Updated version: Humans do sometimes instinctively form dominance hierarchies. We are primates and primates have hierarchical social structures. We have many instincts. We also have instincts for murder, and mob rule, and cruelty, and envy, and aggression, on and on. What should we do with these instincts? Throw our hands in the air, declare that it is what it is and lean into it? What kind of world would that lead to? We also have instincts for fairness, co-operation, empathy, play, love, etc. Which instincts you chose to indulge and lean into, and which you choose to manage and minimize is a vote on which direction humanity heads. It’s important to note the difference between a dominance hierarchy and a decision tree. A dominance hierarchy is about who can control who. It’s about which person has more or less value than another. While a decision tree is about roles and structures and less about people. People can hold different roles in different decision trees. Dominance hierarchy is animal behavior. What do you want the future of humanity to look like?

Human’s do sometimes instinctively form hierarchies. We are primates and primates have hierarchical social structures. We have many instincts. We also have instincts for murder, and mob rule, and cruelty, and envy, and aggression, on and on. What should we do with these instincts? Throw our hands in the air, declare that it is what it is and lean into it? What kind of world would that lead to? We also have instincts for fairness, co-operation, empathy, play, love, etc. Which instincts you chose to indulge and lean into, and which you chose to manage and minimize is a vote on which direction humanity heads. Hierarchy is animal behavior. What do you want the future of humanity to look like?

You know how I know I'm old? I can't stop listening to Sade.

My ongoing series of selfies where I try to convince my nervous system that airplane bathrooms are glamorous fun places and not hideous death traps.

We don’t have a knowledge issue in our world anymore. We have all the world’s knowledge at our finger tips. So now it’s all perspective and maturity issues.

I told Claude that Star Trek was my favorite Sci-Fi universe and it responded with... "A post-scarcity federation with no money feels like an interesting pick for someone who spends her days on payments infrastructure" 😑 You wouldn't understand Claude, you wouldn't understand!

My Facebook page as been so over run with execution blood lust and rape apologist bots that it's become nearly unusable.

“A person who views the world the same at 50 as they did at 20 has wasted 30 years of their life.” - Muhammad Ali

When people fail to add nuance to their statements/memes sometimes that is just laziness or ignorance, but more often I think it's intention. They want to make the subtle implications. Example, when someone makes a meme about Israel and American politicians but says "jews" instead of Netanyahu. Sometimes I want to add that nuance for them, and other times I'm like nah, they meant that.

You could argue that until we evolve into something better than human, that there will always be some percentage of the population that will rape and murder, etc. and so we have to just accept that and adjust accordingly. And to some extent that is true, but also… Did you ever hear the story of the neuroscientist who discovered that he was a psychopath? Ya he was conducting a study and scanned his own brain in the process and identified that scan as a psychopathic brain. And yet he was not a rapist or a murderer, he was a decent family guy. He had come from a good household where he was loved and taught well and he did not become a monster. The moral of the story being that even if a certain percentage of the population will have brains that allow them to be monsters, the quality of the civilization they are living in will play a huge role in determining if that potential is reached or not. And second, what we allow in a culture determines what a predator can get away with. There is a meme going around stating that a woman could walk drunk and naked into a party and the only way she would be rapped is if a rapist is also at that party. True, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Let’s assume that 100 people are at that party and 5 of them are rapists… just blending into the crowd like normal people. When that naked woman comes stumbling into that party those 5 rapists will never make it to her if the other 95 people at that party have decent values. The only way those 5 rapists manage to get her upstairs and alone is if all 95 of the rest just look the other way and let it happen. So, ya human’s evolve slowly. We will have this issue for a long time. But we could eliminate SO, SO many of these incidences if we just had a better culture. A culture where people were kind to others, and actively looked out for others, a culture where we didn’t accept rape etc. as just a part of life.

Things grow and change slowly, bit by bit, and often at the edges. This applies to all sorts of things, to neighborhoods, to fungus, and to cultural shifts. I’m obsessed with the egregore or the Jungian collective unconscious. Are you familiar with these concepts? This is essentially the concept of a shared culture, a shared set of values that are so ingrained that they are unconscious and that combines together to nearly have a life of it’s own. It’s an incredibly powerful force. But these powerful forces do change and evolve. And it changes bit by bit every day it the tiny things that you and I do. The jokes we laugh at, and the ones we scoff at. The subtle assumptions in the phrases we use. The graphic tee that we did or didn’t wear. As a collective unconscious is just a shared set of beliefs and assumptions about the world, it changes when the people in that community change. When you or I change our minds and behavior the egregore is slightly altered, and a change can build and build and then tip dramatically. We like to think that we are going to change the world dramatically by creating some new invention, or starting some new business, or electing some new politician, but we really don’t have much control at all on a large scale. And nearly always, the most effective thing we can do to improve the world is just to make sure our little corner of it has a healthy and moral culture.

And back to my theories on exclusion panic... You know what else releases stress hormones and lights up the same physical pain brain regions? Social exclusion. Humans are a social species.

Did ya know that “heartache” is actually physically painful and measurable? It’s true. FMRI studies show that heartache activates many of the same brain regions involved in physical pain. Heartache also produces measurable stress effects, elevated cortisol, increased heart rate and blood pressure, and higher inflammatory markers. And of course, the heart is effected. Heartache can flood the body with stress hormones that actually weaken the heart muscle to such an extent that it’s measurable on EKG’s, via blood tests, and can even mimic a heart attack.