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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Then why do our genetic memories compel us to be terrified of them

How do you know it's genetic memory and not simply popular attitudes from childhood? I know when I was a kid people generally viewed spiders as a threat and so I adopted this attitude. It was only as an adult that I learned this is basically folklore and in my area not based on fact. But I don't think that's genetic, I think it is cultural. I would be curious to see what anthropologists have discovered about this.

I think you're conflating your own phobia up with something more fundamental.

I've certainly never found them even a little bit frightening. I've definitely felt like "someone's home" but it's probably the big eyes bias.

I would not characterize it as phobia, so much as I find them disgusting for some reason, dirty and unclean.

It's just your conditioning. If you look at it from another angle you can see that they are actually harmless and clean. And even playful amd cute if you goof around with them a bit.

Maybe it's about being grossed out by cobwebs.

which jumping spiders don't do

Even if we are predisposed to be fearful of spiders, so what? Not all spiders are the same, and jumping spiders are certainly 100% harmless to humans of all sizes. Why not work on promoting that experience and rationality override any (often mistaken) primal urges that we have?

Why did we gain those instincts in the first place. What is nature trying to warn us

Should we also kill all the other human-tribes then?

I can’t believe how frequently I have to say this to people: instinct is far from reason.

That they bite, a very few of them are significantly venomous, and no matter how easy their webs are to find, they don't make good snacks.

May be because of their unpredictability owing to their jumpiness? That seems very reasonable since humans do instinctually stay away from unpredictable organisms/animals in nature. That unpredictability doesn’t always have to correlate with the real dangerousness of those creatures.

If you don't know anything about any wild berries, beyond some are poisonous, it might be a safe bet to never eat any of them.

If you know something about berries, like this species is definitely poisonous, and this species is definitely safe, and this species you don't know anything about, then it is perfectly safe to avoid the first and third and indulge in the second.

Jumping spiders trigger significantly less of that response than other types of spiders. Are you sure you know what a jumping spider looks like?

You say "compel" like you have no choice. Our instincts push us to do all kinds of irrational things. Try not to do them.

I felt a compulsion to respond snarkily to this comment, but I believe I've pretty successfully avoided doing so

When you show images of a spider to a six month old baby their pupils expand, which is apparently a pretty reliable physiological indicator of fear.

https://www.cbs.mpg.de/Fear-of-spiders-and-snakes-is-deeply-...

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