Over
a decade ago I began my research into how IQ matters for nations. I
soon found that the strong link between average IQ and national
productivity couldn’t be explained with just the conventional finding
that IQ predicts higher wages. IQ apparently mattered far more for
nations than for individuals. In my early work, I estimated that IQ
mattered about six times more for nations than for individuals: your
nation’s IQ mattered so much more than your own. That puzzle, that
paradox of IQ, is what set me on my intellectual journey. …
I’ll lay out five major channels for how IQ can pay off more for nations than for you as an individual:
1. High-scoring people tend to save more,
and some of that savings stays in their home country. More savings mean
more machines, more computers, more technology to work with, which
helps make everyone in the nation more productive.
2. High-scoring groups tend to be more cooperative. And cooperation is a key ingredient for building higher-quality governments and more productive businesses.
3. High-scoring groups are more likely to support market-oriented policies, a key to national prosperity. People who do well on standardized tests also tend to be better at remembering information, and informed voters are an important ingredient for good government.
4. High-scoring groups will tend to be more successful at using highly productive team-based technology. With these “weakest link” technologies, one misstep can destroy the product’s value, so getting high-quality workers together is crucial. Think about computer chips, summer blockbuster films, cooperative mega-mergers.
5. The human tendency to conform, at least a little, creates a fifth channel that multiplies the effect of the other four: the imitation channel, the peer effect channel. Even a small tendency to conform, to act just a little bit like those around us, too try to fit in, tends to quietly shape our behavior. If you have cooperative, patient, well-informed neighbors, that probably makes you a bit more cooperative, patient, and well-informed.
- See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/11/statestupidity.html#sthash.QzqWo0JN.dpuf2. High-scoring groups tend to be more cooperative. And cooperation is a key ingredient for building higher-quality governments and more productive businesses.
3. High-scoring groups are more likely to support market-oriented policies, a key to national prosperity. People who do well on standardized tests also tend to be better at remembering information, and informed voters are an important ingredient for good government.
4. High-scoring groups will tend to be more successful at using highly productive team-based technology. With these “weakest link” technologies, one misstep can destroy the product’s value, so getting high-quality workers together is crucial. Think about computer chips, summer blockbuster films, cooperative mega-mergers.
5. The human tendency to conform, at least a little, creates a fifth channel that multiplies the effect of the other four: the imitation channel, the peer effect channel. Even a small tendency to conform, to act just a little bit like those around us, too try to fit in, tends to quietly shape our behavior. If you have cooperative, patient, well-informed neighbors, that probably makes you a bit more cooperative, patient, and well-informed.
IGNORANCE IZ BLISS. READ ABOUT HOW BLISSFUL YOU FOLKZ ARE. (IF YOU HAVE A LOW IQ, NO UNDERSTANDING OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY, AND BLINDLY BELIEVE IN RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGY LIFE CAN BE GRAND!)
Retweeted by Mark Changizi
Retweeted by Mark Changizi
Do successful evolutionary biologists have more offspring?
NO THEY DON'T!
NO THEY DON'T!
Why Does A Fictitious, Religious Outlook On Life Facilitate The Passing Of Your Genes? It Gives You Optimism And A Reason To Live And To Reproduce! It Deludes You And Distracts You From The Genetic Role You Play In Human Evolution (The Only Role That Matters).
Why Does An Accurate, Scientific Outlook On Life Prevent You From Passing On Your Genes? ("God Put Us Here For A Purpose And Our Purpose Is To Do God's Will. And Once We're Done Doing God's Will (If We Did It Well Enough) We'll Get To Meet God And Live Happily Ever After With Him In Heaven! Hey, We're All Equal. God Created Us All Equally. So You Can Have A Child With Anyone Of Any Race And Any Status And With The Right Guidance And Nurturing You Can Turn He Or She Into Whatever You Want He Or She To Be." FICTITIOUS, RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGY WILL LEAD YOU TO BELIEVE THIS NONSENSE AND IT'LL GIVE YOU THE OPTIMISM, MOTIVATION, AND COURAGE TO LIVE AND HAVE CHILDREN. Accurate, Scientific Ideology Can Sometimes Lead To The Opposite (Ending Your Life And Ending Your Children's Lives!)! THE END!)
