[ExI] Is the USA doing too much to prevent COVID-19?

[Darin Sunley]

Clearly, yelling at them online, degrading them, and demanding they get
onboard with the 21st century social progress movement like their coastal
betters will win their hearts and minds!

Also, they should obviously learn to code,

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 3:10 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> snip
>
> > But other than that I can't think of any stone age
> traits that could be extrapolated to explain why one state was blue and
> another was red.
>
> Economics.  Every one of the states that went red had a population
> that was facing a bleak economic future, unlike the blue states.  Not
> bleak in absolute terms, but humans respond to relative stimulations.
> For a long list of reasons, the average life prospects in those
> populations were not as good as they had been for their parents.
>
> People in the stone age facing a resource crisis (or a looming one)
> would fight with neighbors. At the individual level, going to war was
> irrational, but at the gene level, it was not.  So if conditions
> called for war, the tribe members have the psychological traits to
> find an irrational leader attractive.
>
> You do need to be careful in extrapolating evolved stone age
> psychological traits to the present day, though one example.
> http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Capture-bonding is obvious.
>
> I would also say that it is clear from history that people under
> stress from falling income per capita switch on the same mechanisms
> that stone age peoples did for a resource crisis.  These include
> spreading xenophobic memes and supporting irrational leaders.
>
> Assuming the above analysis is correct, does anything jump out at you
> as to how to prevent what happened in the red states?
>
> Keith
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