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Comment by mrrrgn | Hacker News Reader

Certain personality types are more likely to ignore social pressure and pursue logical conclusions of ideals. It's probably no accident that such personality profiles only account for a small percentage of our population as logical conclusions based off of faulty models can lead to huge disasters.

The great mass of people who don't do much deep thinking act as a dampener and probably prevent our society from shaking itself apart as it whips to and fro across the space of all possible ideologies.

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I don't think that's so much an adaptive aspect of human societies as it is a result of the sort of memes that are effective at propagating themselves. If you are a meme that is facing selective pressures towards persisting for as long as possible, you'll fare best if you exploit human psychology such that you're very hard to get rid of and invoke behavior in the people that carry you that is oppressively dogmatic and ideally prevents the sort of exploratory behavior that might see you replaced by another meme.

That sounds a bit naturalist fallacy - just because it is selected for doesn't mean it is ideal. Legacy is perfectly capable of leaving maladaption. The inertia can and has worked against them too.

For instance it could have been from the history of human group hunting, warfare that sort of cohesion served better than intellectual ability in the short term.

But under modern conditions the utility would invert - muscle power is basically worthless compared to machines for labor for one. Not falling for the stupid delusions of the day can give a lead of centuries.

Besides shouldn't proper deep thinkers should be able to weigh risks of ideologies? The unthinking masses would continue along with disaster while critical thinkere would say "stop!".

> That sounds a bit naturalist fallacy

When we see things in nature, it's always possible that they serve a purpose. Adaptive traits are selected for. It's also possible they aren't.

It seems there are three possibilities:

  - Trait is useful.

  - Trait was useful (no longer is).

  - Trait is neutral.

> Besides shouldn't proper deep thinkers should be able to weigh risks of ideologies?

Shouldn't a good programmer be able to look at a program and its input and determine with 100% certainty whether or not the program will halt?

It might seem so but of course we know from computer science that they [in the general case] cannot. Deep thinking and intelligence alone aren't enough to predict all of the possible routes through a complex problem space.

Some things just have to be tried in order to be understood. And because of that it's probably safe to stick with things that have been tried before over things that seem reasonable to some smart but not all knowing person but that haven't been tried before.

Aren't most mutations harmful afterall?

"Adaptive" is not a Boolean. Contradictory, even mutually hostile, traits can develop because the ecosystem switches between different modes for various physical reasons [1] and different survival skills are optimal in each.

By the time you get to humans you have an incoherent patchwork of mutually exclusive behaviour modes and cognitive approaches - not just between individuals, but within individuals.

[1] Seasonal changes, population cycles, and so on.

This is an argument against teaching critical thinking skills, which in the current zeitgeist is an extremist position. By thinking independently like this you weaken the dampener and risk the disintegration of society.

If that's followed by an adaptive reintegration, it's a feature not a bug.

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