I CURSE THE DAY I WAS BORN! NOW, READ THE FIRST COMMENT BY BRIAN W.
TELL ME LIES! TELL ME SWEET LIL LIES! TELL ME LIES! TELL ME, TELL ME LIES! - MAC
This perhaps help explain why my books don't sell as many copies as religious & spiritual books promising health, wealth, & eternal bliss.
I wish there were more self-help books that acknowledge that we are all imperfect and gives suggestions on how to grow and be a better person. Most “self-help” books these days just tell you how badass and great you are and basically say what you want to hear.
This was the whole and entire point of my book 'Mate' (2015) BTW.
For most kinds of knowledge embodied in most of our psychological adaptations, I think their argument is correct. Natural selection has endowed us with an intuitive physics that allows us to understand mass, momentum, and movement well enough to deal with the material world. We also have an intuitive biology that allows us to understand plants and animals well enough to survive, and an intuitive psychology that lets us understand people. Especially since the 1980s, psychologists have been busy investigating these intuitive forms of knowledge in children and adults. Our hundreds of adaptations for sensation, perception, categorization, inference, and behavior embody thousands of important truths about the world.
However, when we come to verbally expressed beliefs, sexual selection undermines these reliability arguments. While natural selection for survival may have endowed us with a pragmatically accurate perceptual system, mate choice may not have cared about the accuracy of our more complex belief systems. Sexual selection could have favored ideologies that were entertaining, exaggerated, exciting, dramatic, pleasant, comforting, narratively coherent, aesthetically balanced, wittily comic, or nobly strategic. It could have shaped our minds to be amusing and attractive, but deeply fallible. As long as our ideologies do not undermine our more pragmatic adaptations, their epistemological frailty does not matter to evolution.
- 🇺🇸 @Mangan150
People believe what they want to believe.
It's a rare bird that's genuinely interested in other views and will question his own.
BEGIN LISTENING AT 0:45-3:06 THEN LISTEN AGAIN AT THE 3:26 POINT WHERE HE BEGINS EXPLAINING THE INHERENT HUMAN DRIVE TO BE OPTIMISTIC AND WHY THAT OPTIMISM CAN LEAD TO INACCURATE BELIEFS, BAD DECISIONS, AND INEFFICIENT INSTITUTIONS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMNhdt_dzUI
The hominid named Carl proposes: "We are moral, fallible primates who survive on this fickle savanna only because we cluster in these jealousy-ridden groups. Everywhere we have ever traveled is just a tiny, random corner of a vast continent on an unimaginable huge sphere spinning in a vacuum. The sphere has traveled billions and billions of times around a flaming ball of gas, which will eventually blow up to incinerate our empty, fossilized skulls. I have discovered several compelling lines of evidence in support of these hypotheses...."
The hominid named Candide interrupts: "No, I believe we are immortal spirits gifted with these beautiful bodies because the great god Wug chose us as his favorite creatures. Wug blessed us with this fertile paradise that provides just enough challenges to keep things interesting. Behind the moon, mystic nightingales sing our praise, some of us more than others. Above the azure dome of the sky the smiling sun warms our hearts. After we grow old and enjoy the babbling of our grandchildren, Wug will lift us from these bodies to join our friends to eat roasted gazelle and dance eternally. I know these things because Wug picked me to receive this special wisdom in a dream last night."
Which ideology do you suppose would prove more sexually attractive? Will Carl's truth-seeking genes - which may discover some rather ugly truths - out-compete Candide's wonderful-story genes? The evidence of human history suggest that our ancestors were more like Candide than Carl. Most modern humans are naturally Candides. It usually takes years of watching BBC or PBS documentaries to become as objective as Carl.
Runaway sexual selection for ideological entertainment would not have produced accurate belief-systems, except by accident. If ideological displays were favored as fitness indicators, the only truth they had to convey was truth about fitness. They need not be accurate world-models any more than the eyes of a peacock's tail need to represent real eyes. Das Kapital demonstrated Karl Marx's intelligence, imagination, and energy, but its reliability as a fitness indicator does not guarantee the truth of dialectical materialism. The majesty of Bringham Young's religious visions were sufficient to attract 27 wives (who averaged 24.5 years old at marriage - with wives number 12 through 21 marrying him when he was in his mid-40s), but that does not guarantee the veracity of his belief that dead ancestors can be retroactively converted to the Mormon faith.
