Steven Pinker 3of3: Reverse engineering romance and revenge

[MrJonkelp]

love the video really good

[ericajjful]

love the video really good

[PktMma]

I think I'd turn gay for Steven Pinker. He's so sexy!

[alohaoliwa]

Totally inspired~

[JavierBonillaC]

Let's asume that I am a person with an illness (quite self-destructive) that makes it so that if I don't deliver on a threat I will have a heart attack. If others know that I have such condition they will take my threats more seriously, increasing my chances of not being "duped" and of survival and reproduction. Interestingly that illness would turn out to be more productive than destructive; it would  become "selected for" in evolution. Well, that is what vengeance, jealousy or loyalty are.

[eangelos89]

Steve Pinker should read up on venusian arts. Reverse engineering seduction. I am a 6-7 at best when it comes to looks, my girlfriend is a perfect 10 and not only to my eyes. Men look at her as if she's a magnet yet she chose to be with me and I'm keeping her. Peace.

[theinquisitor]

@eangelos89 I find your attitude somewhat distasteful. Referring to her like a possession and talking about how you manipulated her into staying with you. It could just be that women with low self esteem are often attracted to arseholes. Call it an alternative hypothesis.

[eangelos89]

@theinquisitor You, Sir, are an arsehole for insulting me without knowing me. I said "she chose to be with me". "I'm keeping her" was meant jokingly, a playful use of words, as I am very happy with her and treat her with the respect that she deserves and do what it takes to make her happy. But it was Steve Pinker who said something about 10s and 9s and shit like that, you can't even rate looks because it's relative, it's a matter of taste. But the belief that you have, like, a "league" is bs.

[theinquisitor]

@eangelos89 take it easy mate. Random people on the internet aren't worth getting upset about. If you don't like being called an arsehole then you'd best not talk to people online. I just thought your "venusian arts" stuff was probably a load of nonsense and you're just attributing good luck or some other factor to that. Anyway, yeah I was probably out of line. I apologise with all the seriousness with which I made my initial comment. Don't take the internet so seriously, you'll get a hernia.

[eangelos89]

@theinquisitor Trust me, venusian arts are way more than picking up women or being a 'playa', in other words a person who has trust issues, hence he's afraid of commitment. It's about improving your self-worth, your persona and your social life :) And I didn't get upset, friend. I just gave you a full answer.

[theinquisitor]

@eangelos89 sounds like more self-help mumbo jumbo to me. Any evidence that it works that goes beyond anecdotal testimony?

[Alllex1703]

@theinquisitor ehm... Look bro, all this does is help you see, analyze and send signals to other people. It's psychology and reverse psychology. They take the subject of relationships and make it into a science. All I can say is it's as logical and simple as 1+1=2 once you get the drift.. I'm no writer, neither do I sell such books, there's even torrents and sites where you can get them for free illegally :P All I know is they've really helped me and another two troubled friends I gave em too.

[theinquisitor]

@Alllex1703 yeah and people say astrology helps them too. Anecdotal evidence is meaningless. Also I just don't like the idea of manipulating people with psychological tricks. Why can't you just be honest with people and treat them like people, not a fucking science experiment?

[CamronJohn]

he finished it so brilliantly!

[pawsoned]

All this newfangled terminology is just a lot of BS - words, words, words.

[dinomand]

@pawsoned

Damn you must be dim !

[pawsoned]

@dinomand Not dimmer than an average Internet user, I reckon. Even though, your primitive comment does not show your high level of I.Q either.

[dinomand]

@pawsoned

Damn I was right you are dim

[jonesgerard]

This is what happens when intelligent people try to quantify love, they get lost.

[Entropy56]

What was the point of this?

[flamablesteve]

I love Pinker.

[sphericalpyramid]

Lame. Someone fill a syringe full of vitality and please inject it into this person. While you're at it, give him a haircut. I guarantee his thoughts on love will change immediately therafter.

[xSilverPhinx]

Pinker is shrewd. I wonder how he is in a romance.

[sphericalpyramid]

Just imagine the shit talking...."OOO...YEAH...do continue to imbibe my salix alba caerulea-esque Mentula Obscenis with your salvering glossopharyngeal cavity..."

[johntkucz]

this guy's awesome. ridiucling love. awesome. this is illuminating.

[ivanisavich]

Pinker is fantastic...thanks for uploading this!

