Michael

“Insight 1: Human decision making serves evolutionary goals. The traditional way of thinking about human behavior is based almost completely on a consideration of people’s surface goals—getting a decent bargain on a pair of dress shoes, for example, or picking a fine restaurant for a date next Saturday. But humans, like all animals, evolved to make choices in ways that promote deeper evolutionary purposes. Once we start looking at modern choices through this ancestral lens, many decisions that appear foolish and irrational at the surface level turn out to be smart and adaptive at a deeper evolutionary level. Insight 2: Human decision making is designed to achieve several very different evolutionary goals. Economists and psychologists have often assumed that humans seek a single broad goal: to feel good or to maximize benefits. In actuality, all humans pursue several very different evolutionary goals, such as acquiring a mate, protecting themselves from danger, and attaining status. This is an important distinction. Depending on which evolutionary goal they currently have in mind, consciously or subconsciously, people will have very different biases and make very different choices.”
― Anonymous

“Natural selection is a pretty efficient process, so if a behavior is found widely in humans and other species, it’s a better starting guess to presume it is adaptive rather than to assume it’s merely dumb.”
― Anonymous

“Despots, it turns out, are learning to practice what journalist Rebecca MacKinnon calls “networked authoritarianism”—the use of the Internet to consolidate power. Rather than simply ban all digital communications, they realize, why not leave it partially open? Then dissidents will engage in public thinking and networking, which is a great way to keep tabs on them. “Before the advent of social media, it took a lot of effort for repressive governments to learn about the people dissidents are associated with,” as the writer Evgeny Morozov notes in The Net Delusion.”
― Anonymous

“The 2011 US budget included $60 billion for “protection” and another $964 billion for “defense.” With a population of 311 million people, that averages out to $3,294.60 spent by every man, woman, and child for government protection. That does not include the additional taxes you pay to support your local police, incidentally.”
― Anonymous