That is incredibly well worded. Right, the ratchet effect.
That concept actually explains most of the cultural drift that we see today. Yes it was curated to some extent, but in reality we allowed the ratchet effect to control our culture as opposed to the other way around and those that were ready took the opportunities presented to them by the evolution of our culture.
I read a similar description in a programming forum the other day talking about what common lisp is not a popular programming language. Once guy summarized it basically as not having that killer app that is making so much money forcing people to come to the ecosystem and then have the programmers version of the stockholm syndrome keep them there until critical mass is reached.
Ratchet effect. Thanks for that.
on Info Galactic (Google won't even show you the site in search results, even if you name it).
Thinking about culture, the ratchet effect would explain the often-repeated quote
Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.
The ratchet effect is only active during hard times, so people have to get their shit together or die. But then when times are good, there's less selection pressure so bad things can flourish. We need some way to keep pressure so only the good, beneficial aspects of culture endure. In nature the pressure is always on so it doesn't degenerate as much.
I have been thinking about that for a while now. Do you have any thoughts on that?
My starting point is: evolution is real, we are mamals, we are a type of mammal called a chimp, chimps are genocide / war creatures it is all they do (as do we), to understand a human you understand him like you would a dog, a cat, a horse ... or a chimp.
I have read a lot of philosophy, politics, math, science, but most of that reall is in the esoteric weeds of the issue.
The real stuff is happening in evoultionary psychology, these are the weeds we need to study.
Buuuuuuuuut, while we can learn a lot form evolutionay psychology (Gaad Saad may be a jew but thankfully he doesn't fully understand the full scope of his work and how useful it is) we don't operate on that level. We opearte a couple of levels above. I have noticed that all of us men have not been taughted and trained to to fight, how to speak in front of people, how to lead, how to manage risk ... nor even how to manage relationships.
It's as if we are children of children whose brave fathers that had the knowledge died in a long ago war and we are having to re-learn the same lessons every generation.
What are your thoughts on this?
Finally had time to read what you wrote. My first thought is it's depressing. The layers built have been left in ruins. We don't go to war because bread and circuses now. Back then they kept order through leadership, taking risks, etc.
In my own life I see a motivation to make everyday tasks more efficient so that I spend less time and energy on them, and have more for greater pursuits. This seems to be how any animal works, if its basic needs are met it's not going to be attacking other animals etc. We just have far greater capacity to build layers and make basic needs easier to meet. All the animal stuff we're capable of, and it has its place as a fallback when our brain isn't getting things done. Machines we design also have fallback mechanisms like this when the more intelligent ones fail.
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