I linked to this a few days ago. I’ve been experimenting with using the technique described over the past few days, and it seems to work pretty well. For example, trying to spend all of my mental bandwidth noticing good things (re-noticing good things I already noticed was allowed) seemed to get me out of a depressive funk in an hour or two. The technique also has some other interesting benefits: some of the positive things I notice are good things that I did, which has the effect of reinforcing those behaviors, and by noticing the good things that are going on in social interactions, I enjoy myself more and become more relaxed and fun to be around (in theory at least—only limited experience with this one thus far), and sometimes I get valuable ideas through realizing that something that initially seemed bad actually has a hidden upside (reminds me of research I’ve read about lucky people).
At this point, I’m left wondering why humans evolved to be so gosh-darn negative all the time. It feels like there must be some hidden upside to being negative that just hasn’t occurred to me.
At this point, I’m left wondering why humans evolved to be so gosh-darn negative all the time. It feels like there must be some hidden upside to being negative that just hasn’t occurred to me.
Some guesses:
Compared with the rest of the nature, and even with large parts of humankind, we live incredibly lucky lives. Our monkey brains were not designed for this, they are probably designed to keep a certain level of unhappiness, so they invent some if they don’t enough from outside. Similarly how our immune systems in absence of parasites develop alergies. Our mechanisms for fighting problems do not have an off switch, because in nature there was no reason to evolve one.
There is probably also some status aspect in this. If you are low status, you better don’t express too much happiness in front of higher status monkeys, because they will punish you just to teach you where is your place. That’s probably because low status itself makes people unhappy, so if you are not unhappy enough, it seems like you are claiming higher status.
I would expect many people to provide a rationalization: “But if I will be happy, that will make me less logical! And I will not be motivated to improve things.” (But I think that is nonsense, because unhappiness is also an emotion, and also interferes with logic. And unhappy people probably have less “willpower” to improve things.)
I’ll use the term “threat” for a problem where avoidance and/or submission is a good way of dealing it.
If a tiger is known to live in a particular part of a forest, that is a threat: Avoiding that part of the forest is a good way of dealing with the problem. If I take part in a hunting expedition and I don’t do my part because I’m too much of a coward, that is also a threat: If I act as if nothing happened and eat as much food as I want, etc. then my fellow tribespeople will think I’m an obnoxious jerk and I’ll be liable to get kicked out. So submission is a good way of dealing with this problem.
If I’m hungry or sleepy or I have homework to do or I need to get a job, those are not threats, even though they have potentially dire consequences: ignoring these problems is not going to make them go away.
Hypothesis: the EEA was full of threats according to my definition; the modern world has fewer such threats. However, we’re wired to assume our environment is full of threats. We’re also wired to believe that if a problem is a serious one, it’s likely a threat. So we’re more likely to exhibit the avoidance behavior for serious problems like finding a job than for trivial ones like solving a puzzle.
(I like the idea of co-opting the word “threat” because then you can repeat phrases like “this is not a threat” in your internal monologue to reassure yourself, if you’ve checked to see if something is a threat and it doesn’t seem to be.)
This seems correct. In a jungle, the cost of failure is frequently death. In our society, when you live an ordinary life (so this does not apply to things like organized crime or playing with explosives), the costs are much smaller, and there is much fun to be gained. But our brains are biased to believe they are in the jungle; they incorrectly perceive many things as tiger equivalents.
This is kind of nitpicky, but “the cost of failure is frequently death” is not the same as “avoidance and/or submission is a good way of dealing with the problem”. It’s not enough to show that in the EEA things could kill you… you have to show that they could kill you, and that trying hard not to think about them was the best way to avoid having them kill you.
I found some interesting thoughts in the book Learned Optimism about the evolutionary usefulness of pessimism:
The benefits of pessimism may have arisen during our recent evolutionary history. We are animals of the Pleistocene, the epoch of the ice ages. Our emotional makeup has most recently been shaped by one hundred thousand years of climactic catastrophe: waves of cold and heat; drought and flood; plenty and sudden famine. Those of our ancestors who survived the Pleis- tocene may have done so because they had the capacity to worry incessantly about the future, to see sunny days as mere prelude to a harsh winter, to brood. We have inherited these ancestors’ brains and therefore their ca- pacity to see the cloud rather than the silver lining.
...
Pessimism produces inertia rather than activity in the face of setbacks.
If the weather is very cold and your brain’s probability estimate of finding any game in the frost is low, maybe inactivity really is the best approach. But if I, as a modern human, am not calorie-constrained, then inactivity seems less wise.
At this point, I’m left wondering why humans evolved to be so gosh-darn negative all the time. It feels like there must be some hidden upside to being negative that just hasn’t occurred to me.
It’s not so much that there’s an upside to negativity as that continued positivity is evolutionarily useless. Evolution wants you to “chase the dragon” of steep, exciting highs rather than maintain a reasonably happy steady-state or, worse yet from Its perspective, “go full transhuman” and rewrite your own mind-design to bring Being Happy and Doing the Right Things into perfect alignment (which we can’t do yet, but probably will be able to someday).
For a community-scale solution, this article seems correct.
I expect spats, arguments, occasional insults, and even inevitable grudges. We’ve all done that. But in the end, I expect you to act like a group of friends who care about each other, no matter how dumb some of us might be, no matter what political opinions some of us hold, no matter what games some of us like or dislike.
One of the first things I learned when I began researching discussion platforms two years ago is the importance of empathy as the fundamental basis of all stable long term communities.
Hate is easy to recognize. Cruelty is easy to recognize. You do not tolerate these in your community, full stop. But what about behavior that isn’t so obviously corrosive? What about behavior patterns that seem sort of vaguely negative, but … nobody can show you exactly how this behavior is directly hurting anyone?
