Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Stimulating monkey brains

Posted on | January 22, 2009 | Comments Off by Aschwin de Wolf

At Overcoming Bias Patri Friedman observes:

In the ancestral environment, pulling together to help the tribe in a time of crisis was the best way for an individual to survive.  In our modern environment, however, we are often led to identify with an entire nation as our “tribe”, and it turns out that this is an inefficiently large group for most types of collective action.  We evaluate the prospect of unity with ancient mental modules optimized for Dunbarian tribes, and that sphexishness leads us into disastrous collective ventures…Anytime you get excited about collective actions in supra-Dunbarian groups, you should be suspicious that you may be in monkey-mode.

Read the complete post here.

Category: Economics, Politics, Voting
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