cursed comments on Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: Gondolinian 15 December 2014 12:01AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (309)
Tags: open_thread

Comments (309)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: cursed 16 December 2014 11:23:03AM *  3 points [-]

Thinking about a quote from HPMOR (the podcast is quite good, if anyone was interested):

But human beings had four times the brain size of a chimpanzee. 20% of a human's metabolic energy went into feeding the brain. Humans were ridiculously smarter than any other species. That sort of thing didn't happen because the environment stepped up the difficulty of its problems a little. Then the organisms would just get a little smarter to solve them. Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.

And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.

...

It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.

Besides the quoted "Chimpanzee Politics" are there any other references to this hypothesis? I've tried Googling around for 5 minutes and I couldn't find anything.

Edit: seems like I was looking using the wrong keywords: Wikipedia seems to have a small paragraph on evolution of human brain due to competitive social behavior, but I'd still like to see if anyone else had any articles on the matter.

Comment author: drethelin 18 December 2014 12:18:38AM 3 points [-]

I believe one phrase for it is the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis

Comment author: taelor 19 December 2014 04:28:25AM 0 points [-]

The less dramatic name for it is the Social Brain Hypothesis. It was originally proposed by R. A. Dunbar (of Dunbar's number fame).

Comment author: advancedatheist 16 December 2014 03:09:25PM 1 point [-]

Yet many of the really smart humans seem to have trouble with social interactions. Dark Triad people who excel at getting others to do their bidding might have higher than average IQ's, but they generally don't go into STEM fields where having high IQ's can pay off.

Comment author: Lumifer 16 December 2014 04:22:37PM 8 points [-]

Dark Triad people who excel at getting others to do their bidding might have higher than average IQ's, but they generally don't go into STEM fields where having high IQ's can pay off.

If you're smart and "excel at getting others to do [your] bidding", you don't want to go into STEM, you want to go into management.

Comment author: drethelin 18 December 2014 12:18:20AM 6 points [-]

STEM pays you far less for being smart and manipulative than say, being a good lawyer or salesman.

Comment author: emr 16 December 2014 09:38:28PM *  1 point [-]

Not exactly a match, but Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness makes a variant of this claim, putting an arms race concerning prediction of third-party reactions to hypothetical actions as the driving force of human self-awareness.

Comment author: pcm 16 December 2014 07:21:32PM 0 points [-]

I suggest Geoffrey Miller's book The Mating Mind. Or search for sexual selection.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit