Why Your Brain Is an Idiot

Seventy thousand years ago, when we started migrating out of Africa. First into Asia, then Europe. Homo Neanderthalensis was also around. They lived in Europe and large parts of Asia for about 100,000 years. Within a few thousand years of Homo sapien travel, they were gone. Interbreeding must have happened as 1-4% of the European and Asian genome is from them. We may have lived in larger groups and adapted to weather changes better. Or we just killed them. Neanderthals were making tools, producing fire, abstract art, and jewelry tens of thousands of years before Sapiens turned up to destroy everything.

Humans spot patterns in our environment and make educated guesses about how things work, building up a complex mental model of the world from all our senses. Then we build on that model with our imagination and communicate ideas with others. We can then make improvements to our society which gets passed on and added to with every generation. We are also capable of working together for the sake of a plan or idea, that only exists in our imagination, to achieve breakthroughs otherwise unattainable. Wild innovations turn into traditions, which then turns into culture/society.

The first wheel was 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia, for pottery. Several hundred years later it was turned on its side to move things.

Evolution hurls a large number of hungry, horny organisms at a dangerous and unforgiving world and sees who fails least. Our brains are a loose collection of hacks and shortcuts that made our distant ancestors 2% better at finding food or communicating danger. The shortcuts are called heuristics. Heuristics sometimes lead us down the wrong path. Our brains are so into spotting patterns that we see them everywhere – even when they don’t exist. “Illusory correlation” or “Cluster illusion”. Once you’ve been told an idea/story you’ll be much more likely to remember all the times it has happened in the past. Our brains create patterns of randomness sometimes. 

In psychology, illusory correlation is the phenomenon of perceiving a relationship between variables even when no such relationship exists. A false association may be formed because rare or novel occurrences are more salient and therefore tend to capture one’s attention (WIKI).

Our main shortcuts are the “Anchoring Heuristic” and the “Availability Heuristic”

• Anchoring is when you make up your mind on something, even if you have no evidence, after being disproportionately influenced by the first piece of information you hear. Your guess on a price can be skewed once given a figure to go by. Your brain seizes the information as an anchor to guess from.
• Availability is making judgments based on information that comes to you the easiest. Making us biased to our own worldview of information that has happened recently, are dramatic, or memorable. It’s why crime news makes our world seem more dangerous than it really is.

These two heuristics are great for making snap judgements in moments of crisis or with decisions that don’t matter much. If you want to make an informed decision about something, it screws it up.

• Your brain will always try to slide into the comfort zone of whatever comes to mind. Our brains hate being wrong and “Confirmation Bias” will ensure we search for any information to ensure we are right and to ignore information that would suggest otherwise. That’s why you can’t argue a conspiracy theorist out of their beliefs because they’ve already cherry picked the info that confirms their beliefs and discarded the evidence on the contrary.
• “Choice Supportive Bias” is when we cling to an idea and reinforce reasons behind it even if you’re suffering (like wearing badly fitted shoes but telling everyone how good they are). Government ministers are great at doing that and saying things are going well even when they aren’t. They’ve convinced themselves to save face.

The act of telling somebody they are wrong can actually reinforce their beliefs even more. We’re a social animal that hates being left out. So we often make bad decisions that go against our better judgement to avoid ostracism.

• “Groupthink” is when we jump on the bandwagon with others or to believe in something to be a part of the crowd.
• “Dunning-Kruger effect” is when there are difficulties in recognizing ones own incompetence and having inflated confidence. People who are good at a skill tend to be modest, whereas those who are not skilled overestimate their abilities. This makes spiritual warriors pretty dangerous as they encourage optimism and belief in one’s own ability and the universe revolving around them. Gathering groups of people whose whole theory is about neglecting evidence for the belief that believing harder will overcome all odds. While anybody who disagrees just isn’t “woke” or “enlightened”. Greed fuels wishful thinking.

We are not very good at cost-benefit analysis when the benefit is high. Common sense and morality will get thrown to the side with a big enough lure of reward.

