I hated this post because it called me out on a fundamental level. I suppose i worship a degree of mystery, despite being determinist, I think that the world is far to large in its totality for any given human or singular communicating group of humans to fully comprehend ( and always will be due to the constraints of our biology and collective behaviour). As such, the humbling blows that consistently come out of ones blind spot, to me are beautiful and worthy of awe. Despite my best efforts and my objective progress in those efforts, I will always be humbl...
unconstrained by the semantic stop sign, where would one stop in unguided inquiry? It feels like its just system 1 kicking in to stop the spiralling usage of system 2, or perhaps just system 1 finding a reason to cut its own sloppy output. I suppose you could just say 'i don't know', but within a social context where some inquiry does occur spontaneously there are incentives that guide the usage of semantic stop signs, in many cases to the short term benefit of the participants. In casual discussion I try to constrain the discussion to rational principles but enforcing this can be a social net negative for me or anyone in a similar position.
Throughout the evolution related posts you use arbitrary examples to show that any given species wide feature gave us a fitness advantage at some point. What about mutations that occurred in small populations and due to inbreeding or population bottlenecks fixated to what would become the dominant breeding population of the future?
What if a random mutation in an already somewhat breeding dominant male was spread to a population of 20, then some catastrophe affects all but these 20 creatures (chance fixation of arbitrary trait).
I gue... (read more)