I think the criticism of 6 is a misunderstanding. It doesn’t say “the world resembles the ancestral savanna”, it says “the world resembles the ancestral savanna more than say a windowless office”. The best environment is unlikely to be anything like the ancestral savanna, but it’s likely to be closer to that than to a windowless office, in terms of sensory experience. The point I think is not the specifics of the environment, but that it engages with our bodies and senses in a way that we, as evolved creatures, find satisfying, and in a way that the purely mental stimulation available in the office does not.
I’m really not sure I’d even rather live in something that was just “more like” a savannah than a windowless office. Offices usually have stuff in them, and… air conditioning.
Making bland air that doesn’t taste of anything, except perhaps paper dust. Nobody’s saying you can’t temperature-control the place; if you don’t like the literal savannah, how about a nice temperate forest on a summer’s day in European latitudes? With enough green stuff to give the air freshness, and the occasional animal? I suggest that you are not thinking specifically enough.
Hmm, there seems to be a general communication problem here. Saying “more like X than Y” will only succeed at communicating, if others share your intuitions about the most salient differences between X and Y.
I doubt that air temperature was what EY was alluding to. The “From Cro-Magnons to Consumers” parable (p. 2) and “The Natural-Living Test” (p. 331) in Spent by Geoffrey Miller make the point I think EY was trying to make much more clearly.
(And even wrt air temperature, don’t fall for the typical mind fallacy. I mean, all those people going on summer holiday in Florida can’t be all masochists, can they? My mother’s favourite temperature is at least 5 °C higher than mine.)
I think the criticism of 6 is a misunderstanding. It doesn’t say “the world resembles the ancestral savanna”, it says “the world resembles the ancestral savanna more than say a windowless office”. The best environment is unlikely to be anything like the ancestral savanna, but it’s likely to be closer to that than to a windowless office, in terms of sensory experience. The point I think is not the specifics of the environment, but that it engages with our bodies and senses in a way that we, as evolved creatures, find satisfying, and in a way that the purely mental stimulation available in the office does not.
That’s what I took away from the linked post.
I’m really not sure I’d even rather live in something that was just “more like” a savannah than a windowless office. Offices usually have stuff in them, and… air conditioning.
Making bland air that doesn’t taste of anything, except perhaps paper dust. Nobody’s saying you can’t temperature-control the place; if you don’t like the literal savannah, how about a nice temperate forest on a summer’s day in European latitudes? With enough green stuff to give the air freshness, and the occasional animal? I suggest that you are not thinking specifically enough.
Hmm, there seems to be a general communication problem here. Saying “more like X than Y” will only succeed at communicating, if others share your intuitions about the most salient differences between X and Y.
I doubt that air temperature was what EY was alluding to. The “From Cro-Magnons to Consumers” parable (p. 2) and “The Natural-Living Test” (p. 331) in Spent by Geoffrey Miller make the point I think EY was trying to make much more clearly.
(And even wrt air temperature, don’t fall for the typical mind fallacy. I mean, all those people going on summer holiday in Florida can’t be all masochists, can they? My mother’s favourite temperature is at least 5 °C higher than mine.)