notes

quotes

That human social behavior was shaped in an environment of small bands with repeated interactions, endowing us with instincts to be fair and punish defections that surely aren’t game-theoretically optimal now in anonymous late modernity but have positive externalities in making large-scale cooperation possible and without which society as we know it probably couldn’t exist.

That private life exists and that markets, while we all (some?) appreciate their power to allocate resources, don’t permeate every single part of life, that there are moments of beauty and grace that aren’t best understood as competition and harnessed selfishness.

That even though we evolved as ruthless replication machines, we’ve somehow risen out of the muck and we currently find ourselves running cultural software that’s way out of sync with what game theory would dictate, and perhaps we can seize the moment and build a civilization that can tame the brutal dynamics that created us.

That evolution happened to settle on this trick of “love” to serve the interests of reproduction rather than, like, causing us to feel like we’re being burned alive every time we don’t find mates or feed our kids or whatever, which there’s no obvious reason it should have done, and also I acknowledge the real pain some lonely people do feel.

That we happen to live in a world where ideas are both non-rivalrous and hugely valuable allowing us to create things like small molecule drugs and no-knead bread recipes and semiconductor manufacturing techniques which are a gift to our descendants at least unless/until civilization collapses, and which makes the average utility of human life a concave function of world population rather than some monotonic decrease, giving us another tool to fight evolution’s greedy hand trying to drag us back into the mud.

That the abstraction of “narratives” exists, allowing us to understand the world at least partially through the crazy messy process you’re undertaking right now rather than everything being a blind inscrutable idiotic evolution of the wavefunction, and also the world happens to be structured so that these “narratives” are powerful enough to actually partially explain at least some phenomena sometimes.