Category: Psychology & Anthropology

Source: Cory Doctorow: Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention

There is a war for your attention, and like all adversarial scenarios, the sides develop new countermeasures and then new tactics to overcome those countermeasures.
…
The attention wars have real consequences for our daily lives. The entire fake news/Facebook ad/Twitter bot scandal is but a skirmish in the wider attention war, albeit one with global geopolitical (and potentially thermo­nuclear) consequences.
…
But history is littered with armies of seemingly invincible attention warriors who were out-evolved by their prey, and could not overcome the counter­measures that were begat by repeated exposure to their once-undefeatable tactics.

Source: Why everything might have taken so long, by Katja Grace
RE: Why did everything take so long?, by Katja Grace

One of the biggest intuitive mysteries to me is how humanity took so long to do anything.

the Internet gave me its thoughts. Here is my expanded list of hypotheses

Continue reading Why did everything take so long? – Katja Grace

Source: Our enemies are human: that’s why we want to kill them | Aeon Ideas

the failure to recognise someone’s humanity predicts indifference toward their welfare, not an active desire and delight in bringing about their suffering. To understand the active desire to cause pain and suffering in another person, we have to look to a counterintuitive source: human morality.
…
dehumanisation allows us to commit instrumental violence, wherein people do not desire to harm victims, but knowingly harm them anyway in order to achieve some other objective (imagine shooting a stranger in order to steal his wallet). However, dehumanisation does not cause us to commit moral violence, where people actively desire to harm victims who deserve it (imagine shooting your cheating spouse). We find that moral violence emerges only when perpetrators see victims as capable of thinking, experiencing sensations and having moral emotions. In other words, when perpetrators perceive their victims as human.

Source: The link between polygamy and war

Plural marriage, bred of inequality, begets violence

Wherever it is widely practised, polygamy (specifically polygyny, the taking of multiple wives) destabilises society, largely because it is a form of inequality which creates an urgent distress in the hearts, and loins, of young men. If a rich man has a Lamborghini, that does not mean that a poor man has to walk, for the supply of cars is not fixed. By contrast, every time a rich man takes an extra wife, another poor man must remain single. If the richest and most powerful 10% of men have, say, four wives each, the bottom 30% of men cannot marry. Young men will take desperate measures to avoid this state.

Source: Conservatism Won’t Survive Donald Trump

“Conservatism in this country long predated Trump; for now, it is tied up with Trump; soon, it will have survived Trump.”
…
You can believe this only if you imagine that ideologies exist independently of the human beings who espouse them—and that they can continue unchanged and unchanging despite the flux of their adherents. … This is simply not true. Ideas are not artifacts, especially the kind of collective ideas we know as ideologies.
…
Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it means to be a conservative. … The word conservative will of course continue in use. But its meaning is being rewritten each day by the actions of those who lay claim to the word.