story of us book wait but why
They’re good now, they were always good in the past, and they’ll continue to be good in the future. The good news is, with some grit and determination, we finally figured out how to hire someo. But unlike ants, humans are more than just cells in competing giants—they’re competing individuals too. DIY your personalized love book as much as you want! Conviction. I managed to read this whole book in one sitting. Loved the posts about science, perspectives and biographies, didn't care that much for the life lessons (except for the procrastination post, that was really good). But how about the Higher Mind? The bad guys are the opposite—they are and always have been stupid, ignorant, malicious, and morally backwards. Couple that with the complexity, flexibility, and revisability of human value systems and moral codes—and you have a species whose behavioral output is the product of multiple axes of wild variability. Lulu considers. If you could brainwash, you could write the story. Join 608,367 other humans and have new posts emailed to you. Religious queen bees, free of real-world constraints, took things to an even more intense place, ramping the incentives up to unfathomable heights, wielding Snausages and electroshocks that would have made Moochie faint. The next day, she encounters the same berry bush and pauses to consider the situation. A superglue story will almost always intertwine itself with the identity of its believers. —to empires fighting wars over desired continents. Indirect knowledge only works in your favor when it’s coupled with reason. Both articles about scientific stuff, but also some articles of total nonsense in a nice mix. Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the project's quality scale. We clawed our way to the top of Emergence Tower—. Moochie never comes when the Johnsons call him, and whenever they open the front door, Moochie jumps out the door and runs away. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. This is the power of human beliefs. Promises of treats for behaving the right way, promises of electroshocks for behaving the wrong way. And as Harari, Weinstein, and others point out, what has mattered most in our past is not whether our beliefs were true but whether they drove the right behavior. The human Primitive Mind comes hardwired with this as the full range of possibilities for rewards and penalties: Optimized superglue stories though, able to author reality, innovated with extensions to the range that were so tantalizing or terrifying to our Primitive Minds that they made everything else look trivial. Everything had just gotten bigger. Now, more than ever, it is an enduring testament to the wise and courageous vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. Includes photographs and an Afterword by Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. Our biological evolution made us tribal to help glue us together. Why We Can't Wait - Afterword Summary & Analysis Martin Luther King, Jr. He urges the boy to go back to bed, but the boy denies that he’s sick until his father feels his forehead and confirms that he has a fever. I realized after I drew this that it’s weird that all the grandparents are dead. The claim that your behavior will be known by the arbiter of the incentives—even, in some cases, where no one is around to see it. In some ways, humans are just like Moochie. It’ll roll out over the next…” They yearn for praise and acceptance and detest loneliness or embarrassment. If you want people to act like ants or bees, give them a queen. LitCharts Teacher Editions. But with humans, things get more complicated. You’d pick up your child and run away, barely making the escape. It would need to make the giants who hosted it better survivors. Just as important as the size of a tribe’s outward-facing cudgel (the giant’s “military”) is the size of the one it points inward at its own members (the giant’s “police force”). Lulu is reaching out to grab one when Mimi says: Lulu pauses to assess the situation. And the way things are now, the head of the one clan is the chief of all three clans—leaving his clan with higher status and special privileges. It might be the most universal human quality. By giving Moochie a Snausage every time he obeys their commands, or by casually electrocuting him whenever he tries to run away, the Johnsons can link a certain type of behavior that his software doesn’t care about to one that it does. So the Johnsons come up with a plan. Laura Story. So if the chief is your second cousin, it may feel a bit like they’re part of a different clan from yours altogether. One example he gives is the belief that porcupines can shoot their quills. Ruler opens the part by thinking back to the hours of subjection when some oppressed African-Americans were constrained by their proprietors to buy themselves, friends and family, and others out of bondage. They’re wired by primitive software to have certain motivations, and they live in an environment that stands between them and what they want—with their behavior as the dependent variable. Menu. Jen from the Occasionally Interesting podcast reads Wait but Why's The Story of Us. This is a book that explains, defends and accuses: it explains the background leading to the civil rights demands of 1963; it defends the issues at