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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

What surprises me about habits like watching news or scrolling Facebook is that people don't get bored by it. Because this is our failsafe mechanism for not falling into repetitive loops.

And I get the appeal of most of these things. When I was an adolescent I had this or other 24h info network on most of the time on a tv in my room. I spent nights arguing with people on Usenet.

But after a few months or maybe a year or two, I would get bored with them. Yet people can keep going for decades. Why is their memetic immune system not firing up?

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Casual social interaction argumentative or otherwise is natural. I mean it's not like we're by nature solitary animals who sit in our rooms and ponder the mysteries of the universe for ten hours. That's just a nerdy hobby of a minority of people who write blogs like that.

Every day when I go to work (pre-covid anyway) I used to chat with the middle-aged lady living next door and we'd talk about the weather or the news or whatever, and there's nothing new about it but it's enjoyable. I've heard someone argue it's like a low-key reality check, sort of like people pinging each other checking if everything's still in tune.

Not too long ago we used to congregate in large communities and extended families for much of the day, and for the last few decades we've locked ourselves in cubicles and single family homes. My grandmother had 8 siblings and three generations living in one home, there was always something to talk about or get in a fight with. It's no wonder most people are yearning for a sort of casual background chat.

I think there are a few factors.

The other side never tires, and it always offers something new. This novelty is different to a conversation with a real (or virtual) human that will tire or run out of new content which leads to natural boredom.

The effort is also smaller. Bite size interactions are easy to digest and "just one more" whereas starting a new movie or TV show has a larger mental hurdle.

It also has elements of gambling. What's in the news feed mystery box this time? Refresh and see. It does not have to be good every time. Intermittent reinforcement takes care of that. In this respect it has a lot in common with many video games.

Those who are alive have genes that have survived billions of generations due to our ancestors' habitual vigilance for predators, prey and mates. We are hardwired to scan the world for those, whatever the channel. Our predecessors who got bored too quickly by massively repetitive scenery were less likely to become our ancestors.

Tell that to all the descendants of Genghis Khan....

If we go back in history far enough: yes, of course we will realize that X% of humanity is a descendant of person Y. But that is just a rather obvious consequence of the fact that genetic signals can travel through a genepool pretty quickly. Nevermind that we are talking about ancestry, not any particular genetic signals. It's just that Genghis Khan, King John and Charlemagne are rather prominent ancestors, and that their geneanalogy is documented well. I'm pretty sure we would find similar results with most people who still had decendants by, let's say, 1750. Since then, humanity went through a phase of tremendous population growth, which by definition expands the set of descendants of any of our ancestors. Most humans that have ever existed are alive today. Their ancestry must come from somewhere.

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