Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

> Racism and global climate change are not explained by our shared history with chimpanzees, nor are gender diversity, the #MeToo movement, and the recent rise in nationalism.

No. It can all be compared to how most social mammals operate.

Racism & nationalism have their roots in tribalism, a very useful tool to keep a tribe cohesive and thus competitive against other tribes.

Climate change: Have a look at any invasive species for examples.

Gender diversity & MeToo: Genders in mammals will take on certain specialized roles in order to survive in their environment.

Are they right and ethical? Of course not. Times have changed, and our psyches haven't kept up. But ignoring our evolutionary heritage only results in treating the symptoms rather than the cause. That's not how you correct problems.

> It’s only by delving into humanity’s distinctive evolutionary history, since our split with the other ape lineages, that we are better able to develop a fuller understanding of the human niche, of what makes us specifically human.

Uh, no. It's also important to find out what's baked into our psyche, no matter how ugly or inconvenient, and take steps to compensate for them or maybe even correct them. That's what higher reasoning is for.

I would say that racism is rooted not specifically tribalism but more broadly in inductive reasoning (particular-to-general heuristics) which has been absolutely indispensable to survival and evolution.

It is critical to classify a creature as friend or foe based on what class it belongs to, rather than granting the instance benefit of doubt.

How previously observed members of a group have behaved in the past constitutes rational evidence for estimating the future behavior of a newly observed member of that group.

Trying to understand the thread of reasoning here so correct me if I didn't interpret this correctly.

An individual observing some members of a group with different physical characteristic with a certain behavior, an individual infers all members of that group behave that way.

Then with an individual being exposed to a sampling of that groups behavior due to say the news or social media algorithms the individual makes an inference but is unable to account for the bias these sources might have.

Even before social media - we're a social and talkative species. More often than not, we're not observing members of a group directly, but we're receiving an already made generalization from other people - which they as well may have received, not made. In the past, the main source of those received generalizations were people we met. Ever since the printing press, it's mass media instead.

> individual infers all members of that group behave that way.

E.g. "all sharks bite legs off"

This leads to survival: not having your legs bitten off.

Higher reasoning isn't all that great. E.g., people have constructed consistent systems of reasoning that are entirely misanthropic or, if not actually misanthropic, they conclude that the extinction of the human species is good.

And you're missing the point that the stratification of phenomena into "higher reasoning" <-> "base instinct" is a false hierarchy. Even when you're working within ethics, you eventually have to ground yourself in moral intuitions, which is fundamentally irrational (the underlying mechanism of moral intuition can't be examined through reason).

I think maybe what the author is ultimately saying is that it's not wrong to think about these uniquely human qualities as being just as natural and basic as anything else.

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