amazen
human civilization is even dumber because we continuously fight the person trying to open the latch. this would be human civilization in the best case scenario where we work together instead of against each other.
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jakeslop
The issue isn't the crabs. Crabs in the wild do that to securely hang on to each other when predators like stingrays are above them. The issue is the bucket and the asshole who put them there. So if you find yourself in a bucket, quit blaming other crabs and start looking for the fisherman
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The Grove Digger
Thank you, I love that video so much. (Though it does remind me of that movie "Nope") Maybe the metaphor here could be that community resilience needs to adapt to the problem at hand
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jakeslop
that's what I'm saying. the world is the way it is because people are scared of retaliation by the evil pricks in charge. And certainly they have the means to obliterate any individual they really want. But we WAY outnumber and outgun them. Plus the elite are actually idiots so we're smarter too
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Jon Stone
It's not just fear of retaliation. What can we actually do to harm them or force their hand? Unless you can convince everyone to arm up and storm the citadel at the same time, we have no weapons to take them on. Even the bravest person charging them head on will accomplish next to nothing.
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jakeslop
That's not even remotely true. Are you helping the homeless in your community? Are you joining or contributing to mutual aid organizations? Are you meeting with friends on a regular basis? This isn't just about physical force, though there are certainly times that's appropriate
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jakeslop
Doing these things builds collective power that we need to not just react to everything going on. Rather, we build toward a goal of being able to rely on other people again to combat the relentless individualism that leads to everyone just trying to stay afloat
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Jon Stone
Well, I agree with all that, but I thought you were talking about immediate and decisive steps to close down the fascist threat. It seems to me we can and are doing all the things you talk about but are still in real danger of being overrun and outpaced by the speed of destruction.
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Rae
Not so sure about the outgunning part. Now the atomic arsenal of the world is controlled mostly by evil idiots.
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jakeslop
Even the idiots know that you need people to rule over, and that can't happen if everyone gets nuked
Nukes are only for the good empires
You could also interpret it as a bad thing though. One cow acting in pure self-interest decides to break the system and the delicate balance of society is broken. If 1000 people live fine and get along how many of them is needed to ruin it? Just 1 smart psychopath. "In a world of the blind..."
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amazen
it is true, unfortunately the systems in place have allowed and continue to allow a whole class of psychopaths to suck the blood of the rest of the system. I would like to think that more compassion and solidarity and working together can undo some of the damage that has already been done.
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Nukes are only for the good empires
And that's why radicals have a harder road, because while the reactionaries need 1 person to make the changes they want, if it's reversed it definitely isn't "1 non-psycho among 1000 psychos will change the group", not at all, that lone radical is just toast. We need to ORGANISE to do anything. ✊💖
iury souza
You never know when they're opening the latch to a new pasture or the one full of predators though. That's why there's always contention
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amazen
actual threats that are existential to humanity so far have been a product of working against each other. take for example weapons of mass destruction, or rushing into building bigger and bigger AIs to beat the competition instead of working together more cautiously for safer and more useful AI.
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Catalytic Converser
We keep arguing about whether to open the latch or whether to invite that fuzzy-looking gray cow with the sharp claws and teeth to open it for us.
mccraephilosophies.bsky.social
"this would be human civilization in the best case scenario where we work together instead of against each other." And then there was the invention of the nuclear bomb. And of artificial intelligence. But people are still born all equally ignorant. And make of it whatever they prefer.
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amazen
both are prime cases of humans working against each other and not together. artificial intelligence should be developed carefully and after figuring out how to make it safe, how to make it useful, and how it's going to affect us. the reason it's being rushed is "free" market competition.
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mccraephilosophies.bsky.social
"both are prime cases of humans working against each other and not together. " No, they aren't. They are just physics. What people do with it is an entirely diffrent matter. A human matter. Part of the human matter is to be exploitative and greedy. Altogether independent from physics.
Fleurs de Mal 🇺🇸
The problem with your argument is it assumes there’s only “the latch” and not many latches opening to a myriad of pastures some of which will help us but many of which will only help the opener while harming others.
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amazen
working against each other is still detrimental in that case. take for example building weapons of mass destruction because of wars, or rushing into building bigger and bigger AIs to beat the market competition instead of working together as humanity more cautiously for safer and more useful AI.
