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Tradition is Smarter Than You Are
The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of
... See moreW. David Marx • Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change
There’s a theory in evolutionary biology called Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection. It’s the idea that variance equals strength, because the more diverse a population is, the more chances it has to come up with new traits that can be selected for. No one can know what traits will be useful; that’s not how evolution works. But if you
... See moreMorgan Housel • Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life
Yes, we are intelligent, as earth creatures go; nevertheless, we are not nearly smart enough to account for our immense ecological success. Moreover, while we humans are good at certain cognitive feats, we are not so good at others. Many of both our mental skills and deficiencies can be predicted by recognizing that our brains evolved and expanded
... See moreJoseph Henrich • The Secret of Our Success
Natural Selection is no Hero’s Journey, no Deity Designing
And sadly we’ve cocooned ourselves so far from the pressures, the larger forces at ecological play we (we being the privileged few in wealthy, prevalent cultures, the 1/3rd or Global North ….) have actually de-volved as a result. Our social licence is writ large with one basic, infantile
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