Our modern environment is dominated by supernormal stimuli.
- Our modern environment is dominated by supernormal stimuli.
- Normally in evolutionary contexts, the stimuli an organism is exposed to in their environment changes at a similar speed as their own evolution.
- For example, a butterfly being attracted to a flower that is co-evolving with it. As the flower ramps up the intensity of its stimuli, the butterfly coevolves to be less responsive to the stimuli.
- Both evolutionary loops are in a biological substrate, which has a similar clock speed.
- This allows their response to a stimuli to be well-calibrated to the stimuli.
- But sometimes the environment can change much more quickly than the species can evolve, and produce "supernormal" stimuli that activate the response way more strongly than ideal.
- When humans created language, which allowed mutating and passing down ideas orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution, it created a machine that could produce supernormal stimuli.
- Modern commerce is extremely good at producing these supernormal stimuli that we find irresistible because they are orders of magnitude more potent than the stimuli we evolved for.
- Examples include modern junk food and also our informational junk food.
- Capitalism is great for giving users what they want, not what they want to want.
- Why is there an obesity epidemic? Because capitalism figured out great ways to make irresistible food that our lizard brains can't say no to.
- Capitalism is very good at giving us what we want: supernormal stimuli.
- This riff is inspired by this video: Why are Lemurs Terrified of Predators that don't Exist?