Sir Basil
The problem with the world is that the intelligent cows are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence
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astrodork2pt0.bsky.social
Except this; when you ARE the smart cow with an idea that requires more effort than simply lifting a latch (maybe requiring participation from a few cows who haven't seen the new outcome) humans will 10,000,000 :: 1 ridicule what they don't understand, rather than lift a finger to help.
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reyin poetic
What tends to happen is that lots of slightly-less-smart cows then figure out smaller steps towards lifting that complicated latch.
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Call me Cassandra
And then you've got the cow who, finding the gate open and a lush meadow beyond it, goes through and closes the gate behind itself so it has it all to himself.
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Pete Kotz
The problem is that in America, the dumbest cow will denounce the smart cow as elitist, convincing all the other moron cows that the elite cow is the cause of their problems. Then they'll ban opening the gate as a way to own the elites.
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Robert
There's only a relative handful of people who actually understand the architecture of a modern processor chip. But, any computer engineering major could make a basic calculator out of simple components. So, it's a level of complexity problem.
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Robert
It really is. Once you understand how logic gates work, it's just a matter of finding a way to duplicate them in the right order. There's an old children's game with marbles that is essentially a mechanical computer.
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Lucy Fair
It depends. A simple calculator? Sure. A NES era machine? Some people could do that. A modern PC? Probably like a dozen people in the world. And that's the theory, those people most likely have no idea about how to actually manufacture the thing and most certainly don't know how to process raw ore.
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thejeff
Like, how "scratch" is from scratch? Do we have to start by banging the rocks together?
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carl
You can't make a processor from wires and a battery. Well, I mean, you probably *could* if you added in relays and such but it would be the size of a small city.
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Jason Packer
It's definitely all of computer technology. We strive to make things more accessible and in the process train people not to know how to make things more accessible.
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qurwIn (Curwin)
I've often opined that a very small percentage of our society is responsible for its development. Everyone else just goes along because its convenient to have an electric refrigerator.
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stone
So... did anybody mention "The Hundredth Monkey"? Still waiting to see enough people express concern over climate change and biodiversity loss... that the right wingers will get convinced, and we can all finally take some small action toward preservation of the planet...
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Ratravarman
I recall being in Madison, WI in the 90s and calls for nuclear disarmament via the method of “The Hundredth Monkey” 🤦🏻‍♂️
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Gabro Games
That's what we're trying to do with Gabro - solve a lot of hard problems of keeping classic games alive so that future generations can inherit the knowledge and keep those games alive long after we're gone.
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OlYello
It only takes one smart, unscrupulous, charismatic human to convince all the other humans that the open gate leads straight to Hell and that the one smart cow is the Devil incarnate, bent upon leading everyone to destruction. This is how the corral winds up empty of cows and full of humans.
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Quokka Fury
That's it. Just ideas stacked on top of each other. All thinking life. Sometimes the stacks fall over. Incidentally I read there are 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000 ways to shuffle a deck of 52 cards.
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Katie
Except humans now would stand by the gate and ask for a fee to get through
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Veltoss
Nowadays some of the other cows would spread a conspiracy that the gate *wasn't* unlatched and the unlatching is a liberal conspiracy, and that anyone who unlatches the gate will die or be mind controlled.
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Dalton
...or in our context 2025, a few mediocre cows end up in charge of the gate and make it impossible for anyone to get out (e.g., the cows promoting AI garbage, which include the cows monopolizing search at Google, the cows monopolizing PC operating systems at Microsoft).
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dredecopp.bsky.social
James Burke on his show Connections pointed out that a lot of ideas come to us at about the same time when the other knowledge has "gathered" to make the logical "leap". For example Darwin and Wallace.
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Gonzo
Trump = refutation of this theory - some people undo the solution (throwing him out of office) and work to pretend it never happened.
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ewdaisyrose.bsky.social
Cult. Propaganda. Brainwashing. Even with the Conservative Churches before Trump. Democrats don't understand that a Propaganda war is a real war with real victims and that they need to use every tool possible to fight this. And damn the MSM for supporting Trump this entire time.
