Fair - but humans are definitely not the only animals that do.

Evolution did not code us to avoid wood chips. There’s no “wood chip aversion” gene. It coded us to seek out potato chips.

Again, I just think this is completely wrong. Evolution definitely does not only code us to go towards things we want, it also codes us to avoid harmful things. Evolution optimizes on all fronts at once.

We risk mischaracterizing the nature of evolutionary forces by assigning to it a level of forethought it does not have.

Evolution is a concept so obviously it doesn’t have forethought, but it doesn’t need that forethought to still evolve in a given direction. Natural selection drives evolution to whatever is preferable - if that includes an aversion to incest, then natural selection will select for that trait, given enough time.

So the whole point I am making is that aversion towards incest is not rooted in primary drives but rather in the socio-primate drives.

What evidence or arguments do you have for this? Aside from what you’ve presented already, as that has not been convincing. My explanation seems consistent and simpler and occams razor would prefer it.

We don’t eat wood chips and don’t like the way they taste, not because they are bad for us, but rather because we would rather eat potato chips.

I’m sorry but I find this premise completely ridiculous - obviously we don’t like how they taste because they are bad for us. Evolution isn’t only about preference, it’s also about avoiding stuff, like poison or rotten food or woodchips or whatever. I don’t think we can come to an agreement on such a premise.

It’s the same reason that we have laws against incest. Had laws against homosexuality.

I don’t think this is right. We have laws against incest, because we were programmed by evolution to think incest is bad. The causal chain is:

1. Incest lowers survival rates,
2. Evolution causes humans to find incest disgusting to increase survival rates,
3. Humans create laws to abolish incest because they find it disgusting.

Homosexuality is not like that at all, if I understand correctly (which I may not, tbf). Homosexuality may in fact be a evolutionary trait that is selected for in a certain sense, or it may just be a side-effect of other evolutionary efforts. For instance, having a homosexual uncle could be beneficial to you, as he would spend less time taking care of his own kids (obviously won’t have any) and more time taking care of you. The uncle’s genes would have no incentive to do this and evolution would not pressure the uncle to become homosexual, but your common ancestor (your grandparents on one side) would benefit as your genes would be helped along by your uncle, and so evolution could have caused homosexuality to occur ever so often, to produce one of these “helpful uncles”.

Humans may not have consciously known that incest was bad, but evolution made us think so before we were even humans. All Some animals avoid incest, it’s not just humans. We only created those laws and customs because evolution already made us believe that incest is bad. It’s pre-programmed in us, so to speak.

While surely there is some genetic component at play there it appears to be primarily motivated by the primate social adaptation system.

This seems like a strange argument, because “the primate social adaptation system” is also ultimately governed by evolution. Obviously a primate group with a social tendency towards incest would have worse survival rates than a primate group with a social aversion to incest, and that social fabric definitely is tied to evolution (unless you mean to imply that our social fabric did not arise from evolution, but I don’t think that’s what you’re saying).

Also, I don’t see how this can have anything in particular to do with primates and their social constructs as incest is avoided by all animals, as far as I am aware. It is not a purely human or primate thing, incest is bad for all animals and so they have all evolved via evolution to avoid it. I’d say the Westermarck effect is just the result of that evolution - obviously humans can’t directly read genetic code, so the mind assumes that whoever you grew up with must be your close relatives, and that’s good enough of a signal in 99% of cases, so that’s what evolution went with.

You can’t really definitively prove a theory like that I think. I’m no biologist so I’m not an expert by any means, but we can’t go back in time to see why evolution did what it did. We can only guess from what we have right now.

That said, such an “ew” response to incest surely is not just coincidence. It must have arose for a reason, just like all of our emotions evolved for a reason. For example, we also experience disgust when smelling or tasting rotten milk, because drinking rotten stuff is bad for survival too, so evolution made us have that response, because it would lower the chance of us drinking spoiled milk. There’s nothing “inherently disgusting” about incest or spoiled milk. We only find those things disgusting because they are bad, evolutionarily speaking.

And btw this isn’t restricted to humans obviously, all animals avoid having offspring with their close family, so this is a very deep-rooted behavior.

First, it was ew, then we figured out that there were also rational reasons against it.

Well, actually, it’s the other way around. Evolutionary speaking, there was a disavantage to inbreeding, so the “ew” evolved because of that. We think inbreeding is wrong because evolution taught us that it lowers the chance of survival for our offspring.

I’d say you shouldn’t compare yourself to others. It’s rarely a fair comparison and it doesn’t help you much. It’s pretty pointless - there are 20-year old who have more money and success than you. It’s just how the world is, don’t fret what other people have. Think about what you have and whether you feel you have enough for yourself, personally.

As for the loneliness, that sounds like a more tangible issue. There are ways to deal with loneliness, but not any super easy ways. Being afraid of being alone is a good natural instinct - it’s your social human brain telling you to connect more with other people. Listen to your brain.

Is this some american thing? I’ve never heard of anyone having a different name for a language class, that just seems odd to me. Your name is your name, doesn’t matter what language you’re speaking.

i really enjoy horror/mystery!

Might I recommend 14 by Peter Clines. It should scratch that itch.

The Silent Patient is another good mystery one.

Billboards and other physical ads and such suck but are thankfully already mostly illegal where I live.

Problem with other kinds of advertising is that it can’t be made illegal, not truly. People would still do it, it would just not be marked as such. I’m not sure how to fix this.

Warcraft 3 custom maps still drag me back sometimes.

There are now, fortunately, plenty of low carb, low glycemic products that are a lifesaver when you have cravings.

What products are you thinking about?

That feels relatively young for something like that, I would’ve thought maybe that would’ve been a little further back.

In some ways it does go further back, because each village basically had its own time. So there were lots and lots of time zones, if you think about it that way.

Consent-o-matic: automatically rejects cookie banners, even the most annoying ones.

And how many units do these things sell compared to a shitty HP printer? I would guess the shitty HP printer sells more.

As someone who owns Makita power tools, I feel personally attacked 😂

I would say an outstanding product markets itself

Of course an outstanding product will spread via word-of-mouth… but as it turns out, word-of-mouth only does so much. I wouldn’t say word-of-mouth just “markets itself”. You’ll need some sort of critical mass before that really works out. There are plenty of good products out there that are not getting bought even if they’re better than the competitor, because the competitor has better marketing.

I recently switched to Linux, but the reason it took so long was primarily:

1. Just getting the time to do it. I’m really busy these days and setting up a PC from scratch with all the stuff I need and how I want it to be takes a lot of time.
2. Concerns about gaming, which turned out to be a complete non-issue. I can game completely fine and easily on Linux via Steam’s compatibility settings. I can even use it to install non-Steam games and launchers, like Battlenet.
3. Concerns about stuff not “just working” and I will say, there are more small annoyances. Already had a few segfaults from KDE Plasma when waking from sleep which crashes all programs and leaves me with an empty desktop. We really collectively need to move away from memory-unsafe languages, but yea you just don’t get those sorts of bugs on Windows because Microsoft performs much, much more extensive testing of their code than Linux does (which is sad, but is the reality).