[mouzogu]

good read. thanks.

> "This [lack of movement] indicates there might be some kind of competitive exclusion going on: Perhaps more energetic, younger deer with offspring to feed are colonizing the best grazing patches."

sounds like ageism in the job market (joking).

i think there is always a simple thing behind motivation. hunger, violence, greed...humans just good at hiding the naked truth.

[HPsquared]

We're good at focusing on our long-term greed and hunger over short-term greed and hunger.

[xnavra50]

Some of us aren't. Eating junk food, drinking alcohol, taking drugs and loans for new shiny things.

[bumby]

There's definitely some research around "hyperbolic discounting" and "dynamic/time inconsistency" that would disagree with this conclusion. There are many examples where we prefer a lesser short term payoff.

[linearrust]

> We're good at focusing on our long-term greed and hunger over short-term greed and hunger.

If that were true, the modern world centered around consumerism wouldn't exist. We wouldn't have the obesity epidemic, environmental degradation or the genocide of dozens of native nations. Feels like short-term thinking where it's at.

[exe34]

> think there is always a simple thing behind motivation. hunger, violence, greed...humans just good at hiding the naked truth

our very emotions, instead of being some ineffable magical thing, can be described as monomaniacal neural nets trained via a genetic algorithm to optimise for survival and reproduction based on a dataset from the palaeolithic and earlier. greed, jealousy, lust, even the beatified versions like love and grief, are explainable this way.

people don't like it when you explain that sort of thing though. they prefer to believe it's all magical.

[unaindz]

We could even argue that we are good at thinking we are in control of our own thoughts.

If you haven't looked into it already I recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts followed by the short story The Colonel and Echopraxia.

They talk a lot about human consciousness and it's importance or lack thereof. With an actually original and scary alien contact (related to the topic at hand), scary non cringe hard scify vampires (also related), in my opinion really good prose and in general high density of interesting concepts per page. With bonus real life papers at the end that extrapolated could explain the ideas presented in the books.

I'm gonna stop because I'm far past the point that Watts should pay me ad money.

It's licenced under Creative Commons. You can get it for free here (epub link at the top or read it straight from the page): https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

I would tell you to donate/buy it if you like it but maybe if he feels the pressure in his bank account he finally writes the next one. jk please pay him, he deserves it.

[meroes]

If we’re neural nets, shouldn’t 12,000 years of post paleolithic experience be enough to have more modern emotions?

All you’re doing is forcing people to choose something other than magic. You could name almost anything and they’d have to choose it over magic since magic doesn’t exist.

This is not convincing at all.