[ExI] [Extropolis] trump

[William Flynn Wallace]

Mike, I agree with you for the most part, but our system has some common
sense type features the metric doesn't.  A foot, for example (my foot is
exactly 12 inches).  Inches - one knuckle.  Yard - my long step is 36" -
easy to measure rooms etc.  Metric has none of these.  Maybe if you were
raised in the metric system it would be better.  As it is I have to convert
to make sense of the measurement.  bill w

On Sat, Aug 19, 2023 at 9:49 AM Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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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