Lennvor

If evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience (which is debatable to begin with), it's that way not because our evolutionary history doesn't inform our psychology but because our understanding of both those things is too immature for the questions most people are are trying to answer. But that in itself depends on the questions and the level of answer one finds acceptable. I've found Michael Tomasello's book "The Evolution of Agency" perfectly proportionate in the kinds of questions it seeks to answer given the information it has, and I think the wild speculations I extrapolate from it are totally fine to share in random internet conversations.

Nah, I think that overstates the extent to which our ancestors were the hunter more than the hunted and ignores the social dimension. An early human might have been at risk for predators when they were out alone hunting or gathering but when you're with the group I'd think that's a much smaller threat. Having to deal with social threats from within the group, now, that's ever-present. And still present today!

Also, after reading a book about the evolution of agency that suggests the evolutionary innovation of humans is that we're a goal-seeking system that's able to function as a part of a larger goal-seeking system (collective action)... I wonder how much that can account for existential dread. We have a diffuse drive to be part of something greater than ourselves but it's not always clear what that should be.

That is absolutely hilarious. Yeah Reddit, I totally buy that you want internet communities to not depend on platforms like Reddit. This would be totally monetizeable for you, not that you care about monetization and not that monetization has proven to work at cross-purposes with making good internet websites/communities. And once you mentioned blockchain, well that's when I recognized the subliminal cues suggesting a well-thought-out proposal that positively impacts the world.

EDIT: Ugh just saw that again, they just linked an old post, this one apparently from 2021. I don't think it changes things much insofar as they're presumably planning to replace awards with something and this proposal presumably describes it. But I already didn't see them successfully implementing the thing as written, and knowing now that it's from 2021 it just makes me more certain that whatever they roll out is unlikely to be exactly what's described here.

I'd say knowing this was written two years ago makes the text less hilariously on-the-nose but that depends on whether they'd write something different today doesn't it, I'm not sure they wouldn't.

This question is so generic I can't help but feel there is a more specific idea behind it. Can you talk about what made you want to ask this, what kind of answers you're expecting?

Is it, though?

My kid was conceived via IVF. I literally have a picture of him as a 5-day-old blastocyst. (ok I can't help being pedantic and pointing out that I think it would be more accurate to consider the embryonic disk as the true "here is me when I was little" precursor as the zygote/blastocyst develops not just into the baby but into the whole amniotic sac. But whatever).

That first comment has thrown me for a loop. The replies accuse if of being ChatGPT, and it extremely looks like ChatGPT, but I think it might be a human imitating ChatGPT? Bang-on imitation if so.

Why wouldn't people expect differently? Is people trashing them on something so front facing undesirable for them or something?

900 comments and it's still up, looks like they gave up ^^

It really reminds me of this paper that was discussed on the Many Minds podcast awhile ago, about a new hypothesis on the evolution of music. Basically this person argued that music evolved as a credible signal for group cohesion - working together is a critical adaptive skill for humans (I recently finished Michael Tomasello's book "The Evolution of Agency" which I think drives that point home even harder), and singing and doing music requires coordination. And putting on a good performance requires really good coordination. So the idea is that it evolved as a signal of "you don't want to fuck with us, look at how much of a well-oiled machine we are".

It's just one hypothesis among others of course but it's compelling enough to me that it's wormed itself into my brain as being obviously true.

Anyway, I kind of want to find that author and link them to r/place and just go like "whaddaya think, is there a paper in this". There are quite a few ways internet communities flex and compete in terms of "we're more numerous and better organized than other communities" but I'm not sure there are others that are as performative as r/places. And I don't think it was intended that way, was it? Like, today's r/place says "alone you can do something, together you can do more" but when they originally did it had they expected explicit subreddit coordination to be such a big part of it? Or were they expecting something much more random and individual-driven?

I don't think there currently are but I haven't searched either. I will say there were two separate "how about we do this" on kbin.social/m/redditMigration (where I first posted this comment), and given most replies seems to agree on shunning r/place I'd guess that nobody has started anything at this time. This comment isn't me volunteering to do it either, I wouldn't even know how to start, I just decided I disagreed with people's arguments and wanted to throw my thoughts out there. I might participate if something did get coordinated though; I don't have the app but when I was checking out r/place on my browser I seemed to hit a page where it looked like I could participate. Dunno if they changed things or if I misunderstood.

Anyway ISTM lemmy.world/c/reddit (is this where this is?) and kbin.social/m/redditMigration would be the logical places for such coordination if it were to happen. They're the places I've seen people talk about it.

There are definitely diminishing returns to increasing the discoverability of something (if we hate the word "advertise") once enough people know about it. What are your reasons for thinking we are now at this point of diminishing returns and not still in the expansion phase?

Like, if it were actually the case that everybody who had an interest in being on Lemmy or kbin knew about Lemmy and kbin and understood exactly how much it was in their interest to be there... The only conclusion I can come to is that Lemmy and kbin kind of suck, given the activity in the subs I'm interested in. Or are inherently niche products that intrinsically interest few people compared to a platform like Reddit. I can definitely see an argument that this is true of Mastodon given the graveyard of "here is my new home away from Twitter" accounts that haven't posted since 2022 (I don't think Mastodon sucks but I can definitely buy that it has features that made it an unsatisfactory replacement for Twitter for most people in 2022), but whether that argument is correct or not I don't think you can make the same one for kbin or Lemmy at this point in time.