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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

This is perhaps one of my biggest downside surprises about university.

Although there were plenty of fun people to hang out with, there were very few people who had a seriousness about getting work done, along with a collaborative instinct. Maybe I was unlucky, but I'd thought that an Oxbridge college would yield a few people who could keep me focussed on the academics. And yes, in another world I would have brought the motivation myself, but like many people, I am influenced by my environment.

If you've ever coded with someone you click with, you might have had this experience of generating way more useful code than 2x people working on their own, or what one person could do in 2x the time.

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Intellectualism hasn’t matured as Barbarism has (still going through refinement). Your gym partner is never going to even attempt to prove to you they are stronger, and you yourself won’t even care if they are (or vice versa). There’s a natural understanding of the physical, and mostly we as a society realize how futile it is to exert physical dominance on one another. So you are stronger, what are you going to do, beat me up every day? We realize this is a stupid game.

Ironically, it’s the intellectual stuff that hasn’t come full circle. So you’re smarter, is your plan to just out smart me everyday? Well actually, yes, that is the plan. I will out smart you, establish dominance, hierarchy, status etc - all of which is systemically quantified via prestige, status, income, life partners (all the stupid shit physical dominance once got us) . It’s hard to find synergy in this realm when we as a society haven’t gotten over ourselves on this front, the same way we got over all that physical beat people up bullshit. We haven’t yet accepted that this too is a waste of time in the context of civilization.

We are all more than capable of collaborating intellectually, but as a society we are just too dumb at the moment to do so. Hard to collaborate with barbaric intellectuals.

Long story short, you are probably part of the problem, as we all are at this inflection point in humanity.

> we as a society realize how futile it is to exert physical dominance on one another

A more cynical explanation may say it only disappeared was because we discovered the more /effective/ way to exert dominance on others was mentally, not physically. It wasn't due to any collective enlightenment about the sociological futility of domination -- it was merely a desire to achieve better logistics.

As a follow-up to this line of thought (which I find insightful): if we were to become mature with regards to intellectualism as you say - do you think we would then go on to the next thing to be competitive about? Or maybe we need that next thing to trigger our maturing, as a consequence of competition switching to another domain?

Or, is it possible that competition about important matters is not an inherently human trait, and we could actually just all switch to deeply caring about who is best at Trackmania or who follows the best football team or whatever?

In some sense a sizeable portion of the human population has already done the latter - perhaps they are actually the enlightened ones?

(I'm assuming that competition is important for humans, since this seems to be a well established fact. The question here is whether the competitiveness needs to be about factors related to your intellect and studies/workplace achievements.)

I guess I’ll use the lame saying ‘Bar is closing, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here’ as to what will solve it.

I get people have underpinnings of nature that enflame instincts. That’s great, but you know, when it impacts people’s lives - it needs to find another place to party.

I hope that makes sense. Hitler ad-reductio incoming. Hey, Germany, I get your bullshit pulled you out of the depths of WW1, but look, your nonsense is killing millions of people.

Just find another abstract gutter for your nonsense, find another means of self fulfillment, please, and don’t hurt anyone.

We don’t have to placate every human instinct and constantly romanticize every aspect of the human struggle. Life is absolutely requires empathy and stability.

Very well written. I always preferred mathematics to chess, because the competitive aspect of chess always seemed to hinder collaboration.

Seeing the same lack of collaboration in university was really disappointing. Friendly people listened passively, less friendly people liked to listen and contradict. The willingness to actually share knowledge seemed to be almost non-existent.

I haven't solved the puzzle yet why sharing knowledge is so hard. Some people don't have knowledge to share, some want to keep an advantage, and the barbaric instincts to reject unfamiliar ideas tramples the remaining few sparks.

Noticing my own barbaric instincts in action was enlightening.

I've never seen this verbalized before, but it makes a lot of sense.

