Steven Pinker explains the cognitive biases we all suffer from and how they can short-circuit rational thinking and lead us into believing stupid things. Skip to 12:15 to bypass the preamble.
Steven Pinker explains the cognitive biases we all suffer from and how they can short-circuit rational thinking and lead us into believing stupid things. Skip to 12:15 to bypass the preamble.
Most people I find (and I’m often a victim of it myself) are selfish and isolated.
Most people see the world and the universe as a place that exists for them … they have a hard time accepting that they are just a small part of the universe. To think of yourself so humbly accepts the fact that you don’t matter that much to the universe and most people don’t like that idea.
It’s that while modern philosophy of individualism and that you are the creator and manager of your own world.
Is there a solution to this problem?
Time … and I don’t mean waiting a few years for some grand revolutionary way of thinking.
I mean evolutionary time scales of hundreds or even thousands of years for our species to evolve away from our cave man prehistoric mentalities.
When you graph out the age of our current species, we are closer to our prehistoric ancestors than we like to think. We are still a developing species that is built more for survival and aggression than as a modern technologically advanced society.
I have an old friend of mine who puts it more simply as “we are just monkeys driving cars”
The answer is time … a lot of time … for us to grow out of our old mentalities. Hopefully we can have that time.