[ExI] Human species model

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Dec 3, 2018, at 3:53 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> When our Constitution and Bill of Rights were created, our philosophers and others of the elite believed two very fundamental things:  that people were rational, and that learning was everything, according to the Blank Slate idea put forth by John Locke.
> 
> We now know and have established by numerous experiments and other data, that these two things are very, very wrong.
> 
> The question is what do we do about it?  Keith suggests that we need to know evolution.  Why not, instead of framing human nature as being created by evolution, avoid the pushback and just inform people of what we are like without reference to how we got that way?
> 
> What all of this may lead to is beyond my imagination to consider, but clearly some changes need to be made.  I think economics may be making some, based on Kahneman's data showing how irrational people can be.  We need to do something like this in every area of our lives.  Ideas?

This is far too simplistic a view of the worldview at that time in the US and the Atlantic world. You’re forgetting that Locke, while very influential in regards to rights theory and politics, was already dead nearly 90 years by this time and other thinkers, such as Hume, Rousseau, and Adam Smith were of no small influence. While Rousseau would probably fit into the more simplistic model, Hume and Smith don’t, especially when it comes to moral theory and action. 

And this is hardly academic since the Framers and other Founders (since many Founders were anti-Constitution I distinguish between the former and the latter) were not all Lockeans and were worried about specifically mob rule, factionalism, and other things we could sweep into the category of the irrational.

The later model of rationality in economics arose with folks like Ricardo and later economists. 

Regards,

Dan
   Sample my Kindle books at:
http://author.to/DanUst
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