> I will out smart you, establish dominance, hierarchy, status etc - all of which is systemically quantified via prestige, status, income, life partners (all the stupid shit physical dominance once got us)

This seems like it will be very hard to get rid of compared to physical dominance. Partly because smarts are far less straightforward than physicality, and partly because it would be a systemic change.

Part of this feels like sexual selection exerting its pressure.

It’s why the paradise birds dance.

Being physically fit used to be the main factor and while it still helps today, it’s only one smaller component of status.

I don’t see the physical fitness and intellectual posturing as two distinct areas that have separately matured.

It’s one sexual selection continuum - only the environment and what’s adaptive for attracting mates has changed.

There’s a new dance to learn.

I don’t think this is something we can easily overcome.

Isn't that more or less why Perelman turned down the Fields medal? He had no interest in the competitive part of professional math study?

What a bizarre claim. Physical competitiveness is a huge part of culture. You don't need to beat someot up to physically intimidate and dominate someone, and you don't need to mentally abuse someone to have a valuable experience in a relationship.

Physical dominance found many abstract gutters to empty into, and necessarily so. It was literally destroying the world with violence.

The Roman identity was literally built on conquering. It took a long time until we were able to say ‘yeah, why can’t this small little land mass be it’s own country?’. Why would a country have to fight for independence? Can you imagine that in today’s society? It’s absurd. Yet, many of our countries had to ... fight for independence. What kind of world was that? A world where dominance wasn’t an undercurrent?

Intellectual dominance hasn’t found socially acceptable gutters, it literally pays in society. Esports and video games is a band aid. The underlying trait is dominance. I can’t prove my thesis in two paragraphs I suppose, but you’ll have to forgive me for that.

Dominant behavior is dysfunctional, and since it is an underlying human trait, it reincarnates itself constantly. Racism and classism are all forms of it, under the umbrella of elitism.

Why can’t my unfit brother go to the same gym I worked hard to get into? Sounds crazy right? Well he’s fat, he didn’t earn it, etc. We don’t even contemplate this anymore physically. Yet, why can’t someone also work at Google because they aren’t the best? Intellectualism at the moment rejects ‘it takes a village’, and it rejects ‘the hand cannot say I am not of the body’.

So be it, it’s just the dark ages. One day we’ll figure it out, as we did with the other manifestation of dominance.

My most serious point is this - the nonsense cannot and should not affect people’s livelihoods. Find the abstract gutter for the nonsense already, and do not fuck with people with your meta game.

Would you agree that the fastest/least harmful way to get to that place is to codify practices/laws at the level of a nation-state, or do you think that's ridiculous and it'll just be some organic development of individuals opting for that type of behavior?

So, I’ll give away a little bit of my teenage naivety (pretty old now relative to my 20s, still a child to some here) in that lately I’ve been influenced by some serious reading on the Holocaust and Nazi-Soviet dystopian ideas. In a sense, we really didn’t see the insanity until it fulfilled it’s natural conclusion (a disgusting simile to the final solution). Such a pattern is more common place amongst addicts, who basically need to bottom out until they get it.

The sadness is that I know it must play out before we can come to the table and solve it.

In other words, there’s no shortcuts, and we have to see it through to the end to prove it, no inductive step. No theory in this.

If you ever get the chance or make time to read Chimpanzee Politics it is uncanny just how closely the behaviors match that of humans.

Except you get to see it without any of the rationalizations that we make. You get the raw distillation of this behavior.

It'll never change.

Write a blog post about this. It would be a good read.

This is the reason I struggle so much with distance learning during corona. Usually I find partners in my classes to review the lecture with and work on the assignment in parallel. I get so much drive, energy and fun just by not being alone and discussing concepts together. Since I am in my masters, I can freely choose the lectures I want and often don't know anyone in class and rely on making friends in the first week(s). So I am way more on my own during corona and feel like I am fighting alone against the quite demanding lectures. It's not easy and it's just not as fun anymore. I feel like I am only trying to survive the exams without the drive to learn and explore.

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