• “Social Trap” or “Tragedy of the Commons” is when a group of people do things that would be fine short term individually but terrible when people do it together. Such as exploiting the ocean for resources to the extent that they cannot replenish.
• “Negative Externality” is when two parties benefit but the price is paid elsewhere by someone not part of the transaction.
• “Prejudice” is when you split the world into “us” vs “them” and believe the worst of “them”.

These biases and heuristics combined creates Super Bigotry! Dividing the world up into categories from patterns that don’t exist, making snap judgements from the first information that comes to mind, cherry picking information that backs our beliefs, desperately trying to fit into groups by making decisions that align with them, and then confidently believing in our superiority for no good reason.

We get financial bubbles when the perceived value of something far outstrips the actual value. Once reality kicks in the bubble pops, people lose money, and the economy fails.

Nice Environment You’ve Got Here

13,000 years ago, humans began planting crops in Mesopotamia. The origin of agriculture was also the origin of wealth inequality. Elites who had more than everybody else began to boss people around. This may have even been the birth of war. Once you have a village you have the danger of a raid from the next village. It also brings humans in contact with diseases never before attainable, by having close contact with animals and waste products (epidemics from close human contact). It meant you could feed more people faster and therefore increase the population. Especially because you were no longer nomadic and could keep having kids without worrying about them not being able to walk yet. We went for food quantity over quality of life and kept increasing population with food. This led to starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

The world around us changed with the increase in agriculture. We planted crops in areas they don’t usually live and in close proximity. In the US, the people believed that the rain followed the plow. Meaning they thought that rain would turn up wherever somebody would farm. They sold dry areas for half the price of good areas thinking that they could become an agrarian nation. During WW1, having a wheat farm was great and they earned heaps by picking up Europe’s slack. However, afterwards they had heaps of wheat but no money when the prices dropped. They planted more wheat to make more money and then the rain stopped. Dust bowls appeared and farms became useless and dangerous. Shouldn’t have pulled out all the topsoil that was home to plants that rooted dirt down.

The Soviets wanted to plant more cotton, so they diverted some rivers and it resulted in the drying up of the Aral sea and Syr Darlya. It was a partial success but 75% of the water was sucked up into the dry soil and lost. The salt stayed in the lake, even though it dropped in size, and killed off the life in it. Fishing industries crashed and toxic byproducts were picked up in the dry deserts and thrown around towns (respiratory disease and cancer shot up).

The rivers have also been used for fresh water and for dumping waste into. In Cleveland, the Cuyahoga river was so polluted it kept catching fire. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the rest of America heard about it and Times magazine did an article on it, prompting Cleveland to think about cleaning it.

The great Pacific Trash Vortex is a huge pile of garbage, the size of Texas, mostly made from plastic and fishing equipment.

Rapa nui (Easter island) was home to an advanced Polynesian culture with intergroup cooperation, intensive agriculture, and socially stratified community. Unfortunately, they cut down trees to build their villages and to move the rocks. This led to a vulnerable area that prevented trees growing back. Tragedy of the commons. They all did it on a big scale and caused a huge problem. They couldn’t make canoes, couldn’t fish, the soil eroded, became infertile, landslides destroyed the villages, and they had to burn the remaining vegetation to stay warm in the winter. Then, in a panic, they kept building the stones in the hope that it would inspire some sort of better luck from the gods.

Life, Uh, Finds a Way

The first domesticated animal predates agriculture by thousands of years. Dogs approx. between 15,000-40,000 years ago in either Europe, Siberia, India, or China. Hard to know because they’ll have sex with any other dog. About 11,000 years ago goats and sheep in Mesopotamia, 500 years after cattle in Turkey and then Pakistan afterwards. Pigs 9000ya in China and Turkey, horses in Kazakhstan 6000-5500, guinea pigs 7000ya in Peru.

Having animals around made it easier to spread disease and having horses and elephants led to more intense war. Domesticating these animals and plants made humans feel like the masters of the planet. Unfortunately, they decided to take these animals with them in their travels, which messed with ecosystems (eating native animals and plants killing off native species and leading to erosion where plants were being uprooted).

