Dave, this is the article that I referred to in my post from the other thread:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/201206/is-our-survival-instinct-failing-us

Other stuff I found interesting:
https://thoughtcatalog.com/mathias-ostlund/2015/03/10-ways-evolution-completely-screwed-you-over/

https://hbr.org/1998/07/how-hardwired-is-human-behavior (this is a long read)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201104/why-liberals-and-conservatives-are-both-wrong-about

Also been reading a bit about k/R theory and how resource-scarce vs resource-plentiful environments suit one another (and how this may favour conservative vs liberal behaviour). Not sure how well it's established but definitely an interesting angle to take on the subject.

Comment deleted by Site Moderator

Comment deleted by Site Moderator

Fans of Maidenhead United are queuing up to take a crack at this!

Society is fecked

Religion creates wars

Oh and I have no ethics ,ok>

Comment deleted by Site Moderator

All species? what about rabbits

Is this a specialist subject for Maidenhead fans?
-----------------
I thought if I'm going to mislabel an article then what place better to put it than the Man Utd, sorry Maidenhead, board

Rabbits are basically liberals and avoid wars like the plague

Comment deleted by Site Moderator

Rabbits have turf wars? lol I thought they all lived together and just banged all day

comment by Nickasaurus (U9257)
posted 11 minutes ago
All species? what about rabbits
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Have you not seen Watership Down?

comment by HenrysCat (U3608)
posted 5 minutes ago
comment by Nickasaurus (U9257)
posted 11 minutes ago
All species? what about rabbits
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Have you not seen Watership Down?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Tis a well regarded documentary indeed that

Have you ever seen Bugs in a room with another rabbit?

Apart from a female counterpart

comment by Firmino Can Karius {Proud owner of the 5 000 0... (U2720)
posted 1 minute ago
Have you ever seen Bugs in a room with another rabbit?

Apart from a female counterpart
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Roger Rabbit even went for a human wife

comment by Blarmy (U14547)
posted 9 minutes ago
comment by HenrysCat (U3608)
posted 5 minutes ago
comment by Nickasaurus (U9257)
posted 11 minutes ago
All species? what about rabbits
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Have you not seen Watership Down?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Tis a well regarded documentary indeed that
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Exactly. The rabbits say it in their own voices, ffs. That's actual testimony - there's none more convincing evidence than that, surely.

Seagulls are tw@s though.

Kafflicks breed like rabbits, and prods like giant pandas😉

Aul Ulster saying.

Mr reboot.

Love the new thread concept.

I will contribute, once I google the bigger words meanings😁

Here is one.

Huge crowds in Barcelona, one week for Catalan independence, then next week unionist Spanish Catalans on the same Barca streets, highlighting dual identity.

One teenage girl on TV wants independence for the Catalan region, and another teenage girl on camera refers to her identity as Spanish And Catalan.....how did they pick sides and why?

Collective human behaviour among peers, or family, or social media info.

Same background, class etc, but different identity choices.

Discuss😁

comment by thebluebellsareblue (U9292)
posted 9 minutes ago
Mr reboot.

Love the new thread concept.

I will contribute, once I google the bigger words meanings😁
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sorry, Mr renoog

Hey tbab

Difficult to say but in general I'd argue that our views and decisions are guided by 3 separate forces:

1) external culture/ideology
2) internal instinct
3) internal decision-making i.e. intelligence

The degree to which each has an influence varies person-to-person. So I think someone of low intelligence is more likely to follow the crowd, or their instinct. And someone of higher intelligence more likely to rise above it. But you have extreme cases where some people's ideology will over-ride their natural instinct e.g. a suicide bomber/kamikaze pilot's ideology can convince them that killing themselves is the best course of action to take, even though their natural survival instinct tells them to do everything in their power to stay alive.

And each of those 3 factors can influence the others. A culture can often develop in the mould of our biological instincts. And what some people like to think of as an independent intelligent decision, is sometimes actually sub-consciously influenced by instinct or culture.

