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[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md

diff --git a/content/drafts/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md b/content/drafts/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md
index 0f36741..1cbd4d9 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md
+++ b/content/drafts/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md
@@ -16,13 +16,15 @@ A few students inquire further: but that's a _contingent_ fact about the distrib
 
 To which it is replied: yes, well, there's a reason the ascension of Earth-that-was would be sparked by the _H. sapiens_ line of hominids some millions of years later, rather than by the Plain Speech subspecies 9792 and 9794.
 
-Another adaptive infromation-processing instinct in subspecies 9792 and 9794 was a taste for novelty. Not all information is equally valuable. A slight variation on a known secret was less valuable than a completely original secret the likes of which had never been hitherto suspected. (Among pre-intelligent creatures generally, novelty-seeking instincts are _more_ convergent than secrecy instincts, but with considerable variation in strength depending on the derivatives of the distribution of adaptive problems; Dripler's Pre-Intelligent Novelty-Seeking Scale puts subspecies 9792 and 9794 in the 76th percentile on this dimension.)
+Another adaptive infromation-processing instinct in subspecies 9792 and 9794 was a taste for novelty. Not all information is equally valuable. A slight variation on a known secret was less valuable than a completely original secret the likes of which had never been hitherto suspected. Among pre-intelligent creatures generally, novelty-seeking instincts are _more_ convergent than secrecy instincts, but with considerable variation in strength depending on the derivatives of the landscape of adaptive problems; Dripler's Pre-Intelligent Novelty-Seeking Scale puts subspecies 9792 and 9794 in the 76th percentile on this dimension.
 
 The coincidental conjunction of a friendship-forming instinct, a novel-secret-seeking instinct, _and_ a nearby distinct subspecies with similar properties, led to some unusual behavior patterns. Given the different survival-relevant opportunities in their respective habitats, each subspecies predominantly hoarded _different_ secrets: the secret of how to jump and land on the thinner branches of the reedy pilot tree was of little relevance to the daily activity of a west-valley ground squirrel, but the secret of how to bury nuts without making it obvious that the ground had been upturned was of little import to an east-valley tree squirrel.
 
-But the squirrels' _novelty-seeking instincts_ didn't track such distinctions. Secrets from one subspecies thus functioned as a superstimulus to the other subspecies, on account of being so exotic, thus making cross-species friendships 
+But the squirrels' _novelty-seeking instincts_ didn't track such distinctions. Secrets from one subspecies thus functioned as a superstimulus to the other subspecies, on account of being so exotic, thus making "special" cross-species friendships particularly desirable and sought-after.
 
-[TODO: but species differences also make them frustrating]
+At the same time, subspecies differences in social instincts also made them particularly _frustrating_, as friendships: for example, west-valley ground squirrels tended to have a more anxious disposition (reflecting the need to be alert to predators on open terrain), whereas east-valley tree squirrels tended to have a more rambunctious nature.
+
+[TODO: frustration cont'd ...]
 
 At this, some extremely naïve novice students of historical mammology inquire: [TODO ...]