Key insights
- Let's look at emergence tower (atom -> molecule -> .. -> cell -> organ system -> animal -> pack/tribe) and consider where independent lifeforms live
- amoebas are on a cell level
- ants live on a pack level
- spiders live on single animals level
- humans live somewhere between ants and spiders and can move up and down as a response to external threat
- Evolutionary pressure prefers inner tribe kindness and outer kind ruthlessness
- Totally ruthless people die to inner tribe competition
- Totally kind people die to intertribe competition
From footnote 3:
"I made shit up, then checked the facts later." This made me lol, because that's exactly my impression of Urban's writing.
In the useful version of this activity, arriving at right answers is not relevant. Instead, you are collecting tools for thinking about a topic, which is mostly about being able to hold and manipulate ideas in your mind, including incorrect ideas. At some point, you get to use those tools to understand what others have figured out, or what's going on in the real world. This framing opposes the failure mode where you learn facts without being able to grasp what they even mean or why they hold.