"they want to indoctrinate your kids!" is the universal rallying cry because of course they do, just like you want to indoctrinate their kids.

every ideology has to be self-reinforcing rather than self-refuting and that naturally leads to the belief that this ideology is more correct than other ideologies (otherwise you would switch) and it is better for children to learn correct things than incorrect things (unless you hate kids?) therefore this ideology should be taught to kids (a polite way of saying "indoctrinated").

one could imagine an Ideology of Indifference that was uninterested in perpetuating itself and did not make any claims as to its own correctness or usefulness or relevance but obviously such an ideology would not spread far nor last long!

and in practice even neutral hobbies like golf or knitting inevitably attract advocacy efforts to promote and evangelise and yes, even indoctrinate the kids as to how knitting is cool and golf is a real sport or whatever it is.

Mostly correct, but there's probably room for distinguishing "teaching" and "indoctrinating" an ideology — for a first pass, deriving doctrine from more basic assumptions, versus demanding orthodoxy without further explanation (this makes for a spectrum of course).

though then that's going to be often rhetorically unpopular in that it does not give a division where all opposing ideologies are due to Indoctrination; not even a division where any particular ideology is necessarily on just one side.

so I guess the knife works because whether a cut is made depends upon pressure, not force, and

pressure = force / area

so the narrower you make the blade, the more pressure you apply with the same force.

this seems pretty clear to be looking at a knife. But I honestly feel like I never would’ve thought of a knife. I would’ve had to see other sharp things first

and even then, would I make the jump from “I can find something sharp” to “I can make something sharp by sharpening it”?

Unless there’s some weird hypothetical world, i feel like you’d be able to generalize from nails (or if in the hypothetical you’re not human but still from earth) claws.

Probably you’d get to pointy stick before knife. first naturally pointy, then break it in a way that makes it pointy, then maybe some way of sharpening it to be pointy, then finding someway to get a line of shapness instead of a point.

For the vast majority of human prehistory (ca. 3 million BCE — 8000 BCE), knifes have indeed not been made by sharpening anything, they've been made by knapping rocks to leave a natural sharp edge. The best option is obsidian, as already known to Homo erectus. Then again, sharpening sticks is obviously an older technology still — known even to chimpanzees. OP's question is moot in that probably no human has ever needed to invent the general concept of sharpening, which is knowledge that predates our species.

Of course you still can't exactly make a wooden knife worth a damn no matter how sharp you hone it. Getting from any random sharp stick or rock to specifically a knife requires first developing a whole variety of handaxes. I would wager also bone/horn tools (good for things like scrapers and awls; also, shell razors), though unfortunately as organic materials these do not fossilize well enough to be clearly attested in the archeological record for us to be certain about this. Still, these (1) can be created by breaking but also (2) can be easily honed with stone, much more so than stones themselves.

Honed stone tools though are indeed an exclusively modern human technology, apparently first invented in Australia ca. 44000 BCE and independently in Japan ca. 38000 BCE (both fairly marginal places — maybe invented by necessity after being left outside of Pleistocene obsidian trade networks?). They do not spread worldwide until the Neolithic, which is indeed late enough to overlap with the knowledge of the working of natural copper and meteoric iron. Looking up some details of this on Wikipedia I even stumbled on this interesting quote: "Knowledge of the use of copper was far more widespread than the metal itself. The European Battle Axe culture [the first Indo-Europeans of Fennoscandia, 2800–2300 BCE] used stone axes modeled on copper axes, even with moulding carved in the stone."

@plain-dealing-villain There are few human cultural universals, but as you might expect for a species that uses language heavily, one of them is social status being accorded to particularly skillful users of language: poets, composers of songs, witty jokesters, eloquent speakers, and so forth. And since verbal intelligence is correlated with other kinds of intelligence, that means even just within human groups and competing with other humans, intelligence has been at least somewhat adaptive for as long as we’ve had language–when we acquired language is debated, but it’s assumed we definitely had it around the time of the advent of behavioral modernity 50,000 years ago.

The human brain probably evolved its large size in the first place due to our highly social environment, resulting in an increase in the usefulness of improving cooperation and modeling the behavior of other humans–which in turn resulted in more cooperation and more complex behavior–in a feedback loop that ballooned the 640 ccs of Homo habilis’s skull to modern humans’ 1260 cc. You know, evolution! A manifestation of evolutionary pressure in the direction of increasing intelligence! The thing that notably sets the hominid lineage apart from other primates starting millions of years ago.

