HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Question like those is why researchers goes to animal observations. Easier to make conclusions without introducing too much cultural assumptions.

In the jungle people find a dead young female baboon. She is apparently dead from starvation, so we hastily conclude it was natural causes. The researcher however who observed the flock gives a different explanation. The young female was healthy just a few weeks ago, but after joining the flock she got continuously bitten and scratched by other females whenever she went to eat or tried to sleep. After weeks of constant stress, lack of sleep and food she died.

In contrast we might find a dead young male baboon clearly beaten to death. They joined the same flock recently and after a large fight over dominance the young male acquired injuries and died. Which of the two cases displayed more capacity for violence, brutality or aggressiveness? Is a brawl better or worse than cold calculated murder?

> why did we come to have a culture that fears men

Very good question. One likely answer is that we have a culture that reward men who commit violence in the right context. Why do men get rewarded for violence? There are many contradicting theories and books on that subject. Are humans inherently violent or peaceful? Is society holding back the savage beast or is cooperation the human default behavior? A lot of questions, a lot of research, a lot of theories.

If you want to dig down into those question there are good books and other sources on it. The stanford Human Behavioral Biology lecture serie on youtube is a good start (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...). The same researcher has also a book called Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, which focus a fair bit on aggression and violence. There is War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, which also has a counter-argument book which name is currently evading me.

⬐ Bakary

I must confess, I don't have a definite answer to your questions. Thank you for the recommendations, I enjoy this topic very much and have heard good things about this researcher so I will check those out.

In books and lectures available on YouTube, Robert Sapolsky really goes in to nature, nurture, and the effects of both which clearly rejects "it doesn't matter how you raise your kids" but also underlines that there are also strong genetic factors that you have little opportunity to change. Your future is not written in your genetics, nor are you a blank slate, a lump of clay free to mold into anything.

Genetics gives you a range of possibilities, experience gives you a path through them.

There is an understandable but wrong motivation to free people from the guilt of any of their actions by saying things like "it doesn't matter". Yes, we do need to reject the extreme helicopter-parent attempt to achieve perfection, it's toxic and not all that helpful. Doing it by claiming nothing matters at all is wrong.

Sapolsky has several good series of lectures on The Great Courses, an into human behavior Stanford course on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA , and a few books including Behave. (there is a lot of overlap between all of these, you'll get bored hearing the same thing if you consume multiples)

Many studies show chemical markers of these things, it's not just psychological behavioral studies (which are often quite dubious) but easily measurable outcomes. If you're thinking quite narrowly, your point seems reasonable, it's probably below significance to say your neighbor with the bigger house and nicer car is "healthier", but this is a lot different than them vs the family that sometimes skips meals because they can't afford to put food on the table with the knowledge that a lost job will mean homelessness.

Good arguments are resources by Robert Sapolsky https://www.amazon.com/Stress-and-Your-Body-audiobook/dp/B00... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C... or any of the books he has published (many have significantly overlapping content)

The Queen of Trees doco is great, I wrote about and linked to it recently here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792509

Scott Noble makes truly excellent and important political documentaries, all linked to free from his site https://metanoia-films.org/

Satyamev Jayate is an amazing documentary/talk show series with Indian star Aamir Khan, each episode looking at an important and troubling social issue. Almost every episode is now available with english subtitles on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=satyamev+jayate...

John Berger's Ways of Seeing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utEoRdSL1jo

Sapolsky's Biology of Human Behavior course. 11+ million views! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...

If you like this, do yourself a favor and go watch the entire Human Behavioral Biology course from Standford, it's also taught by Sapolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

What I think makes the course so good is that it gives you a brief but solid introduction to many different fields:

    - Behavioral Evolution
    - Molecular Genetics
    - Behavioral Genetics
    - Ethology
    - Neuroscience
    - Neurology and Endocrinology

And then combines all of those to try to make sense of human behavior, by looking at animal and human behavior from all these different lenses.

