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bouzyges"...This is a striking mismatch: let’s say modern humans genetically (mostly) and physically (definitely) were around 100,000 years ago: why does it take 90,000 years to get Göbekli Tepe? This perplexing question is called the “Sapient Paradox”...
...What’s interesting is that anthropologists, from what I’ve read, seem to assume that raw social power is mostly a good thing (one wonders if they’ve ever seen social pressure applied). Mostly they focus on gossip, and if we look at the work of Robin Dunbar, and his 1996 book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, he speculates that the need to gossip was why language was invented in the first place. And gossip has (as far as I can tell), an almost universally positive valence throughout anthropology. In the literature it is portrayed as something that maintains social relationships and rids groups of free-riders and cheats, i.e., gossip is a “leveling mechanism” that prevents individuals from accruing too much power...
...A “gossip trap” is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people ... And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives — it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90 000 years. Being in the gossip trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering...
...And this explains why violating the Dunbar number forces you to invent civilization — at a certain size (possibly a lot larger than the actual Dunbar number) you simply can’t organize society using the non-ordinal natural social hierarchy of humans. Eventually, you need to create formal structures, which at first are seasonal and changeable and theatrical, and take all sorts of diverse forms, since the initial condition is just who’s popular. But then these formal systems slowly become real.
So then what is civilization? It is a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms, freeing us from the gossip trap. For what are the hallmarks of civilization? I’d venture to say: immunity to gossip".
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-gossip-trap
"...Нравилось остроумием, при разборе аргументации и следствий каждой такой гипотезы выяснялось, что из некой, вроде бы мелкой и случайной черты, следовало множество глубоких и содержательных выводов, то есть как зайцы из шляпы - из пустяка удавалось извлечь множество следствий, существенно характеризующих ту или иную культуру. Такие объяснения "экономны", их одобряет Оккам: из ничего получились вселенная, жизнь, разум и смартфон.
Несогласие вызывает то, что мне долго не удавалось сформулировать. Видимо, так: это - редукция содержания культурных явлений к формам социальной жизни. Исторический материализм..."
https://ivanov-petrov.livejournal.com/2306349.html
...What’s interesting is that anthropologists, from what I’ve read, seem to assume that raw social power is mostly a good thing (one wonders if they’ve ever seen social pressure applied). Mostly they focus on gossip, and if we look at the work of Robin Dunbar, and his 1996 book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, he speculates that the need to gossip was why language was invented in the first place. And gossip has (as far as I can tell), an almost universally positive valence throughout anthropology. In the literature it is portrayed as something that maintains social relationships and rids groups of free-riders and cheats, i.e., gossip is a “leveling mechanism” that prevents individuals from accruing too much power...
...A “gossip trap” is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people ... And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives — it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90 000 years. Being in the gossip trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering...
...And this explains why violating the Dunbar number forces you to invent civilization — at a certain size (possibly a lot larger than the actual Dunbar number) you simply can’t organize society using the non-ordinal natural social hierarchy of humans. Eventually, you need to create formal structures, which at first are seasonal and changeable and theatrical, and take all sorts of diverse forms, since the initial condition is just who’s popular. But then these formal systems slowly become real.
So then what is civilization? It is a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms, freeing us from the gossip trap. For what are the hallmarks of civilization? I’d venture to say: immunity to gossip".
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-gossip-trap
"...Нравилось остроумием, при разборе аргументации и следствий каждой такой гипотезы выяснялось, что из некой, вроде бы мелкой и случайной черты, следовало множество глубоких и содержательных выводов, то есть как зайцы из шляпы - из пустяка удавалось извлечь множество следствий, существенно характеризующих ту или иную культуру. Такие объяснения "экономны", их одобряет Оккам: из ничего получились вселенная, жизнь, разум и смартфон.
Несогласие вызывает то, что мне долго не удавалось сформулировать. Видимо, так: это - редукция содержания культурных явлений к формам социальной жизни. Исторический материализм..."
https://ivanov-petrov.livejournal.com/2306349.html