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advancedatheist comments on Stupid Questions August 2015 - Less Wrong
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Apparently since the Enlightenment this idea has gotten about that all the previous generations didn't know how to live properly, even our parents' generation; but that we somehow mysteriously know how to do it right, or at least better. But then if we have offspring, many of them might develop the same attitude towards us.
This really doesn't make sense, because incompetent people generally don't leave descendants. Our ancestors must have gotten a lot of important things right on average for us to have come into existence in the first place. Yet we think we can just reverse the wisdom of the ages in all kinds of areas and not screw things up. It looks like a kind of evolution-denialism, in fact.
How can people who say they believe in evolution also hold the conflicting idea that they know better than the principles derived from the collective evolutionary experiences of human survival?
The criticism tends to be that people were too mean rather than that they were incompetent.
Evolution works in the timespan of hundreds of generations or more. A cultural or political trend can wreck a society in a few generations, before evolution has any time to compensate.
We have values besides inclusive genetic fitness.
Here's an SSC post and ~700 comments on cultural evolution: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/07/the-argument-from-cultural-evolution/
Has it? That rather sounds like a crotchety old guy's notion about Kids These Days, and as far as I know old people only got that crotchety after 1950 or so (tongue-in-cheek).
As far as I can tell, in postmodern western value systems the idea isn't that they know better than Gnon, it's the idea that "principles derived from the collective evolutionary experiences of human survival" shouldn't matter in comparison to postmodern cultural sensibilities, and therefore it's worth expending effort to counter them as opposed to making use of them.
There's lots of systems which exist, but don't deliver my preferences and goals. I find it extremely likely that know what I want and how to get it much better than a semi-random offspring filtering process.
Most people don't consider the goal of life to be maximizing the amount of offspring.