Steve Stewart-Williams Retweeted
"Through the invention of science, our species discovered a way to selectively breed memes for greater and greater accuracy, just as we selectively bred dogs to be friendlier and fruit to be sweeter."
When we considered the evolution of language, we saw that sexual selection rarely favors displays that include accurate conceptual representations of the world. Across millions of species throughout the Earth's history, there have only been two good examples of sexual selection for world-representing truth: human language and human representational art. Even so, human language's ability to refer to real objects and events does not guarantee the reliability of human ideologies expressed through language.
...Human ideology is the result: a tabloid concoction of religious conviction, political idealism, urban myth, tribal myth, wishful thinking, memorable anecdote, and pseudo-science.
The Mating Mind. Miller, p. 420-423.
https://ontherapyaspse.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/geoffrey-miller-the-mating-mind.pdf
GOOD RIDDANCE!
In 5-billion yrs the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.
I need to accurately perceive the location of a rabbit to hit it with my throwing stick. However, there are many, many other situations in which it can be adaptive to distort reality...Even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world."
In Other Words, Deception, Both Towards Oneself And Towards Others, Is Favored By Natural Selection And Sexual Selection. So We've All Evolved To Be Self-Deceived And To Deceive! Think Of It This Way. If A Person Is Too Truthful When It Comes To Dealing With Prospective Business Partners, Prospective Friends, Prospective Mates, Etc., Do You Think He'll Succeed In Making Money, Making Friends, Making Love, And Making Children? I DON'T THINK SO. SO "accurate reporting [telling the truth] and genetic interests [sexual selection, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, etc.]" DID NOT INTERSECT, FOR THE MOST PART, DURING HUMAN EVOLUTION!
HEY, LOW IQ, UNEDUCATED PEOPLE (EVERYONE OUT THERE THAT DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT EVOLUTIONARY THEORY), THE FACT THAT WE DIDN'T EVOLVE TO BE COMPLETELY HONEST IN ALL OF OUR DEALINGS DOESN'T MEAN THAT I TRY TO DECEIVE PEOPLE. NO, IT'S THE EXACT OPPOSITE. I'M AWARE OF THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN TENDENCY TO BE DISHONEST, BUT I TRY TO OVERRIDE THIS TENDENCY. I'M JUST POINTING OUT TO ALL OF YOU THE FACT THAT EVOLUTION ERRED ON THE SIDE OF DECEPTION THROUGHOUT THE MILLIONS OF YEARS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION!
"People don't want to see the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed" Nietzsche
"TELL ME LIES! TELL ME SWEET LIL LIES! TELL ME LIES! TELL ME, TELL ME LIES!" - MAC
’s article for is excellent.
Beliefs are used to show belonging & status, so we choose beliefs partially for social reasons rather than accuracy alone.
Means that accurate beliefs will only be common if the social environment is receptive.
Language Evolved To Manipulate Listeners For The Speakers Benefit!
"HUMANS BE LYIN'...NIGGAS LIE A LOT, SO WHEN THEY TALK I BARELY LISTEN" - P DA GUNMAN (WHO CANNIBALISTIC)
https://ideas.ted.com/are-we-living-in-a-post-truth-era-yes-but-thats-because-were-a-post-truth-species/
https://ideas.ted.com/are-we-living-in-a-post-truth-era-yes-but-thats-because-were-a-post-truth-species/
Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. You will have to admit things — for example, about the sources of your own power — that will anger allies, dishearten followers, or undermine social harmony.
Scholars throughout history have faced this dilemma: Do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments — whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins or Communist ideologues — placed unity above truth. That’s why they were so powerful.
As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it — and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it. If you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo sapiens. Better to try your luck with chimps.
Evolution cares nothing for accuracy and objectivity: it cares about fitness
To test his theory, Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary computer simulations in which digital organisms whose perceptual systems are tuned exclusively for truth are outcompeted by those tuned solely for fitness. Because natural selection depends only on expected fitness, evolution shaped our sensory systems toward fitter behavior, not truthful representation.