⬐ ReDeiPirati

Cannot recommend this more! Seriously. It has been an eye opener to me. For people who loves books over video, he wrote those books where he covers the same topics:

- Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

- Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping

⬐ mikevm

Have you read the books as well? I was wondering whether it's worth listening to the lectures or reading the book.

⬐ ReDeiPirati

I read "Behave" and IIRC it covers around 80-90% of the lectures, moreover on the book you will find a couple of appendixes to refresh the reader on the basics of Biology and Neurology to better understand certain sections. I think that the lectures are a bit more entertaining than the book, but I found it more easy to follow than the lessons.

⬐ junon

Seconded. I've only watched the first five or so, but they are absolutely worth it. They changed a lot about how I think through certain situations and have proven their worth many times.

The man is also just an incredible lecturer, too.

⬐ arketyp

Great lectures. He even manages to cover chaos theory. Philosophy students should look into this series for some biology orientation, in my humble opinion.

⬐ xorfish

Especially if they want to discuss Free Will.

⬐ seg_lol

The lectures are good, the LECTURER is galaxy class. Everyone regardless of discipline should watch the lectures for their metacognitive qualities alone.

Sapolsky could literally give a lecture on shit and I'd be at the bus stop, someone would mention just a sliver of a lead and I'd intergect with, "I just saw this amazing lecture on shit by Sapolsky ..." to a complete stranger.

His lectures are that good. He is science jesus.

⬐ belorn

I often bring up his lecture series as an shining example of how to explain scientific theories with a critical qualifier that almost always is otherwise missing.

He first explains a concept with logically and narrative consistency in order to explain why something occur. Then at the end he goes and demonstrate all the wholes in the theory and through that shine a light at where the narrative fails. It is only after going through multiple different competing theories that the edges start to get defined.

This blog post is low quality marketing/SEO copy and paste. But the topic itself is very interesting. High-quality lecture series around the same topic (Human Behavioral Biology)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

⬐ HKH2

I don't think it's common knowledge, so I guess such a format is good for mass education.

There are many lectures and conference talks from university professors who are at the top of their field on YouTube. You might be able to find better content than what's available in your local university class.

For example, Robert Sapolsky's lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology at Stanford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...

Stanford and MIT both have lots of lectures on YouTube.

⬐ bluGill

Oh I know, but there are also a lot of people making claims to expertise they don't have and spreading lies. Some of them are real experts in other fields and so have respect there.

⬐ snek_case

I would say critical thinking, learning to distinguish good information from bad is a valuable life skill that is only getting more valuable with time. Something we should try to teach people about from a young age.

⬐ FlyMoreRockets

It's generally pretty easy to spot the fakes if you have a basic understanding of the field and are just researching for specific details. Frankly, for the stuff I typically look for, there are surprisingly few fakes to be found. This may change with YT deprecating the down-vote arrow.

on "What's the right way to understand and model personality?"

Personality is an outdated concept, personality types triply so. There is no fundamental stability of personality, just behavior context.

Christian Miller - The character gap https://philosophybites.com/2019/02/christian-miller-on-the-... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/24/4818596...

Robert Sapolsky - Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

⬐ hcta

If you taboo the word 'personality', the underlying question here is still interesting. Do different people in the "exact same" situation always behave /identically/? (Obviously not.) What are the most informative features of the person explaining the divergence in response?

⬐ totetsu

Christian Miller is arguing that while we do have phycological character traits and motivations, that persist between situations, how we actually behave is a complex interaction between these and our contexts. Divergence can maybe be explained as much by contexts as by characteristics. If I were to meet someone who works a similar job, has a similar social and familia situation, but divergent motivations, I might have more in common with them than I would have if I met the university student version of myself.

