[Antimatter]

I like soft pillows

[AmericanEmpire]

The biggest flaw is that we are gonna live the highest standard of living we can even if that screws future generations and the planet.

How many people will voluntarily choose to live in poverty because its better for the planet?

Yeah, some people on this message board are powering down in preparation. But its a small percentage of the population who knows about petrocollapse and even smaller percentage of those that know doing anything meaningful about it.

[Odin]

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

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AmericanEmpire', 'T')he biggest flaw is that we are gonna live the highest standard of living we can even if that screws future generations and the planet.

How many people will voluntarily choose to live in poverty because its better for the planet?

Yeah, some people on this message board are powering down in preparation. But its a small percentage of the population who knows about petrocollapse and even smaller percentage of those that know doing anything meaningful about it.

[crapattack]

People can overcome greed and hate by stopping feeding them, stopping encouraging them, and start denying them expression. They can decide to live a different way despite their maladaptive tendancies. For how long I'm not sure, it's a project that would be good to start, hard to maintain and that is probably why religion is behavioural guide to keep us on track.

On second thought, maybe we just need to start accepting ourselves as the wonderful beautiful beings of light we are. Perhaps hate and greed are manifestations of our low esteem, and all we need to do is accept and love ourselves fully. I don't know. If we could do this than maybe we will have achevied Nirvanna on earth. Sounds wonderful, I'd like to think we're all capable of it, but in the end I don't know if we're anywhere close while people are still being hacked to bits.

[Ludi]

I think it's largely a matter of lack of information and support, really. People live the way we do (wastefully and shortsightedly) because we're largely kept from the information about other ways to live and why to live them, and our society actively encourages these destructive behaviors. I think most humans value humans quite a bit, and would like them to continue living, even if it just means their own genetic material and not other peoples'. So, with enough information and promotion of other ways to live (through example) I think it entirely possible people in our culture could develop some new cultural ideals. Could this happen quickly enough to "save" us? Pessimistically, I don't think so. On my optimistic days I think it might be possible, but those are fairly few and far between. Especially since some of these ideas are hard enough to promote even here at po.com, where most people are probably somewhat above average in terms of intelligence and/or education. In my promotion of other ways to live I've been mocked by both doomers and cornucopians!

[JustinFrankl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('crapattack', 'P')eople can overcome greed and hate by stopping feeding them, stopping encouraging them, and start denying them expression. They can decide to live a different way despite their maladaptive tendancies.

[bobbyald]

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

[JohnLudi]

You missed one: The endless capacity for denial.


(But you have to admit, nothing beats a nice soft pillow.)

[crapattack]

Justin_frankl,
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')nd I would argue that the less expression you give to hate, the more you deny it and bottle it up, the more likely it will explode on you uncontrollably.

[Cran]

ego

[KrellEnergySource]

1) The need to eat several times a day.
2) Physical comfortable only in a narrow temperature range.

These two flaws in the design require a baseline of consumption that is quite high.

[galacticsurfer]

how can we evolve to a higher state of awareness? Our weakness is our self. We have more natural strengths than a chimpanzee however. Religious practice and study helps us to advance-meditation and yoga or marital arts direct us towards a higher level of self awareness and self control(along with good nutrition). Spiritual and physical evolution then are self directed not anymore a matter of coincidental mutations.

I read an article on BBC.com a couple of weeks that said that by studying dimensions of skulls from 1350s and 1550s in comparison with modern skulls that dentists discovered that modern people had 20% bigger brains and less pronounced facial features. Could evoltion happen that fast? Is this real? Maybe that all happened due to industrialization (better nutrition and educatiion stimulating brain simultaneously).

I think our weakness is not seeing the big picture. I always thought I saw the big picture. I was thinking not just about my own life but due to reading LATOC, energy bulletin,climate ark, etc. and a good knowledge of history and science had a global view. However obviously earth is just a small planet and our individual lives are quite short. Even as above example shows, things are happening to us we are not aware of. We are not the same humans as even our great-great-grandparents were.

I have read a lot of spiritual books and even about aliens. Are there other dimensions? What happens to the soul? Who or what is God really? I think after many lives and not necessarily in a physical body on earth that an individual understands possibly a small amount of what is "really happening" out there. We are now something like bacteria with no real big picture view. We multiply when there are good conditions then reduce by bad conditions. Wisdom could stop this. This seems to be lacking under our current system as "money is the root of all evil" and contact with "the great spirit" is extremely uncommon nowadays so that people"go with the flow" and just like bacteria will be reduced automatically by reduced water, energy, nutrition.

[Doly]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('galacticsurfer', '
')I read an article on BBC.com a couple of weeks that said that by studying dimensions of skulls from 1350s and 1550s in comparison with modern skulls that dentists discovered that modern people had 20% bigger brains and less pronounced facial features. Could evoltion happen that fast? Is this real? Maybe that all happened due to industrialization (better nutrition and educatiion stimulating brain simultaneously).

[Ludi]

Except "the tragedy of the commons" only occurs in our culture and ones like it, not in other cultures, which existed on commons for thousands of years with little degradation. Native Americans lived on commons for tens of thousands of years and helped build one of the most productive ecosystems on Earth, the prairie.

[PrairieMule]

Has to be a toss up between pride or arrogance.

[Ayame]

List of some important cognitive biases:

Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.

Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.

Illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.

Overconfidence effect - the tendency to overestimate one's own abilities.

Optimism bias - the systematic tendency to be over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions.

Ingroup bias - preferential treatment people give to whom they perceive to be members of their own groups.

Just-world phenomenon - the tendency for people to believe that the world is "just" and therefore people "get what they deserve."

Projection bias - the tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions.

Self-serving bias - the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures.

And the most important bias of all that keeps all other biases running smoothly is:

Bias blind spot - the tendency not to recognise one's own cognitive biases.

[gego]

Sounds about right.

It just goes to show that really not that much brain power is necessary for survival; we made it this far and other species have an even better survival record on a lot less wattage.

The joke is the delusion we hold about how well our brains work.

[rogerhb]

How many times to you have to actually think in a day? How much of your day is spent on auto-pilot? How many times did you decide what to do based on repeating what you did previously?

Our brains are lazy guessing engines.