The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Notes -
Had a random thought that really kinda depressed me. It was thinking about my father and extended family as a whole, and how I can naturally relate to them a lot, while in the world at large I butt heads against people all the time from the sheer fact we're just so different. I remember Westerners laughing at those little tribes in Africa or Brazil with 99%+ genetic similarity that murder fractions of their populations, and do it again yearly, and the punchline is supposed to be Hey look at these idiots killing each other when they're so similar!, and yet they never stopped to think hey perhaps those tribes lived separately because their ancestors hated one another and split off from the same tribe generations ago, like the valley vs. highland people, and this happens constantly in hunter-gatherer societies when there's conflict, and our society is a spectacular achievement in taming groups that should by all accounts loathe one another, by hiding who we are through politeness and living in Dunbar's number-adjacent circles of moderate genetic similarity.
Knowing the reason we fight is pretty much just genetics is a downer.
Isn't this backwards? The two genetically similar groups fight each other for tribal reasons. The US nukes Japan and within a decade both are cooperating to get rich as hell, improving the lives genetically distinct populations. I'm a realist when it comes to genetics, but en masse we seem to fight often because of the ideas we have.
And what are tribal reasons? Differences in behavior. A symbiotic relation is made possibly only by very advanced social mechanisms, and when you consider the advancement of tribal peoples, you should take it to heart that failure to innovate in these systems more than anything concrete is the culprit for their failure. Someone very well read in Chinese history would probably get me, since this process is much harder to see in Western society, as low population density is the historical norm and we had generous time to figure these things out.
Belief precedes action by necessity. This will boil down to a debate about determinism, but other objections to the assertion made are irrelevant.
Homogenous Japan doesn't feel compelled to attack itself - and hadn't for 250 years - but they became enthrall to attacking their nearest neighbors for a period, then they got nuked, and then they formed warm relations the formerly enemy distant genome.
My point is that John Walker Lindh chose to fight because of idiotic Iron Age beliefs. No advanced social mechanism was necessary. High IQ might help to build better systems for producing beneficial beliefs, but its not dispositive, and doesn't preclude the intrusion of bad ideas. Adopt a low IQ tribe-baby, raise him in the west, and I don't think they'd grow up with a burning desire to return home and fight the Afro-McCoy's.
Keep in mind that religion is a social mechanism -- one of multiple nigh-invisible but indispensable mechanisms to keep us from clawing out one another's throats. In Japan's case what happened is not religion, but something functionally equivalent to one, which is that the entire country sort of melded into one enormous clan, and the operative faith here is that if one performs his duty in the clan to the nth degree he's going to get all the spoils of society, which is why Japanese elders make no bones about picking up trash or being a crossing guard, and why they're so reticent and polite. Japan is also by no means homogeneous, and that word is a phantasm unless you're talking about very old villages or uncontacted tribes.
Politeness is a social mechanism too
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