Many people who suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder cannot distinguish truth from their emotional reactions. In other words, they regard their personal emotional responses to the world as infallible guides to truth — and regard any questioning of their conclusions as a personal attack. “If I feel it, it must be true” is how they approach the world.
…Cluster B pathologies are deeply embedded in our institutions these days. I’d say the Arday disaster has a lot to do with this, in that the people who kept promoting him throughout his career have absorbed classic Cluster B thinking, and made an ideology out of it.
Institutions—to be functional—generally have to been scaled-up teams. That women are systematically worse at teams than men means that the feminisation of institutions and organisations tends to degrade their functionality.
On at least a few occasions, I have traced the deterioration of higher education to the loss of values that males naturally support and females tend to support less.
Stefanie Stantcheva and others write,
Our paper yields three sets of findings. The first set of results documents a sharp rise in anger in political discourse, with anger emerging as the dominant emotion among citizens, voters, and policymakers alike.
…Anger also rises within the same users, conditional on policy topic. In voter tweets, changes in the anger rates and posting volume of continuing 3 users account for most of the aggregate increase. The rise appears across political parties and demographic groups.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Steve Stewart-Williams writes,
According to Yong and colleagues, many of the aches and pains of modern life can be traced in part to these mismatches. Large cities, inequality, and complex social hierarchies ramp up status competition, stress, and loneliness. Artificial environments and sedentary lifestyles undermine health and well-being. Screens, social media, and information overload bombard us with more stimulation and information than we evolved to handle. And 24-hour news gives us constant exposure to distant wars, pandemics, and other crises, keeping ancient threat-detection mechanisms working overtime.
It’s worth pointing out that although the modern world is mismatched with human nature in some ways, in other ways it’s better adapted to our evolved needs and wants than more natural environments are. It would be surprising if this weren’t the case, given that we ourselves created the modern world. We’ve got food on tap metaphorically, water on tap literally, and the safest environments humans have ever inhabited. We’ve got more options for work, leisure, and lifestyle than our ancestors could dream of. We’ve got glasses, contraception, air conditioning, heating, and medicine that actually works.
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