Follow the Leader

A few thousand years after crops were planted, inequality started to become a thing. This was determined by the change in house sizes. In the Americas it stopped after a few thousand years, but in the old world it kept getting worse (probably because they had animals to plow fields). This is when the elites stopped just being rich and began to boss the others around. It started as spiritual leaders until about 5000ya in Egypt and Sumer. Having a ruler may be due to not having a choice and also from war.

Many different types of autocrat: hereditary dynasties, ruling by divine right, seizing by force, and various dictators (also democratic elections).

Inherited thrones usually resulted in kids that either wanted nothing to do with ruling or psychos that would kill all their siblings to remove any chance of rivalry.

People Power

Democracy may have started, to some extent, in India 2500ya but Athens gets the credit for it 508BC. They would essentially vote on a dictator who would be asked to give up his role once he was finished with his role. Caesar decided to keep his role until stabby stabby. The next people tried to do the same and started the Roman Empire.

Democracy relies on the voters making good decisions…Democracy usually goes wrong when you believe you’ll always be a democracy.

Many of the world’s worst man-made events weren’t the product of evil geniuses but rather a parade of idiots and lunatics, flailing their way through things helped by overconfident people who thought they could control them.

War. Huh. What Is It Good For?

Jebel Sahaba 14,000ya, was the first recorded evidence of mass violence. Although, evidence from Oaxaca Mexico has shown we were fighting as soon as we started living in villages. The ones who tended to avoid it were nomads. One exception was the Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley 5000ya. They had plumbing, toilets, baths, city planning, innovation, no monuments to great leaders, and no wars. They existed for about 700 years until it seems the land may have become arid, so they all disappeared into the country. Climate changed around 2200BCE but that’s a guess as to why they disappeared.

In 1625 the English decided they wanted to fuck up the Spanish. Charles I was pissed that they wouldn’t let him marry one of their princesses so he took a bunch of homies to steal gold and silver that Spain was shipping from the Americas. When they reached Cadiz they didn’t have enough food or drink so the troops ran to the wine stocks and got extremely drunk. So, the commander decided to bail and about 1000 stayed behind, because they were so drunk, and got executed.

Both Hitler and Napoleon made the mistake of attacking Russia. The Soviets just ran away and scorched the earth of resources until winter came and killed them off. The Germans also planned the Pearl Harbor attack while in Japan. Two big mistakes. In 1943, American and Canadian troops tried retaking Kiska from Japan. Air forces told them that Japan had already evacuated and yet they believed they never would. So, they ended up shooting each other in the fog until finally realizing the airforce was right.

Super Happy Fun Colonialism Party

Columbus apparently “discovered” the Americas by accident, when he ran into the Caribbean while looking for a shortcut to India. He messed up because his units were wrong. He assumed Asia was much longer and used inaccurate measurements for the globe. He thought the measurements were a Roman mile when in fact it was the Arabic mile. His trip was only funded by Spain because Portugal said no, probably realizing how bad his math was.

The Vikings had actually been there 5 centuries earlier. Leif Eriksson left from Greenland and arrived in Newfoundland (they called it Vinland) and set up a trading colony with the Thule people (they called Skraelings). In typical European fashion, they found about 10 natives and promptly killed them. So, they weren’t too keen on trading with the Vikings after that. Vikings only existed in Greenland in the first place because Eric the Red was exiled there for murdering people.

When Columbus crashed the Santa Maria into Hispaniola in 1492, the Taino population was about a few hundred thousand. After two decades and the introduction of slavery, mining, and disease it was 32,000. Overall, the continents population was decreased by about 90% because of colonialism (from tens of millions). They’ve also caused the African slave trade, concentration camps, sexual slavery in the Japanese empire, human stock in the Americas, etc. The defense for the horrors on colonialization is that without their help they think the natives would be uncivilized, incapable of self-governance, immune to progress, and unable to utilize their resources properly. While this has all been horrible and extremely subjective, it doesn’t mean the natives were living in perfect harmony beforehand either. It just doesn’t work trying to compare what side was better and if it was worth destroying an entire culture for the sake of “progress”. Humans, in general, are pretty dumb. Columbus believed he was doing the Lord’s work by spreading Christianity to the world. The stories from one side always differ from the truth. It is in this manner that you can’t fully trust the records from word of mouth or a person’s writing.