stake in the Birmingham Crusade as well as the methods Rev. It’s a common tribal practice, because doing this: Expressing allegiance to the story is the best way of expressing allegiance to a story-based tribe. So the first prerequisite for a fit story is that it’s good at binding to its host. In the first scenario, we saw Lulu learn new information about reality from personal experience. We were still playing in the Power Games. When a story is linked to our identity, the same phenomenon is happening. With it, 100 humans can learn the lesson from only one of them getting sick. The same toolkit the Johnsons had access to in changing Lulu’s behavior has turned out to be a breathtaking evolutionary innovation. Early tribes of humans were probably similar to tribes of other apes—glued together mostly by family ties. by Newfie » Thu Oct 15, 2020 3:27 pm . $ 24.00. The story can dictate what’s true and false, virtuous and immoral, valuable and worthless, important and irrelevant, covering the full spectrum of human belief. If a critical mass of people in a tribe wants everybody in the tribe to behave a certain way, they can bully the dissenters into submission. When Kiki warns her about the berry, Lulu thinks about her experience with Kiki and recalls the day Kiki told her that one time she slid down a rainbow—Lulu later relayed the story to her mom, who told her that you can’t slide down rainbows. Or, more succinctly: Everyone can do whatever they want, if they have the power to pull it off. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Jen from the Occasionally Interesting podcast reads Wait but Why's The Story of Us. As susceptible as we are to the Primitive Mind’s tricks, we’re also each the home of a determined Higher Mind—and no matter how many people believe a superglue story, there will always be clear-headed people among them. I can't remember the last time I was so sorry that a book ended - this is thought provoking stuff with a lot of sarcasm and humour. The story needs to be all about good guys and bad guys, with a crisp, clear distinction between the two. Your support of our work is inspiring and invaluable. First there’s Moochie. As the centuries passed, super-optimized superglue stories competed to out-perfect each other in a game of rapidly growing giants. Not only do they produce an endless array of behavioral varieties—a million little evolutionary experiments—they allow for the complete behavioral mutation of any one of them within a single generation. Without the binding force of a common enemy, if you’re the alpha character in your clan, you may decide you don’t like the status quo and either go to battle with the other clan or break off into your own tribe. This bestselling full-color ebook presents 24 reasons—12 biblical and 12 medical and emotional—to think twice before risking health and happiness on sex outside of marriage. So as tribes grew in size, the benefits of strength and capability would be accompanied by the cost of increasing instability. In fact, they cannot—but those who believe they can are more likely to stay far away from porcupines and therefore less likely to end up hurt by one.2. A superglue story will usually go even further and write a cudgel right into its pages—it’s a jealous story that expressly forbids belief in other stories. I’d bet that somewhere, at some time, some tribe became convinced that suicide at the age of 16 is the only way to enter heaven, while death at any other age sends you straight to hell. But does that necessarily mean making the individual humans who believed it better at surviving? Since we started Wait But Why in 2013, we've received a bunch of requests from readers to get the blog onto their e-reader. They’re gratified by helping others and guilty when they cause pain. Since its publication in the 1960s, Why We Can’t Wait has become an indisputable classic. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes about the “imagined realities” we all believe—not only mysteries like the supernatural or the meaning of life, but seemingly concrete things like a company or a nation or the value of money. The Story of Us is a Wait But Why series that launches today. In the latter three scenarios, we saw Lulu perform an incredible magic trick. The story needs to be all about good guys and bad guys, with a crisp, clear distinction between the two. They tell Lulu that A) Santa Claus is omniscient—he knows when she’s been sleeping and he knows when she’s awake and he knows when she’s been bad or good; and B) when Santa breaks into their house next Christmas, he’ll leave presents for her if and only if she’s been good. All three of these ingredients rely heavily on delusion. —only to still act like fighting tribes of primates once we got there. But now we have to consider exactly what behavior the story is driving. The Story of Us continues. Stories like these would probably encourage discussion and debate around true vs. false or right vs. wrong, and they’d probably emphasize that people are not their beliefs and that different people can believe different things and still be good people. When you consider human history as primarily the output of a software program—and when you consider the fact that that software program, unlike our rapidly evolving civilization, hasn’t really been updated in the last 10,000 