It’s how we’re actually optimised to live, I believe. Nuclear families are an anomaly. There’s friction and conflict in in communalism, but also less depression, suicide, etc. Have y’all read Junger’s Tribe
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Interesting. 🤔 Would you also say “no nature here, only politics” when making sense of how different amounts of human contact lead to different outcomes for young children?
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Infants in hunter-gatherer societies carried by mothers as much as 90% of the time (similar to other primates)
In 1970s America, skin-to-skin contact with mother was as low as 16% - might be considered child abuse by some societies.
Similar issue: isolating sleeping children
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Also curious to hear your proposals on how to use human ingenuity to solve problems of chronic stress, loneliness and depression without taking into consideration human biological needs, impulses, limits!
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(Aside: What has ever been fully satisfactory for anybody anywhere?)
My point here that there are human needs that are rooted in biology. I fail to see how this is hopeless, naive or pessimistic. I am hopeful and optimistic about our capacity for better ways of doing things...
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... but to do those things we’ll have to design FOR people, taking into account their needs. A lot of dehumanizing, oppressive design is rooted in a lack of consideration for human needs. As social creatures, we need each other. Why else is solitary confinement a form of torture
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“There is no nature here”, even if/when talking about a narrow context, is something that sets off alarm bells for me. It sounds awfully Procrustean to me. Every system has constraints. CPUs need cooling. Humans need human contact. Isolation often damages lives, communities heal
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"What we're optimized for" equally sets off naturalistic fallacy alarm bells for me. "Humans are social" != "groups of 14-15 are optimal regardless of context"
"Social" needs may be met by anything from Wilson the basketball to Kumbh mela. Human sociability is very programmable.
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re: naturalistic fallacy, fair
I wouldn’t say “14-15 = optimal regardless of context”, but generally I think it’s pretty clear that lots of people (most?) living in modern cities are lonelier and more isolated than they would prefer to be, & this is bad for health/wellbeing
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this is *exactly* backwards historically... the vast urban migrations of 19th and 20th centuries happened from small villages and towns... because people wanted to get the hell away from small community squalor (both material and psychological)
ie, their actual behavior... or a least their grandparents/great grandparents, reveals a true preference for larger, more anonymous social groups to get away from oppressive patterns of community. And most of us now *wouldn't* go back to small towns. We just pretend we want to
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This is reminding me of a separate conversation I had with a friend about sexual habits, and how some women are called sluts while others are called prudes. And another, about the frustration of being expected to talk to people about your feelings, vs having no one to talk to
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