Begin Listening At The 2:00 Minute Mark. Then Pay Special Attention At The 2:55 Mark, The 3:36 Mark ("So, It's Not About Truth. It's About Fitness That Evolution Is Concerned With."), The 4:15 Mark ("What We Find Is That Truth Goes Extinct!"), The 5:37 Mark ("And We Can't Even Get Truth To Breed!"), The 6:11 Mark ("The Condition Is That If Fitness Is Not Essentially The Same Thing As Truth Then Truth Will Go Extinct!"), And, Finally, The 8:14 Mark ("Natural Selection Drives True Perceptions To Swift Extinction!").
"That natural selection would shape any sensory system of any organism to reveal true properties of objective reality is zero..evolution has not shaped us to see the truth. Fitness payoff functions almost surely have no information about objective reality"
"DON'T NOBODY LIKE THE TRUTH NO MO" - G PUERTO RICOOOOOO
"Evolution ruthlessly selects against truth strategies and for payoff strategies. An organism that sees objective reality is less fit than an organism that sees fitness payoffs. Seeing objective reality will make you extinct."
The remarkable human ability to believe bullshit is only surprising if you think the primary function of the human brain is to discover the truth. It’s not. It’s to enhance an organism’s fitness. If that requires believing and promoting bullshit, then so be it.
At least, not true ones per se. To the extent that accurate perceptions and comprehension of the world helped humanity's ancestors get genes into the next generation, then of course mental accuracy would be favored by natural selection. And usually mental accuracy is good for the survival and transmission of the genes. That's why we have excellent equipment for depth perception, for picking up human voices against background noise, and so on. Still, in situations where accurate perception and judgement impede survival and reproduction, you would expect natural selection to militate against accuracy.
In 1974, San Francisco newspaper heiress Patty Hearst* was kidnapped by a radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose goals included "death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people." After being kept in a closet for a while, she came to identify with her new peer group. Before long, she was enthusiastically helping them generate income, at one point brandishing a machine gun during a bank robbery. When left alone, with an opportunity to escape, she didn't take it.
She later described the experience: "I had virtually no free will until I was separated from them for about two weeks. And then it suddenly, you know, slowly began to dawn that they just weren't there anymore. I could actually think my own thoughts." Hearst didn't just accept her captors' "subjective" beliefs, such as ideology; she bought into their views about how the physical world works. One of her captors "didn't want me thinking about rescue because he thought that brain waves could be read or that, you know, they'd get a psychic in to find me. And I was even afraid of that."
Hearst's condition of coerced credulity is called the Stockholm syndrome, after a kidnapping in Sweden. But the term "syndrome" may be misleading in its suggestion of abnormality. Hearst's response to her circumstances was probably an example of human nature functioning properly; we seem to be "designed" by natural selection to be brainwashed.
Some people find this prospect a shocking affront to human autonomy, but they tend not to be evolutionary psychologists. In Darwinian terms, it makes sense that our species could contain genes encouraging blind credulity in at least some situations. If you are surrounded by a small group of people on whom your survival depends, rejecting the beliefs that are most important to them will not help you live long enough to get your genes into the next generation.
Confinement with a small group of people may sound so rare that natural selection would have little chance to take account of it, but it is in a sense the natural human condition. Humans evolved in small groups - twenty, forty, sixty people - from which emigration was often not a viable option. Survival depended on social support: sharing food, sticking together during fights, and so on. To alienate your peers by stubbornly contesting their heartfelt beliefs would have lowered your chances of genetic proliferation.
Maybe that explains why you don't have to lock somebody in a closet to get a bit of the Stockholm syndrome. Religious cults just offer aimless teenagers a free bus ride to a free meal, and after the recruits have been surrounded by believers for a few days, they tend to warm up to the beliefs. And there doesn't have to be some powerful authority figure pushing the beliefs. In one famous social psychology experiment, subjects opined that two lines of manifestly different lengths were the same length, once a few of their "peers" (who in fact were confederates) voiced that opinion.
...
