> "Can you imagine how exhausting it would be to weigh every possible motivation of another person?"
Which is why people take the shortcut of assuming anyone who says things they don't like is an asshole.
Which is why people take the shortcut of assuming anyone who says things they don't like is an asshole.
Why? Because to me it feels, we are mostly rational people and at the end of the day we don't want to do anything that will hunt our consciousness. So we will always try to balance out our good and evil.
I don't have the mental energy to give everyone I come across the benefit of the doubt. When it's all said and done, the people who don't take the time to try and understand me get dismissed pretty quickly.
I know, I know, that makes me a terrible person. But it's also true that some people are more considerate than others, and all things being equal, if I'm going to expend my limited energy on someone, it's going to be the person who is a little more considerate.
I guess that's my failing, but whatever.
There's no reason for you or anyone else to think you're a terrible person because of what you're saying, but at the same time, it might be helpful for you to reconsider your position. What happens if someone catches you on a bad day in which you aren't trying to understand people? They "dismiss you pretty quickly" and you're left holding the bag.
I can excuse me and hello, nice to meet you all day long without a second thought. But I'm not going to spend my time trying to reconcile with someone who is being unfair to something I said when I could instead be using that time to reconcile with someone who is instead simply misunderstanding me.
there is an idea known as irreconcilable differences, that idea applies here.
If you're not willing to empathize enough to do this for another human being, then you're a terrible person who needs to work to be better.
So you basically demand others spend mental energy on you, but you refuse to return the favor?
The question is going to be will you start telling me what my point is? because I'm not going to waste my time on you.
No reasonable person who has been online for any length of time is going to really argue with what I just said. There is no way you sit and really contemplate and try to communicate as best you can with everyone you come across online, you would never make it out of a single youtube video.
There's how you view yourself and then there's the way you really are. You pick and choose just as readily as I do, the only difference is I'm pretty open about it.
You won't give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but only take seriously the people who offer it to you.
That strategy doesn't seem like it would pan out very well!
This all came up in a verbal discussion I had with someone as to why evolution hasn't "fixed" memory, it subjectively seems technically possible looking at skill memory (riding a bike, etc), and the theory we more or less proposed is social cohesion is reproductively valuable and social cohesion is destroyed if people remember minor slights (or, worse than minor slights...) forever. So a population where people forget is a population that will be more reproductively successful over time and outcompete a more petty society where members remember everything. And that's why google searches and/or social media are a net negative for society, or rephrased its a competitive advantage for a culture not to have google/facebook integration. I don't think that was the result they were looking for, and now as per the above any time that poor bastard runs into a new user of the Socratic method of discussion he's going to auto-categorize the new guy as an asshole, all my fault. Oh well, at least its not google searchable (aside from here), LOL.
Quite a few cultures worked like this. Minor issues of "honour" would turn into persistent and violent multi-generational vendettas. Unfortunately, violence isn't necessarily a problem for social cohesion. It makes your culture a horrible place to be, but it doesn't keep humans from breeding successfully.
Re: memory, I think it's more likely that a better memory would take extra energy and perhaps a different brain structure, but would add no obvious survival benefits.
Early humans basically needed enough memory to find their way around an environment, to recognise each other, and to know a few heuristics for group values and survival practices (often camouflaged as myths and stories.)
There was no need to learn every possible back-of-the-book calculus formula or the entire syntax of Haskell. From that pov, human memory is already an order of magnitude better than it really needs to be.
Interestingly, some cultures were allegedly much better at memory than we are. Supposedly epic poets and druids endured long and incredibly arduous trainings with huge amounts of rote memorisation.
I remember a Maori exhibit at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The gist was, they had these never-ending violence cycles based on perceived points of honor, but as you say they weren't a huge deal because their weapons weren't very good and most conflicts had few fatalities. Then they got guns from the Europeans and suddenly had an actual problem. At this point, some of the chiefs converted to Christianity for, according to the museum, the sole reason that it let them 'turn the other cheek' without losing honor (and thus their leadership position).
I remember only a small amount from the rest of the museum, but that bit was fascinating.