[Falconoffury]

Greatest Flaw in Human Nature? It is a simple question, but the number of different answers can be vast.

[cornholio]

I voted for inability to see the big picture, but I would have liked to choose "The illusion that humans are above nature, have a special destiny ... and are the center of the universe"

[legit]

There is no such thing as human nature, it's all due to environment.

[Phil]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('legit', 'T')here is no such thing as human nature, it's all due to environment.

[gg3]

Biggest flaw in human nature:

The Instinct for Increase.

Simply put, this is the drive for MORE: MORE reproduction and MORE consumption. All other factors equal, humans are hardwired for MORE. And, like a malfunctioning thermostat that adds heat whenever it detects heat, it operates on positive feedback: MORE leads to EVEN MORE.

Strictly speaking this is not an "instinct," in the sense of a hardwired set of complex behaviors. It's rather more like a "reflex" in the sense of an automatic response that operates outside of conscious control. It has two components; actually these are independent of each other but both operate on positive feedback:

One is the sex drive. The inherent desire to copulate, or more specifically, to obtain the neurophysiological reward sensations of orgasm, regardless of reproductive consequences. In males it tends more toward the "reflex" end of the spectrum, since male orgasm is almost entirely an affair of the spinal nerves. In females it tends more toward the "instinct" end of the spectrum, since female orgasm is apparently more dependent on emotional functions controlled by the brain rather than only the spinal nerves.

The other component is the attraction to novelty. In common with chimpanzees, humans inherently attract to objects that are shiny or sparkly, and new. Novelty is compelling, i.e. the sensation of detecting a new object in the environment will immediately produce an orienting response regardless of conscious intent. If the new object is associated with any other pleasurable sensation, humans will seek to have it and experience the sensations it produces. You can see this behavior in infants as soon as they are old enough to focus their eyes and have muscular control of their hands: put a new object in the crib, preferably something brightly colored, and an infant will focus his/her eyes on it and reach out for it. You can also observe it among humans of all ages in settings such as shopping malls, and this is literally true, not an ironic or joking remark.

All other factors equal, these behaviors are advantageous to the individual: respectively they lead to reproductive success and to material gratification.

However, as with so much else, what is good for the isolated individual can become terribly bad in-aggregate for the entire human species.

Thus we have overpopulation, supported and rationalized by cultural factors that give males the right of unlimited copulation with females (more evident in certain cultures than in others, e.g. places where marital rape is not recognized in law, where women "cannot say No").

Thus we also have overconsumption, supported and rationalized by cultural factors that elevate material comfort to the status of religion (also more evident in certain cultures than others).

100% of what we discuss when we talk about sustainability, from peak oil to climate change to resource wars, is related to the need to overcome the Instinct for Increase. That is to say, our probability of maintaining long-term civilized societies that are free and secure, depends 100% upon limiting the behavioral excesses driven by the Instinct for Increase.

---

After the Instinct for Increase, the next most significant flaw in human nature is the inability to comprehend exponential functions. This however can be overcome much more readily by education. Unlike copulation and consumption, humans do not have a hardwired desire for exponentials as such. The ability to bring negative feedback to bear upon exponential functions in the abstract, is hardly as emotionally loaded as issues such as contraception and cutting back on consumption. By becoming aware of the danger of exponentials, humans may be able to develop psychological negative-feedback (limiting) functions that can affect their behavior.

---

However this in turn implicates the third most dangrous flaw in human nature, the inability to plan long-term. The span of living historic memory is three generations, or about 90 years, i.e. from the child to the grandparents. Beyond that, history becomes an abstraction whose details are largely forgotten (aside from written or oral records) and whose lessons are forgotten even more easily. But history or collective memory operates retrospectively rather than prospectively; it looks back rather than forward. "Learning from history" is the ability to flip the timeline in such a way as to recognize the relationship between what has come before and what may yet come.

As an example, consider all forms of written fiction in Western cultures. The verb tense used is past-tense: "It was a dark and stormy night. The old man sat before the fireplace and drank a cup of tea. Suddenly there was a knock at the door..."

