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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2637 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Even "The natural environment had limited resources" doesn't seem like a good enough reason for the desire to self-neglect and to avoid opportunities which are obviously good just because they're a little bit difficult.

But that is the long and short of it. Consider humans before the fairly modern era we have:

  1. Food is more scarce
  2. You have to work way harder for it (physically)

Because food was scarce, it was advantageous to survival to store up calories as fat. And because you had to exercise just to eat, everyone had to exercise. So there was no selection pressure pushing humans to develop in a direction where the body would maintain its health without exercise.

You have to work hard for food, so if you felt like staying home instead of going out to hunt or pick berries, wouldn't that be a bad thing? I think there's a point where this laziness can be said to be pathological.

I'm quite thin, but even in overweight people, laziness seems dominant. I think optimism and confidence "ought to" modulate laziness (since it would hint at abundance, or tell ones body that one is the pack leader). But personally, my appetite is low no matter my mood.

Sure, it would be a bad thing. But it's only going to be weeded out by natural selection to the extent that you're so lazy that you die off. Presumably people with genes that made them that lazy are long since dead, but everyone else got to work (because they had to) and so they passed on their traits to us.

No it's basically like predators resting a lot in between hunts, it conserves calories if you sit with your clan.

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