Because whenever we read something we have to guess the meaning. To the human mind, all communications are inherently contextual and metaphorical. To put it another way each individual has his own internal private language into which everything he reads must be translated.
My predictably unpopular theory is that highly social people are really afraid of other people. Perhaps not without reason if one regards other humans as potential predators. So they designate a group of people friends and use it as protection against all the other people.
Yet they remain afraid, and this fear is what makes social interactions addictive (like gambling; the great the fear the greater the high on the occasions when you don't lose).
Yes they get along with new people and have a large number of shallow relationships. Whereas I think normies and aspies tend to have deeper relationships with only a few people. Btw, they're not aware of their motives -- they don't feel afraid (though I suppose they may have felt so when the whole process began, at school).
Civilisation is a Red Queen; we must keep running just to stand still. Maintaining and conserving things is the job of conservatives, not entrepreneurs, and conservatives resist change. Indeed most changes are detrimental.
Yet in the long run we absolutely depend on change in order to adapt and survive. Therefore there has to be a rigorous way of reconciling these two principles. Without fudging ('maintenance often matters more...')
Maybe: visionaries will develop new ideas with no intention to enact them. Eventually a few will become so well-thought-out, so vivid and so blatantly superior to the incumbent alternatives that they become inevitable. That is, society cannot help but enact them.
This already seems to be happening in some areas:
e.g. moral improvements which come about via fiction, especially fantasy fiction
e.g. individual decision-making (it seems like we deliberate for a while and then actions take place automatically)
e.g. Project Hieroglyph (no idea how this is getting along but what a great idea)
> Maintaining and conserving things is the job of conservatives, not entrepreneurs, and conservatives resist change.
I'm mystified by this. Why does maintenance have to be a 'conservative' thing? Probably 70% of software engineering work is maintenance of one kind of or another. Are those engineers conservatives? Do they 'resist change'? Unless you mean 'conversative' in a very restricted sense of that word.
> so well-thought-out, so vivid and so blatantly superior to the incumbent alternatives that they become inevitable. That is, society cannot help but enact them.
This is a version of 'technological determinism' (Google it if you need to). If there's any single takeaway from the last 50 years of scholarship on the history of technnology, it's that technological determism is false.
> This is a version of 'technological determinism' [...] If there's any single takeaway from the last 50 years of scholarship on the history of technnology, it's that technological determism is false.
This kind of thinking is astonishing to me. "Technological determinism" is a historical term--i.e. reified in its era. The arguments ("stirrups enabled feudalism") are dated and simplistic and easily torn down. But to reduce a thought (discovery of technology influences human behavior, and can bring about its own creation) to a label ("technological determinism") and then dismiss it for historical reasons (older versions of that label were insufficient, therefore it is wrong), is sloppy thinking, imo.
I agree. It would be inaccurate to say that the invention of the electric guitar was the sufficient cause of rock'n'roll. On the other hand, the electric guitar is clearly a necessary cause. I think the best model for this interaction is a feedback loop (in the systems sense) where technology influence culture which influences technology.
Conservative in the sense of conserving existing knowledge and technology; not to try out new ideas.
>This is a version of 'technological determinism'
True, the growth of technology can't be predicted. There's no guarantee any particular idea will work. Many ideas will fail due to unforeseen problems, including in apparently unrelated areas like financing and social media and so on. Entrepreneurs may take up an idea and then change it beyond recognition (PG points out that start-ups usually change their product ideas). Each attempt to enact an idea is just that, an attempt.
Whereas in the past we built things before we understood why they worked (steam engines), or whether people would like them, more and more we'll be trying out stuff in theory (richly animated and exciting fiction) before trying in practice.
> Civilisation is a Red Queen; we must keep running just to stand still.
While this is true, it doesn't prevent a hell of a lot of our engineered world from just being retained while the innovations are piled on top. So there is a hell of a lot of close-to-static stuff that matters a lot -- probably more than the innovative works of any given day.
If the old layers were a bit dodgy, their abstractions will leak, foundations will shift and problems will appear in the layers above. And most things are a bit dodgy to start of with, and will not become a firm foundation until they have gone through incremental improvement and maintenance.
it’s meaningless to say human society had made progress without stating areas that you’re considering and not considering when it comes to assessing such progress
Is it meaningless to say that some areas are more worthy of consideration than others? There are reasons why the OP chose infant mortality and education as example areas. Those reasons could be made explicit and examined objectively: for instance to see if they make sense by their own terms. For example is a society that prioritises a certain area able to continue to do that well into the future, or not?
Staying at home with children is marvellous. Interactions with adult friends are staid and stereotypical by comparison. Plus with the internet one has access to the world's knowledge. Any boredom is therefore one's own problem.
>Yet we long for more than just that one perfect mate — we need to be a part of something bigger to feel happy and alive. We need community and a variety of ages and friends. No one person can be everything to us.
Some equivocation there. Isn't sexual adventure really just another version of 'Valium and liquor'?
Yes and the mere fact of reading doesn't imply an engagement with the content, which can't be forced. One can imagine hearing the words of one hundred audiobooks playing at 1.5x speed in the background, but, like an inane radio talk show, not listened to very closely. Then there's Sturgeon's Law, which implies that most reading is just skimming/searching for the good stuff.
Besides, Arthur C Clarke boasted that the true intellectual reads a book every day :-/
>Debate and negotiation are not games that I anticipate enjoying
Yes and I think that's because they entail criticism, which is used to attack ideas and people we don't like. Whereas creating something worthwhile is about discovering or perceiving something already inside the mind that we do like (and therefore cannot seriously attempt to criticize). Building a family is an attempt to create something worthwhile.