The percentage of novels written in the future tense is vanishingly small. "It will be a dark and stormy night. The old man will sit before the fireplace, and will drink a cup of tea. There will suddenly be a knock at the door..." As you see, this doesn't work very well as a writing style.

This issue might also be overcome by education, since again there is not an inherent emotionally-reinforced drive associated with inability to anticipate. In fact it could be taught. Imagine for a moment, classes from elementary school to high school, in which children are taught to predict outcomes of actions. One way to do this might be to use television programs or movies, where the action can be stopped and kids can be asked what's going to happen next, since the entire plot resolves during the timespan of a classroom session. Grades would be earned not just for accuracy of prediction, but for the reasoning involved: being able to explain why one predicted a given outcome. In later years in highschool the focus would turn more toward current events and forecasting: what's going to be the outcome of this trial, or that election, or that change in a corporation's management, or whatever.

The goal here is to train kids not only to predict with increased accuracy, but to be able to specify the reasons for their predictions. Even an emotional "reason" is a viable explanation if it can be made explcitly, for example, "Candidate Q will win the election; I feel good listening to him speak and I believe most voters will feel that way also and vote accordingly."

For the sake of pure accuracy, intuition (defined as massively parallel cognitive processing that occurs simultaneously rather than sequentially) can be more accurate than "logical" predictions whose contents can be reasoned out. An intuitive conclusion occurs so rapidly that it is less likely than a reasoned conclusion to be subject to conscious interference from internalized preferences, i.e. "shoulds." (For this reason, some major corporations successfully employ "intuitives" in their planning departments, to anticipate cultural trends such as fashion and style, consumer preferences, political developments relevant to the industry or the company, and so on.)

Intuition could be taught as a skill, distinct from the skill of logically reasoning out a forecast. Expose kids to a bunch of input data (e.g. news or the opening scenes of a fictional TV program or movie) and ask them to make rapid forecasts about some outcome or another, and reward an increase in accuracy.

Once we can train people to look forward and make reasonable forecasts, with reasonable accuracy, it becomes relatively straightforward to extend this to long-term thinking.

---

Can we fix this stuff in time to save us from die-off..? I'm not optimistic about that. But in the midst of the likely collapse of the present political/economic arrangements, some of these fatal flaws in human nature will have to resolve themselves by natural selection in order to preserve the core values and capabilities of civilized societies: liberty and justice, protection from random violence, and expansion of knowledge.

[jackal42]

Greed

[crapattack]

IMO,

1. Of course it is GREED.

While the instinct to aquire beyond immediate use is adaptive in an environment of scarcity, in one of abundance this same instinct is maladaptive, leading to useless competition and accelerated resource consumption.

2. HATE.

Hate may be an adaptive emotional response mechanism to constant resource competion leading to enhanced survival outcomes and social opportunity, but is maladaptive in peace and times of abundance.

[Jack]

Humans are detrivores.

From that, all else follows.

[smallpoxgirl]

I think that to try and pigeon hole human nature is pretty short sighted. Humans are incredibly complex creatures. We are capable of building for ourselves all kinds of different natures. The Dali Lama and Mother Teressa are just as much expressions of human nature as Charles Manson and George Bush are.

It is the responsibility of society to take the collection of raw personality traits and craft them in ways that bring about the greatest good for everyone. What gets described as flaws of human nature, I would argue, stem almost entirely from failure of society to perform this function. In fact, our society functions in exactly the opposite direction. All politicians are disreputable self-serving liars. We all know this. Is it any wonder then, with this sort of leadership that we have crafted a society of disreputable, dishonest, self-serving people? To then attribute our failures to "human nature" is intellectual laziness. The truth is that human nature appears as it does to us because our society honors and cultivates its worst possible expression.

[cornholio]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('smallpoxgirl', '.').. We are capable of building for ourselves all kinds of different natures. The Dali Lama and Mother Teressa are just as much expressions of human nature as Charles Manson and George Bush are.

