Humans have a capacity to reason, i.e., to find and weigh reasons for and against conclusions. While one might expect this capacity to be designed to work well for a wide variety of types of conclusions and situations, our actual capacity seems to be tuned for more specific cases. Mercier and Sperber:
If this is true, I would expect to solve math problems better if I frame them to my brain as an argument I'm having, and I'd expect to think about issues more effectively & creatively if I argue for one side, then the other side instead of just dispassionately analyzing.
Well, the obvious, not so interesting answer is that the logic problem has no coalition politics salience.
"Good and bad archetypes help highlight the importance of your theme in delineating these characters."
Reminds me of Paul Graham's essay on Wisdom vs. Intelligence (or general knowledge&discipline vs. specific-creative-insight). He observes that people in the distant past respected wisdom (over creative intelligence) because innovation was so rare that it wasn't expected. Great men were those that knew the right thing to do had the discipline to do it. Now, with rapid innovation, we expect our great men to create great new things. Past respected wisdom; present respects creative intelligence.
Point is, the Wise fictional archetype is easy to write interestingly. But the creative genius archetype isn't.
Be like George Washington or Ben Franklin or Gandhi; easy to write.
Fire was controlled as early as 400k years ago, stone tools and communicative advantages even earlier. Our ancestors DID use their brains to survive. Merely learning to reproduce something from your parents already requires a big brain, but it also gives tremendous advantages over other animals that we humans take for granted. Most of the (absolute) brain growth took place in the latter stages of our evolution.
You claim that we're evolved to tell stories rather than to tell the truth. But for that to make sense the storytellers audience needs to have already evolved an appreciation for fictional tropes, otherwise there would be no distinction. And the only mechanism I can think of that would lead to an appreciation for fictional tropes is limited cognitive resources. But that's sufficient in itself to explain the poor quality of our reasoning. So your explanation seems to have a huge complexity penalty.
Try writing down a transcript of your friend telling you about how they met their partner, and uploading it to website where people post their stories. See how low it gets rated.
Doesn't it? I've heard other people's stories about such things (how they met their partner, how they ended up in their current job) and they didn't come across as *especially* uninteresting relative to anything else that might happen in the life of an ordinary boring person.
I guess such things don't normally follow the "funny thing that happened one time" story template that the most entertaining personal stories usually do, but not everyone is good at those.
It seems to me that social signalling must be fundamentally honest more often than not, or we would have evolved to filter it out.
> Most of our real life events, even the most important ones like marriages, funerals, and choices of jobs or spouses, seem too boring to be told as stories
I don't think this statement is true at all. There are many famous and popular stories where "choice of spouse" is a major feature. Also, there are several I can think of involving marriage ceremonies. I've even seen a show that spent several episodes on choice of job.
So an interesting follow up is why isn't it more interesting to highlight a certain truth--such as in Cryptonomicon, that certain logic problems are interesting and important--and not spend much time on good and bad?
I think it's because as Cicero said, the purpose of wisdom is to know 'the good.' So, at the end of the day, if you can't delineate 'good' and 'bad', you don't have anything important to say. Good and bad archetypes help highlight the importance of your theme in delineating these characters.
I'll use Cryptonomicon as an example. It's been awhile since I read it, so the plot is fuzzy, but what do I remember vividly? The kinds of people Neal Stephenson likes and dislikes. For example, Stephenson butchers Randy Waterhouse's postmodernist wife and her obnoxious friends. He admires the pragmatic smarts, candidness and toughness of the Marine Shaftoe. And obviously Stephenson idolizes nerds.
I forget the details of fiction read long ago; but easily recall the groups the author identifies w/, or against. And I take pleasure if their likes align w/ mine.
Starship Troopers provides an even easier example.
IMASBA, regarding brains you said: "...figure out the hygiene and medicinal properties of certain materials and eventually to develop modern technologies. I highly doubt that all of these things are merely tiny side effects."
But those very recent things are merely side effects, right? Evolution can't select for benefits bestowed on future generations.
The idea that reason is mostly about persuasion violates my intuitions, too, but how do we explain this (below) away:
Miller, Mating Mind:
"...there was a very long lag between the brain’s expansion and its apparent survival payoffs during human evolution. Brain size tripled in our ancestors between two and a half million years ago and a hundred thousand years ago. Yet for most of this period our ancestors continued to make the same kind of stone handaxes. Technological innovation was at a standstill during most of our brain evolution. Only long after our brains stopped expanding did any tradition of cumulative technological progress develop, or any global colonization beyond the middle latitudes, or any population growth beyond a few million individuals. Arguably, one could not ask for a worse correlation between growth in a biological organ and evidence of its supposed survival benefits."
Using fire to cook meat and keep predators away or simply using tools, plans and traps to hunt are very old inventions, older than modern humans. Some of our anatomical features only evolved after those inventions because they could not have been sustained otherwise. I don't see how that can be ingored in any theory that wants to explain the evolution of the human mind. Even further in the past reasoning skills could be used to convey complicated messages (for example a lookout could not only signal that there was danger but also what kind of danger, when it would arrive and from what direction), so even using these skills for social reasons doesn't just entail only manipulation and scheming against fellow members of the species.
