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This was an interesting piece. One thing I think was missing is a note about evolution's role. I think many of these traits are evolutionary; they trigger dop
by everforward 3y ago
This was an interesting piece.
One thing I think was missing is a note about evolution's role.
I think many of these traits are evolutionary; they trigger dopamine responses because at some point they were helpful. Sugary foods have calories so you don't starve. Boredom is painful so people invent.
Modern society is frankly too good at satisfying these evolutionary cravings. They've become maladaptive by nature of being artificially satiated. Boredom no longer leads to invention, it leads to addiction. Sugary foods no longer help you survive the winter, they give you diabetes.
Our social evolution has dramatically outpaced our geneologic evolution. Our social evolution is so far along that we can not only manipulate ourselves using our prior geneologic evolution, but also treat maladaptive traits well enough to prevent evolving out of those signals.
Eating too much sugary food gives people diabetes, but modern medicine allows people to survive that and procreate. Social media makes people depressed and anxious, but we have meds to help and online dating to find a partner.
That feedback loop where maladaptive traits are gradually phased out is gone. Society is now the cause of and solution to most of life's problems (insert Homer Simpson "beer is the cause of and solution to life's problems" meme here).
The solutions here kind of suck. One is to let evolution run its course, but that's frankly a thin veil over eugenics and society will just pivot and make some other trait maladaptive. The other is regulation, which is likely to be politically unpopular. The last is the global warming approach where we largely ignore it until nature takes control away from us. That appears to be what we're doing; we hope the issues don't become society-threatening and wait.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoI feel like people in tech like to ascribe causality to evolution. As if “Evolution” is some sort of sentient, God-like entity that knows what’s best. It’s not. It’s a theory. The core tenet of evolution is that organisms adapt to their environment. All organisms are capable of modifying their environment such that they improve their odds of survival. Birds build nests. Beavers build dams. Trees drop seeds in clever ways. Humans do an upgraded version of all those things. Technology (in the broadest sense of the term) is really about tweaking the environment to increase our odds of survival. Sometimes, these experiments backfire. It happens to all species. It just happens to be globally-disruptive in the case of humans. Frankly, all this talk about how “social evolution has hijacked the dopaminergic pathways of the brain” sounds like the ramblings of someone who recently read a pop-science book about the brain.
- 2snakes 3y ago"To me the jury is still out as to what this will all mean in the end. The worst case scenario is the annihilation of all life on our planet, rendering the entire human experiment a useless exercise in self aggrandizement. The best case scenario, the one that I personally am holding out for, is that it all leads to a leap in consciousness in which the creative power of abstract thinking stops being used exclusively for the benefit of just one species and starts being utilized on behalf of the planet and ultimately the cosmos." (Jeff Carreira, The Path of Cosmic Consciousness)
- jonfw 3y agoEvolution is way too slow to handle technology. Social media is a problem of the last 30 years or so. Barring a bubonic plague type of event, there is no mechanism for evolution on this short of a timescale
- lotsofpulp 3y agoThe term for this is supernormal stimulus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus