Acting Poker Players One interesting paradox, that isn’t really a paradox when you dive a little bit beneath the surface, is celebrity poker tournaments. On one hand, these celebrities are usually actors, which means they get paid millions of dollars to purposely be congruent with fake emotions when they are playing parts of imaginary […]
Planting Mind Seeds
Genetic Modification Ever since the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, humans have been slowly applying genetic modification to our environment. Up until very recently, this was done by selective breeding. By carefully replanting the plumpest fruits from an orchard, which, over the centuries, creates plumper and plumper fruit. This is why […]
Time Flies Like An Arrow
Instinct People Humans have a ton of instincts. Things that compel us to behaviors, sometimes against our will. Most of us are familiar with social instincts, and food instincts and sex instincts. But there is also a humor instinct. It makes sense from a physiological-immune system kind of way. Whenever we laugh, aside […]
Brain Replication and Creation
Genetically Programmed Builders Ants, beavers and bees all have one thing in common. They are genetically programmed to come into this world, take raw materials from their environment and turn those raw materials into complex functioning homes. If you went back in time a million years, you’d see bees and beaver and ants busily […]
Interdependent Co-Evolved Instincts
Cute Babies I read a recent article in a science magazine that suggested that the instinct to pick up and protect a cute baby is an evolutionarily beneficial instinct. If you can imagine two different tribes of people, one tribe that had the protect the cute baby instinct and another try that had the […]
Overlapping Selfishness
Basic Economics Recently I read this interesting book on economics. It talked about the basics of trade and said that nobody will trade anything with anybody else unless they want what the other person has more than what they have. If both people feel this way there will be a voluntary trade that will […]
How To Know When To Violate The Law Of Social Proof
I was watching one of those TED talks the other night. It was this mathematician who was talking about “swarm theory.” Maybe you’ve seen some videos, or some real life “swarms” of birds. When there’s a whole bunch of them, it looks pretty cool. Almost like it’s one giant organism. The guy was saying that […]
Bees, Figure Eights, And Subconscious Social Proof
There’s a fascinating theory that humans are a lot like bees, or ants. Meaning that one way to look at human society is not as a group of individuals, but as one gigantic organism, slowly spreading across Earth. I know this is controversial, and most of us (especially yours truly) doesn’t like the idea of […]