> The truth is evolution selects the best adaptation for the specific ecosystem. Evolution is completely random.
- run4yourlives 16y ago
  No it isn't. Where did you get this idea?

domokun 16y ago

I don't think evolution has a whole lot to do with this. Evolution takes place on a much longer time frame, so we're mostly talking about cultural norms here. Furthermore, whatever "trait" leads to accumulating sports cars and mcmansions is not heritable. There's something called the Matching Hypothesis in sociology that basically says people end up pairing with those on the same "level" (in whichever way that person's culture defines status). i.e. an 8 takes home an 8-ish from the bar, or rich guy gets supermodel. But most everyone ends up matching up with some one else, and flashy-guy isn't improving his gene pool by mating with brain-dead hottie, so I don't think nature is the culprit here. (However, less educated (for simplicity, let's equate that to less intelligent) people do have a higher birth rate. So the world is getting dumber, but for different reasons! :) ) @euro, we need to work on changing cultural norms (more education, more sustainability, less consumerism) like you suggest in order to better the world.

kevinelliott 16y ago
And how can we communicate the desire for more education, more sustainability, less consumerism in order to better the world without reeking of progressive utopianism in our message? Sincerely doing this may very well benefit society and allow us to focus on the really amazing progressions in society and technology (like space colonization), but it's going to upset a whole lot of people who have invested time, money and energy to protect their anti-progressive infrastructures along the way. I'd very much like to see us focusing on improvement of our societal and economical infrastructures (education, sustainability, personal growth, pursuit of happiness and purpose, medical & technological advancement, etc) than to stay victims of our "evil" infrastructures (overly influential political lobbyism, corporate en-slavery of its workforce, and greed/thirst for financial domination). But this isn't something that can happen until there are several societal shifts, and perhaps some cultural memory loss. (Please note that my use of progressive and anti-progressive are apolitical references and should not represent actual values of political parties or interests!)
- realitygrill 16y ago
  someone needs to study how to hack memetics

jaytee_clone 16y ago

The world will continue getting dumber... until we re-program our genes so that we won't perceive excess as attractive... We can also improve a few other human limitations such as keeping meaningful relationships with more than 150 people. It's hard but it will happen eventually, or our species will die out before we get there, who knows.

mkramlich 16y ago

"The world will continue getting dumber." on same topic: recommend you see the movie Idiocracy