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 creates systems, like the brain, that are biased to minimize the costlier error. This built-in bias to avoid evolutionarily expensive errors is known as the smoke detector principle. Evolutionary psychologists Martie Haselton and Randy Nesse believe that natural selection engineered human judgment and decision making to be biased according to the same principle. Like a good smoke detector, our brain is rigged to sound the alarm even when there is no fire, forcing us to tolerate the inconvenience of false alarms to avoid potentially lethal misses. Because our evolutionary tendencies steer us toward avoiding costly errors, our decisions will result in more small errors. But we are disposed to produce little errors so that we avoid big mistakes.”
― 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

“But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status, (5) attracting a mate, (6) keeping that mate, and (7) caring for family.”
― Vladas Griskevicius, The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think