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We are still just hairless apes
- PaulHoule 4y agoI'd frame it the other way. Most of human intelligence is really animal intelligence. Rather than saying man is a "naked ape" I'd say a human is an animal with a language facility. The point here is not to bring down the perception of our species but to raise it for animals.
- mkaic 4y ago(author here) I totally agree, we shouldn't be trying to bring down the perception of the species! It's just useful to be mindful/remember sometimes that we are still animals, which means we're still going to be predisposed to want to do stupid irrational animal things. Understanding the source of those instincts can help in bridling them.
- h2odragon 4y agoAlcohol would be a good example too. I'll bet we're still hairless apes 1,000 years from now, as we were 1k yr ago. Than, as now, we'll be just as silly and waste about as much of our time on stupid shit. "we need to change for the modern world" is just one of the silly things we waste our time on. We ain't gonna change, perhaps we should build our world and calibrate our expectations in light of that?
- mkaic 4y agoAgreed! Though there are also times when our hairless-ape-ness can be a good thing -- for example, sometimes good things come from our irrational tendency to obsess over singular pursuits. Think about all the companies that make great products that would never have made it big if the founder hadn't been completely delusional!