I watched his 25-part Biology of Human Behavior (Stanford U.) course years ago, it's the best course I've ever done. Maybe covers a lot of the same ground. He's a great lecturer! Very funny and a great storyteller. There's a lot on how brains work, how genes work, and then all the levels science studies human (and animal) behaviour - e.g. "Why did they do that?" can be explained by what happened a millisecond ago, or a few seconds ago, or that morning, or .. (a dozen levels omitted) ... millions of years ago.

Lecture I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

Also, the initial few lectures from Robert Sapolsky's lecture series[1] were an eyeopener for me. The exact mechanism of how environment affects epigenetics (transcription factors, etc.) was really fascinating!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLqeYp3nxIY...

A common critique in all behavioral science is that most of it can be distilled down into telling the better story through weak or nonexistent evidence, and thus the only "real" way to conduct science into behavior is to use more hard evidence like genetics, neuroscience or even more concrete such as fossil records.

The problem is that the probability to finding a "gaming" gene, one that only exist or be expressed in males, would be very unlikely.

Robert Sapolsky has a good description of this in his lecture series "Human Behavioral Biology" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...).

Trial and error as a programmer dealing with depression and anxiety accounts for a lot, but for resources I'd point you to Robert Sapolsky's lectures on Behavioral Biology (here: https://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA). Sapolsky's lectures are great for getting a Biology perspective to how human's operate. Jordan Peterson's has lectures on Personality (here: https://youtu.be/kYYJlNbV1OM) which are also great and echo similar ideas from a Psychology perspective.

If people are interested in exploring this topic, I would highly recommend Robert Sapolsky's course "Human Behavioral Biology" from stanford. The lectures are all available on YouTube and I learned so much from them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...

⬐ 0-_-0

I can second that recommendation, I'm watching that lecture series for the second time it's so great.

Sapolsky - Biology of Human Behavior 25 lectures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...

It's accessible to laymen, no prior knowledge needed. It covers so many different fields and levels of knowledge ("buckets" Sapolsky calls them), different ways of explaining human behaviour. By the signals in their brain, or the hormones in their blood, or what happened that day, or their childhood, or their genes, or evolution of humans etc. Also looks at other animals. A lot of touching/funny/inspiring/poignant stories about scientists in the field(s). Sapolsky is an amazing lecturer/raconteur.

Hamming - Learning to Learn 32 lectures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD4b-52jtos&list=PL2FF649D0C...

The famous "You and your research" is one lecture in this, but every one of them is fascinating. History of computers, AI, codes, n-space, digital filters etc etc. Mainly it's great seeing how his mind works, his thinking style. (I've since read a few of his books, and I love how they're soaked with practical experience, in the same way these talks are. It's all stuff he's lived.)

⬐ hhs

Nice question, ambivalents, and thanks for the recommendation, yesenadam. Very cool. I just started watching the first video of Sapolsky's lecture and found it to instantly capture my attention. I'm going to stick to this series. By the way, studying Sapolsky could also help with the forum question recently in Ask: HN about explaining things well to people.

His lectures look like a neat place to get a deep anthropological grip on things.

>Imagine if you can randomly jumble up code and still have a reasonable outcome.

Ray's Tierra (early 1990s) was a fascinating experiment with this. Its DNA are little assembler-like programs telling the 'creatures' how to reproduce, how to copy their genes. Many kinds of parasites evolved. I believe no-one had tried randomly mutating genetic info like that before Tierra.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation)

http://life.ou.edu/pubs/doc/index.html#What

I recommend Sapolsky's Biology of Human Behavior course - accessible to beginners, it goes into a lot of detail about DNA, genes, the brain, emotions, sexual selection, evolution, and the many other levels involved in animal and human behaviour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...

Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes

Well, that doesn't sound right either. It's not easy to put what is correct in a nutshell, I think. Your annoyance with everyone who doesn't agree with your understanding seems unreasonable. For one thing, if what the people who annoy you write is almost entirely determined by their genes, why be angry about that?

