5 ms·
"Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it
by bmc7505 5y ago
"Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us."
―Peter Watts, Echopraxia (2015)
- H8crilA 5y agoNassim Taleb would love this quote. "Yes, the VIX is overpriced. Although you can't make a living by shorting it. Both statements are true at the same time."
- PaulHoule 5y agoThere was that time I "invested" in an inverse VIX ETF. It was doing great until the day the VIX spiked and it got liquidated. Funny enough after the liquidation I had about as much money left over as I put in originally. So I didn't lose much skin and got a great story to tell.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tshaddox 5y agoSurely there's some point where the ability of the individual to not expend energy inefficiently becomes balanced with the ability of the organism to evade tigers. It's clearly not true that the individual who thinks they hear a tiger more often (without bound) will be more successful at surviving/reproducing.
- Retric 5y agoSure, but that balance point still involves a lot of needless running before the energy costs become an issue.
- tshaddox 5y agoThis is really just an empirical question in ethology, but if I had to guess I'd say that prey animal in fact don't do a lot of needless running. On the contrary, I'd suspect their sense do a pretty darn good job at quickly determining the risk of predation.
- Retric 5y agoI regularly see prey animals doing a lot of running from me when I am not a threat to them. Even remote observation of fairly large prey animals like goats in their natural environment show them seemingly randomly get spooked.
- willcipriano 5y agoDon't be so hard on yourself.
- culi 5y agoNatural selection doesn't always favor the paranoid. Running like hell requires a lot of energy and if we're overly paranoid, we might just run ourselves to death whenever the wind is wilder than usual
- s1artibartfast 5y agoWho says humans aren't running ourselves to death at the sound of the wind right now?
- s1artibartfast 5y agoContext for the pedants: This is dialog from a sci-fi novel about aliens and space vampires. It is figurative language to illustrate a concept. Great novel full of evolutionary psychology trivia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watching-eye_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watching-eye_effect https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9424-big-brother-eyes-make-us-act-more-honestly/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9424-big-brother-eyes...
- spacebanana7 5y agoThe parable of tigers in the grass might demonstrate a selective pressure towards caution, but doesn’t demonstrate any benefit towards ascribing agency to natural phenomenon. The agency of the entity which caused the rustling is somewhat irrelevant for the hunters. The important belief for their survival is that this rustling entity is dangerous. If they hold this belief but attribute the behaviour of the entity to randomness, they’ll do just as well.