[nobagav]

Around time 7:00 he almost seems to be getting the evolution of the brain backwards. The question isn't why did expressions of emotion develope, but why did we keep it, as these behaviors are directly traceable through the majority of animals as far back as amphibians in some cases. More interestingly, have we really kept it that well? ie How significant is the ability to lie in all of this?

[PeeGeeBeeDee]

We keep them because they helped us either survive or procreate or both. And the ability to lie is about as significant as any human mental capability their is. Without it we'd have been unable to create societies and maintain relationships.

[PeeGeeBeeDee]

"KEPT" "THERE"

[PeeGeeBeeDee]

I'm referring to "White Lies" here people.

[humanist7117]

Though the mind arose out of the brain, they have evolved different though interelated funcions.

[nobagav]

"Though the mind arose out of the brain, they have evolved different though interelated funcions."

This is also well put in through use of emergent behaviors. Through constructing a sufficiently complex system, the brain has given rise to a new medium through which evolutionary and emergent interactions can take place. Thus thoughts 'evolve' on a faster time scale than biology, which 'evolves' on a faster timescale than chemistry... and so on.

[humanist7117]

Exactly! Well thought out.

[nobagav]

"Well thought out."

I can't take much credit... I'm pretty sure that Dennett covered this idea in 'Consciousness Explained'... though perhaps not in the exact same way.

[Mastikator]

It's a beautiful idea all the same :)

[Zigiwy]

Ahhh love is in the air!

[eswyatt]

The economic principle he's talking about is called a 'precommitment mechanism.'

[82abhilash]

Steve Pinker seems to indicate that people have to make irrational decisions about choosing a life-partner because rational decisions fall short. Well the fact that he can provide a rationale for his argument undercuts his own argument. For some reason Steve Pinker's 'rational agent' seems incapable of taking the time factor into consideration. If he/she does then Pinker's argument begins to fall apart. Why does Pinker think only he can consider the effects of time?

[82abhilash]

Now let us re-examine the 'rational agent' looking for a mate with long term commitment. Would he go for the best looking mate? Perhaps. But he is in for the long term right? So he may may not want the best looking mate, just a average looking one that can continue to look decent over a period of time. What use is a good looking mate if in say a year's time, everything goes to trash?

[82abhilash]

What about intelligence? Intelligence tends to last longer than looks but if the rational agent is in for a long term the considerations are once again different. Is the mate going to use their intelligence to help in the agent's well-being or is she going to use it to exploit him? So it seems that if time factor is being considered one might settle for someone who gives consistent results over a long period of time rather than great results once in a while.

[82abhilash]

Now what would happen if this agent also tends to deliver consistently (average or above average results) finds someone who delivers consistently and is taking the same factors into consideration? So their long term concerns match with one another. Now they are off the market. People in the market will never find them.

[82abhilash]

And what if one of them stumbles on an even better mate, a super mate. Who delivers consistently, and delivers great results. Will he/she leave her current choice. Maybe, but it is less likely. Firstly since you are not looking, you are unlikely to notice such a potential super mates. Second, given a choice, people tend to stick with what is known. So being rational they may decide the risk is too high. It is better to use the opportunity pressure your current mate into behaving better.

[Darwyn43]

While I agree with you that it is possible to make a rational cost-benefit analysis that's more fine-tuned, I think generally speaking, you are demonstrating a level of higher thought that not everyone has demonsrated in recent past, particularly in the evolutionary range he was talking about where this would adaptation would have evolved. Now, i think the ability to model this in consciousness will allow a perhaps new, more complex mating "system" in the near future.

[82abhilash]

You have almost said that I am a more highly evolved being. While I appreciate the flattery, I must disagree about it being the exception rather than the norm. People today are already far more sophisticated and tend to make more well-informed life choices than ever before. But that is not how perceptions are shaped by press and the mass media. Like Walter Lippmann once pointed out, 'The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.'

[Darwyn43]

I do think people today make these choices often with an impressive degree of modeling, but he's talking about evolution, most of the leg work for which was done long before our last, most thoughtful two-thousand years. Considering that cognition is modelled on patterns, and then organized with the ability to label the patterns and work them into precise arrangement, I doubt very much if pre-literate humans had the ability to do the thinking on the subject we can now - the love emotion, helped.

