I find it interesting that almost all the good advice I read—whether regarding the workplace, romance, friendships, shopping, etc—translates, in your vocabulary, to “be more jock.” Be more pushy, more demanding, set higher expectations, make things happen, be the first mover, be more assertive. While all this is individually interesting, it nevertheless leads to the question of why there should be free “fitness points” for a generic strategy change across a wide range of areas—which you would expect not to be the case.
My naive hypothesis is that something has changed to make “jock” a more attractive strategy now than in the past, so social and cultural mores push us into a more “geek” direction than is good for us. But this seems a rather unsatisfactory explanation for various reasons. Does anyone have better explanations?
why there should be free “fitness points” for a generic strategy change across a wide range of areas
I think you need to remember that “us geeks” are outliers, a tail of the distribution. For some things that’s too far out of the mainstream and moving back towards the center would be useful. For comparison look at the other tail—impulsive, not too smart, hold-mah-beer-and-watch-this people. Their “free fitness points” are in becoming more thoughtful, in reflecting more on themselves and the world, etc.
Having said that, I think that in specific cases—particularly Russia under Stalin—there was a significant enough culling of the population to affect the gene pool. Dumb and obedient people survived, smart and active did not.
I don’t know enough about Russia under Stalin. I can believe that passivity was a good strategy, but how about knowing how to manipulate the system, if only in small ways?
My impression is that periodic purges made any kind of success dangerous—the best survival strategy was just to keep your head down and not stick out in any way.
It is perfectly satisfactory. Two world wars, several genocides, and a cold war dun it. Being too jock on the collective level became incredibly dangerous, you really, really don’t want any “hawks” or “direct action worshippers” around nukes. It was more like “Think twice, think thrice, heck, think a million times and still don’t press that button!”
Around the 1960′s, the hippie era, came the geek revolution which took things a bit too far and now we are correcting, regressing back to the mean. Largely because we feel safer now, current problems East Ukraine and ISIS notwithstanding are NOT Cuban Missile Crisis level of problems.
Also, geeks with computers at home are way more formidable than geeks stuffed away into a bleak research lab in 1950. This made us a bit over-confident. We need reminders that even with a geeky software startup success depends on more jocky hard-work and discipline and so on than just smart ideas.
Finally, because intelligence or rationality is supposed to be a self-correcting virtue or tool: perhaps the only one of them? So it is part of intelligence or rationality to figure out when you need to rely on something else than it. To know its own limitations. To figure out how people who economized their time differently and spent their time on building other virtues or tools may have advantages. Intelligence is a universal learner, even from the less intelligent, and while the intelligent tend to economize their time towards intellectual learning part of the universal learning is about the outcomes of other optimizations.
I find it interesting that almost all the good advice I read—whether regarding the workplace, romance, friendships, shopping, etc—translates, in your vocabulary, to “be more jock.” Be more pushy, more demanding, set higher expectations, make things happen, be the first mover, be more assertive. While all this is individually interesting, it nevertheless leads to the question of why there should be free “fitness points” for a generic strategy change across a wide range of areas—which you would expect not to be the case.
My naive hypothesis is that something has changed to make “jock” a more attractive strategy now than in the past, so social and cultural mores push us into a more “geek” direction than is good for us. But this seems a rather unsatisfactory explanation for various reasons. Does anyone have better explanations?
I think you need to remember that “us geeks” are outliers, a tail of the distribution. For some things that’s too far out of the mainstream and moving back towards the center would be useful. For comparison look at the other tail—impulsive, not too smart, hold-mah-beer-and-watch-this people. Their “free fitness points” are in becoming more thoughtful, in reflecting more on themselves and the world, etc.
Having said that, I think that in specific cases—particularly Russia under Stalin—there was a significant enough culling of the population to affect the gene pool. Dumb and obedient people survived, smart and active did not.
Smart and obedient? Dumb and active?.. Just let them interbreed.
I don’t know enough about Russia under Stalin. I can believe that passivity was a good strategy, but how about knowing how to manipulate the system, if only in small ways?
My impression is that periodic purges made any kind of success dangerous—the best survival strategy was just to keep your head down and not stick out in any way.
It is perfectly satisfactory. Two world wars, several genocides, and a cold war dun it. Being too jock on the collective level became incredibly dangerous, you really, really don’t want any “hawks” or “direct action worshippers” around nukes. It was more like “Think twice, think thrice, heck, think a million times and still don’t press that button!”
Around the 1960′s, the hippie era, came the geek revolution which took things a bit too far and now we are correcting, regressing back to the mean. Largely because we feel safer now, current problems East Ukraine and ISIS notwithstanding are NOT Cuban Missile Crisis level of problems.
Also, geeks with computers at home are way more formidable than geeks stuffed away into a bleak research lab in 1950. This made us a bit over-confident. We need reminders that even with a geeky software startup success depends on more jocky hard-work and discipline and so on than just smart ideas.
Finally, because intelligence or rationality is supposed to be a self-correcting virtue or tool: perhaps the only one of them? So it is part of intelligence or rationality to figure out when you need to rely on something else than it. To know its own limitations. To figure out how people who economized their time differently and spent their time on building other virtues or tools may have advantages. Intelligence is a universal learner, even from the less intelligent, and while the intelligent tend to economize their time towards intellectual learning part of the universal learning is about the outcomes of other optimizations.