I often see the latter in so-called educated people, especially those who've been through higher education. One example I'd give (and this is just personal opinion which I haven't been able to establish properly) is that a lot of higher-educated, left-leaning people naturally have high levels of empathy towards people outside their 'tribe', which is why we see concern from straight white males for the plight of refugees, women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities etc. But because those people naturally are geared towards empathy, then they can under-estimate the threat posed by people who don't share their empathy. So left-leaning people will more often support things like open borders as they work on the assumption that people coming in from outside think like they do. But we know from experience that being too welcoming attracts people who want to abuse our generosity (benefit cheats and violent criminals for example).

Or how angry feminist SJWs think that their views on protecting social minorities are guided by their higher intelligence but actually completely overlook the role that their internal maternal instincts play (which causes them to molly-coddle their 'child' i.e. the minorities, and viciously attack the 'threat' i.e. the white male patriarchy).

I think a lot of higher IQ, academic types fall for the hype of their own intelligence and fail to see how their decisions are clouded by their own, unique biases.

^I say that with full knowledge of the irony that if I'm to be classed as a higher IQ, academic type, then all of what I've written above could have been clouded by my own, unique biases

I say that with full knowledge of the irony that if I'm to be classed as a higher IQ, academic type, then all of what I've written above could have been clouded by my own, unique biases
========================================================
So are you a higher IQ, academic type?
If you are, it's highly unlikely that it's made you more biased. The premise of Daniel Kahneman's book (Thinking Fast, and Slow) is that everybody's decisions are clouded by bias...regardless of their IQ.
It is an evolutionary trait in everybody.

People who lose the emotional function of their brains (by damaging the amygdala) also lose the ability to make decisions, because in the final analysis, all decisions are emotional.

There are so many assumptions in your post I lost count, and assumptions, (as opposed to facts), are more likely to come from the emotional side of the street.

How do you know, for example, that anybody is "working on the assumption that people coming in from outside will think like they do"? How do you even know that the driving motivation is mainly empathy?

If anything, it's more likely to be sympathy, but there are many business-leaders, for example, who support immigration because it expands the economy, and one of Merkel's motivations was that Germany's population is declining, which will have an effect on economic growth, and on their ability to pay the pensions of the ageing population.

"Academic types" are in fact more likely to be aware of their biases, because they are more likely to have read about it. But here's the thing, even when you are aware of it, and of why your brain acts that way, you still cannot overcome it.

Only a belief in facts and empirical evidence can overcome it, but we choose to question facts all the time, because we don't necessarily want to believe what they are telling us, and we prefer to believe those facts that support our instincts.

Or, in Donald Trump's case, not to bother with facts at all.

Wessie,

According to my own blunt definition of it being someone who has gone through higher education, yes.

I didn't say academia/education makes one more biased, I said it can give a false sense of belief in the objectiveness of one's own beliefs.

The thing is higher education isn't really the issue here - it's intelligence. Higher education is an environment which possesses a certain culture, but it doesn't make people more intelligent so much as more intelligent people choose to pursue higher education. The traits that I associate with a higher education environment are actually traits that are biologically associated with intelligence. Higher education/academia cultures merely reflect these biological associations.

See this article for this instance:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224132655.htm

"In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals."

Empathy is perhaps the wrong word. I mean more the ability to feel concern for people outside of your tribe, however you want to define that.

There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that intelligence is actually a 'trait' in itself that has associations with other traits such as open-ness, anxiety, nocturnal behaviour etc. Hence why I say that high IQ people have their own unique biases which that they need to be aware of.

I am in complete agreement that the more you read and study, the more likely you are to be aware of your own biases. I never said anything about the effect of higher education on bias. I am merely pointing out that because higher education culture is moulded after higher IQ personality traits, then it's created blind spots within those cultures about their own biases. Those involved in research and 'higher higher' education are probably much more likely to be aware of these, but from my experience a vast proportion of the regular student base at university was blissfully unaware of the extent of their own biases, because of the fundamentally-flawed belief that their intelligence allowed them to break free of bias.

See this paper for e.g.:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2952510

It's very easy for e.g. to see the flaws in conservatism when you're naturally an open-minded person, is it so easy to see the flaws in open-ness when you're an open-minded person though? Sounds like a paradox but I'd be interested in your thoughts.