I'm no expert; I should rewatch Robert Sapolsky's excellent 25-part lecture series on the biology of human behavior[0], which covers this question in depth from a number of perspectives. It's by a long way the best lecture series I've seen.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL150326949...

Try Sapolsky's incredible 25-or-so-part online lectures on Biology of Human Behavior. A great lecturer on a most fascinating subject, it's accessible to a general audience. Covers the topic on all different levels, scales, approaches, from evolutionary psychology to the minutiae of brains and genes, with a lot of stories about the discoveries and researchers involved, and jokes, he's a funny guy. Best course I've ever done. Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

True, but by combining different disciplines we can get closer to figuring things out. I can strongly recommend the Behavioral Biology lecture series on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL150326949...

But we don't need perfect models. Sometimes its enough just to get a idea over what influence the outcome. The popular science book freakonomics has a famous example where its describe crime and what influenced the outcome. Interestingly, it involved neither actions done to the criminals nor victims.

In the case of race we are both in agreement that there exist a power difference, ie that the outcome is not identical. What we have not talked about it what influence it. For example, is it the material starting point that causes ripple effects and influencing the outcome? If so there should be some validating data from isolated local areas where the material starting point is smaller or greater, result in a detectable effect. If we can't find such support, it would strongly hint towards invalidating such theory.

⬐ pron

> But we don't need perfect models. Sometimes its enough just to get a idea over what influence the outcome.

Sure, this is very common in the social science.

> there should be some validating data from isolated local areas where the material starting point is smaller or greater, result in a detectable effect

Absolutely. What do you think sociology/history/anthropology journals publish? They're full of such studies.

Robert Sapolsky`s lectures on human behavioral biology.

Fascinating, funny and gives insights into many different topics like cultural differences and nationalism.

http://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA?list=PL150326949691B199

rewards are strongly tied to dopamine release in the brain. suggest watching Ropert Sapolsky's lectures on Human Behavioral Biology [1]. i learned alot from them. i keep rewatching/relistening to his lectures and every time i learn something new.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

There are definitely known links between psychology and genes; we know the epigenetics behind why if mothers are stressed when pregnant, their children will be more stressed for their entire lives. Far too many people still have the Jurassic Park view of DNA and believe in Central Dogma—but it has become clear that environment and all sorts of post-conception events effect genetics. Dr. Sapolsky, in this lecture series, explains, for just one example, how and why Lamarckian evolution sometimes occurs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...

⬐ thaumasiotes

"The dickinson of morality and the Way"?

While what you are saying is partial true, the picture of genetics vs nurture is much more complex. I would recommend a excellent lecture series at (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&index=1&list=PL4...) which goes into quite into depth about the subject.

For example, while there are clear differences at birth, nurture can permanent shutdown genes. Additionally a lot of activators for genes are triggered by mental thought process and the environment around individuals.

To make a car analogy, we could assume that faster cars are more often breaking the speed limit than slower cars, and we might very likely find this to be true in practice regardless of the actually speed limit. From there we need to be careful to conclude that its the fault of the car when a driver choses to ignore the law, or that just because the acceleration is faster and it is easier to drive fast in a fast car a person is not conscious in their choice.

BTW, you should watch his lecture series on the biology of behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL45A5E21EC...

For me one of the best teachers you will find online

⬐ Dobiasd

Can confirm. These lectures are totally awesome. It is also possible to understand them only by audio, for example while driving.

⬐ ufo

I watched those a while ago. They might seem really long at first but I can confirm that they are really good. I was fascinated by how much more sense our emotions and behaviour make if you learn a bit more about how the brain is wired and how it evolved.

Be well versed in genetics / molecular biology! - If I had the time to finish school, I'd double in biology / math or CS. Man will that be a killer combo when that kid is 30.

It feels like biotech is where computing was in the 1930's... what's to come, and how it will change the world is both frightening and exciting.

On the "soft" side (whatever that means): ethics, the history of ethics, from every point of view.

