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First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us — LessWrong

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The inside of a womb looks as it did 70,000 years ago, but the world outside has changed. In July 2021, when our daughter was born, the night sky didn’t light up with stars; it was lit up by the warm afterglow of sodium street lamps. Green-clad women carried the baby away, pumping oxygen into her mouth. It was like something out of a sci-fi: she had woken up, without a memory, in an alien world. Smeared in white-yellow fat, she didn’t know who she was nor what she was doing here. The only thing she knew, genetically, was that she needed to figure this out fast or die. How do we ever do this? Chimpanzees, who are born into the habitat their genes expect, get by largely on instinct. We cannot. We have to rely on what anthropologists call cultural learning. We have to observe the people that surround us; we have to figure out who among them navigate our local culture best and then extract the mental models that allow them to do so. This is a wicked problem. But we solve it instinctively.

x First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us — LessWrong Education Parenting World Modeling Practical Frontpage 53 First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us by Henrik Karlsson 7th Sep 2022 Linkpost for escapingflatland.substack.com 9 min read 6 53 The inside of a womb looks as it did 70,000 years ago, but the world outside has changed. In July 2021, when our daughter was born, the night sky didn’t light up with stars; it was lit up by the warm afterglow of sodium street lamps. Green-clad women carried the baby away, pumping oxygen into her mouth. It was like something out of a

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