QC

https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1187186376371888128 …

one thing i'm really confused about: why does trauma even exist in the first place? are we just so far out of the ancestral env that trauma is almost always bad now? if not, what trauma should we hold on to??

i asked @Malcolm_Ocean a version of this question once and he responded with a hypothesis by @DavidDeutschOxf that basically we have ancestral trauma that is good at reproducing itself (in a cycles of abuse kind of way) but not necessarily good for its individual human hosts

which frankly is one of the most terrifying things i've ever heard and really put the entire history of human civilization in a new light. this has been haunting me, honestly

oh, i forgot an important component, more specifically the claim (IIRC) is that one of the main ways a collection of cultural memes stays stable over time is by traumatizing its hosts into stifling their creativity so they don't fuck with the memes

it's easy to think of trauma as a thing that is like intrinsically bad but from this standpoint the main point is that trauma keeps your responses to situations relatively fixed. so trauma-based culture cannot keep up with rapidly accelerating technological and cultural change

lemme see if i get this trauma started out as a memetic parasite it probably helped civilizational cooperation, and so didn't get selected out of existence but now that things change to fast, it's maladaptive

the main thing that feels iffy about this story is the fact that animals seem to experience trauma -- it doesn't seem to be particularly memetic