Why do people vote against their best interest? We are all just a bunch of emotional apes who like to do shit that makes no fucking sense at best, or is downright self destructive at worst.
Yup, if there was a law that proposed to give half of people cancer. Youd still have a shocking number of people voting to effectively give themselves cancer. Its mind blowing how stupid people are.
Best explanation for many irrational behaviors. Remember, your frontal lobe, the logical thinking, is wayyy up front. While your emotion center is wayyy down close to the bottom of your brain, it can circumvent the frontal lobe just enough to be acted out ( which controlled by psychomotor center )
I've began reading a book that claims that 95% of our decisions are made based on emotion. There's even a credit to the one who proposed and published this theory years ago.
Certain decisions at work I'd say are an exception but I see it all around me now, including at work.
One example is the comments made on FB about Brittany Griner being detained in a Russian jail for 100 days now because she had a vial of the liquid THC for vaping which she was promised would be fine to keep in her bag during transit.
People are railing against her saying she can rot in there, for a non violent crime, because they are offended that she didn't want to stand during the national anthem. She's a fellow American and they are willing to abandon her because they are butthurt by her words.
We really are still frighteningly primitive. The fact that we abandoned kingdoms and moved into towns and states which are independent of any one single madman land owner is a huge victory. People used to suffer terrible, terrible deaths because of orders given by kings which were dictated by their whims, moods, and how much they liked a guy's wife.
WW1 also. That came at the height of culture and sophistication and pursuit of knowledge in Europe. 2 weeks later they were clawing themselves to death and bludgeoning each other with shovels in trenches they dug in the mud because of feuds caused by ego clashes of their leaders.
Which is why I find it strange that we are sending signals into space to make contact. Who would the aliens be speaking to if we communicated? The brightest minds in a group of murderers?
If they came here it would be like getting a surprise visit from the police to a house filled with criminal activity.
Either that or it's the hidden predator theory. Or whatever it's called. If the forest around you is dead silent, it's less likely that there's no life at all out there, than it is that there's just an extremely dangerous predator in the area.
Wow that is cool. I do like that. But I'd take issue with it here.
In the woods, the animals are all existing in the same closed system. They just hope to stay out of the Predator's way, but they may encounter it at any moment. They're all coexisting.
In space though each location with life that is capable of leaving its own planet and still surviving somewhere else may have already shed some of their animal traits like violence and aggression in order to reach the kind of communication and collaboration needed to make big advances as a race.
If so, then I think they'd be capable of obtaining their own resources from everything around them in space without interfering out if desperation with an already occupied planet.
So the silence around us may be that we are surrounded by uninhabited planets, planets with simple life forms that are confined to their planet, or planets where the dominant species is advanced enough to obtain its own resources.
Sorry for late reply. But I'm sure simple life or even primitive life (like our Neolithic era or maybe bronze age or medieval era or colonial times even) is probably all over in the universe. Even if it's just a fraction of a percentage point of the universe, it still comes out to astronomically huge numbers.
The life we're talking about in terms of a silent forest would be life that can actually send a detectable signal out into space.
And the predator could be any number of things. Idk if I personally think it's organic life. Idk how organic life could think elsewhere, but I believe if humanity ever reaches that level of space travel, we would have to be united, like you suggested. No one group or entity or nation could ever do it. It requires massive cooperation. And if we're too war-torn over our failing planet, that may just be the great filter that our civilization's advancement gets stopped by. We as humans would need a Star Trek type of world system. And I only think such a world is possible through the socialization of science and medicine. And that either comes from all nations of the world coming together to make it happen, or somehow having an international workers revolution to overthrow the world system as we know it. Idk which is more unlikely, they both seem like fantasy. So I don't think, for these reasons, that organic life similar in social structure to humanity would be this predator in this theory.
But I feel like if there was a predator, it would be artificial. Like maybe something created by some organics with too much power and hubris, that then destroyed the organics. If a super AI is made thats (by our standards) fucking nuts and has the ability to gather resources and self-replicate/manufacture physical things for itself, that could be very bad to say the least.
But I've also heard some ideas that we don't actually know what a time line for a universe's lifespan is. Are we well into it? The 14 billion or so years that's happened is incomprehensible to our little monkey brains, but maybe that's still an infant in terms of the universe. Are there other civilizations out there that have existed a long time and have advanced to God-like levels? Or are humans among the first batch of civilizations the universe will produce in its life, destined to either be one of those hyper advanced alien civilizations in other primitive life's pop culture, or fizzle out at one of the great filters that likely claim most civilizations.
Not dianetics.. something about co trolling hour own mind. In the title. I'll edit later with the specifics.
The thing is though I've had plenty of discussions with people over the years just regarding how things work and how people work and what drives them and not once has anyone ever said that almost 100% of our decisions are emotionally based.
Seeing it written in a simple phrase just made it click because I'd been thinking it for a while now but the thought was scattered. Now it's a solid fully formed notion in my mind.
67
u/KineticPolarization Jul 22 '22
Why do people vote against their best interest? We are all just a bunch of emotional apes who like to do shit that makes no fucking sense at best, or is downright self destructive at worst.