[ExI] (no subject)

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Tue Jun 9 22:06:25 UTC 2020


Darin Sunley <dsunley at gmail.com> wrote:

> People who, due to their circumstances, literally do not believe in the
future, any future, frequently do things that can very reasonably be called
"crazy".

Which might lead you to wonder how such behavior (or the psychological
traits behind it) could have evolved?

> When you hyperbolicly discount any projected future utility more than a
month or so out down to zero due to genuinely real uncertainty about still
being alive and healthy then, a lot of very extreme actions start to seem
rational.

It is worse than individuals feeling this way because of memes.

> When a critical mass of the population of an area becomes this nihilistic,
the nihilism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the stone age, when a critical mass of the population became wound
up, they went to war.  This usually solved the problem (which was
almost always a resource crisis) with an orgy of killing that reduced
the population and improved the future outlook for the ones who were
left.

Bummer, but having to kill your own species to control population
seems to be a feature of top predators.  By comparison, birth control
is a really good idea.

Keith


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