Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

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That's the primacy effect from the article. Where assuming 50% smoothly distributed random assholery in the general population (for the sake of easy math) and X opinions, then people who know significantly more than two times X people (lets say ten X) will tend to have met at least one person with the "wrong" opinion who is an asshole therefore by the primacy effect the next person they meet with the "wrong" opinion has been sabotaged by someone from their past to be autocategorized into asshole status much like that jerk from 8 years ago or whatever.

This all came up in a verbal discussion I had with someone as to why evolution hasn't "fixed" memory, it subjectively seems technically possible looking at skill memory (riding a bike, etc), and the theory we more or less proposed is social cohesion is reproductively valuable and social cohesion is destroyed if people remember minor slights (or, worse than minor slights...) forever. So a population where people forget is a population that will be more reproductively successful over time and outcompete a more petty society where members remember everything. And that's why google searches and/or social media are a net negative for society, or rephrased its a competitive advantage for a culture not to have google/facebook integration. I don't think that was the result they were looking for, and now as per the above any time that poor bastard runs into a new user of the Socratic method of discussion he's going to auto-categorize the new guy as an asshole, all my fault. Oh well, at least its not google searchable (aside from here), LOL.

> social cohesion is destroyed if people remember minor slights (or, worse than minor slights...) forever.

Quite a few cultures worked like this. Minor issues of "honour" would turn into persistent and violent multi-generational vendettas. Unfortunately, violence isn't necessarily a problem for social cohesion. It makes your culture a horrible place to be, but it doesn't keep humans from breeding successfully.

Re: memory, I think it's more likely that a better memory would take extra energy and perhaps a different brain structure, but would add no obvious survival benefits.

Early humans basically needed enough memory to find their way around an environment, to recognise each other, and to know a few heuristics for group values and survival practices (often camouflaged as myths and stories.)

There was no need to learn every possible back-of-the-book calculus formula or the entire syntax of Haskell. From that pov, human memory is already an order of magnitude better than it really needs to be.

Interestingly, some cultures were allegedly much better at memory than we are. Supposedly epic poets and druids endured long and incredibly arduous trainings with huge amounts of rote memorisation.

> It makes your culture a horrible place to be, but it doesn't keep humans from breeding successfully.

I remember a Maori exhibit at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The gist was, they had these never-ending violence cycles based on perceived points of honor, but as you say they weren't a huge deal because their weapons weren't very good and most conflicts had few fatalities. Then they got guns from the Europeans and suddenly had an actual problem. At this point, some of the chiefs converted to Christianity for, according to the museum, the sole reason that it let them 'turn the other cheek' without losing honor (and thus their leadership position).

I remember only a small amount from the rest of the museum, but that bit was fascinating.

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