just another blog on skeptic thinking
Like someone bloating and sickening from overindulging in industrial sugar, the uncritical moralist overindulges in moral convictions – restlessly driven into a state of deadly fervour devoid of reason and health. What if our modern civilization is plagued with a pandemic, not unlike the obesity pandemic, of overindulgence in maladaptive morals?
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1. Introduction A central concept for the understanding of evolutionary theory and subsequent disciplines such as evolutionary game theory or psychology is that of fitness (cf. Millstein 2021, p.5; Alexander 2001, p.1). But: There are few idioms as popular and as regularly misunderstood as the survival of the fittest, which was coined by Herbert Spencer and popularized by Charles Darwin….
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Introduction To ask a human what and how influential social norms are, is a little bit akin to asking a fish: What is water and how does it affect you? The difference: fish seem to honour the old latin proverb si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses and don’t embarrass themselves by trying to answer. Humans are ultra-social beings, with a capacity to….
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1. Introduction Whenever the expected utilities of one agent’s choices depend on another agent’s decision, such an interaction can be modelled as a game and analysed through the lens of game theory (GT) (cf. Binmore 2007b, p. 3 – 5). Despite its theoretical success many academics and “practical men of business used to dismiss game theory as just one more….
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1. Introduction Human decisions often deviate from the prescriptions of rational choice theory. Psychologists and behavioral economists usually explain this deviation with biases, which are mental patterns or heuristics causing incorrect inferences and irrationality, especially when relying on fast thinking and intuitions (cf. Kahneman 2012, p. 19). Biases are a vibrant area of research. Consequently, there is a growing interest….
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