years—it suddenly makes perfect sense that the global civilizations of 1700 AD would be acting out the same basic skit, on a larger scale, as the humans of the ancient past. The Story of US - Wait But Why. Just like a giant’s outward-facing cudgel, the internal cudgel is all about numbers. Fogginess on its own is just confusion, disarray, forgetfulness. Moochie the good boy is still being just as selfish as Moochie the bad boy. Reread it this year. Quick View Jack and Lucy Tee. All We Can Do is Wait. But through it all—through the Ice Age and the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, through the rise and fall of empires, through the wars and plagues and genocides, underneath miles and miles of thick mental fog, the Higher Mind remained. But the same superpower makes us vulnerable. To help us answer that question, let’s bring in the Johnsons. Now consider ten human tribes, living, like the ten wolf packs, in a common natural environment. When you remember that the Primitive Mind cares about genetic immortality—not people—you’re reminded why it also shouldn’t be surprising that a species running on that software could develop an advanced civilization and find that life still sucks for most people. They crave self-esteem and want to avoid shame. No, I am not falling into some mystical religious explanation where I believe that the Bible has eternally existed in heaven or in the mind of God (though many Christians actually believe this), or that the Bible fell out of the sky on stone tablets or golden plates (like some other religions believe about their Scriptures).No, all I am saying is that the Bible — as you find it on your shelf, or desk, or bedside stand, or wherever — was never written… Lo mejor es la forma exhaustiva y muy particular de analizarlos, además de su sentido del humor. If you want a dog to change their mind about something, show them hard, concrete evidence. The first articles are more funny and entertaining compared with the last ones. They get a bag of Snausages, and every time Moochie comes when they call him, they give him a treat. This ebook is a collection of posts from my new favorite blog, "Wait But Why" written by Tim Urban. imaginations and questionable reasoning, and with an instinct, “Two incompatible sacred values in American universities”. Keep asking yourself I wonder ‘Why’. A human tribe is held together by weaker glue than an ant colony, and the bigger the tribe, the harder it is for that glue to hold up. First, their primal motivations are super complex. Become a Premium Member. I’m sure some ancient stories were chill about things, upholding the value of tolerance of a variety of ideas and beliefs. by Richard Lawson. I need more. Waiting is a part of life and one of God’s tools for developing people. Because of the Higher Mind, it’s hard for people to truly hate a real human. You’d be on a trek through the woods on a Monday and come across a wolf pack, and you’d be scared for a minute, but then you’d realize that this one believed it was evil to be violent. A story also needs to preserve at least a reasonable degree of self-preservation instinct in its hosts. Another parasitic story would be one that absolutely forbade any use of violence. The unnamed narrator of this story, the father of a nine-year-old boy nicknamed Schatz, notices one morning that his son seems ill. That’s why the final superglue ingredient is the critical cancer-fighting tool. If we had a brain-machine interface, we might be able to change his nature—rewiring Moochie’s software so that dopamine hits are triggered by, say, the high arts instead of by gorging on food. The ability to admit a Trojan horse superglue story into our beliefs, via a fogged-out consciousness, was a strong survival trait—so strong that every person on Earth today is susceptible to it. A bunny’s power comes in the form of sensitive ears, quick reflexes, and running (bouncing?) If you happened to draw a jack of hearts and be born the child of a noble in one of the dictator’s deemed upper castes, you might live a safe and enjoyable life. If you could write the story, you could write reality. That today’s priests are celibate is a testament to the power of stories to override even the most fundamental tenets of our software.3 But that doesn’t make the story parasitic for the future of Catholicism, because only a few Catholic men are priests. Optimized religious stories would depict the killing of non-believers as the highest service to god and dying in the act an instant ticket to heaven. The delusion that your enemies aren’t actually full three-dimensional people with full life stories like your own is the prime source of giant aggression. Sales of legendary actress Cicely Tyson’s memoir, released two days before her death last week, have soared, with supply hardly keeping up with demand. A story, for our purposes, is the complete array of a human’s beliefs—their beliefs around values and morality, their beliefs about their environment and the broader world they live in, their beliefs about what happened in the past and what will happen in the future, their beliefs about the meaning of life and death. Published February 2018. He’s stuck as a second-class citizen in the human head, that’s where. In scenario A, Lulu is alone when she encounters the berry bush. If you’re new to the series, visit