[ExI] evolution and crazy thinking

[Colin Hales]

I wrote about this in my book.

When you don't know something then to understand it you have to make an
explanatory hypothesis which, at the moment of its creation, is formally
'wrong' in the sense that until evidence confirms it, it's not predictive
yet. Over time your hypothesis acquires a body of evidence and you get to
be 'right' in the sense of 'predictive'. That is, in order for a human to
make sense of the world, you have to be able to be 'wrong'. Making wrong
hypotheses is a double edged sword.

1) You get to be right post-hoc.
but
2) On the down side, if you're an idiot that has a broken sense of what
evidence is (...in the 1000 cognitive biases in Wikipedia and in the
attached 'codex') then you get stuck with your own, pardon me, bullshit.
Like religion, for example.

In the brutal evolutionary 'get it right or die' process, evolution has
favoured a creature like us that can be very wrong and use that exact
ability to then get at the true nature of things. Later you become 'right'.
I used this to great effect in a formal scientific account of scientific
behaviour.

Job done (I am right) :-) ..... or am I? So far the evidence is consistent
with my hypothesis. It predicts exactly what your post is about: it
predicts humans screwing up badly as a primary cognitive necessity to deal
with the unknown.

cheers
colin





On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 5:51 AM, Spike Jones <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *William Flynn Wallace
>
>
>
> >…Evolution did a great job but it has a long way to go.  I hope it gets
> the chance.  'Survival of the fittest' does not seem to describe the
> current state of world affairs in the evolutionary sense.
>
> ​Are we, in fact, not losing the unfit?  bill w​
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> This observation about survival of the fittest should have been stated
> survival of the best adapted.
>
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> If we are discussing humans, fitness in the traditional sense is nearly
> irrelevant.  The unfit prosper in the right environment, such as our
> technically advanced world.  People who are dependent on modern medical
> technology for instance are likely to reside near a hospital, which implies
> a big city, where reproductive opportunities are relatively plentiful.  In
> that sense, the unfit are better adapted to our world than the fittest.
>
>
>
> spike
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
>
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