There Is Only One Eternal Conflict
faster communication lets you evolve towards it faster, unless you have enough tigers
In the beginning there was only darkness. Then there was light - theories vary about who exactly was responsible. And then there was the question - for any given point in the universe, should it be in light, or in darkness? Not really a “question,” since people with big enough brains to invent the concept of questions were still a few billion years away, but more of a … possibility. Two ways the photon could go.
A few billion years later, some monkeys on earth invented language, cooperation and culture. This was all very important, because now instead of each monkey doing whatever and possibly thriving or dying, they could talk to each other and create cooperative behaviors that worked even more effectively. And what was even better, unlike nature, - which could only encode information on monkey genes - they could encode this information into words and culture and pass them immediately on to the other monkeys. Good work, monkeys.
The one remaining - well, to be fair, it predated the existence of the monkeys - question was: which information to pass on? Light and dark are still mutually exclusive - just as a place cannot be both light and dark, we also cannot pass on information representing them both as applying to the same point. Should we light the torch in the back of the cave, so everyone can see, but leaving the cave entrance in darkness? Or place the torch in the front, to ward off predators, but everyone stumbled around in the dark? Turns out, just like monkey genes force monkeys to compete to see if the next generation gets a little bit more adenine or cytosine, monkey ideas force monkeys to compete to see if tomorrow night will be light or dark.
So the monkeys actually have to decide which choice to make. Crucially, they also have to decide a few other things at the same time:
Since the choice of “light or dark” does not exist all by itself, they must choose which actual monkey’s argument for which choice to accept as best, and why that argument is best.
Since there’s only one torch, they must choose which monkey is going to take the take torch and execute the decision, and then enforce the decision on the rest of the monkeys.
Since there are going to be a lot more nights in the future, and indeed a lot of other different subjects for the monkey tribe to decide on, they need to decide if the “monkey with the right argument” tonight gets to decide in the future too - they can’t waste hours every night re-litigating the issue.
Every one of these things might go different ways depending on the persuasive skills of whichever monkeys are adopting which choice. Idea evolution starts - some monkey ideas get passed on based on traits that appeal to various monkeys, who start repeating them - and some don’t. The monkeys debate for hours and finally concoct the best (importantly: determined by which idea gets the most monkeys to think about it and repeat it) argument, rated a perfect 100 on the monkey’s newly invented idea rating system: monkey Bob will be established as torch master, he will place the torch in the back of the cave (because everyone needs to be able to see to eat their mammoth burgers), he gets to decide where it gets placed every night from now on - and gets to beat up any monkey who disagrees. Even better work, monkeys - this is real civilizational development.
Except for one tiny problem. There’s someone the monkeys forgot to ask: nature. Turns out there is a real life constraint on the quality of the arguments: if you don’t put the torch at the front of the cave, tigers come and eat all the monkeys. So Bob’s monkey tribe, and any other tribe that chose “back of cave torch”, gets wiped out and “front of cave” becomes the default cultural choice of every (currently existing) monkey tribe. But, before that evolution-by-tigers occurred, evolution-by-argument was the dominant mechanism and wholly determined which idea won. We don’t know what reasons or logic that Bob or Sally or Thag or any other monkey actually said, all we know is that, by definition, the idea that survived until the end was the fittest, strongest, most evolved idea - at least, in the context of “pulling levers in the monkey brain to get them to think about and repeat it.” The cutting edge that culls less-fit ideas in the argument phase is “do they get repeated by other monkey brains”. The cutting edge that culls ideas in the “execution phase” is… well, tigers. This is bad, monkeys, very bad - there’s no way you’ll ever have a nice civilization if you can’t determine ahead of time which ideas get you eaten by tigers and which don’t.
Thankfully, the monkeys had one last trick up their, uh, sleeves: they could use the brains that had rapidly evolved to be really good at making arguments - that is, determining which words more often transmitted to other monkey brains and thereby got passed on - and repurpose that cause-and-effect logic mental architecture to determine how crucial real life features would impact the “do we all get eaten by tigers” phase of new ideas ahead of time. So they started using that trick, noticed that there were a lot of hungry tigers outside, and also that they were afraid of fire - and as a result, decided to go with “torch out front” and managed to pro-actively arrive at that better evolutionary outcome than Bob’s hapless monkey tribe. Finally, a system that would ensure millions of future generations of both monkeys and monkey ideas.
