[ExI] [Extropolis] trump

[Mike Dougherty]

On Sat, Aug 19, 2023, 2:55 AM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 5:17 PM spike
> I can't think of a time when anyone (besides me) posting on the
> extropian list invoked an EP view.  People talk about social and
> political matters as if there was no deeper level.
>
> Have humans been selected to reject understanding their evolved
> psychological traits?  Seems possible to me.
>

Re: deeper level - you may have noticed the length (and depth) of posts
here (and in general) has decreased. I suspect this is a coping mechanism
to deal with the accelerating rate of change: we have to run ever faster to
not fall behind.  tbh, I've made peace with the limit of my intellect.
There are people smarter than me on this list; I do not need to compete or
posture to assert superiority and I'm not threatened by it.  I expect AI
will soon enough force the rest of humanity into a similar position.
(Well, plenty of doomsayers are very threatened by superintelligence)

Re: EP - you didn't have to convince me with a hard sell.  It was more like
someone struggling with imperial measures being shown the metric system and
immediately recognizing "oh hell yeah, this makes sense" ... or trying to
understand planetary position through retrograde motion and being shown the
heliocentric model.  In hindsight, the better model is so obvious the old
one is abandoned as an embarrassing moment (much worse that the moment may
have been the entire course of humanity trying to understand how/why of the
world)

Re: reject understanding - surely we evolved attention span for external
threats over internal states.  ex: hearing bloodflow in my ears taking
priority over approaching predators would be disadvantageous to survival.
We have relative safety in the modern world for navel gazing; that's
comparatively new in evolutionary time.

It may also be less an outright rejection and more a habitual return to the
familiar;  such as persisting with ounces (despite enlightenment of metric
milliliters) because my measuring cup is graduated in ounces.  Also,
cognitive load (eg: new braining) is expensive... of course we would rather
not expend the energy on deep introspection when shortcuts are working well
enough to get by in the short term.

btw, the length of this post feels too long as a single idea and too short
to have properly developed multiple ideas into a full article.  iiwii :)

>
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