Thursday, January 15, 2015

them's bad guys

One place in the world of electronic communications, where our evolutionarily-important tendencies toward xenophobia and organism-centricity converge, is around criminal actions by non-state and rogue-state actors. Recall that a media "spectacle focus" on someone makes them seem important (in fact gives them net-surprisal), a result in the face of which the single bit of information as to whether it's " important-good" or "important-bad" may be insignificant.

In this context we've long argued that organism-centric humor ("look at what they are doing now"), rather than organism-centric xenophobia ("they may be evil incarnate") is a much more powerful evolutionarily-available antidote to the problem. Hence sarcasm is naturally seen as a more important target than is the enemy who speaks of your power, given that the latter may be an asset rather than a liability.

The root problem is of course generally not organism-centric at all, but has a solution which lies in a multi-layer focus on community health. Where else might this insight come in handy?

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