On net, conformity worked ‘for us’ in the past, because we are here, our ancestors made it. This is just the anthropomorphic principle—those who were too maladapted to conformity got weeded out and can’t voice their grievances about it today. It’s important to recognize how anyone in the present cannot rely on this, many will fall prey to bad memes like always, all the way back to the beginning of our big brains.
You need to be careful to define “us” in these discussions. The people for whom it worked in the past are not the people making behavioral choices now. They are the ancestors of today’s people. You also have to be more specific about what “worked” means—they were able to reproduce and create the current people. That is very different from what most people mean by “it works” when evaluating how to behave today.
It’s also impossible to distinguish what parts of historical behavior “worked” in this way. Perhaps it was conformity per se, perhaps it was the specific conformist behaviors that previous eras preferred, perhaps it was other parts of the environment that made it work, which no longer does.
Not disagreeing with anything there, perhaps I should have added a bit more to the ‘cannot rely on this’ part. It will only be after the fact, from the perspective of a being in some present looking at the past, that they can say this or that did or didn’t work in a pretty abstract sense, its the fundamental fallacy of conservatism or traditionalism to assume that we just have to repeat or go back to what worked in retrospective. It’s a tempting illusion of any perspective looking at the past, that has a tendency to overlook all the beings that didn’t make it. We are the winners of history if you will, but only up until this point, just by virtue of being here, in a weak sense we are these people by having inherited their genes, yet a lot of those winners will be dead ends, like in any generation.
Yea, you can only define ‘it works’ with respect to some value standard, reproduction is a sort of lowest common denominator, you don’t have to value reproduction obviously, but if you don’t reproduce your values tend to die with you, at least over the long run, so it’s part of any bottom line. Their genes continue in us, those genes that lead to conformity/disobedience in these and those circumstances. It’s a trite routine to point out how our environment changed a lot, but it’s really important in this case. Just doing what everyone does and used to do unthinkingly, out of convergent herd mentality, is going to result in a lot of trouble, like the essay elaborated. We need new conscious and rational solutions that will work with our out of sync, anachronistic brains, that’s the huge challenge of modernity.
On net, conformity worked ‘for us’ in the past, because we are here, our ancestors made it. This is just the anthropomorphic principle—those who were too maladapted to conformity got weeded out and can’t voice their grievances about it today. It’s important to recognize how anyone in the present cannot rely on this, many will fall prey to bad memes like always, all the way back to the beginning of our big brains.
You need to be careful to define “us” in these discussions. The people for whom it worked in the past are not the people making behavioral choices now. They are the ancestors of today’s people. You also have to be more specific about what “worked” means—they were able to reproduce and create the current people. That is very different from what most people mean by “it works” when evaluating how to behave today.
It’s also impossible to distinguish what parts of historical behavior “worked” in this way. Perhaps it was conformity per se, perhaps it was the specific conformist behaviors that previous eras preferred, perhaps it was other parts of the environment that made it work, which no longer does.
Not disagreeing with anything there, perhaps I should have added a bit more to the ‘cannot rely on this’ part. It will only be after the fact, from the perspective of a being in some present looking at the past, that they can say this or that did or didn’t work in a pretty abstract sense, its the fundamental fallacy of conservatism or traditionalism to assume that we just have to repeat or go back to what worked in retrospective. It’s a tempting illusion of any perspective looking at the past, that has a tendency to overlook all the beings that didn’t make it. We are the winners of history if you will, but only up until this point, just by virtue of being here, in a weak sense we are these people by having inherited their genes, yet a lot of those winners will be dead ends, like in any generation.
Yea, you can only define ‘it works’ with respect to some value standard, reproduction is a sort of lowest common denominator, you don’t have to value reproduction obviously, but if you don’t reproduce your values tend to die with you, at least over the long run, so it’s part of any bottom line. Their genes continue in us, those genes that lead to conformity/disobedience in these and those circumstances. It’s a trite routine to point out how our environment changed a lot, but it’s really important in this case. Just doing what everyone does and used to do unthinkingly, out of convergent herd mentality, is going to result in a lot of trouble, like the essay elaborated. We need new conscious and rational solutions that will work with our out of sync, anachronistic brains, that’s the huge challenge of modernity.