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How is Man Better Than Beast? IQ or I Will
Should you bank on being clever, or is persistence the ultimate key to success in life? We discuss why persistence enabled early humans to hunt successfully and how valuing persistence over intelligence has shaped our lives and values. We talk about using incentives and shaming to instill the importance of persistence in kids, how persistence helps you roll the dice more times, stories of persisting even when others laugh, and more.
Simone Collins: [00:00:00] the thing that helps persistence and endurance beat out cleverness is that you have, you know, a billion rolls of the dice. So even if the dice is loaded against you, eventually you're going to roll something great.
Malcolm Collins: People who are persistent get mini dice rolls. In D& D terms, or Baldur's Gate terms, it's the difference between having high stats and rolling with advantage.
Rolling with advantage means you roll twice and then you take the highest roll. Whereas high stats just add a number to your role after the role and you would always rather role was advantage than have high stats. This is, this is just true for life, right? Like you can actually just have advantage on everything so long as you are willing to accept failure and try again and again be rejected again and again.
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: Malcolm, one thing I really appreciate about you is that you loved that my motto when we first met was repeated blunt force. Like you got it instantly and no one else. Yes. [00:01:00]
Malcolm Collins: I was like, oh, this is someone I want to marry, but I want to ask you a question because I want to know if you actually know this other than our intelligence as a species, which is just.
Off the charts. Do you know what other thing is almost holistically unique in humans?
Simone Collins: Endurance, right? Like long, long endurance hunting and whatnot that, that we've even really early humans did, which is why so many mega fauna have gone
Malcolm Collins: extinct. Yes. So, there are some African tribes that still do this and I'll see if I can find a video of it or something.
Cause it's insane to watch. So what they will do to hunt a deer or gazelle like in Africa, right? Is they'll just chase them.
And they just keep chasing them. They can run faster than people. Yes, to start. But, they just keep chasing them until the deer just falls over exhausted. They walk up to it and they break its neck.
These are the San people of the Kalahari Desert, the last tribe on earth to [00:02:00] use what some believe is the most ancient hunting technique of all, the persistence hunt. They run down.
The animals have taken fright.
They will concentrate on the bull. He will be carrying a heavy set of horns, and therefore will tire more quickly.
After hours of tracking, they've entered an almost trance like state of concentration.
At times, it's impossible to see any sign of the kudu's tracks, and the hunters must imagine the path it will have taken., they're now close enough for the next stage in the hunt. The chase.
Only one man will undertake it. Kuroe, the runner.
It's now a test of endurance. Who will collapse first, the man or the animal?
This was how men hunted before they had weapons. When a hunt had nothing more than his own physical endurance with which to gain his prize, running on two feet is more efficient over long [00:03:00] distances than running on four. A
man sweats from glands all over his. Body and so calls himself a kudu sweats much less and has to find shade if it's to cool down,
and a man has hands with which to carry water. So during the chase he can replenish the liquid, he loses as sweat
then the kudu collapses from sheer exhaustion.
Malcolm Collins: It's
Simone Col
Published on 2 years ago