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FatsMcGee
Yes. If an adaptation solves a problem, no matter how shortsighted, it will be incorporated. Evolution doesn't care long term, only the relatively short term. This is that on a microscope level. Even if that very adaptation is what causes it to die off later.
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Lunar Biohazard
The gate latch is already unlocked but one cow locks the latch itself. Now, whenever the latch is left open, all of the cows manually lock it themselves.
NightSteward
Depending on your worldview, the "smart cow problem" is either a way to justify why the smart cow deserves exclusive access to power and resources over all the other cows or a recognition of how creativity and innovation can move an entire community/herd forward where everyone wins.
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cwstoughton.bsky.social
It really, truly is not. Basically every unsolved problem humanity faces - or has ever faced for that matter - requires monumental effort by lots of people working together. That’s how we do this, not waiting for a smart cow to figure it out
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@badgator.bsky
For twenty years, I have been teaching my broadcasting kids how to use this method. Now I have a name for it.
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Beekurr
Anyone can do it. It just takes one to show them how . Didn't know that was a doctrine😂
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Mourna Lisa
but but... it takes a bunch of possibly lesser cows to set it up so that the smart cow can even get to the latch of the gate.
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kurtosis cobain
They think this general idea (or more specifically, the propensity of humans to mimic the smart cow) is one reason why we outcompeted all the other hominids, because we would be able to build on existing culture/technology Too bad it makes us do dumb shit also
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WorldFamous Jim
A couple conundrums: -more than one smart cow in the herd, and they have conflicting ideas -LOTS of cows thinking they are smart (but aren't) -a rancher who doesn't want any smart cows in his herd and culls them -a crazy guy with an AR style weapon randomly shoots all the cows
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Brian Payne
I'm more of a back-of-the-pack kind of cow who waits to see if our herd's new found freedom is actually a trick leading us to the killing floor.
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MattFaxtor2.697
hmm this is uncomfortably close to what musk and others have suggested - that technocratic elites (smart cows) should be the select who participate in democracy. It's nurture not nature! We would have soooo many "smart cows" if access to education and opportunity was shared the world through
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TrismegistusMx
Also why capitalist scarcity is a myth. Our production has gone up, our efficiency has gone up, why has our poverty gone up?
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micropush
In between the innovations, there is the bullying.* * Or bullying by spreadsheet, the threat of violence being subtler.
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Marlow
When designing garbage cans for national parks the biggest hurdle was that the smartest bear is the same as the dumbest human, except they can’t read. So the park added instructions for the humans.
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rabbit2rabbit
I’m not so sure any more that human civilization has even one smart cow among them. Myself included. I actually BELIEVED in this democracy and that the checks and balances would hold. That 34 convicted felonies and credible evidence of treason could be stopped. Silly cow.
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Mo
Not "all" albeit most 😳 "Cattle mentality" is what I called it over the years raising my daughter to recognize it and avoid it!
Blackout
I can’t wait to use this term on my male friends when they’re all scrambling to solve something so trivial all at the same time. Especially when it involves research on a phone
invadertenn.bsky.social
That is one thought, but keep in mind, that a scared cow/horse basically all livestock will run back to a safe place (their barn) even if the barn is on fire and thats what scared them. So don't put too much stock in the smart cow theory- they aren't necessarily gonna follow the smartest one.
Jason
Ideas grow The basics of General Relativity had been around for 100 years Smart cows had a lot of clever ideas that became common ideas and ENABLED many smart cows to have thoughts about Relativity in physics, but one of those cows published first creating the illusion that one cow did a smart thing
Rae
Problem for the 'smart cow' is that's the one getting culled first.
ra-nut.bsky.social
Interesting. I’ve seen all the cows in a herd mosy into the next field beyond the fence when there is no gate. Yet one cow remains in the previous field bellowing constantly. Their herd is so disturbed by the noise that they go back into the previous field to rejoin the bellowing fellow.
LilHimawari
Like how many things have you learned from tiktok that are just simple life things that you regularly do now? It's endless. There's an infinite way to do just about anything, but it just takes one smart cow to show you you've been doing it wrong this whole time lol
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Jason Shots
I've learned from Tiktok that people think they are more profound than they actually are. All those life hacks are just normal processes that people use who aren't perpetually online.
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