Thread by @Mammals_Suck

Let's talk about the ways that humans socially learn, bc without that context it may be hard to understand how we got to the "folks taking livestock medication & shitting themselves in public" situation (🧵)

https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1430914726444339200

As humans, our adaptive cognitive architecture for social learning is <chef's kiss>

(also, y'all should go ahead & follow Prof @MichelleAKline bc she is really in the know about all this)

From an individual perspective, learning things through "trial & error" or "guess & check" is fraught with pitfalls. At BEST it can take a LOT of time, limiting how much a person can learn in lifetime...

but at WORST, learning through trial & error involves A LOT OF RISK... "are these berries nutritious or toxic? Let's guess & check!"

BUT HUMANS HAVE SOME KICKASS SHORTCUTS TO KNOWLEDGE! (aka: natural selection has shaped the cognitive architecture of the human lineage for social learning & cultural transmission) proquest.com/docview/170015…

So the shortcut is to look around (observe) and copy (imitate, emulate)- some of the common approaches are:

1) Do what the majority do
2) Do what successful people do
3) Do what prestigious people do
4) Do what folks around you are doing
5) Do what folks like you are doing

Sidebar: That list basically explains much of marketing/advertising

Our ancestors who used any of these tricks for learning shortcuts generally did better than yahoos out guessing & checking because...

For natural selection to favor a trait it doesn't have to be perfect. Shit, a trait doesn't even have to be all that great... it just has to be better than other variants.

And this adaptation for "watch & copy" is OBVIOUSLY imperfect, with errors in observation, errors in copying, but again, it doesn't have to be perfect, just better than "guess and check" more of the time.

And if we look at human communities throughout MOST of human history (& in a substantial proportion of settings today), our access to checking out what many other people were actually doing was pretty good. #VillageLife

In our village communities, it's pretty darn obvious what others were doing and how it was going, who is doing good, who is respected, who's the big asshat that no one copies...

But now we're here, during a pandemic, in our virtual communities, organized with in-group promotion & out-group denigration, sharing increasingly polarized information curated by confirmation bias, all on platforms engineered to maximize profit (pnas.org/content/118/27…)

Life scientists ethically pioneered an astonishingly effective & safe vaccine, made freely available, that is poised to protect billions of people and save millions of lives...

BUT too many people are fearfully directing their trust & credulity for social learning to sham billionaires & false prophets, routinely amplifying & unwittingly legitimizing the swindlers, quacks, & charlatans, creating a cacophony of fictitious consensus.

So they chug bleach & chloroquine & livestock dewormer.

And many will vomit.

And shit themselves.

And some of them will die.

And all of them stay vulnerable to COVID.

And their vulnerability imperils us all.
theatlantic.com/health/archive…

For folks who live in rural communities a tool kit (ruralhealthweb.org/programs/covid…) & the imporance of recruiting farmers to message about vaccines- npr.org/sections/healt…

And lastly, here is a thread about how folks specifically started talking about ivermectin... (it's so, so, so bad)

https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1431040456364810242