[trabant00]

> If the local optimal point was only available in hindsight though, we couldn't have survived as a species thus far

We didn't survive as a species thanks to life guiding philosophy or in general thanks to a conscious thinking process in which we tried to predict the future. When even our greatest people tried to do that it more often resulted in unpredicted results than not.

I can make a case for believing we can though. It is a most powerful motivator for action and association. So maybe the lesson is don't have a philosophy for yourself but have one for your would be followers?

[pattrn]

> We didn't survive as a species thanks to life guiding philosophy or in general thanks to a conscious thinking process in which we tried to predict the future.

Not sure I understand you correctly here. Choosing to build shelters from the inevitable elements, storing food for the winter months, building traps to capture animals that may walk by at some point, etc... seem like crucial, conscious, predictive behaviors that increased odds of survival. Are you talking about this type of predictive decision making, or something else?

[trabant00]

The second part of what I said is simply bad. Should have stopped at philosophy.

[pattrn]

No worries! I agree in part with your original statement, which is why I was asking for more detail. As a society I think we have too much confidence in our predictions about macro events, especially ones involving human behavior. Even the simple examples I gave likely involved many unsuccessful predictions before landing on the ones that were reproducible, so in a way we were likely poor at predicting even those events (20/20 hindsight). It's certainly an interesting topic.

In a way, we do fail pretty often at predicting, but if the gold standard is every other organism's creative predictive ability (as opposed to common instinctual behavior), we're actually quite good :).

[acituan]

> We didn't survive as a species thanks to life guiding philosophy or in general thanks to a conscious thinking process in which we tried to predict the future

You couldn't be more wrong. Consciousness, inferential thinking, symbolic processing, they are all selected because they give a tremendous adaptive advantage. To claim otherwise would be at best to claim they are mere spandrels.

> I can make a case for believing we can though. It is a most powerful motivator for action and association.

Believing we have agency where we don't is actually the most powerful reason for burnout and depression. Stoicism gives a corrective suggestion; engage in a questioning process in order not to overestimate your agency, but also not to underestimate it; don't forgo the predictive power you do have. It calls you to reframe your life's problems in a way where you salience the information about the degree of agency you might or might not have. Notice how there is no ready made answers for you to consume.

> So maybe the lesson is don't have a philosophy for yourself but have one for your would be followers?

I think you're conflating philosophy with indoctrination or dogma. Philosophy literally means love of wisdom. Wisdom is not a collection of propositions or assertions, it is roughly a hyper-parameter tuning process of our heuristics. One does not become wise, because it is not a terminal position. One aspires to cultivate wisdom, i.e. to work on their hyper-parameters. Philosophy is the dedication to this process.