Consillyence

These factors combine to make our era the most consistently and consequentially deluded and unadaptive of any era ever.  When they remember us, our distant descendants will be shake their heads at the demographic transition, where we each took far less than full advantage of the reproductive opportunities our wealth offered.  They will note how we instead spent our wealth to buy products we saw in ads that talked mostly about the sort of folks who buy them.  They will lament our obsession with super-stimili that highjacked our evolved heuristics to give us taste without nutrition.   They will note we spent vast sums on things that didn’t actually help on the margin, such as on medicine that didn’t make us healthier, or education that didn’t make us more productive.

Our descendants will also remember our adolescent and extreme mating patterns, our extreme gender personalities, and our unprecedentedly fierce warriors.  They will be amazed at the strange religious, political, and social beliefs we acted on, and how we preferred a political system, democracy, designed to emphasize the hardly-considered fleeting delusory thoughts of the median voter rather than the considered opinions of our best experts.

Perhaps most important, our descendants may remember how history hung by a precarious thread on a few crucial coordination choices that our highly integrated rapidly changing world did or might have allowed us to achieve, and the strange delusions that influenced such choices.  These choices might have been about global warming, rampaging robots, nuclear weapons, bioterror, etc.  Our delusions may have led us to do something quite wonderful, or quite horrible, that permanently changed the options available to our descendants.  This would be the most lasting legacy of this, our explosively growing dream time, when what was once adaptive behavior with mostly harmless delusions become strange and dreamy unadaptive behavior, before adaptation again reasserted a clear-headed relation between behavior and reality.

The concluding passages from a few-months-old post at Overcoming Bias that has been on my mind as I follow the proceedings at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Read the whole thing here.

“I could tell that the octopus, busy manipulating coconut shells, was up to something, but I never expected it would pick up the stacked shells and run away,” Finn said. “It was an extremely comical sight—I have never laughed so hard underwater.”

“The law professors argued that the justices in the majority were in the grip of a common psychological fallacy: that other people’s perceptions might be shaped by socioeconomic position or political commitment, but they themselves perceived the objective truth.”