The computational problems our ancestors faced were not drawn randomly from the universe of all possible problems; instead, they were densely clustered in particular, recurrent families (e.g., predator avoidance, foraging, mating) that occupy only miniscule regions of the space of possible problems.#
General-purpose reasoning methods are very weak, and have crippling defects (e.g., combinatorial explosion) that are a direct consequence of their domain generality.#
Allowing flexibility to react to information or to select actions will not necessarily improve performance if there is uncertainty about how to use that information or about when to select particular actions.#
As humans we are only moderately good at deductive logic, and we make only moderate use of it. But we are superb at seeing or recognizing or matching patterns—behaviors#
Human nature is not inherently good or bad: it is, “inherently,” a collection of programs, which execute their functions. The real question is: Which programs reliably develop in the human mind, and how do they process information?#
Political debate in the present is often a struggle over how to characterize events in terms of ancestral situation-types, because alternative framings trigger different evolved moral heuristics.#
Social emotions are often altruistic, indicating actions benefiting others at a cost to oneself, so that in any dynamic in which the higher payoff trait tends to increase in frequency, social emotions would eventually disappear.#
Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.#
Adaptation to a new situation, whether good or bad, consists in large part of thinking less and less about it.#
Cognitive expectations are our ideas about the future. They are “subjective.” The “long-term expectations” of the General Theory are cognitive expectations. In this meaning, the economic concept of “expectation” is about the same as the common-sense meaning of “expectation.” Cognitive expectations emerge from processes of learning. Acognitive expectations [on the other hand] are implicit in our actions. They are “objective.” Rational expectations are acognitive, at least in some interpretations. In this meaning, the economic concept of “expectation” differs from the common-sense meaning of “expectation.” Acognitive expectations emerge from natural selection.#
Without language, we might be much more akin to discrete Cartesian ‘inner’ minds, in which high-level cognition relies largely on internal resources. But the advent of language has allowed us to spread this burden into the world. Language, thus construed, is not a mirror of our inner states but a complement to them. It serves as a tool whose role is to extend cognition in ways that on-board devices cannot. Indeed, it may be that the intellectual explosion in recent evolutionary time is due as much to this linguistically-enabled extension of cognition as to any independent development in our inner cognitive resources.#
Our painful experience of sacrifice and our effort to diminish it leads us to believe that its total elimination would raise life to perfection. But here we overlook that sacrifice is by no means always an external obstacle, but is the inner condition of the goal itself and the road by which it may be reached. . . . Sacrifice is not only the condition of specific values, but the condition of value as such.#
Actions carried out on the basis of representations that are not at all identical with objective being nevertheless secure results of a reliability, expediency and accuracy that could hardly be greater if we knew the objective conditions as they are in themselves, whereas other activities based on ‘false’ representations tend to injure us.#