[coyote]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Jack', 'H')umans are detrivores.

From that, all else follows.

[Itch]

What smallpoxgirl said. This "human nature is flawed, because" bullshit is just another cultural construct that is meant to justify your misery. All of these flaws that everyone is jumping on are manifestations of a rotten culture that has fucked everything up.

The Gobbler-Shitter culture, an obvious suicide cult, has dominated most of the world, so it seems that the suffering it brings -- the need for more, control of everything, simplification, not understanding the rate of breeding habits, and so on -- is what all people do.

In reality, due to this culture's emphasis on overbreeding and exterminating, it churned out hordes of frail, bucktoothed losers that would go out and kill and enslave most of the people who didn't have the same cultural values. Those cultures who didn't mindlessly breed, and therefore didn't have to worry about the exponential function, but still managed to have plenty of orgasms without shooting out babies; didn't care about shiny objects, and all other obvious flaws exclusive to popular culture, were overwhelmed and killed, leaving the Gobbler-Shitter culture the dominant one, which any observant person can see today.

This is a huge failure on all scales, both evolutionary and ecologically. This might be considered successful if you think that exterminating everything in order to continue fucking up, but that's just silly...and creepy. Evolution favors variety, and most land mass normally ends up forested. Desertification from simplifying, defining, and controlling the food supply while making weapons to exterminate and enslave is not a default, either.

Other cultures that existed before being consumed by the Gobbler-Shitters had quite a few methods of population control. They would send some of the most obnoxious, least productive, or whatever you want to call them, on suicide journeys. The societies on Tikopia island would send out people in boats in some kind of overglorified mission of some kind.

Some cultural ideas would restrict sexual urges for religious reasons. There were plenty of "hunting accidents" that occured, where the assholes who are now running everything were usually killed. And there was sometimes tribal war, which would often resemble a game of hide and seek or capture the flag, except people sometimes get killed or seriously injured. I'll trade modern war for that any time. These are a few methods for population control.

I think the cultural idea for more came with the style of agriculture that is popular today. The whole point of it is to plant, pray that famine doesn't occur from bad weather, harvest, store, and sell. Having more food means more money and control. It also means that standing armies will be better equiped to go out and exterminate.

For horticultural, hunter, and horticulural and hunter hybrids, the point of their food production was to feed their respective tribes. They were at a population level where they intimately knew evey member, so they weren't inclined to send their buddies out to wars; losing a tribe member would be extremely demoralizing.

The lesson is to learn how to differentiate humans and cultures. This thread gets an "F" for that, but remember that for future reference. I don't know how people like Ludi can put up with this shit.

[cornholio]

Umm... thanks for sharing your wisdom and "correcting" us .

[bobbyald]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hat is the greatest flaw in human nature?

[smallpoxgirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cornholio', 'r')eason- people are hardwired to enjoy pleasure, to enjoy rest, and to want to satisfy their senses (exotic food, housing and entertainment). Likewise competition for the best spouse is intertwined with status and resource hoarding, as surrogate markers for desirability. Luxury has appeals that moderation and virtue can't compete with... Nature (scarcity, disease, death) not reason and culture, limit human population and consumption as far as I can see...

[threadbear]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Phil', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('legit', 'T')here is no such thing as human nature, it's all due to environment.

[Phil]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('threadbear', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Phil', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('legit', 'T')here is no such thing as human nature, it's all due to environment.

[JustinFrankl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('threadbear', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Phil', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('legit', 'T')here is no such thing as human nature, it's all due to environment.

[Ludi]

I don't see "flaws" in human nature, any more than I see "flaws" in bear nature or rattlesnake nature. We are what we are. And certainly a lot of people confuse cultural traits with "human nature." That's pretty rampant on this site, and one gets tired of pointing it out.

[crapattack]

This is the same old "nature vs nurture" argument we learned in university replayed, and the scientific community has largely moved on from this. Were a combo of both nature and nurture.

We have traits that are "flaws" in one context (maladaptive responses) and "features" in others (adaptive responses). When it comes to human nature, context is everything.