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The Distinctiveness of Human Aggression | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
Humans tamed one another by taking out particularly aggressive individuals. This led us to become relatively peaceful apes.
But if humans are “self-domesticated,” then why are there so many violent people among us today?
The fact is, humans are not nearly as violent as our nearest evolutionary relatives.
Comparing the level of within-group physical aggression among chimpanzees with human hunter-gatherer communities, chimps are 150 to 550 times more likely than humans to inflict violence against their peers.
We humans are far nicer to members of our own group than chimps are. Thanks to our ancestors and their ability to plan organized murder. And tear overly dominant males to shreds.
Many people are familiar with the findings that bonobos are more peaceful than chimpanzees.
This is true.
Male bonobos are about half as aggressive as male chimpanzees, while female bonobos are more aggressive than female chimpanzees.
Bonobos are “peaceful,” relative to chimps. But bonobos are extremely aggressive compared to humans.
The eminent Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham explores these findings at length in his fascinating 2019 book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. […]
Throughout the book, he uses the term “coalitionary proactive aggression,” which means a group of individuals who come together to deliberately attack a person or another group.
This type of violence is unique to humans. […]
Among humans in hunter-gatherer communities, killing a member of a different group is often considered pleasurable in itself. The aim, in some cases, isn’t to obtain food or mates or resources. Rather, killing the troublemaker or members of the outgroup is a goal in itself.
Coalitionary proactive aggression is common between groups. But it is extremely rare within groups. […]
In the ancestral environment, cold-blooded, self-centered individualists would have been wiped out by human groups who cooperated.
However, indiscriminate cooperators would have been exploited and outcompeted by those who carefully cooperated only with their team.
Modern humans descended not from cold-blooded individualists nor from indiscriminate cooperators. Rather, we are descendants of those who distinguished between us and them. Between ingroups and outgroups.
American Vulcan | Tablet
The facts of Palmer Luckey’s life are so uniquely bizarre—combining elements of fantasy with lunacy and also world-altering change—that they could be printed on magnetic poetry tiles, rearranged in an endless number of indiscriminate combinations by a drooling baby, and yet every time, still manage to convey something significant and true.
Let me show you: Luckey is the owner of the world’s largest video game collection, which he keeps buried 200 feet underground in a decommissioned U.S. Air Force nuclear missile base—which is the kind of thing a man can afford to buy when he single-handedly turns virtual reality from the laughingstock of the technology industry into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise by inventing the Oculus Rift in a camper trailer parked in the driveway of his parents’ duplex in Long Beach, California, where at 19 years old he lived alone and survived on frozen burritos and Mucho Mango AriZona tea.
Or: After selling Oculus to Facebook for $2.7 billion and then getting fired by Mark Zuckerberg for making a $10,000 donation to a pro-Trump troll group dedicated to “shitposting in real life,” Luckey tried his hand at building a nonprofit private prison chain that only gets paid when ex-prisoners stay out of prison. After he decided that would require too much lobbying work, he attempted to solve the obesity epidemic by making food out of petroleum products centrifuged out of the sewer system—a perfectly delicious and low-calorie idea, he maintains, which he only ditched because of the “marketing nightmare” of persuading people to eat remanufactured sewage. In the end, he decided instead to found Anduril Industries, a defense technology startup that makes lethal autonomous weapons systems. It is now valued at $14 billion.
Another: In his spare time, when he is not providing U.S. Customs and Border Patrol with AI-powered long-range sensors, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy with drones to attack high-value Russian targets, or winning first place in the Texas Renaissance Festival’s costume contest with historically meticulous renderings of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn sewn and stitched by his wife, Nicole—who’s been at his side for 16 of his 31 years on earth—Luckey recently built a bypass for his peripheral nervous system to experiment with giving himself superhuman reflexes; vestibular implants to pipe sounds into his skull so that instead of having to call him and wait for him to pick up, Anduril employees could just pick up a designated Palmer Phone and talk straight into his head; and a virtual reality headset that—by tying three explosive charges to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency (i.e., GAME OVER)—kills you in real life when you die in a video game.
How California Turned Against Growth | Construction Physics
Between 1900 and 1970, California had the greatest population increase of any state (going from the size of Kansas to surpassing New York as the most populous state), and the second-highest rate of population growth (barely behind Arizona’s). For over a century, California was a growth machine.
But starting in the 1960s, California began to put the brakes on its growth machine. New housing became increasingly difficult to build, and investment in the infrastructure needed to support it collapsed. Home prices shot up, becoming some of the highest in the nation. California’s population continued to increase, but more slowly than it had.
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Your Book Review: How the War Was Won | Astral Codex Ten
To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien?
It provides a new, transformative view of the conflict by focusing on production of key goods and what affected that production instead of the ups and downs of battles at the front.
That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW.
