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People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

freakonomics.com

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Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#2
We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Increasingly, the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals will become a pressing issue.

One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own.

“Well I just don’t get why the baby didn’t defend itself from the bear.”

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#6

We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Increasingly, the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals will become a pressing issue. One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own. “Well I just don’t get wh…

Hear hear, the agricultural revolution has trapped us in a Faustian bargain!

"The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."[1]

[1] https://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/20.html

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#7

We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Increasingly, the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals will become a pressing issue. One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own. “Well I just don’t get wh…

Yet people have done and are doing it on a daily basis.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#8

We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Increasingly, the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals will become a pressing issue. One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own. “Well I just don’t get wh…

I like to remind people that it's not "you versus AT&T" it's "you versus a quarter million experts in their respective domains."

I would expect any average individual to lose against AT&T in whatever their issue is unless AT&T willingly concedes to them.

Picking on AT&T for no particular reason.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#9
post #6

We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Increasingly, the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals will become a pressing issue. One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own. “Well I just don’t get wh…

Hear hear, the agricultural revolution has trapped us in a Faustian bargain! "The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies…

# of copies of DNA is just a proxy for probability of propagation.
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