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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Justin Gregg
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February 10 - February 12, 2023
Nietzsche both wished he was as stupid as a cow so he wouldn’t have to contemplate existence, and pitied cows for being so stupid that they couldn’t contemplate existence.
In a special issue of the Journal of Artificial General Intelligence, dozens more experts were given a chance to comment on Wang’s definition. In a completely unsurprising turn of events, the editors concluded that “if the reader was expecting a consensus around defining AI, we are afraid we have to disappoint them.”12 There is, and never will be, any agreement as to what intelligence is for an entire field of science focused exclusively on creating it. Which is a rather ridiculous state of affairs.
If you want to highlight the slipperiness of intelligence as a concept, just ask an animal behavior researcher to explain why crows are more intelligent than pigeons. You’ll often get an answer from folks like me along the lines of, “Well, you really can’t compare the intelligence of different species like this.” Which is code for “the question doesn’t make sense because nobody knows what the hell intelligence is or how to measure it.”
By all accounts, Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas were integral to the formation and success of the Nazi Party and helped to justify the Holocaust. This even though Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism and would probably have hated Nazis,23 advising that people should “eject the anti-Semitic ranters from the country.”24 Having served as a medic in the Franco-Prussian War, Nietzsche had seen his fair share of brutality, and it affected him deeply. He was no fan of violence. He certainly rejected the kind of state-sponsored violence that jingoistic political movements like the Nazis employed. Even
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With an understanding of how the world has been built comes the knowledge to break it. Humans have the capacity to both rationalize genocide and the technological competence to carry it out. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche used her brother’s philosophical writings—born of a staggering human intellect—to validate a worldview that led to the deaths of six million Jews.27 In this regard, humans are nothing like narwhals. Narwhals do not build gas chambers.
A reality in which the Earth is bursting with animal species that have hit on solutions for how to live a good life in ways that put the human species to shame.
Orlando’s stock-picking technique was just the researchers’ clever way of generating random stock picks to prove a point. That point being that people investing in the stock market might as well be throwing darts at a board. When it comes to picking winning stocks, it’s all a big crapshoot.
Humans are the why specialist species. It is one of a handful of cognitive traits that separates our thinking style from other animals.
Of all the things that fall under the glittery umbrella of human intelligence, our understanding of cause and effect is the source from which everything else springs.
Humans’ why specialist thinking offers us two cognitive skills that animals like bettongs lack: imagination and an understanding of causality.
It was this kind of racism—scientific racism—that fueled the justification for slavery in the United States and the centuries-long white supremacy that has created untold suffering for millions of people.
Animal communication involves signals that convey information about a small set of subjects, whereas human language can convey information about any subject at all. This pithy explanation avoids a protracted discussion about the structural or functional differences between language and animal communication, and the question of how language evolved from earlier forms of hominid communication. The bottom line is this: There is something different about the human mind that allows for a capacity for limitless subject-discussion.
Lying: a method for intentionally transmitting false information to another creature with the express purpose of making that creature believe something that is not true to manipulate its behavior.
The bosses rated their less honest employees as the most politically skilled. But, importantly, also rated them as more competent than their honest and humble workmates. This creates a scenario where the biggest bullshitters among us are likely to be viewed as the most competent, and thus more likely to receive promotions or be elected to positions of power. Sure, we might not like them, and they might be objectively terrible people, but we respect their political and social acumen.
The evolutionary biologist Carl T. Bergstrom and the information scientist Jevin West teach a course at the University of Washington titled Calling Bullshit, which they turned into a book of the same name. Although the course and book are lighthearted to some extent, with a goal to “provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit,”41 they do not mince words about the serious threat that the proliferation of bullshit in the internet age poses to human civilization. They write that “adequate bullshit
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The spread of dubious, confusing, or false information through the act of state-sponsored lies and bullshit has killed millions of people. From the anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda that proliferated in Nietzsche’s time to Russia’s Internet Research Agency currently spreading anti-vaxxer messages, lives are lost when bullshit spreads.
The fact that sociocultural and historical context has such an enormous influence on what we consider right or wrong behavior suggests that our moral sense is not a monolithic code bestowed upon us by external, supernatural forces. It appears more like a set of inherited prescripts that get tweaked by culture.
But I will also show that it is in fact animals that usually hold the ethical high ground despite lacking the capacity for full-blown human moral thinking. You see, human moral reasoning often leads to more death, violence, and destruction than we find in the normative behavior of nonhuman animals. Which is why human morality, as I will argue, kind of sucks.
We, as a species, can justify—on moral grounds—genocide. Not just cultural genocide, but the murder of entire populations and racial groups, including children.
Many of the cases of homosexuality in the animal kingdom work like this, where same-sex behaviors are just part of an individual’s typical behavioral repertoire, and reproduction still occurs to ensure species survival. Bonobos are perhaps the best example: Individuals engage in sex between same- and opposite-sex partners on a regular basis, resulting in lots of gayness, but also lots of babies.
Lawns are a monoculture wasteland that are almost entirely useless as a habitat for wildlife. They don’t provide us with any food, but nonetheless require a huge investment in time, money, and resources. They are a love letter to conspicuous consumption, a term coined by economist Thorstein Veblen in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class, and defined as “the purchase of goods or services for the specific purpose of displaying one’s wealth.”8 Lawns are also a giant middle finger to the environmental movement.
Consider that a child born today is five times more likely to die in a global extinction event than in a car crash. Think about that for a second. Think about how often people drive, and then read that sentence again.
This is what I call the Exceptionalism Paradox. It’s the idea that even though humans are indeed exceptional when it comes to our cognition, it does not mean we are better at the game of life than other animals. In fact, because of this paradox, humans might be a less successful species precisely because of our amazing, complex intelligence.