Two lecture series I always recommend, and feel like everyone should watch with a gun to their head (as the instructor himself says):

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY -- Harvard course on justice / ethics.

- https://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA -- Robert Saposky (and guests) on the biology of human behavior.

Literary theory. Gaining a deeper understanding of how masters of symbolism, language, and creativity think and put together their work; the history of literature; etc. will open you up to new ways of thinking just like studying pure maths or programming would.

Now to invent a time machine and give myself this advice! Boy I could've used it.

This is a common fallacy about evolution, and is explained beautifully by the anthropic principle, or in other words, the innate selection bias of our existence.

I'm a little confused about how the anthropic principle explains this fallacy (and it is a fallacy to be sure). I guess you're referring to how natural selection (and all the other sorts of selection that occur regularly) lead to the existence of "appropriate" organisms and features.

But I think knowing some of the actual details in how evolution works at all the different levels (molecular bio, epigenetics, competition/cooperation, behavior, etc, etc, etc) serves as an even better explanation. Here's a 25 lecture course from Stanford that explains just that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

⬐ FreakLegion

I'm going to take a few seconds here to be a pedant and disentangle the structure of an argument from its contents.

Strictly speaking, a fallacy is a defect in the structure of an argument, i.e. in the logic that connects a premise to a conclusion. What you and the parent have identified is simply a false premise ("Things at least seem to organize themselves somewhat better than they 'ought' to"[1]). A false premise may result in the wrong conclusion, but an argument can be wrong without being fallacious.

This distinction isn't so much relevant here, but it comes in handy when you want to pinpoint sources of disagreement in a discussion. Lobbing the f-word around (even when deserved) just makes people defensive.

1. Of course the argument used to derive this premise might be fallacious, but that argument isn't given.

⬐ ehsanu1

Thanks for making the distinction, but the word "fallacy" can also be used more loosely than the way you define it. Googling "fallacy definition" gives me:

    1. A mistaken belief, esp. one based on unsound argument.
    2. A failure in reasoning that renders an argument invalid.

We were using it in the first sense.

⬐ calinet6

Absolutely, but Penrose was a brilliant man; he surely understood the biological and scientific explanations of it all. Yet, he still held some mysterious belief that there was something magical about the process. This belief comes from the self-selection bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias) (NOTE: not natural selection or evolutionary selection; there's a conflict of terms between probability theory and biology there—sorry for the confusion) I spoke of, and many people share it. From our individual perspective, or even from a human-wide perspective (which are the ones most familiar to all of us) we appear extremely special, extremely lucky to exist at all; to have been in the right place at the right time to undergo this process of evolution.

The anthropic principle simply invalidates this mystery: it is not special, it simply happened, and because it happened, we exist to observe it.

It doesn't care to explain evolution in any biological or scientific way; it only seeks to remove all doubt that it was able to happen at all.

That's well known if you ever took evolutionary biology course, or game theory course.

Even popular books like Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" talk in some detail about it, and this 25 hour video course is also a must see for pretty much everyone:

http://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA

⬐ tomrod

This is really what I signed on to add. This paper really adds nothing to what is already known in various other fields. Perhaps its new to the authors' field however? I'm not a Computer Scientist so I'm not sure.

(Full Disclosure: {Applied Games in Economics} \in {What I do})

⬐ hythloday

I'm really interested in this, but I have an extremely shallow knowledge of applied game theory. Can you point out some papers or textbooks you'd recommend on this subject? Particularly about the design of strategies that will dominate evolutionary strategies.

⬐ tomrod

In all reality, one of the best places to start is Wikipedia. The sources quoted in the game theory articles are fantastic.

Also, "Game Theory" by Fudenberg and Tirole of you're mathy, or Gibbons if you're wanting a fairly awesome introduction: http://www.amazon.com/Game-Theory-Applied-Economists-ebook/d...

There are also a lot of blogs on algorithmic (computational) game theory if that is of interest to you.