“Intelligence is more adaptive in Europe bc the weather is worse” or something, while a bad argument and one I would happily challenge, would be more comprehensible to me as a proposition than “intelligence is not particularly adaptive anywhere before a thousand years ago” when intelligence is one of the reasons humans spread across the entire globe and developed complex societies, tool use, and language thousands and thousands of years ago. Especially when it’s a feature that’s been evolutionarily notable in our lineage since it separated from our closest ancestors!

Almost none of this is correct. “Social status being accorded to particularly skillful users of language" was a strictly upper class thing, top 1% of the pyramid, for most of history. If you’re a farmer, which until at least 1000 AD 95% of the world was - and for a while afterward, it’s debatable exactly when, but it was after 1000 AD - you don’t have time or energy to reward that meaningfully.

Agriculture comprises like 3% of the history of anatomically modern humans (still only 20% even if we go with 50ka as a “behavioral modernity” cut-off), while folk poetry and/or oral tradition are known among all hunter-gatherer groups. Agriculture and civilization definitely impose selection among extant variation, but neither has been around for a long enough time to form that much selection pressure for the evolution of new traits, other than immediately strongly adaptive ones like lactase persistence.

Intelligence however does not need to aid in anything like making up better poetry or the like that would provide social status specifically, since it already aids in being better at memorizing tradition, i.e. giving better access to human technologies in more general.

On the settlement of high latitudes: you absolutely need a certain level of intelligence for hominids to live in very cold climates (cf. H. erectus populating most of the tropical and temperate Old World but never more than that) but probably again more by gradual evolution of technology. A handful of smart early humans randomly dropped into Pleistocene Siberia will still freeze/starve to death in the winter before they figure out how to sew the kind of highly insulating fur clothing used by native peoples of the (sub)arctic, if they don’t have any pre-existing knowledge of this tech, as honed over dozens of generations. And on the other hand, humans who are already capable of gradually developing elaborate material cultures in e.g. stonesmithing spear tips / arrowheads probably don’t need to be any more intelligent to eventually develop also other material cultures. I’d think any possible improved selection for intelligence enters the picture instead via competition between different human groups — i.e. in the fact that in harsh climates (with fewer backup food sources available, etc.) the penalties for failing to compete are worse.

unpopular fact: there is no meaningful cutoff between “let [poor] people have nice things” and “conspicuous consumption” where “nice things” would cease to mean real needs and start meaning status goods

the core reason for this is that humans are social being and status IS a need

including also higher up in social hierarchy; lots of purposes require extensive connections that would be much harder to form without signalling your social status

But why do we need a social hierarchy? What is it good for (except fulfilling our animalistic needs, for example being at the top meant more successful in reproducing)

Perhaps “we” could indeed use fewer hierarchies, but in any case currently our societies do have them, and they create needs for people for navigating them.

Biological needs like reproductive success are also still needs of course, and you may have answered your own question there already if you think they can be fulfilled by establishing oneself in some social hierarchy.

rage in support of the machine

calmly advocate for the machine, surely

critical appraisal of the machine with an eye to making incremental changes

critical appraisal of posting with an eye to making incremental reblogs

Also since it was mentioned in something that I was just listening to I gotta say while social darwinistic “winners should win and losers should lose“ is a part of this far-right movement I think I put more of it on a sort of aggressive entitlement, people have aggressive conceptions on what they deserve and have the right to do and to hell with anyone else in their way.

I mean you could say that a real social darwinist would be free trade, now while that may be assigning a but too much coherence but it’s not nothing

Yeah the thing I was always confused by was how the right seems to fuse this very paternalistic-authoritarian tendency, this desire for a strongman leader who can handle everything, which feels neotenous and Freudian, with this other ethic of self-sufficiency and consequences for actions that seems totally at odds with that.

I guess to some extent those just reflect distinct traditions, like the former is more fascistic and the latter is more generically conservative, but the two don’t really seem at odds in the same way that the equivalent liberalism vs. authoritarianism split is on the left.

But there’s I guess a certain logic to the idea that some people’s ressentiment naturally flows into a social-darwinist idiom even if it’s only a superficial gloss; what I’m left wondering then is why that’s the go-to idiom, when it’s otherwise at odds. Maybe that’s just the moral paradigm you drift toward if you fetishize strength-as-an-idea?

