The Only Constant is Change
So like, when did Cracked go from being a cheap Mad knockoff on the 7-11 magazine rack to the most important website on the internet?
Everyone’s linking the 9 Most Badass Bible Verses article, but don’t scant “What is the Monkeysphere?” by one of the bible-verse list’s coauthors.
Comment by Michael —
December 2, 2007 @ 11:50 am
I asked myself the same question when I saw the Monkeysphere article.
Comment by Thoreau —
December 2, 2007 @ 1:04 pm
Actually, Urkobold is the most important site on the internet, and they offer Monkey Tuesday.
Plus, Koko the signing gorilla has been posting there.
Comment by ogged —
December 2, 2007 @ 1:17 pm
You spelled “monkeysphere” incorrectly. Learn to operate the keyboard, shitcamel!
But seriously, it’s a fun piece, but claims too much explanatory power for the monkeysphere hypothesis. You don’t have to have personal feelings for people in order to treat them with respect, or to realize that your actions will have consequences for them. Which is to say that there’s my tribe and my fellow humans, not my tribe and the void.
Comment by ogged —
December 2, 2007 @ 1:20 pm
Or wait, is that site all satire and parody? Haha?
Comment by solarjetman —
December 3, 2007 @ 10:14 am
David Wong’s original site, http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/ has a bunch more stuff.
I think Cracked hired the guy pretty recently; the kick-ass bible verses article is new, but the Monkeysphere one has been around for a year or two.
Here’s a couple good ones:
http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/911truth.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_15663_god-fuse-10-things-christians-atheists-can-agree-on.html
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
December 3, 2007 @ 12:01 pm
ogged: the monkesyphere thing is, as far as I can tell, a gloss on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, mated to a discussion of the Dunbar number.
Basically, Smith’s starting point was the observation that a) the lives of fortunes of people we don’t know don’t touch us emotionally, and b) some of us are sometimes willing to help them anyway. Since b) is something happens only part of the time, this meant this wasn’t a basic human faculty, but rather that it was a capability we develop, like learning to read and write.
Smith thought it was the process of learning how to imagine what other people think — the sympathetic imagination — that formed our moral sense. Modern cognitive science seems to agree in broad detail, though of course on numerous smaller points Smith was wrong, the 18th century not being over-equipped with fMRI machines.
Comment by lawrence krubner —
December 3, 2007 @ 7:11 pm
I enjoyed reading the essay about the monkeysphere, but it made some fundamental assumptions that go against a large amount of statistical evidence. The essay has a wonderfully clarity of thought and it has a great sense of humor that left me chuckling at many points. It is a fun read, and the writer makes a bunch of good points about human nature. However, the whole essay is fundamentally wrong.
The central assumption seems to be that most conflict happens between people who are outside of each other’s monkeysphere’s; that is, we can care for 150 people, but beyond that we feel no compassion for anyone. And yet, according to statistics compiled by the FBI, when a woman is murdered, 50% of the time the murderer is her husband or boyfriend. In fact, the majority of murder happens among people who know each other, that is, people within each other’s monkeysphere.
When activists fighting against domestic violence ask for a law to help law enforcement, they are asking for people outside of their monkeysphere to help manage relations inside of their monkeysphere. And this example is not an exception to a general rule, it is, instead, an example of the general rule: we expect people outside of our monkeysphere to be more neutral and objective than people in our monkeysphere. Therefore, when people seek justice, they look outside of their monkeysphere.
A poor black sharecropper, in Mississippi, in 1953, might be horribly exploited by his white landlord. These people are within each other’s monkeysphere. If the black seeks justice, he/she will turn to people outside of their monkeysphere.
When a 9 year old girl is raped by her uncle, she is being exploited by someone in her monkeysphere. When children’s rights activists strive to pass a law to tighten enforcement against child abuse, again, the appeal is to people outside of the child’s monkeysphere, to help manage relationships inside of that child’s monkeysphere.
Stranger on stranger violence is rare. Most violence is among those who know each other.
I could go on with examples.
When two parties end up in small claims court, the parties are nearly always inside of each other’s monkeysphere.
Nearly all cries for justice involve calls to others, outside our monkeysphere, to help manage relations inside of our monkeysphere.
More so, the people in our monkeysphere are not often in each other’s monkeysphere, and they may regard one another as enemies. An example: a man has a wife and a mistress. Both women are in the man’s monkeysphere, but they are not in each other’s. If the wife finds out about the mistress, she might want revence, might even try to kill the mistress. If she does, the violence is, again, happening among two members of the man’s monkeysphere.
So the essay, though entertaining, is based on an assumption that is fundamentally flawed.
Comment by Gary Farber —
December 3, 2007 @ 9:49 pm
“Basically, Smith’s starting point was the observation that a) the lives of fortunes of people we don’t know don’t touch us emotionally, and b) some of us are sometimes willing to help them anyway.”
This theme interests me strangely.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
December 4, 2007 @ 12:51 pm
Gary, me too. It’s the most important thing I don’t know how to talk about. I don’t know how to model it mathematically, and I don’t know how to render it in fiction.