Arda Sever
@Saccha
15 okur puanı
Ekim 2019 tarihinde katıldı
People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their hearth, but sooner or late the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously.
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40-70p: Hafif bağımlı 👀
80p+: Geçmiş olsun, kitaplar seni ele geçirmiş 😅
If 30,000 years ago i helped you hunt a wild chicken and you then kept almost all to yourself, offering me just one wind, i did not say to myself: 'Better one wing than nothing at all'. Instead my evolutionary algorithms kicked in, adrenaline and testosterone flooded my system, my blood boiled, and i stamped my feet and shouted at the top of my voice. In the short term i may have gone hungry, and even risked a punch or two. But it paid off in the long term, because you thought twice before ripping me off again. We refuse unfair offers because people who meekly accepted unfair offers didn't survive in the Stone Age.
A similar fate befell the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. What television did in 1989, Facebook and Twitter did in 2011. The new media helped the masses coordinate their activities, so that thousands of people flooded the streets and squared at the right moment and toppled the Mubarak regime. However, it is one thing to bring 100,000 people people to Tahrir Square, and quite another to get a grip on the political machinery, shake the right hands in the right back rooms and run a country effectively. Consquently, when Mubarak stepped down the demonstrators could not fill the vacuum. Egypt had only twp institutions sufficiently organized to rule the country: the army and the Muslim Brotherhood. Hence the revolution was hijacked first by Brotherhood, and eventually by the army.
In 2010 scientists conducted an unusually touching rat experiment. They locked a rat in a tiny cage, placed the cage within a much larger cell and allowed another rat to roam freely through that cell. The caged cell gave out distress signals, which caused the free rat also to exhibit signs of anxiety and stress. In most cases, the free rat proceeded to help her trapped companion, and after several attempts usually succeeded in oppening the cage and liberating the prisoner. The researchers then repeated the experiment, this time placing chocolate in the cell. The free rat now had to choose between either liberating the prisoner, or enjoying the chocolate all by herself. Many rats preferred to first free their companion and share the chocolate (though quite a few behaved more selfishly, proving perhaps that some rats are meaner than others).
Sceptics dismissed these results, arguing that the free rat liberated the prisoner not out of emphaty, but simply in order to stop the annoying distress signals. The rats were motivated by the unpleasant sensations they felt, and they sought nothing grander than ending these sensations. Maybe. But we could say exactly the same thing about us humans. When i donate money to a beggar, am i not reacting to the unpleasant sensations that the sight of the beggar causes me to feel? Do i really care about the beggar, or do i simply want to feel better for myself?
To illustrate this problem consider the case of Santino, a male chimpanzee from the Furuvik Zoo in Sweden. To relieve the boredom of his compound Santino developed an exciting hobby: throwing stones at visitors to the zoo. In itself, this is hardly unique. Angry chimpanzees often throw stones, sticks and even excrement. However, Santino was planning his moves in advance. During the early morning, long before the zoo opened for visitors, Santino collected projectiles and placed them in a heap, without showing any sign of anger. Guides and visitors soon learned to be wary of Santino, especially whe he was standing near his pile of stones, hence he had increasing difficulties in finding targets.