I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one.
I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einstein’s penmanship.
Morality and rules, and how to avoid drowning: what my daughters learned at school in China | The Guardian
Our twins spent two years at primary school in Chengdu. Their lessons featured alarming cautionary tales and stories of Chinese superiority, but there was fun and irreverence, too
The New Girl Disorder | City Journal
It’s hard to imagine that the cleric looked closely at images of the campus protesters denouncing Israel for its military response to Hamas’s monstrous terror attack last October. If he did, he would have noticed that they were predominantly female. It was women holding the microphones, addressing the press and crowds; women leading the chants of “From the river to the sea”; women giving interviews about the encampments; and women issuing demands to university administrators. In some images, so many women were involved that it seemed as if men had inexplicably vanished, like the missing in the sci-fi series The Leftovers.
The demographic makeup of the university demonstrations was something new for the United States. American women have led political protests before, but those generally concerned “women’s issues,” such as Prohibition, abortion, #MeToo, and the like. Granted, women marched with men in the 1960s civil rights and anti–Vietnam War protests, but they usually played secondary roles, such as cooking food, typing speeches, and sometimes serving as playmates; “The only position of women in SNCC is prone,” in the memorable words of Stokely Carmichael. (Recognizing their second-class status among otherwise progressive male comrades motivated activist women of the era to start building the second-wave feminist movement.) Decades later, at Occupy Wall Street, a male protester produced a Tumblr video featuring photos of some of the comelier females sitting in at Zuccotti Park. He called it “Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street.” Those days are over. Imagine publicizing a “Hot Chicks of the Campus Encampments” video in 2024; the writer would have to go into a witness-protection program.
Men consume relationships. Women produce them. | Wood from Eden
I have an (equally anecdotal and unscientific) theory why things are this way: Because for women, romantic relationships are work, aimed at achieving things, while for men, romantic relationships are leisure, aimed at relaxing and having a good time.
That is the number one difference between male and female relationship styles, I think. The usual differences that are well-established by science appear much smaller: Women value commitment higher than men, men like casual relationships more and so on. All this is well-known. But the difference between the sexes in these areas are not that big and pervasive. The male and female averages differ, but there is also a large gender overlap: There are plenty of very devoted men and rather casual-minded women on the market.
Instead I think that the biggest, most consistent difference between male and female relationship styles lies in the amount of intellectual investment in relationship matters.
Why We Shut Down | Asterisk Magazine
In international development, it’s not enough to try to do good. We need the tools to tell if a project is really working — and the incentive to end it if it’s not.
The Left Has an Authoritarian Problem (but Doesn’t Know It) | Presser
It isn’t just our lab that has woken up to this growing left-wing authoritarianism threat. There is an emerging revolution of academic data revealing a large body of evidence that left-wing authoritarians in the United States and elsewhere are extremely authoritarian. This includes work in the United States published in major research outlets that says, among other things, liberals more broadly are often just as prone as conservatives to possess traits considered hallmarks of authoritarianism. Yet, you may wonder how it is possible for academics to have completely missed such an obvious truth, and the answer is important in helping us understand the nature of modern left-wing authoritarianism in the United States—and why it is especially difficult to eradicate. The answer is that liberals are highly motivated not to see left-wing authoritarianism. And the more left-wing authoritarian they are, quite ironically, the less they want to believe in authoritarianism on the left. They have a kind of curious self-ignorance of their own authoritarian motives. Put another way, liberal authoritarians have a blind spot.
Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases? | Astral Codex Ten
Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction.
There’s a pattern in fake scammy alternative medicine. People get excited about some new herb. They invent a laundry list of effects: it improves heart health, softens menopause, increases energy, deepens sleep, clears up your skin. This is how you know it’s a fraud. Real medicine works by mimicking natural biochemical signals. Why would you have a signal for “have low energy, bad sleep, nasty menopause, poor heart health, and ugly skin”? Why would all the herb’s side effects be other good things? Real medications usually shift a system along a tradeoff curve; if they hit more than one system, the extras usually just produce side effects. If you’re lucky, you can pick out a subset of patients for whom the intended effect is more beneficial than the side effects are bad. That’s how real medicine works.
But GLP-1 drugs are starting to feel more like the magic herb. Why?
Friendly Google and Enemy Remedies | Stratechery
More broadly, we tend to think of monopolies as being mean; the problem with Aggregators is they have the temptation to be too nice. It has been very profitable to be Google’s friend; I think consumers — and Google — are better off if the company has a few more enemies.
The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite | The Scholar’s Stage
I often draw a distinction between the political elites of Washington DC and the industrial elites of Silicon Valley with a joke: in San Francisco reading books, and talking about what you have read, is a matter of high prestige. Not so in Washington DC. In Washington people never read books—they just write them.
