I think I tend to devalue the human because a) this species seems unduly impressed with itself and b) I’m a fairly typical one myself and I have the inside scoop on what we’re really like
But objectively, Homo sapiens is genuinely interesting. Better than lunar eclipses for eg.
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Kidding aside, I think a big reason “humans” rank lower on the interestingness scale than they should is that almost all of our models of “human” are adversarially constructed. One group reductively modeling another in a reductive, impoverished ways.
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Models of rich people are made by resentful middle class people
Models of the poor are made by contemptuous rich people
Models of middle-class people are made by populist demagogues
Blacks by whites, whites by blacks, Europeans and Asians by each other
A bunch of caricatures
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If a biologist modeled, say, dolphins or redwood trees with this much epistemically destructive motivated bias, they’d be fired
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Popping out of our own species head and modeling humans as (for eg) Martians might, is really hard. Desmond Morris made a brave attempt with his two 70s pop books, Naked Ape and Human Zoo. Flawed but interesting. I liked Oliver Sacks’ old books too.
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Our ability to caricature is unique among animals, and is part of what makes us uniquely human
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This is a different insight on the Buckley Baldwin debate at Oxford in 1965.
Baldwin's capacity to model Buckley was greater than vice versa.
Also a new insight on why I find Vaclav Havel so compelling.
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Models are recursive. If X models Y, and Y models X, then X models itself by modeling Y.
Tangentially, major reason humanity seeks alien life is to have someone through whom to model itself.




