Encefalus

Hey, I return after nearly missing for a month. This time, I won’t write about my current interests which revolve around computation in social sciences. This time I am writing to revisit politics. Actually, I don’t know why, after a month not having published an article I feel the urge to throw some random rant. So please, bear with me.

You know what, people are stupid. People are utterly stupid. And the problem is that they are so stupid that they don’t even realize it. I’ve started thinking that people are not much smarter than monkeys. Sometimes, I feel like stranded on an island with monkeys as my sole companion.

Home…

It wouldn’t be an overstatement if I said that most people resemble airplanes with deficient auto-piloting systems. They go straight to nowhere without even realizing where they are.

Now, let me tell you why. Psychology exists as a science for over a century (1879). Through its existence we have started to uncover many of the mechanisms that we use to survive in our every day environments.

But, why do I use the word mechanism instead of something other word? Because, you don’t have to see people as something more than that. And let me explain myself.

Why don’t you hear very often every day people arguing with mathematicians and physicists about science? Because no-one really cares about maths and physics in their every day lives. But, the huge amount of self-help and pop psychology books shows clearly how much interest exists about psychology in our every day lives. This is natural, since in order to interact in a social setting we all have to become amateur psychologists.

Your everyday reasoning and its results

In our efforts to do that, we create theories about others and how people interact. We create theoritical notions like "free-will" and some of us end up using political theories in our cognitive arsenal, as a means to explain social phenomena.

However, while we believe that these theories are correct, in fact, science has proven most of them to be absolute crap. Yes, they might help us get through the day, but they are not correct.

Of course, being scientifically correct is not what life is all about. Life is just about one thing: survival. Yeap, so simple. This is what the theory of evolution teaches us. And this is why people are so utterly stupid. We don’t need anything too much sophisticated to survive in our environment. We just need some simple heuristics to survive.

Yet, this is exactly the very reason everything seems to go straight to hell. Our brains have built societies and civilizations that are far more complex than anything our brain has been evolved to face. This is why we need to start trusting science when we are making big decisions. However, I haven’t seen too much science in politics. I haven’t seen too much science in warfare. I haven’t seen too much science in the recent economic crisis.

John Rambo knows how to survive even though he knows jack about science

Someone will surely argue that science is indeed present in all these three occasions: politicians speak with scientists, warfare is based on technological advance and economics is a science in itself. Yeah, but it’s pretty obvious that this is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about how we can use psychology or any other scientific means (like computation sociology I have explored in previous articles)  in order to make decisions that are based more on facts, than on theory.

The problem here is that we have a giant gap between society and science. Psychology has experienced the major paradigm shift of subconscious non-logical mechanisms of action that govern our lives, decades ago. On the other hand, society and politics have not. The most tragic of all is that I am not sure even if they are able to do that. It seems more probable to me that most people are not able to grasp some concepts that will be used by corrupt officers in power in order to create their own vision of society, rather that people can abandon archaic concepts like free-will and spiritualism.

Fuck yeah

Maybe we can see many things in the police state of Great Britain and in the juridical system of the USA, where stupidity reigns supreme above all reason and logic. The fight against terrorism in the recent years has created many comical examples of cops raiding homes or goverments spying on their citizens. Somehow, many people believe this will make the world safer, while if you think about all the terrorist strikes that have happened in the last 10 years, you will see that they are not that many at all.

I can’t really tell what course shoudl society take. I can only tell what I observe: that we are creating policies based on irrational decisions, ignoring all scientific evidence.

The title of this article was inspired by an article on Cracked: What is the Monkeysphere?

You can find more articles about irrationality and human stupidity in Encefalus:

Subliminal messaging, subliminal advertising and subliminal learning for a subliminal post

A different view on economics: maybe all we really need

Lotteries, poverty AND credit cards this time along with the proper social and scientific analysis

Lotteries, poverty and social implications

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under General, Philosophical, Socio-Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.