Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014

MrMind

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

I like that link!

At this point, I'm left wondering why humans evolved to be so gosh-darn negative all the time. It feels like there must be some hidden upside to being negative that just hasn't occurred to me.

Some guesses:

Compared with the rest of the nature, and even with large parts of humankind, we live incredibly lucky lives. Our monkey brains were not designed for this, they are probably designed to keep a certain level of unhappiness, so they invent some if they don't enough from outside. Similarly how our immune systems in absence of parasites develop alergies. Our mechanisms for fighting problems do not have an off switch, because in nature there was no reason to evolve one.

There is probably also some status aspect in this. If you are low status, you better don't express too much happiness in front of higher status monkeys, because they will punish you just to teach you where is your place. That's probably because low status itself makes people unhappy, so if you are not unhappy enough, it seems like you are claiming higher status.

I would expect many people to provide a rationalization: "But if I will be happy, that will make me less logical! And I will not be motivated to improve things." (But I think that is nonsense, because unhappiness is also an emotion, and also interferes with logic. And unhappy people probably have less "willpower" to improve things.)

I found some interesting thoughts in the book Learned Optimism about the evolutionary usefulness of pessimism:

The benefits of pessimism may have arisen during our recent evolutionary history. We are animals of the Pleistocene, the epoch of the ice ages. Our emotional makeup has most recently been shaped by one hundred thousand years of climactic catastrophe: waves of cold and heat; drought and flood; plenty and sudden famine. Those of our ancestors who survived the Pleis- tocene may have done so because they had the capacity to worry incessantly about th

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4John_Maxwell12y

I'll use the term "threat" for a problem where avoidance and/or submission is a good way of dealing it. If a tiger is known to live in a particular part of a forest, that is a threat: Avoiding that part of the forest is a good way of dealing with the problem. If I take part in a hunting expedition and I don't do my part because I'm too much of a coward, that is also a threat: If I act as if nothing happened and eat as much food as I want, etc. then my fellow tribespeople will think I'm an obnoxious jerk and I'll be liable to get kicked out. So submission is a good way of dealing with this problem. If I'm hungry or sleepy or I have homework to do or I need to get a job, those are not threats, even though they have potentially dire consequences: ignoring these problems is not going to make them go away. Hypothesis: the EEA was full of threats according to my definition; the modern world has fewer such threats. However, we're wired to assume our environment is full of threats. We're also wired to believe that if a problem is a serious one, it's likely a threat. So we're more likely to exhibit the avoidance behavior for serious problems like finding a job than for trivial ones like solving a puzzle. (I like the idea of co-opting the word "threat" because then you can repeat phrases like "this is not a threat" in your internal monologue to reassure yourself, if you've checked to see if something is a threat and it doesn't seem to be.)

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