Disagreement is fine, even expected, provided people can disagree in an agreeable way. But when someone joins your community for the sole purpose of disagreeing, that’s Endless Contrarianism. If all a community member can seem to contribute is endlessly pointing out how wrong everyone else is, and how everything about this community is headed in the wrong direction – that’s not building constructive discussion – or the community.
Axe-Grinding is when a user keeps constantly gravitating back to the same pet issue or theme for weeks or months on end. This rapidly becomes tiresome to other participants who have probably heard everything this person has to say on that topic multiple times already.
Griefing is when someone goes out of their way to bait a particular person for weeks or months on end. By that I mean they pointedly follow them around, choosing to engage on whatever topic that person appears in, and needle the other person in any way they can, but always strictly by the book and not in violation of any rules… technically.
In any discussion, there is a general expectation that everyone there is participating in good faith – that they have an open mind, no particular agenda, and no bias against the participants or the topic. While short term disagreement is fine, it’s important that the people in your community have the ability to reset and approach each new topic with a clean(ish) slate. When you don’t do that, when people carry ill will from previous discussions toward the participants or topic into new discussions, that’s a grudge. Grudges can easily lead to every other dark community pattern on this list. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to recognize grudges when they emerge so the community can intervene and point out what’s happening, and all the negative consequences of a grudge.
I linked to this a few days ago. I’ve been experimenting with using the technique described over the past few days, and it seems to work pretty well. For example, trying to spend all of my mental bandwidth noticing good things (re-noticing good things I already noticed was allowed) seemed to get me out of a depressive funk in an hour or two. The technique also has some other interesting benefits: some of the positive things I notice are good things that I did, which has the effect of reinforcing those behaviors, and by noticing the good things that are going on in social interactions, I enjoy myself more and become more relaxed and fun to be around (in theory at least—only limited experience with this one thus far), and sometimes I get valuable ideas through realizing that something that initially seemed bad actually has a hidden upside (reminds me of research I’ve read about lucky people).
At this point, I’m left wondering why humans evolved to be so gosh-darn negative all the time. It feels like there must be some hidden upside to being negative that just hasn’t occurred to me.
I like that link!
Some guesses:
Compared with the rest of the nature, and even with large parts of humankind, we live incredibly lucky lives. Our monkey brains were not designed for this, they are probably designed to keep a certain level of unhappiness, so they invent some if they don’t enough from outside. Similarly how our immune systems in absence of parasites develop alergies. Our mechanisms for fighting problems do not have an off switch, because in nature there was no reason to evolve one.
There is probably also some status aspect in this. If you are low status, you better don’t express too much happiness in front of higher status monkeys, because they will punish you just to teach you where is your place. That’s probably because low status itself makes people unhappy, so if you are not unhappy enough, it seems like you are claiming higher status.
I would expect many people to provide a rationalization: “But if I will be happy, that will make me less logical! And I will not be motivated to improve things.” (But I think that is nonsense, because unhappiness is also an emotion, and also interferes with logic. And unhappy people probably have less “willpower” to improve things.)
I’ll use the term “threat” for a problem where avoidance and/or submission is a good way of dealing it.
If a tiger is known to live in a particular part of a forest, that is a threat: Avoiding that part of the forest is a good way of dealing with the problem. If I take part in a hunting expedition and I don’t do my part because I’m too much of a coward, that is also a threat: If I act as if nothing happened and eat as much food as I want, etc. then my fellow tribespeople will think I’m an obnoxious jerk and I’ll be liable to get kicked out. So submission is a good way of dealing with this problem.
If I’m hungry or sleepy or I have homework to do or I need to get a job, those are not threats, even though they have potentially dire consequences: ignoring these problems is not going to make them go away.
Hypothesis: the EEA was full of threats according to my definition; the modern world has fewer such threats. However, we’re wired to assume our environment is full of threats. We’re also wired to believe that if a problem is a serious one, it’s likely a threat. So we’re more likely to exhibit the avoidance behavior for serious problems like finding a job than for trivial ones like solving a puzzle.
(I like the idea of co-opting the word “threat” because then you can repeat phrases like “this is not a threat” in your internal monologue to reassure yourself, if you’ve checked to see if something is a threat and it doesn’t seem to be.)
This seems correct. In a jungle, the cost of failure is frequently death. In our society, when you live an ordinary life (so this does not apply to things like organized crime or playing with explosives), the costs are much smaller, and there is much fun to be gained. But our brains are biased to believe they are in the jungle; they incorrectly perceive many things as tiger equivalents.
This is kind of nitpicky, but “the cost of failure is frequently death” is not the same as “avoidance and/or submission is a good way of dealing with the problem”. It’s not enough to show that in the EEA things could kill you… you have to show that they could kill you, and that trying hard not to think about them was the best way to avoid having them kill you.
I found some interesting thoughts in the book Learned Optimism about the evolutionary usefulness of pessimism:
...
If the weather is very cold and your brain’s probability estimate of finding any game in the frost is low, maybe inactivity really is the best approach. But if I, as a modern human, am not calorie-constrained, then inactivity seems less wise.
It’s not so much that there’s an upside to negativity as that continued positivity is evolutionarily useless. Evolution wants you to “chase the dragon” of steep, exciting highs rather than maintain a reasonably happy steady-state or, worse yet from Its perspective, “go full transhuman” and rewrite your own mind-design to bring Being Happy and Doing the Right Things into perfect alignment (which we can’t do yet, but probably will be able to someday).
For a community-scale solution, this article seems correct.