If this is true, I would expect to solve math problems better if I frame them to my brain as an argument I'm having, and I'd expect to think about issues more effectively & creatively if I argue for one side, then the other side instead of just dispassionately analyzing.
Well, the obvious, not so interesting answer is that the logic problem has no coalition politics salience.
"Good and bad archetypes help highlight the importance of your theme in delineating these characters."
Reminds me of Paul Graham's essay on Wisdom vs. Intelligence (or general knowledge&discipline vs. specific-creative-insight). He observes that people in the distant past respected wisdom (over creative intelligence) because innovation was so rare that it wasn't expected. Great men were those that knew the right thing to do had the discipline to do it. Now, with rapid innovation, we expect our great men to create great new things. Past respected wisdom; present respects creative intelligence.
Point is, the Wise fictional archetype is easy to write interestingly. But the creative genius archetype isn't.
Be like George Washington or Ben Franklin or Gandhi; easy to write.
Be like Elon Musk; not so much.
Any randomly chosen story on any subject is likely to be low-rated. I don't see how this subject is different.
Fire was controlled as early as 400k years ago, stone tools and communicative advantages even earlier. Our ancestors DID use their brains to survive. Merely learning to reproduce something from your parents already requires a big brain, but it also gives tremendous advantages over other animals that we humans take for granted. Most of the (absolute) brain growth took place in the latter stages of our evolution.
You claim that we're evolved to tell stories rather than to tell the truth. But for that to make sense the storytellers audience needs to have already evolved an appreciation for fictional tropes, otherwise there would be no distinction. And the only mechanism I can think of that would lead to an appreciation for fictional tropes is limited cognitive resources. But that's sufficient in itself to explain the poor quality of our reasoning. So your explanation seems to have a huge complexity penalty.
Try writing down a transcript of your friend telling you about how they met their partner, and uploading it to website where people post their stories. See how low it gets rated.
Doesn't it? I've heard other people's stories about such things (how they met their partner, how they ended up in their current job) and they didn't come across as *especially* uninteresting relative to anything else that might happen in the life of an ordinary boring person.
I guess such things don't normally follow the "funny thing that happened one time" story template that the most entertaining personal stories usually do, but not everyone is good at those.
I mean the specific events that we particular folks are involved in. I mean *your* choice of spouse doesn't make an interesting story.
I too enjoyed the finale of "How I Met Your Mother."
It seems to me that social signalling must be fundamentally honest more often than not, or we would have evolved to filter it out.
> Most of our real life events, even the most important ones like marriages, funerals, and choices of jobs or spouses, seem too boring to be told as stories
I don't think this statement is true at all. There are many famous and popular stories where "choice of spouse" is a major feature. Also, there are several I can think of involving marriage ceremonies. I've even seen a show that spent several episodes on choice of job.
So an interesting follow up is why isn't it more interesting to highlight a certain truth--such as in Cryptonomicon, that certain logic problems are interesting and important--and not spend much time on good and bad?
I think it's because as Cicero said, the purpose of wisdom is to know 'the good.' So, at the end of the day, if you can't delineate 'good' and 'bad', you don't have anything important to say. Good and bad archetypes help highlight the importance of your theme in delineating these characters.
In support of Robin's claim re fiction:
I'll use Cryptonomicon as an example. It's been awhile since I read it, so the plot is fuzzy, but what do I remember vividly? The kinds of people Neal Stephenson likes and dislikes. For example, Stephenson butchers Randy Waterhouse's postmodernist wife and her obnoxious friends. He admires the pragmatic smarts, candidness and toughness of the Marine Shaftoe. And obviously Stephenson idolizes nerds.
I forget the details of fiction read long ago; but easily recall the groups the author identifies w/, or against. And I take pleasure if their likes align w/ mine.
Starship Troopers provides an even easier example.
Stories need to take sides to be interesting.
Ok, just clearing that up.
IMASBA, regarding brains you said: "...figure out the hygiene and medicinal properties of certain materials and eventually to develop modern technologies. I highly doubt that all of these things are merely tiny side effects."
But those very recent things are merely side effects, right? Evolution can't select for benefits bestowed on future generations.
The idea that reason is mostly about persuasion violates my intuitions, too, but how do we explain this (below) away:
Miller, Mating Mind:
"...there was a very long lag between the brain’s expansion and its apparent survival payoffs during human evolution. Brain size tripled in our ancestors between two and a half million years ago and a hundred thousand years ago. Yet for most of this period our ancestors continued to make the same kind of stone handaxes. Technological innovation was at a standstill during most of our brain evolution. Only long after our brains stopped expanding did any tradition of cumulative technological progress develop, or any global colonization beyond the middle latitudes, or any population growth beyond a few million individuals. Arguably, one could not ask for a worse correlation between growth in a biological organ and evidence of its supposed survival benefits."
Of course I'm not saying that.
Using fire to cook meat and keep predators away or simply using tools, plans and traps to hunt are very old inventions, older than modern humans. Some of our anatomical features only evolved after those inventions because they could not have been sustained otherwise. I don't see how that can be ingored in any theory that wants to explain the evolution of the human mind. Even further in the past reasoning skills could be used to convey complicated messages (for example a lookout could not only signal that there was danger but also what kind of danger, when it would arrive and from what direction), so even using these skills for social reasons doesn't just entail only manipulation and scheming against fellow members of the species.