A Dummies’ and/or Current President’s Guide to Diplomacy

With international relations there are two rules to follow: sometimes it is good to trust others, but not too much. This is stemming from the fact that we know we are all dicks sometimes.

Cortes was a rogue conquistador who had been removed from his mission to Cuba but took the boats anyway, and sank them to stop his crew mutinying. The Aztecs and the boss Moctezuma didn’t know how to deal with the invaders so he sent them both gifts and warnings. Sensing their weakness, Cortes used smooth talking and the occasional brutal slaughter to get some of the locals to side with him. They came to the main city to invade and yet boss dog invited him in as a guest. Within weeks Cortes staged a coup and forced him to do his bidding as a puppet. While Cortes went to fight the Spanish, who were sent to stop him from whatever he was doing, one of the lieutenants started killing the Aztec leaders. Cortes came back and told Moctezuma to stop his people being pissed and he said no. This led to his death. A year later the Spanish had the Mexicas under control and Cortes was made governor for his efforts.

In the first 3 decades of the 1400s, China had the greatest naval fleet in the history of the world, under Zheng He. He commanded 300 vessels, some of which could carry 30,000 men, veggie farms, and animals. They essentially ran around the world trading metals and cloth for resources and animals. However, after his death the Ming Dynasty and their fleet just stopped. They resurrected haijin (ban on maritime shipping). They were too busy with the Mongols and building the wall. While the Europeans were running around sailing, China had turned inwards and missed out on the trading and scientific acceleration.

Most of the US’s war problems stemmed from them believing the enemy of their enemy could be an ally. That is until they realized that they can sometimes be a bigger bastard than the original enemy. You shouldn’t base your allegiances around hate.

Ala ad-Din ruled an extremely advanced Islamic empire called Khwarezmian. However, he had trust issues. Genghis was ready to trade with him after conquering everything and he took it as a diss and killed his messengers. So, Genghis wiped them off the map between 1219-1222. The Mongol army was intelligence driven and messed him up when he thought they couldn’t do sieges. So he had about three times as many troops and the home advantage but still lost.

The Shite Heat of Technology

People made dumb shit without undergoing proper scientific methods. Midgely made leaded petrol and CFC. Poisoning the world for profit and destroying the ozone layer.

Epilogue: Fucking Up the Future

We are collectively denying climate change to prevent change to the economy.

Carbon dioxide levels are up, which has caused a warming of the planet (17/18 of the highest year temps recorded were after 2000).

The ocean stores CO2, making it acidic. This kills mollusks and tiny fish (destroying the ecosystem).

Coral gets bleached (further destroying the ecosystem and releasing more carbon).

Plastic has also formed a giant waste circle in the Pacific, killing sea life and bleaching into the ocean.

The ice creates an albedo effect, reflecting sunlight. Melting it reduces the effect and the ocean absorbs more heat, further melting ice and raising sea levels.

Melted ice releases bacteria/viruses that were trapped that we have no resistance to.

We are destroying our forests, which absorb CO2 and produce oxygen.

Overmining may be causing an effect to the planet by removing too much liquid that acts as a suspension and prevents crust movement (guess).

Chlorofluorocarbons are increasing (probably in Asia as it develops).

We are using antibiotics too much and bacteria are developing resistance – accelerating their evolution.

We have built such an intense artificial intelligence network that caters to our likes and dislikes that it reinforces our biases and markets us products and groups that we already have an affinity for. Further encouraging conspiracy theorists and echo chambers.

Garbage thrown out into space may collide with satellites causing more and more debris until we die via our own garbage cataclysm raining hellfire into the cities.