the series home page for a full table of contents. They’re terrified of their own mortality. The Bible is full of stories of people having to wait on God, such as Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joseph, David, Daniel, Jesus, Paul and countless others. If you have to do some seemingly awful things in order to win a ticket to eternal heaven, you do them without a second thought. That’s why today, people are so willing to make huge sacrifices for family members. Wait But Why is part of WikiProject Transhumanism, which aims to organize, expand, clean up, and guide Transhumanism related articles on Wikipedia. Could that additional flexibility find a way to create a human beehive? On Tuesday, you’d run into a new pack whose members were convinced that human children cast spells that caused wolf packs to starve, and that the only way to ensure wolf sustenance was to destroy them. But according to Mimi’s depiction of reality, the optimal behavior would be to pass the berry up. Lulu’s perception of reality, based on her own life experience, would yield berry-eating behavior here. When enough people think saying Y means you’re not a member of the tribe, saying Y actually gets you excommunicated. The enjoyment of berries ranks way high up in Lulu’s values hierarchy, so she eats one. Some would stoke fear with stories of imminent danger or invoke rage with stories about injustice in order to gather an army of supporters. Delusion isn’t the same as fogginess. We believe there's nothing better than reading books, so whether you're looking for new young adult releases, new fantasy releases, new romance novels, or any other book genre coming … Human history is a long progression of human behavior, and human behavior is largely driven by human beliefs. So that starts things off with a few necessary characteristics of a viable story virus: Simplicity. Wait! An effective superglue story goes further than painting the enemy as bad, dangerous people—it dehumanizes them. Con la excepción de algunas de las primeras entradas, todos los temas que toca son muy interesantes. Even if you did draw a decent card, you were always one heart attack or assassination of the leader away from a new queen bee taking control of the giant and reshuffling the deck. So Moochie’s behavior is just a reflection of his particular motivations and the environment around him. We were still going through the same shit we were back in the ancient days—still stuck in the same old zero-sum power struggle the bunny and the bear were dealing with at the beginning of Chapter 1. No, because as we’ve discussed, the ancient human life form wasn’t just the human—it was also the human giant. Haldane puts it: “I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.”, With that in mind, let’s imagine a big extended family made up of 27 immediate families—the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of a single couple—living together as an ancient tribe.1. basically collection of articles from.the blog. She decides “not being nauseous” > “enjoying berries,” so she doesn’t eat any. With a text of few words, frequent repetitions, and delicate illustrations with which children will quickly identify, the book follows a young child's discovery of other creatures. In a geological blink, a million animals scattered throughout the world’s forests became a billion people living in vast civilizations, wresting themselves from the animal world and conquering the food chain in a way no other animal had ever done. Rather than try to convince Moochie to behave differently, the Johnsons just let his existing drive for dog treats do the work by linking obedience to primal gratification. The “critical bully mass” phenomenon can turn a made-up story that some people live in into the actual environment that everyone lives in. Although this is "just" a compilation of blog posts, I was happy to see and read them in one place. My story about the nightmare of doing a TED Talk, My story about going to Iraq, along with a not that brief history of the country, The time I frightened myself by writing about the largest number in math. And in the Power Games, a bigger cudgel is the means to every important end: safety, resources, mates, peace of mind. Wait But Why (@waitbutwhy) added a photo to their Instagram account: “0 days. If you want to change someone’s behavior, easier than altering their motivation or changing their actual environment is altering their perception of reality. If you could brainwash, you could play god. If there’s a common theme to all of human history, all over the globe, it’s probably humans bullying other humans. Raccolta dei migliori articoli dell'omonimo blog di Tim Urban. It can’t exist on its own—it requires a host. Complicated subjects written in layman's terms, with awesome stick-man diagrams for reference. Been such a fan of Tim Urban's articles and was so excited to binge-read all his posts in one go. For the chief and his family, this is what the tribe feels like: Pretty nice setup. Genes also have us selfishly caring about the well-being of siblings and nieces and nephews because a very similar version of themselves lives in them—but we don’t care quite as much about these people as we do about our children. They are more like constants than variables, making behavior pretty much a constant too.