Fast forward a few more million years and here we are: some really damn smart monkeys. We do have one tiny little problem left though: we were so smart that we created fantastic amounts of wealth and safety, which was nice, but it did insulate us almost completely from tigers. Look up the stats yourself - almost no one is eaten by tigers any more, no matter how bad their ideas are. Because tigers are now so rare and far away from most people, the arguments that rested on the concept "that’s a bad idea because tigers will eat us” hold almost no sway any more. No one has ever seen someone eaten by a tiger, and we know hundreds of people with terrible ideas who never seem to get eaten by tigers.
So we have to rely on our ideas that attempt to accurately assess tiger threats in order to persuade others that it is a risk. But now we’re back in the Ideas Only Arena: if a new idea is objectively excellent (if executed) at avoiding tigers, but is then subjectively an un-persuasive argument because no one remembers that tigers are worth avoiding, it will not survive, and other arguments - that better appeal to the criteria that the brains that we have today value - will live on. And not only will those ideas live on, but they will evolve - undeterred by any natural predator - to whatever the most refined, most appealing form of that argument is. For humans that have almost no situations where their ideas are measured and if found wanting - culled (metaphorically or physically) by unforgiving nature, that end point is whatever ideas best seem to meet our simplest, most common shared desires that (both forms of) evolution have given us: feeling good about ourselves, gaining power over others or personal gain. All roughly the same thing, from evolution’s perspective.
That was a long pre-metaphor to talk about this article about “Dale Gribble Voters” - translation: conspiracy theorists, who may or may not be Kennedys, and who may or may not have conspiracy theories ABOUT Kennedys. There’s a lot of words there (yes, very rich for me to complain) to essentially identify that the entire question is:
it's status quo bias. Those who are pro-status quo sort into one camp, and those who are anti- into the other. There's a lot of confusion because status quo doesn't have an objective meaning, but that just makes the theory more explanatory - whatever people THINK is the status quo, regardless of the reality of it, is what they support/oppose.
What it misses is the idea that this is anything new, or even, that it is anything other than the same age old debate: if a thing can be one of two things, you have to choose one. Without any objective bad-idea culling functionality (tigers), all ideas are just judged by their contribution to monkey power struggles. And of course, there’s always only two sides: them and us, light and dark. One side is perceived as having more brain-share: more of their ideas are being inherited in each generation of the debate - they’re the status quo. The other side agrees they’re winning, but they just don’t like it, and would prefer if they won instead.
Both sides discover that when they construct arguments to support their side, if they include any kind of monkey-brain-verifiable facts as justification, pesky smart monkeys on the other side will think about those justifications and often find persuasive (to monkeys) reasons that they’re wrong! Since there is no objective filter without the tigers, the justification only has to pass the monkey-brain-liking-it filter, so ideas are increasing selected in that way. This is why conspiracy theories are never about things we could easily verify, and even if they seem to be, (like say, Flat Earth) most adherents will never respond to that evidence by changing their views. Because accuracy is not the point - the point is that the Argument is Against The Status Quo. Believing it isn’t just *not* about the objective accuracy of the claims, objective claims are actively selected *against* and will be weeded out in the Tiger-Free Ideas Arena.
So we evolve all the way down (up?) to conspiracy theories. You can see all the predicted traits:
Not just wrong, but don’t actually care about being right or wrong: impossible to comprehensively debunk with monkey-logic-brains. Will often prefer purposely less-likely-to-be-true ideas if they are more outlandish, and more likely to attract interest.
Focused on giving the middle finger to whatever the status quo believes, will continue to oppose even if the status quo belief changes. Because “opposition” is the belief, not the actual beliefs.
Maximizes the amount of time simultaneously spent thinking about the topic AND also how bad the status quo people are. Theories will gravitate towards “the other guys are space lizards who torture puppies, let’s hash out which type of torture they use” over “the other guys implemented some policies that are bad for puppies.”
The implied conclusion of the theory is always “other side bad, our side good because we exposed their badness, don’t let them make more decisions, give our side the power instead.”
Will always evolve towards persuasive points that leverage innate human traits/fears/desires - as Hanania points out, lots of theories center around medicine, which even in the best case, is a situation where terrible, inexplicable, incomprehensible things can happen, doing you grievous harm.
So what are we to do? We have to go back to that last monkey trick: repurpose our monkey persuading brains into objective-idea-judging brains, and then go back to the monkey persuasion techniques to convince as many monkeys as possible to do the same. What are you waiting for? Get out there and start persuading. I think I hear tigers in the tall grass.