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achrono10/11/20242 repliesview on HN

Sure. But why do you think changing human nurture is any easier than changing human nature? I suspect that as your set of humans in consideration tends to include the set of all humans, the gap between changeability of human nature vs changeability of human nurture reduces to zero.

Perhaps you are implying that we sign up for a global (truly global, not global by the standards of Western journalists) campaign of complete and irrevocable reform in our behavior, beliefs and knowledge. At the very least, this implies simply killing off a huge number of human beings who for whatever reason stand in the way. This is not (just) a hypothesis -- some versions of this have been tried and tested. *

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism


Replies

wrs10/11/2024

Arguably, human nature hasn't changed much in thousands of years. But there has been plenty of change in human culture/nurture on a much smaller timescale. E.g., look at a graph of world literacy rates since 1800. A lot of human culture is an attempt to productively subvert or attenuate the worse parts of human nature.

Now, maybe the changes in this case would need to happen even quicker than that, and as you point out there's a history of bad attempts to change cultures abruptly. But it's nowhere near correct to say that the difficulty is equal.

beepbooptheory10/11/2024

In general I think concepts like politics, art, community, etc try to capture certain discrete ways we are all nurtured. Like I am not even sure you're point here, there is nothing more totalitarian than reducing people to their "nature", it is arguably its precise conceit if it has one, that such a thing is possible. And the fact that totalitarianism is constantly accompanied by force and violence seems to be the biggest critique you can make of all sorts of "human nature" reductions.

And like what is even the alternative here? What's your freedom of belief worth when your essentially just a behaviorist anyway?