Two Monkeys Were Paid Unequally: Excerpt from Frans de Waal's TED Talk

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.

This experiment, listed in one table and in the references but not discussed elsewhere, would suggest otherwise: ▶ this video There might be other confounding factors in that experiment, but for the life of me I can't imagine what they would be. My stats knowledge has evaporated over the years so I can't follow exactly what the study is doing to come to their conclusion, but it strains my credulity to suggest that the monkeys in that experiment aren't angry about perceived inequity. I'd be interested to know if anyone can do a TLDR of the study as to why they reached that conclusion in the face of what looks like pretty compelling evidence. Edit: Now I come to think about it, I suppose a counter-argument is that the angry monkey just knows that the experimenter has grapes and they're angry they're not getting them, rather than being angry that the other monkey is getting grapes while they're not. Feels like that argument makes sense given our tendency to anthropomorphise animals, particularly primates.

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

This is how we're wired as a species, and frankly more than just a species. We don't just look at what we have and what we want, we look at what other people have and ask ourselves why they got it and we didn't. At a basic level it's an instinct that exists in lower primates, and in us as well. ▶ this video The difference with us is that we can learn and understand the reasons why one person gets a "grape" and the other a "cucumber"... and those answers are often not just unsatisfying, but infuriating.

Oh god this hurts. The same sloppy arguing. Ok I was talking about literature. You just expanded it a whole lot, which diffuses the point I was making. I don't think this is a tactic, I just don't think you can focus. Nonethless, "It happens because our art and our philosophy [1] inspires our science and our engineering [2]" You conveniently assume [1] and [2] are divorced and each lies with two entirely divided castes. They are aspects of the same. "Law, government, peace, prosperity, human rights, ethics. These things all spring from the humanities" Oh lord. Law is from human nature. Desire for justice/fairness exists even in monkeys ▶ this video Peace - this comes from humanities? Justify this. ethics - nothing to do with law apparently, see above. prosperity - nothing to do with science, right. I've had enough of this crap. You can't debate, you don't want to look for common understanding. It's a kind of arrogance.

Yeah, that's not how human psychology works. You didn't have managers earning $400,000K+ at the Wikimedia Foundation then. :) ▶ this video

> people don’t actually care about absolute inequality People care about fairness. Hell, even monkeys care about fairness: ▶ this video Extreme income inequality is unfair. Jeff Bezos is not 1,000,000,000% "more worthy" of wealth than Richard Feynman—and everyone knows it. Very little about financial capitalism is fair.

> First of all, there is no such thing as "morality". There is absolutely a solid sense of morality baked into (at the very least) primate brains. Give this a read. The science is solid: link Or this if you're impatient: ▶ this video > Nothing belongs to nobody. People take whatever they can get away with. What kind of unhinged philosophy are you smoking? Objectivism? Marxism? Freebasing Solipsism?

HN comments remind me of how monkeys would rather have nothing than see another monkey get more than them. ▶ this video

Competition for resources is only one human behavior. In nature, it is carefully balanced not to disrupt the stability of the well functioning community that all primates must have at all times to survive. Being social animals, another more critical instinct is the need to cooperate. Indeed, eliminating cooperation from a human group will extinguish it faster than eliminating competition (assuming it's even possible). And when people have a choice in the matter, pecking order is based on amount of support the higher up people provide to the group, not the leaders ability to serve himself: people do not knowingly and freely back someone who has no interest in backing them. Also instinctive is the sense of fairness[1] Of course those with an abundance of resources might want to convince others that this instinct is unnatural or somehow harmful. But it is clearly a well established instinct over a wide range of mammals and exists for a reason. And while the meaning of life varies greatly from person to person, I suspect that a life lived solely to maximize one's own resources will be as comfortable as it feels meaningless. I image evolution has made it that way. At least so people will have children but also to work fairly with others. Otherwise we would have wandered completely alone in the jungles and been eaten out of existence by Pliocene tigers. [1] ▶ this video

> you will realize that concepts like "fairness" or "caring" simply doesn't exist outside of human brains. Here's the well known capuchin fairness experiment. ▶ this video link