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We really have to stop seeing people as members of a group first and an individual second. It is lazy thinking.

kazinator 9y ago
Survival on planet Earth has critically depended on lazy thinking: generalizing from incomplete scraps of information, and acting in real-time.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  Maybe I am just being an old-timer grouch, but it seems to be getting worse. As people attention is diverted from one topic to another with increasing speed, avoiding lazy thinking gets harder and harder. We do still need to fight against it :)
  - kazinator 9y ago
    What is there to fight? You will never have all the data to make a perfect decision, and even if you have all the data you can possibly have, you don't know which evaluation functions are the right ones to use that will work in your favor. These are fundamentals of the Universe, as such.
- sockgrant 9y ago
  Totally agree. But in some parts of society this is now a detriment that we’ve outgrown. But it’s really hard to fight our nature.
  - kazinator 9y ago
    Not only that, we're busy teaching computers to replicate it and calling it names like "deep learning".
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  While true, our current environment of organized society of billions of humans, all within the same info-sphere[0] is significantly different than the environment our species developed in. A lot of our natural tendencies end up being maladaptive in this new world. -- [0] - communication transcends distance now, and if something of importance happens anywhere in the world, almost everyone else on the planet knows about it in real-time.
  - ahartman00 9y ago
    "natural tendencies end up being maladaptive in this new world" Couldn't agree more, but I read the gp as being descriptive, not prescriptive. While I think we should work to be better, I think some people need to be more realistic in their expectations of time scale. That is, stop being so upset that human nature didn't change today because you said it was bad yesterday.
  - kazinator 9y ago
    It's the same zoo out there, only with mass communication, transportation, comforts and gadgets. You meet someone in a deserted street, you have the same three seconds to evaluate their threat potential that your ape ancestors had.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      No, it's not the same zoo, unless you live in Somalia. Rule of law and working policing changes everything about your reactions to other people. In a typical western country, most of the time you feel threatened just by seeing someone on the street, you're imagining it (proof: count how many times "feeling threatened" turned into "actually being threatened"). Other people don't want to go into jail either, and violence achieves very little compared to patience and civil agreements. But this is a sort of thing we still can handle real-time, reading things off each others' faces as we go along. Where the charade breaks down is all of our intuitions about state of the world, as we consume mass media. Humans run on availability heuristic[0]. Quoting from the Wiki, "availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled". Mass media give us heavily filtered view of the world, which does not, in any way, correspond to the real world we live in. Thanks to news reporting, you feel like you're surrounded by rich and beautiful people, constantly threatened by gangs and terrorists, and that everything around you is going to shit. None of that is true, and yet even knowing that, we all have trouble handling it in our heads. The heuristics we are born with were optimized for small and very localized group of people, not for large, dense populations, and constant light-speed communication with everyone else on the planet. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
dbattaglia 9y ago
Idk, I feel like saying that humans should somehow manage to turn off grouping and categorizing things is kind of lazy. Categorization is such a critical part of our ability to navigate and understand the world. I think the trick is to be able to look at both at the same time and to constantly be willing to question your own biases.
- greenrd 9y ago
  > Idk, I feel like saying that humans should somehow manage to turn off grouping and categorizing things is kind of lazy. I don't think that's what danieltillett was calling for at all. Rather, I think he was arguing for not letting group-level categorisations - such as gender or race - totally dominate over and blind us to attributes of individuals that may differ from what we would expect from our preconceived stereotypes of groups. Because when we do that with race, we do recognise that as racist - maybe not when the race in question is white, but in other cases, yes.
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    Yes that is exactly what I am saying. We should be viewing people as an individuals first and as a member of a group second. Almost all of us do this with people we know well, but many of fail to do this with strangers or opponents.

Survival on planet Earth has critically depended on lazy thinking: generalizing from incomplete scraps of information, and acting in real-time.

danieltillett 9y ago
Maybe I am just being an old-timer grouch, but it seems to be getting worse. As people attention is diverted from one topic to another with increasing speed, avoiding lazy thinking gets harder and harder. We do still need to fight against it :)
- kazinator 9y ago
  What is there to fight? You will never have all the data to make a perfect decision, and even if you have all the data you can possibly have, you don't know which evaluation functions are the right ones to use that will work in your favor. These are fundamentals of the Universe, as such.
sockgrant 9y ago
Totally agree. But in some parts of society this is now a detriment that we’ve outgrown. But it’s really hard to fight our nature.
- kazinator 9y ago
  Not only that, we're busy teaching computers to replicate it and calling it names like "deep learning".
TeMPOraL 9y ago
While true, our current environment of organized society of billions of humans, all within the same info-sphere[0] is significantly different than the environment our species developed in. A lot of our natural tendencies end up being maladaptive in this new world. -- [0] - communication transcends distance now, and if something of importance happens anywhere in the world, almost everyone else on the planet knows about it in real-time.
- ahartman00 9y ago
  "natural tendencies end up being maladaptive in this new world" Couldn't agree more, but I read the gp as being descriptive, not prescriptive. While I think we should work to be better, I think some people need to be more realistic in their expectations of time scale. That is, stop being so upset that human nature didn't change today because you said it was bad yesterday.
- kazinator 9y ago
  It's the same zoo out there, only with mass communication, transportation, comforts and gadgets. You meet someone in a deserted street, you have the same three seconds to evaluate their threat potential that your ape ancestors had.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    No, it's not the same zoo, unless you live in Somalia. Rule of law and working policing changes everything about your reactions to other people. In a typical western country, most of the time you feel threatened just by seeing someone on the street, you're imagining it (proof: count how many times "feeling threatened" turned into "actually being threatened"). Other people don't want to go into jail either, and violence achieves very little compared to patience and civil agreements. But this is a sort of thing we still can handle real-time, reading things off each others' faces as we go along. Where the charade breaks down is all of our intuitions about state of the world, as we consume mass media. Humans run on availability heuristic[0]. Quoting from the Wiki, "availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled". Mass media give us heavily filtered view of the world, which does not, in any way, correspond to the real world we live in. Thanks to news reporting, you feel like you're surrounded by rich and beautiful people, constantly threatened by gangs and terrorists, and that everything around you is going to shit. None of that is true, and yet even knowing that, we all have trouble handling it in our heads. The heuristics we are born with were optimized for small and very localized group of people, not for large, dense populations, and constant light-speed communication with everyone else on the planet. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

dbattaglia 9y ago

Idk, I feel like saying that humans should somehow manage to turn off grouping and categorizing things is kind of lazy. Categorization is such a critical part of our ability to navigate and understand the world. I think the trick is to be able to look at both at the same time and to constantly be willing to question your own biases.

greenrd 9y ago
> Idk, I feel like saying that humans should somehow manage to turn off grouping and categorizing things is kind of lazy. I don't think that's what danieltillett was calling for at all. Rather, I think he was arguing for not letting group-level categorisations - such as gender or race - totally dominate over and blind us to attributes of individuals that may differ from what we would expect from our preconceived stereotypes of groups. Because when we do that with race, we do recognise that as racist - maybe not when the race in question is white, but in other cases, yes.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  Yes that is exactly what I am saying. We should be viewing people as an individuals first and as a member of a group second. Almost all of us do this with people we know well, but many of fail to do this with strangers or opponents.