TED Blog Video
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 18 months, 2014–2024
2:44 · 25M views · Apr 4, 2013
A short excerpt from Frans de Waal's TED talk showing a capuchin monkey fairness experiment in which two monkeys are paid unequally, one with cucumber and one with grapes. The shortchanged monkey reacts angrily.
HN uses it again and again as shorthand for the idea that resentment of unfair pay and inequality is built into primates, including us.
20 comments from Hacker News
This is the video that explains the best how the "morality" is natural even in the capuchin monkeys: this video So, no to those that claim that, humans aren't special, and no, the good sides of morality don't come from religion, especially not from the modern ones with a "jealous" god (killing homosexuals, or punishing women when not wearsing something, however, if that is considered "morality", indeed provably does come from religion). The whole talk: [LINK]
There's a nice video from a psychological experiment that illustrates it: this video I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group. Otherwise complex societies would have never emerged, because assholes exploiting and taking advantage of peers would ruin and doom any group larger than a few individuals.
Understanding power law distributions is a real eye opener. They're everywhere in nature. I don't know about how other people feel, but after learning about power law distributions and then seeing them everywhere I now just think "well, thats just how nature works." That and the normal distribution. I often meditate on people's obsession over fairness. The best I can come up with is that it is a hardball negotiating tactic to get more than you otherwise would through creating leverage by making others feeling uncomfortable and betting that they're not going to be able to tolerate the uncomfortable state. That comes from watching both Frans De Waal's Capuchin monkey experiment below and from observing my toddler. this video Then you consider all of the power Laws in the universe. Almost nothing is fair. Unfairness seems to be the default. Consider the animal kingdom is full of homicidal behavior. Life is very rough. Yet we expect "everything should be fair and everyone should be nice." At some level that just isn't commensurate with reality. I also find there is an extreme intolerance, at least if feels that way to me, maybe it's just an extreme frustration, of inefficiencies in nature. An article pointing out that some talent is being underutilized and this is a travesty! Ok, I'm in agreement it would be nice if it could be maximized, I guess. But I think it's ludicrous to expect a system that has optimize for the whole to optimize for local cases too. Imagine you have to design
Somewhat interesting: Bananas contain the ingredients necessary to produce dopamine. I can see how this all plays out as a way for some apes to get some bananas. Even social structures, fairness and other things (I love this video - two monkeys getting unequal pay this video ) can be explained by a dopamine system that just likes to give us bananas and sex. And it's incentivized to conserve energy because this is better for survival (also called lazy) - interesting is that humans have some tendency to do stuff that don't necessarily is conserving energy. Maybe this is what makes us successful: Sometimes we invest excessive energy to try new things which happens to let us survive better through innovation (which leads to genetics that encode this behavior). I like it, although it isn't necessarily what I call my meaning of life (I'm a dualist, because materialism is too damn dry). I like bananas, though (and yes, the role of bananas may be exaggerated here). Thought long about it. From a materialistic standpoint there are only quantitative differences between a organism which has a sensor, some type of memory and an actuator and human beings, although they sure look different. Still following the same principles. When I further simplify, we are all just energy (and matter, which is just a form of it) following some first principles hallucinating our consciousnesses trying to evade the eventual entropy that we'll reach nevertheless because this is how the universe works. - - - Coo
I think you're right, but historically there have been problems. Frans de Waal has written about how in his field there was a lot of early egregious anthropomorphizing. As people realized how flawed that was, they swung around the other way, to refusing to consider analogous human behavior. But things like de Waal's work demonstrating moral sense in animals is hard to explain in any other way. [1] Even so, it can be tricky. In Bernd Heinrich's excellent "Mind of the Raven" [2], he points to a story where a woman, lost in the wilderness, noticed a raven crying near her and spotted something like a mountain lion creeping up on her. In the news story she gave the raven credit for warning her and saving her life. But Heinrich points out that ravens have a demonstrated history of leading predators to prey, because that way they get the leftovers with much lower risk. So although the woman was correct that the raven understood her danger and was demonstrating advanced social cooperation, her anthropomorphic bias led her to perhaps be dangerously wrong about who the raven was trying to help. So although I think shorthand like, "The octopus is playing" is fine for casual use, I think serious people have to always be challenging those tempting assumptions. [1] e.g., this book [LINK] or this TED talk: this video [2] A stellar book, and I recommend it strongly to anybody fascinated by corvids or interested in decoding animal behavior more generally: [LINK]