[SEQ RERUN] Thou Art Godshatter

[MinibearRex]

Today’s post, Thou Art Godshatter was originally published on 13 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Describes the evolutionary psychology behind the complexity of human values—how they got to be complex, and why, given that origin, there is no reason in hindsight to expect them to be simple. We certainly are not built to maximize genetic fitness.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Protein Reinforcement and DNA Consequentialism, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

[Shmi]

A more poetic quote from the same post:

Being a thousand shards of desire isn’t always fun, but at least it’s not boring. Somewhere along the line, we evolved tastes for novelty, complexity, elegance, and challenge—tastes that judge the blind idiot god’s monomaniacal focus, and find it aesthetically unsatisfying.

[MinibearRex]

Is this a suggestion for an alternate summary?

[Shmi]

Maybe have them both?

[MinibearRex]

There are a fair number of posts with multiple summaries on the Wiki. I just added that quote as an alternate summary. If you want to merge the summaries together, I would encourage you to go for it.