Well our chimp troupe has no dearth of mindlessly ambitious chimps, who end up in the positions of "power" and have no clue what to do after they land up there, given the complexities we face. So I just feel bad for them. It's like a trap that the naturally non ambitious can safely avoid.
So sure, seek out power and sit and appreciate all the routes to get it, but as the world gets more and more complex for our 6 inch chimp brains to handle, ppl in power are all pretty screwed whatever they do.
Are you talking about our society or chimps in the wild? To me it’s all just a mating strategy. Wealthy people aren’t smart from my experience, neither are ambitious people.
Why is that? I think that if you’re smarter you would sit and think about what power actually gets you. Outside of some random people trying to bother you every day and some extra mating, that’s it. You’re stuck with the same chimp/monkey mentality you started with only now you have the added bonus of having annoyed/being annoying.
One of the Laws of Power is to have a "harmless vice" to display your faults. It makes others feel more comfortable and secure around you, especially if you're a high achiever, when they can see an obvious flaw.
Your comment made me find the book, "48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene, judging from law 46: "Never appear too perfect". It's not classified as fiction, but it's gotta be satire, I mean, it's good, but sprinkled with many antisocial and toxic behaviors.
I guess the people in power prove these laws are realistic, definitely adding it to my to-read book pile.
"Bigger, stronger animals beat up smaller, weaker ones. The vanquished slunk away, and the victor claimed the prize. Or so we thought.
To be sure, there are enough of these sorts of brutish battles going on in nature to make war-of-all-against-all theorist Thomas Hobbes smirk. But we now know the quest for power in the animal kingdom is oh-so-much more subtle, interesting and, dare I say, beautiful than we previously thought."
is it possible you can paste some more of the article, please? i could not figure out how to read it around the cookie banner and other playful page elements. thank you
What makes you think anybody actually has any interest in a true meritocracy? There are good reasons all supposed meritocracies turn out not to be actually based on merit but more on personal preference. Humans are social animals and we tend to prefer surrounding us with people we like, not necessarily people who are best at their job.
That's the thing, you could just game the system to your advantage and gain power. We know that in a controlled environment like academia and science, this produces inferior results overall. Mixed form Nash equilibria work on a relative level of progress, but it seems transactions of sacrifices produces greater absolute gains - to specialise in one direction to take great action in, and be supportive of others' specialisations.
1. Meritocracy tends to produce superior results to systems based on nepotism — so people who want the best outcome for their tribe should preference merit.
2. Power is the ultimate meritocracy — you have it or you don’t. One of our best strategies to reduce the raw usage of power to settle disputes within society is create a social system that roughly follows meritocracy.
Humans are social animals, but we’re also animals that like prosperity and safety.
There’s never been a meritocracy. That’s the whole point of the word being used in the satire critiquing a meritocracy. Like the points being made here.
That's a collective prisoners dilemma that we ought to break out of. An individual can win at the expense of the group. What we should be striving for is to align the incentives of individuals with the incentives of the group.
Well meritocracy could be said to favour those who are genetically gifted. Sure, sure, hard work and all that, but if everyone is working just as hard and some are naturally gifted (higher intelligence due to genetics / lack of lead exposure as a child, etc.) then is it really meritocracy? It's no different than inherited wealth. I'm sure idealists would feel repulsed by the idea that genetics can lead to power imbalances in meritocracies.
Meritocracy is also characterised by an enormous range of strategies to achieve dominance. There isn't one characteristic to optimise on, it is a very complex game of figuring out what the world needs and becoming it.
The difference is a meritocracy tries not to optimise on looks, heritage and such instead shifting the focus to results. But competition to achieve those results is still fierce.
The idea of the social animal is MADness. The anti-social predator is the mutual assured destruction from the outside. If i scream or cry, we all will suffer, it is in your interest to have me being well. Else be tigers, dragons and bears, oh my, bearing down on us.
Now, if we are all uniform fit, it might be interesting to conspire to produce one unfit to feed to tigers, lions and bears. Thus mobbing is the creating of a sacrfice of the social unfit and a filter functionality of old society against the brutes.
Now for the rule of law. The rule of law is the ability control mobbing by majority vote, aka religion. We mob a class of humans into social service, give them power and withold power, if they refuse to uphold basic contract society.
Thus regressive behaviour is a sexual selection criteria and contract religion unavoidable. Human society is nothing form and shapeable, but limited in a special ed way.
Which is why humanity will not go to space today.
Nor tomorrow.
We will spend about 300 years fixing the flaws we inheritted in something close to special ed, with social implants and learning self-control.
No, you can not vote on that.
Neither can the murderous dictator you want to push your agenda.
StarTrek is not djungle creature wheel chair accesible.
Its nice that the whole gathered knowledge of the fqalantir research is slowly leaking outwards though. Humanism is not comfort, humanism is to try to become self aware of the horrible & flawed in us and repair.
Comfortable pandering to the emotions we inherited is regressive.
To punish a car-driver for his rewritten accident memories cause of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade , no matter how just it feels and how much he feels he deserves it, is foolish. Instead force to car to adhere to speed limits, as the creature that drives is always retarded.
There needs to be the ability to have a "grown up" conversation, without the "retarded" interrupting by chanting "marx & evangelical" texts && just preaching a return "to the natural state" which is just "instinct feels good" praising every buffon chanting "for the return to the savannah". Downvote away all you want, you priests and believers, the dead are more interesting conversation anyway.
Are you arguing for eugenics, transhumanism or both?
If I understand you correctly (and I'm not sure I do), you believe that prey animals only don't kill/expell the weak because doing so would attract predators to them and that if we all were genetically superior, we would be "able to" do that and that governments/religion undermines that by giving power to the (presumably inferior) majority and suppress a (presumably superior) underclass and that is stunting our development somehow (presumably only more recently given the massive scientific progress in the past century, so the societal decline would have to have become noticeable only in the recent decades or so)?
I'm trying to steelman your argument as best I can but I'm not even sure I read all of that correctly. If that is what you mean, you're using a lot of words to say "postmodern degeneracy is holding the human race back and we should kill the weak instead of comforting them".
Are you sure this isn't a bot that is merely responding to the headline? The comment has almost nothing to do with the article text.
Look at the comment history.
"If the headline was "German bombers drop smart anti-infrastructure water-bombletts into thames \ blitz getting more expensive by the day \ pratchett fans cheer for modern Ankh Morpork" it would describe a similar situation, without the disney googles and nobody would celebrate it.
Ankh Morpork is a Disc World reference that has nothing to do with German bombers or disney or google.
It’s like reading the back of the “Dr. Bronner’s Soap” label. I get what the guy is saying but he’s said it in a way that’s so unappealing I’d rather not care.
https://archive.ph/W2oZC