You’d think that more severe punishment would have a correspondingly greater deterrent effect, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. What matters much more than the severity of the punishment is its likelihood. Sure, you might starve in the streets if you get caught jacking off in some high-born lady’s nether-garments—if you get caught. And, let’s be honest: you’re probably not going to get caught, and if you get caught, you’re probably not going to be reported to your employer.
In any case, all that talk of starvation is far-off, way in the future; the laundry is right here, and offers immediate gratification. IQ is pretty strongly correlated with the ability to delay gratification, and (though I don’t have a citation for this) people seem to care about the future a lot less when they’re horny.
Not treating starvation as important will lead to the 1920′s person repeatedly doing such things until he gets unlucky, at which point he’ll starve and he’ll have selected himself out of existence. You can’t just say that people will ignore deferred gratification under circumstances where ignoring deferred gratification will lead to not surviving—natural selection will ensure that the only ones remaining are the ones who don’t ignore it.
Furthermore, starvation isn’t such a remote threat for people who are on the edge of starvation anyway.
What evidence would get you to revise your thought that evolution via natural selection would work in such short time frames? (OK, now what about updating your evidence about starvation levels in the 1920s? Until 1929, almost no-one would have been starving, full employment was normal.)
If servants who do stupid things starve, the only surviving servants will be the ones who don’t do stupid things. This does not involve evolution; the servants are not passing the information down to another generation. It does however involve natural selection.
And there’s no point in “updating evidence”, unless you have some evidence that deals specifically with the case of lower class people who work as servants and routinely piss off their employers. Whether people in general starved is irrelevant.
You’d think that more severe punishment would have a correspondingly greater deterrent effect, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. What matters much more than the severity of the punishment is its likelihood. Sure, you might starve in the streets if you get caught jacking off in some high-born lady’s nether-garments—if you get caught. And, let’s be honest: you’re probably not going to get caught, and if you get caught, you’re probably not going to be reported to your employer.
In any case, all that talk of starvation is far-off, way in the future; the laundry is right here, and offers immediate gratification. IQ is pretty strongly correlated with the ability to delay gratification, and (though I don’t have a citation for this) people seem to care about the future a lot less when they’re horny.
Not treating starvation as important will lead to the 1920′s person repeatedly doing such things until he gets unlucky, at which point he’ll starve and he’ll have selected himself out of existence. You can’t just say that people will ignore deferred gratification under circumstances where ignoring deferred gratification will lead to not surviving—natural selection will ensure that the only ones remaining are the ones who don’t ignore it.
Furthermore, starvation isn’t such a remote threat for people who are on the edge of starvation anyway.
What evidence would get you to revise your thought that evolution via natural selection would work in such short time frames? (OK, now what about updating your evidence about starvation levels in the 1920s? Until 1929, almost no-one would have been starving, full employment was normal.)
I didn’t use the word “evolution”.
If servants who do stupid things starve, the only surviving servants will be the ones who don’t do stupid things. This does not involve evolution; the servants are not passing the information down to another generation. It does however involve natural selection.
And there’s no point in “updating evidence”, unless you have some evidence that deals specifically with the case of lower class people who work as servants and routinely piss off their employers. Whether people in general starved is irrelevant.