[rwallace]

Your conclusion is absolutely correct.

The explanation is that Homo economicus, the economic optimizing agent, is a leaky abstraction on top of a killer ape. In the modern environment, it's easy to forget that our brains did not actually evolve to deal with money, let alone the high-tech infrastructure of a modern corporation. They evolved to dominate other apes on the African savanna.

But evolution does not document its handiwork. Our genes did not give our brains an explanation of game theory and the evolutionary utility function. They gave our brains a propensity to seek power and to feel pleasure when successfully wielding that power to hurt other people. That this behavior was adaptive in the ancestral environment is a historical fact, not represented anywhere in our neurons.

So yes, it's not about productivity, it's not about profit. It is, as Orwell put it, about the end goal of a boot trampling a human face, forever. That is the default fate of humanity unless that fate is actively and continually opposed.

[bigred100]

Lately I have the vague opinion that half-baked scientific reasoning and the tendency to come up with evolutionary just so stories is a horrible detriment to modern society. Humanity has come up with a reasonable way to interpret human behavior by human standards through the humanities. I feel content to evaluate other humans by human standards rather than speculating on how he’s actually highly adapted for the African savannah. If he acts like an ape, he belongs in a zoo.

[mac01021]

What is the nature of that horrible detriment to society?

There are myriad ways that humans tend to make bad decisions in the course of modern life. Psychology and evolutionary biology currently provide the best answer to "why".

If you want to understand yourself well enough to be able to avoid having marketers and advertisers make your most important life choices for you, or want to raise your children to think critically about statements they hear even when it means overcoming confirmation bias, or want to think about how to help society escape detrimental Nash equilibria that lead catastrophic global warming, a deep and accurate understanding of human behavior seems to me to be clearly better than simply operating under the wildly simplistic assumption that people always behave rationally in the pursuit of well defined goals.

[bigred100]

Well, my personal opinion is that a better understanding of human nature will come from the traditional means (interacting with people, study of literature and history and human institutions, and, even more controversially, maybe even religion) than trying to analyze human behavior from the point of view of apes dominating each other. I don’t think anyone with any reasonably sound theory of human nature would hold the assumption of “people [behaving] rationally in pursuit of well defined goals”.

[hitekker]

Ironically, this comment comes across a denial of human nature.

I think it’s wrong to assume that evolutionary psychology and sociology are mutually exclusive.

[bigred100]

To force an analogy that I think is frankly stupid but may sort of work here, I believe that almost everyone who is an engineer or programmer or something is going to be much better served by thinking of intuitive notions of continuity, linear approximations, etc. when trying to do or apply calculus than by imagining infinite seas of power sets of the empty set and building up from ZFC axioms to dedekind cuts

[mevile]

This is my favorite all time comment on HN. Thank you for these words. I agree!

[arkitaip]

"Homo economicus, the economic optimizing agent, is a leaky abstraction on top of a killer ape."

Amazing phrase.