It makes sense that human brains would naturally seize on strange, surprising things, since the predictable things have already been absorbed into the expectations that guide them through the world; news of the strange and surprising may signal that some amendment of our expectations is warranted. But one property of strange, surprising claims is that they're often untrue. So if they get preferred access to our brains, that gives falsehood a kind of advantage - if a fleeting advantage - over the truth. (The Moral Animal)
*"Cube Captivate Your Mind!: Patty Hurst!" - Rubix Cube
“Seemingly delusional beliefs survive not because they are rational but because the people or groups who adhere to them tend to survive better than those who don’t” spectator.co.uk/article/the-ca
https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1151642534155710464
Fascinating analysis of witch-hunts in early modern Europe, based on @RichardDawkins' selfish meme theory. The basic idea is that the witch-hunt meme propagated purely because it was good at propagating, not because it was good for us in any sense.
https://culturalscience.org/articles/10.5334/csci.116/ …
We know that atheists behave as if the highest good exists. Yet, in a purely secular cosmology, human beings are only the result of adaptation. Our faculties, as Darwinian creatures, have not evolved to seek truth—they have evolved to seek survival. Why shouldn’t we simply align ourselves with the most powerful tribe and destroy our enemies? Why shouldn’t all our mental faculties simply be post hoc justifications for what we do? Many atheists, such as Sam Harris, have argued that free will does not exist. Economist Robin Hanson, in The Elephant in The Brain, has argued that most of our behaviors are driven by social signaling, not a desire for truth.
If human beings are just biological machines that have evolved to seek survival, then the highest good is already a kind of social fiction. It is the story we tell ourselves about our actions, which may or may not even be within our own control. Morality is a human construction. The highest good is just a story. But ethical human behavior is coordinated by such useful fictions. Nations are social constructions, but that does not mean they are ‘false’ exactly. We tell stories about nations to ground ourselves in a reality that is sufficiently accurate to ensure our continuing survival. We tell stories about great heroes and religious figures for the same reason—to coordinate human survival according to an imaginary ideal. Buddha, Christ, and Muhammad are fictions proposed to guide human behavior.
"Sum Uh Them Lie About The Shit They Got And What They Do On Tha Block...Sum Uh 'Em Lie About The …?...Pop" - Nigga Doggy Dogg Livin' A Boss' Lie!
https://www.amazon.com/Born-Liars-Cant-Without-Deceit/dp/184916424X
"LIE TO HER ASS BEFOE SHE LIE 2 U!" - MR. FREE
http://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/
People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.
In other words, just like Acme, the human brain has to strike an awkward balance between two different reward systems:
- Meritocracy, where we monitor beliefs for accuracy out of fear that we'll stumble by acting on a false belief; and
- Cronyism, where we don't care about accuracy so much as whether our beliefs make the right impressions on others.
And so we can roughly (with caveats we'll discuss in a moment) divide our beliefs into merit beliefs and crony beliefs. Both contribute to our bottom line — survival and reproduction — but they do so in different ways: merit beliefs by helping us navigate the world, crony beliefs by helping us look good.
The point is, our brains are incredibly powerful organs, but their native architecture doesn't care about high-minded ideals like Truth. They're designed to work tirelessly and efficiently — if sometimes subtly and counterintuitively — in our self-interest. So if a brain anticipates that it will be rewarded for adopting a particular belief, it's perfectly happy to do so, and doesn't much care where the reward comes from — whether it's pragmatic (better outcomes resulting from better decisions), social (better treatment from one's peers), or some mix of the two. A brain that didn't adopt a socially-useful (crony) belief would quickly find itself at a disadvantage relative to brains that are more willing to "play ball." In extreme environments, like the French Revolution, a brain that rejects crony beliefs, however spurious, may even find itself forcibly removed from its body and left to rot on a pike. Faced with such incentives, is it any wonder our brains fall in line?
https://www.amazon.com/God-Most-Unpleasant-Character-Fiction/dp/1454918322
"FAIRYTALES ARE MAKE BELIEVE" - NIGGA DOGGY DOGG
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180919133003.htm
TAKE 2 AND CALL ME IN THE MOURNIN'!
https://evolution-institute.org/how-to-get-credible-knowledge-in-a-myth-filled-world/
"FAIRYTALES ARE MAKE BELIEVE" - NIGGA DOGGY DOGG
"Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies." - Friedrich Nietzsche #possibilianism
"Taken together, these findings suggest that individuals' avoidance of honesty may be a mistake. By avoiding honesty, individuals miss out on opportunities that they appreciate in the long-run, and that they would want to repeat." https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180919133003.htm … @1TayaC @EmmaELevine
TAKE 2 AND CALL ME IN THE MOURNIN'!
https://evolution-institute.org/how-to-get-credible-knowledge-in-a-myth-filled-world/