This problem only exists if you think of “social darwinism” as a particular life strategy rather than the general notion that natural selection applies to cultures.

Conservatives do not favor strongmannism because of a priori philosophical commitments, as much as they favor it by the heuristic of “it has been prevalent in the past, ergo it must have been beneficial”, i.e. a kind of an extended Chesterton’s fence argument. If there’s a mistake here, I would think it’s probably primarily a group-selectionist one (strongmannism is clearly beneficial to the strongman himself, which alone should suffice for it to come up repeatedly). Maybe also a decent part of not properly recognizing that history is written by the victors?

(For that matter, note that also the inverse “it’s not common therefore it’s probably maladaptive” is in fact a valid inference too, and most applications go instead wrong in the premise. All sorts of things maligned by conservatives as “modern degeneracies” have existed among humans all along…)

it’s so common for “being straight & cis is normal” people to get hung up on what’s most evolutionarily “efficient” like they come at you with “if Men and Women didn’t have sex and continue the species we wouldn’t have made it this far so it doesn’t make sense to be anything but Straight and Cis,” and I really want to ask them when humans have Ever Ever Ever picked the most efficient route. Why did we ever leave the equator then in the first place, to willfully live on tundras and freezing islands where not much grows? 

Why did people move to mountains where future generations needed to be born with bigger lungs to breathe right?

Why have humans historically, for tens of thousands of years, cared for the sick and the disabled and the injured even thought that wouldn’t be an “efficient” use of resources? Why did we ever develop a sense of compassion at all?

Why did any human ever leave home to cross an ocean, or a desert, or a jungle, hoping to find a way to live whether they ended up?

We have never followed the rule of “efficiency.” In fact, read any reputable paper on human evolution and success, and you’ll see it argue that our refusal to follow the “efficient” road is what actually made the human species so successful–that our unrivaled adaptability and unprecedented resilience in an ever-changing world is what put us on top for so long.

So if you can’t keep up with “all these new genders and sexualities,” it seems like you’re the inefficient one, the weak link, and you’re going to get picked out and left behind.

My backyard is a fairly wild and untended little patch of woods, and there’s more than one kind of tree there.  There’s maples, oaks, beech, birch, and a couple pines.  Which is interesting, because a really naive approach to ecology would suggest that a single Best Tree would exist for the conditions of my backyard, and the woods would optimize themselves to be entirely made up of whatever the Best Tree is.

But more often in the real world, the optimal solution is an equilibrium of multiple species.  Asking “which is stronger: oaks or maples?” misses the point that a diverse forest is stronger than a solid block of any one tree.  It’s also more true to the history of the land, and more likely to produce a sustainable future.

So you see.

They have, quite literally all the time!

OP probably thinks they’re asking tough questions, but we know of some pretty decent answers to all of these by now:

And note that evolution doesn’t care whether you know that whatever you are doing is efficient, it only cares whether it actually is efficient. Hence if you see humans doing something that seems extremely “inefficient” … the real conclusion you should draw is not “humans exist outside of biology and can somehow do arbitrarily costly stunts with no punishment”. It is that weird human things are either (1) actually efficient for some purpose that we perhaps do not understand yet; or (2) some kind of a cultural glitch that will be in fact selected against in short order.

You can get a decent handle on if a thing is type 1 or type 2 by looking at history and anthropology: if it’s actually old and widespread, it’s probably type 1 (homosexuality, gender roles, caring for the elderly…); if it only appeared 200 years ago tops, it’s more likely type 2 (drinking soda by the gallons, third person pronouns as an open word class, watching anime as your purpose in life…)

As for 2P, all I need to say is that evolution is a competition. Ecosystems do not exist in an “equilibrium”, they exist in a constant battle for dominance. Perhaps nothing-but-oaks in their backyard would be optimal by some metric like photosynthesis accomplished per m², but it’s also the exact opposite of an effective strategy for the pines that already exist there. They’re not able to spontaneously transform into pines, but they’re also not going to just unilaterally surrender and keel over. I.e. it’s likely to be an ecological work in progress, perhaps in the wake of abandoned farmland, an earlier forest fire, etc. Give it 150 years and there probably won’t be a mixture of half a dozen tree species anymore, but instead a fully developed closed forest of mainly whatever is, in fact, the optimal species.