Lukianoff And Defining Cancel Culture | Astral Codex Ten
But the more work we put into solving these questions, the more robust an anti-cancel-culture coalition will be. A coalition works best when people believe that if they support other members’ pet causes, those other members will support theirs. Right now nobody’s sure about this. If I support a Republican’s right to criticize transgender people, will he support my right to say I wish the Trump assassin hadn’t missed? Should he support it? Is there a natural coalition between people who want to do those two things? I think there is some natural coalition here, but until its members hammer out what promises they’re making their co-coalitioners, it risks collapsing when people feel betrayed by not getting support that they expected (or when they’re told they unknowingly signed up for supporting things that they hate).
Letter #50. The Origin and Harm of Federal Education Mandates | Play Makes Us Human
Twelve to fourteen years have passed since Common Core or something like it has been adopted by the states. What have been the effects? I’ll save a discussion of that for my next letter, but here’s a preview.
The education gap between rich and poor has increased, not decreased. Test scores have gone up, but that seems to be more a result of gaming the system than meaningful learning. What used to be fun in schools—including recesses, lunch periods long enough for socializing, art and music classes, and creative writing assignments just for fun—have been dropped or largely curtailed, all for the sake of more drill in the very narrow range of subjects relevant to the state tests. Anxiety has increased among everyone involved with the schools, especially teachers and students. Teachers in many schools feel disempowered and in fact are disempowered. Many of the best teachers have quit.
That young woman who slayed me in that 1962 debate had it right. Once federal money was on the table, schools sacrificed their souls to get it. They also sacrificed, as it turns out—though I don’t think my debate opponent specifically predicted this—the mental health of their students. More on that in the next letter.
The Democrats' new sunny vibes | Noahpinion
Three weeks ago, as Donald Trump took a clear lead in the presidential race, Tyler Cowen wrote a post enumerating nineteen reasons why the “vibes” of the race had shifted. Some of the reasons included Trump’s personal sense of humor and confident attitude, his team’s mastery of social media, the intellectual vitality of the Trumpian Right, and popular backlashes against wokeness, immigration, higher education, the intellectual class, and various progressive cultural movements.
I would appreciate an update to this post, enumerating the reasons why the vibes appear to have shifted once more.
Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist | Nautilus
My life among the elementary particles has made me question whether reality exists at all.
Against revisionist history on Biden 2024 | Silver Bulletin
You can like the president or his policies. But his campaign was a disaster. And he didn't just drop out — he lost.
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers | Astral Codex Ten
Some commenters on the recent post accused me of misunderstanding the Nietzschean objection to altruism.
We hate altruism, they said, not because we’re “bad and cruel”, but because we instead support vitalism. Vitalism is a moral system that maximizes life, glory and strength, instead of maximizing happiness. Altruism is bad because it throws resources into helping sick (maybe even dysgenic) people, thus sapping our life, glory, and strength.
In a blog post (linked in the original post, discussed at length in the comments), Walt Bismarck compares the ultimate fate of altruism to WALL-E: a world where morbidly obese humans are kept in a hedonistic haze by robot servitors (although the more typical example I hear is tiling the universe with rats on heroin, which maximizes a certain definition of pleasure). In contrast, vitalism imagines a universe alive with dynamism, heroism, and great accomplishments.
My response: in most normal cases, altruism and vitalism suggest the same solutions. The two diverge from each other in Extremistan, but in Extremistan each one also diverges from itself, shattering into innumerable incoherent and horrible outcomes. So we should mostly concentrate on the normal cases where they converge. I’m suspicious of anyone who gets too interested in the extreme divergent cases, because I think many of these people are actively looking for trouble (eg excuses for cruelty) and should stop.
Cut Crime, Slash Spending | Bet On It
Amazingly, though, there is another way to impose monetary sanctions on criminals. A simple way. An easy way. A way that costs taxpayers less than nothing. Namely: Cut their government benefits!
Reservoir of liquid water found deep in Martian rocks | BBC News
Scientists have discovered a reservoir of liquid water on Mars - deep in the rocky outer crust of the planet.
The findings come from a new analysis of data from Nasa’s Mars Insight Lander, which touched down on the planet back in 2018.
The lander carried a seismometer, which recorded four years' of vibrations - Mars quakes - from deep inside the Red Planet.
Analysing those quakes - and exactly how the planet moves - revealed "seismic signals" of liquid water.
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The Real Reason Why Oranges Are Sold In Those Red Net Bags | IFL Science
The principle is based on the confetti illusion, a visual phenomenon where the perception of colors is strongly influenced by its surrounding context. In this optical illusion, a neutrally colored ball is placed within a grid of differently colored lines. When the lines of a particular color are in the foreground, the ball's color appears to blend with that of the lines.
The review which flagged up How the War Was Won for my reading list alone made this batch of links a great one. Thanks!