[Darwyn43]

Now, onto the idea that you are more evolved - in the cultural evolution sense, perhaps, but don't let your head get too big. For most people though, as long as we have a hard time considering ourselves in a scientific context, reason and meaning conflict, so people don't want to consider love in cost-benefit terms - they are more than ever wanting to believe in love at first sight and romantic love to keep a sense of meaning, although I don't think science is meaningless to begin with.

[Darwyn43]

(Oops - meant to post this below, 82abhilash) Finally, I don't see much difference in the media telling me what to think or think about - as long as they're shaping the discourse, we only end up thinking about a few things out of context and of disproportionate importance to the other things that are going un-thought about. That's why I recommend not letting the culture or the media telling you what's important to know or think about.

[82abhilash]

Totally agree. Media once used to represent hopes and aspirations of the general public and the facts that interest them. But today, they are the mouth pieces of state supported commercial enterprise. It is issues that help their agenda that saturate the mass media today. Luckily we have the internet, which evens things a bit, but only a bit.

[82abhilash]

You know love is too abstract a concept that it can get confusing. Two people may be using the same word and mean very different things. To people I love, I usually explain my love for them in terms of its positive practical implications in their lives. Some people get it and like it. Others are turned off by it. I am OK with that, I prefer people who can understand me. I mean if someone loves me so much that they are willing to die for me, it is perhaps in their own interest to hate me.

[82abhilash]

If what you mean is that pre-literate humans who pointlessly acted on ways that where beneficial to them survived to reproduce, then I agree. We on the other hand belong to the literate society. We prefer to act on reasons well understood. In fact we go one step further; we try to understand reasons for why certain things worked in the past, even if people at that time did not ask that question. I am trying to draw a distinction between reason and reason representation here.

[Darwyn43]

You suggest as though evolution stopped with Babylon. In fact, reason is in part what I call a cultural construct - the idea as it's perpetuated is that we are now a rational species, but just look at how many people have a problem with evolution. If evolution is fact, it' reasonable to accept it as a good idea. Yet as something which destroys a sense of meaning, 85% of people don't believe in a purely scientific evolution. That says to me that people aren't reasonable. .

[Darwyn43]

I would say instead, that people "represent" their world around them. Sometimes that means people have to accept fantasies over truth because the fantasy is better for their psychological well-being than the truth is. Whole religions are based on that. In that sense, there are limited spheres in which people are rational, and where rationality comes into conflict with meaning, there remains much that isn't well-understood: like evolution, psychology and culture.

[82abhilash]

The so called fantasies started out as reality accepted by general consensus. Today people cling on to them for psychological well-being, even though most know secretly that it is not true. But it is only because generations where raised on what we now know to be a fantasy and relate to each other through those fantasies. Now if there where popular secular counter parts to birth, marriage and death rituals..

[Darwyn43]

It was good talking to you, I have to run - check out that Non-Zero video, and I'll check out Daniel Dennet's.

[humanist7117]

There are. Humanists, atheists, etc. have developed them.

[82abhilash]

People are capable of rationality, but rationality is not hard-coded into us. So we are not a rational specie, rather we are a specie capable of being rational. Our natural instincts are not always shaped towards that end. After all evolution is a process without foresight. Added that to the fact that rationality is not an inherited trait, we know eugenics won't work. That leaves the most rational amongst us to sensitize the rest to the harms of irrationality and the benefits of rationality.

[Darwyn43]

I agree with most of this point 82ahbilash, but as someone who has been both an ideologue and had a difficult time with the implications of "meaning" in evolution, I think that to take rationality as the singular and most important trait of the mind discounts other psychological dimensions: control, meaning, purpose, identity, etc. These may seem like apples to oranges, but whenever rationality conflicts with any of these, merits alone will not get a person to accept your rational argument.

[82abhilash]

I know what you mean. In fact reality has and can conflict with one's sense of identity, meaning and purpose. People who come around to accepting my argument does so not necessarily because it pleases them or because it is in their interest, but more often than not they do so because everything else they tried has failed. 'When all else fails, men turn to reason.' - Abba Eban (Israeli diplomat). And it is in that common sense of man that we can eventually depend on.

[PrexicKehdaki]

I love pinker so much.. he's one of my top three intellectual heroes.. maybe the first..

[WhatIsNotSeen]

Thanks for posting this mind-opening video.

[username42936432]

Really good series of videos. Pinker is a really good speaker.. I get a sense of neatness, comfort and intellectual nourishment listening to him.