[extropy-chat] Extinctions

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Martin Striz wrote:
> On 6/12/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
>>Martin Striz wrote:
>>
>>>Hominids in the ancestral environment faced a high mortality rate.  At
>>>no time was it worth planning more than a few years ahead.  So when
>>>they came upon a bounty, they used it up.  Lottery winners spend their
>>>millions in an average of 4 years.
>>
>>Got a reference for this?  Sounds like a useful thing to quote.
> 
> I believe that was in Pinker's Blank Slate, although I could be wrong.
> 
> There are other evolutionary psychology corollaries to why people are
> bad with money.  This is a good blog post on that topic:
> 
> http://www.enlightenedliving.us/money_blog/evolutionary_psychology/index.html
> 
> In short we are coalitional, heirarchical, zero-sum thinkers.

Oh, I totally get that.  I was just looking for something citable.  I 
tried reading the Blank Slate, but knew too much of the material to get 
far.  Perfectly good book, if I could have read it fifteen years ago.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence