[extropy-chat] Extinctions

[Martin Striz]

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.

However, poor overall long term planning was my focus.  There was
nothing in the ancestral environment to pressure humans to plan for
more than a year, or even with agriculture, about three years (to
rotate fields, for example).  Given high mortality rates, there was
every reason in the world to use up a surfeit of resources.

Martin