Maxims, rules of thumb and other observations on human cognition and sociocultural affectations

This will be added to on an irregular basis...
  • What is said to humans directly is received with skepticism and considered with dubiousness while that which is heard in passing, especially that which most conforms to their mentality or prejudices, is readily believed.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive latency between exposure to new information or experiences and the ability to think dispassionately and intellectually about it.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive spectrum starting with the moment of exposure to new information or experiences and ending with some point at which the thing is effectively "in the past" for them.
  • This cognitive spectrum is linked to the emotional process often referred to as shock, anger, denial and acceptance.
  • The more and faster information or experiences are presented to people and the closer the quarters and the lesser the distance between people, the more their early reactions in the passionate emotional stage are reflected back to them in the manner of responses to those reactions from others in light of those responses.
  • The more outrages which are suffered without sufficient time to allow emotional bleed-off, the farther the bar for subsequent reaction and outrage are pushed, and the more further events must progress before reaction and outrage.
  • It is possible for serious detriments to eventually sit below this threshold for long enough for their damaging effects to build and multiply until their entire society undergoes some reactive convulsion.
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Friday, January 16, 2009

From a reply of mine at LGF

Creationist Hearings Scheduled in Texas

We conservatives have only ourselves to blame for this creeping superstition masquerading as science. Of course, the modern Olympic dash to chaos and unbelief our society is engaged in overall has much to do with it for multiple reasons, but we conservatives missed a golden opportunity.

Evolution has it that the way we are is a result of slow process of reproduction in the face of adversity from the environment around us which if we do not surmount it, will kill us before we can pass on our traits from parents to children and they to theirs and so on.

That means everything about us has some function in our existence after all this time. The bad parts and the good both. Our endemic species-wide reactions to many things, our psychological tendencies, etc. all relate somehow to our still being here and not having destroyed ourselves.

For instance, if we had evolved without an inherent psychological resistance to unrestrained sexuality, with males and females being equally aggressive and receptive to each others' aggression, our breeding statistics would have been disastrous. We'd have bred in numbers sufficient to kill most females through abuse of their reproductive systems, the numbers of humans produced would have been far far too much for the environment to support in terms of food and biological waste disposal, STDs would have run rampant in ways we almost cannot imagine, and lack of biological waste disposal would have increased biological contamination of our waterways immensely. All the way around unfettered sexual hedonism of the kind imagined as a paradise is so utterly incompatible with our current ability to cope with the side effects that it would have killed us off thousands and thousands of years ago.

There are reasons for our behaviors and mentality almost every single one of which devolve back to our survival instincts or because not being that way would have led to our destruction and those who have evolved in that other direction have been severely outnumbered by those who did not.

There's a reason that massive mental aberrations in humans are aberrations and not every day and that is because insane people with antisocial and even dangerous social and personal behaviors are not good mating candidates in the view of others. They see them as too different and too dangerous or upsetting and do not mate with them and reproduce their DNA into the next generation.

We conservatives dropped the ball when we turned from evolution because the number one argument against the unrestrained practice of many of our more dangerous behaviors was evolution. In doing so the left, which has in the western European and American world practiced a soft touchy-feely version of selective non-judgmentalism turned it into a subliminally inferred argument for the eradication of all qualms and second thoughts about anything, painted all negative reactions to everything as latent primitivism or outright bigotry, and that evolution was really a process to free ourselves from all those things and do whatever we want without cognition or conscience.

Without conscience humanity is doomed and if you don't believe in G-d then evolution is your number one reason for having conscience. We threw it out and instead became the primitives we were accused of by blindly embracing plain scripture instead of treating it as multileveled and full of nuance and import of differing levels of significance, and in doing so rendered our own religious faith into having no greater meaning that any given restaurant menu.