Cognitive Thrift 17 – Jocks vs. Nerds
Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner
May 27, 2017
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We have talked about dynamic, static, ways of thought. You have characterized as ‘jocks’ in a larger theme of jocks vs. nerds in larger evolutionary theory.
Rick Rosner: Well-adapted organisms in stable environments: jocks.
Jacobsen: This could be tied into cybernetics with systems that have elevated levels of feedback, where systems that are static have less feedback.
Rosner: Sure – we’re talking about dogma in society.
Jacobsen: Yes, as a larger theme, yes.
Rosner: So, if you’re looking at the Middle Ages, where – and I know there are nuanced and revisionist pictures of the Middle Ages that have changes happening all the time if you happen to know a lot a history and I don’t – a lot of things stayed the same generation after generation. The cathedral might take 120 years to put up, so when after your kid looks at a cathedral that’s 30 feet higher than you did when you were his age.
And that kid looks at a cathedral that’s another 3 stories higher. Meanwhile, you are farmer, bakers, and barrel makers and living kind of the same types of lives under the same political, religious systems in a lot of cases. I mean, yea political boundaries change and there were doctrinary changes, but there was a lot of stability. Certainly, more stability more than there is now, and stability is amenable to stable rules.
I may have mentioned this before, but my kid and I for her 21st birthday. We went to Italy and we were looking at a bunch art from the Romans and then from the Christians, and between the Romans and the Christians. There seemed to have been a major loss in ability to realistically render the human body.
The Romans had good-looking statues, and whatever survives of their frescoes or whatever. They obviously understood the human body. All its muscles and bones and how they worked, and then you get to the Christians and you have cartoonish figures robes, and it seems like a giving up of that area of knowledge and giving it back to God.
We worry about our spiritual fitness, and we worry about our bodies and how they work. hat kind of suggests a certain at-homeness with stability in a lot of places over the next 1,000 years, and when politics is table, when religions are stable, when societal patterns are stable, and people aren’t really trying to rock the boat. That permits or encourages stable rules.
And in a lot of instances a lack of curiosity or at least a lack of encouragement of curiosity.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Endnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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Rick Rosner 