Family Values: had no past, has no future
I speculate that, in the not too distant future…
Family will disintegrate and no one will shed a tear
I speculate that, in the not too distant future…
Family will disintegrate and no one will shed a tear
In the earlier post titled Evolution 101, we saw how evolution works in the wild. It discussed about how a particular biological trait is selected in a population. Darwin called this “Natural Selection“. Eventually it turned out that Natural Selection is an umbrella term for three different types of selection forces:
The interplay of these forces makes us who we are. Like the inter-play of three primary colors make all the hues that we can see in the nature. It is as of we live a life in a color wheel.
Sam Harris is one of the sharpest thinkers I had come across. Here are some excerpts from one of his thinnest books, Lying. Though the book is not as well thought out as some of his other works, I culled out these gems from the book. I put a next to the ones that hit a chord in me somewhere:
This 5 post series addresses as to how “we are facing exponential threats from resource crunch and environmental degradation and in response, we are inventing a new idea age”.
There are a bunch of reason for us to believe that we have entered a new age of creativity. Another renaissance. But in its scope, this one will be like no other. By the time it has run its course, humankind would have, I speculate, made a clean break with the past.
This 5 post series will addresses as to how “we are facing exponential threats from resource crunch and environmental degradation and that in response, we are inventing a new idea age”.
Before discussing how human creativity is likely to save the day, we must first understand the origin of ideas, either inside a human head, or across a society. After all, there are striking similarities between both types of idea generation.
Most of our so-called intellectuals are fraudsters who are too incompetent to do their homework before they air out an opinion. Liberating ourselves from the twisted world views they provide us is an important part of building ourselves happy lives.
People’s eyes can tell you more than what they wish to disclose. If you know where, or how, to look.
So was Howard Roark. And, very probably, Ayn Rand was a psychopath too. But they were all so called ‘high functioning’ psychopaths. In other words, they have a psychopath’s psychological make up, but they have used the traits constructively.
In the last post, we saw SCARF model proposed by David Rock, identifying five strong human motivations (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness & Fairness). The last post also discussed Status. In this post, we will discuss the Fairness, or morality.
The most important paradigm shift on morality is this:
Fairness and other morals are hard coded in our genes!
The conventional belief is that the moralities have been given to us by religions. But the more we understand how humans and other animals work, the more it becomes clear that
Religions have simply documented the moral values that we have inherited through our genes.
If you are a corporate type, I am sure they have already bored you to death with Abraham Maslow’s human need pyramid. Maslow proposed that human beings start addressing their needs from the bottom most layer. Typically, after the bottom layer is addressed, they move to the layer above. How-much-ever popular Maslow’s pyramid is, I can never figure out what self-actualization is!
Fortunately, there is a delightfully alternative human-drive model that works for me. Proposed by David Rock, the SCARF Model identifies five human needs that have huge impact on our decisions. And it is not as if one of them is more important than the other.
I don’t invest much of time thinking about politics and governance. I think they would take several years to master them. I also think that because they are poorly documented, at least in India where I live, only a person in the middle of all this on a day to day basis can master them.
But today, I had an interesting insight into improving the quality of democracy in a meeting organized by a FaceBook group called Occum’s Saloon (since shut down).
I don’t know the significance any of the other information in this post either. At this point in time, all of them seem to be completely useless pieces of trivia.
We didn’t grow a large brain to help ourselves find better food, fend from predators or to change the very landscape of the planet, like we are doing today. We evolved a large brain hundreds of thousands of years before we did all that.
There is a term called “honest signalling” in evolutionary biology. It is not a new insight, but it is going to form basis for some of the key discussions we are going to have in the future.
We often confuse the selfish motives of our genes with the motives an the animal. We shouldn’t. We are not our genes. We are not more. We are not less either. We are different.
IQ is not the ultimate predictor of success in life. Never the less, IQ research provides some fascinating insights.