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Nathan Taylor's avatar

Mercier and Sperber claim reason evolved to win arguments, which also means reason is good at modeling other people's minds, so as to argue against them.

Joe Henrich claims that our minds evolved to copy cultural knowledge which we ourselves do not understand why it works. So we are programed to copy winners, and assume we can't figure out exactly why they are winners.

The combination of these two theories is our brains are tuned to model and be able to predict the actions of other high status people around us. And this means turning them into a sanded off mental model. A persona. The contradictory reality of what an actual person thinks is not what we meme and follow. Partly we meme persona the high status so we can blindly imitate what their persona would do, and partly so we can argue against that persona in status combat.

There is no evolutionary selection to actually understand logical arguments stand alone. It's more of a spandrel.

The test would be for people are good at abstract argument not tied to a persona, do they over history and prehistory tend to have fewer successful offspring or more. I suspect that capability is at best a non factor in reproductive success. And more likely negatively correlated with it.

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Christopher Brunet's avatar

> When I recently asked scholars who study Adam Smith what was their most controversial issue, they said it is whether Smith was on the left or right politically

Cringe. Partisan politics has broken peoples' brains.

Which is why I think your idea of historians striving for accuracy/consistency/truth is a nice romantic vision, but ultimately naive. Many (most?) historians (e.g. Howard Zinn) strive to further their own agenda and partisan worldview; history is about power, not about truth.

Or maybe I am just jaded and the 1% of partisan historians has soured me on the 99% of honest historians.

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