From 9e5e0b883d9126396b4b05613597c16cd55cd989 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2022 23:20:19 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] publish "Friendship Practices" --- ...-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md | 7 +++---- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) rename content/{drafts => 2022}/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md (88%) diff --git a/content/drafts/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md b/content/2022/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md similarity index 88% rename from content/drafts/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md rename to content/2022/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md index e433fd7..74f93a2 100644 --- a/content/drafts/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md +++ b/content/2022/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels.md @@ -1,16 +1,15 @@ Title: Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels -Date: 2022-08-30 5:00 +Date: 2022-09-25 23:20 Category: fiction Tags: epistemic horror, deniably allegorical -Status: draft In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, in the Valley of Plain Speech in the hinterlands beyond the Lake of Ambiguous Fortune, there lived a population of pre-intelligent squirrels. Historical mammologists have classified them into two main subspecies: the west-valley ground squirrels and the east-valley tree squirrels—numbers 9792 and 9794 in Umi's grand encyclopædia of Plain Speech creatures, but not necessarily respectively: I remember the numbers, but I can never remember which one is which. -Like many pre-intelligent creatures, both subspecies of Plain Speech Valley squirrels were highly social animals, with adaptations for entering stable repeated-cooperation relations with conspecifics: _friendships_ being the technical term. Much of the squirrels' lives concerned the sharing of information about how to survive: how to fashion simple tools for digging up nuts, the best running patterns for fleeing predators, what kind of hole or tree offered the best shelter, _&c._ Possession of such information was valuable, and closely guarded: squirrels would only share secrets with their closest friends. Maneuvering to be told secrets, and occasionally to spread fake secrets to rivals, was the subject of much drama and intrigue in their lives. +Like many pre-intelligent creatures, both subspecies of Plain Speech Valley squirrels were highly social animals, with adaptations for entering stable repeated-cooperation relations with conspecifics: _friendships_ being the technical term. Much of the squirrels' lives concerned the sharing of information about how to survive: how to fashion simple tools for digging up nuts, the best running patterns for fleeing predators, what kind of hole or tree offered the best shelter, _&c._ Possession of such information was valuable, and closely guarded: squirrels would only share secrets with their closest friends and family. Maneuvering to be told secrets, and occasionally to spread fake secrets to rivals, was the subject of much drama and intrigue in their lives. At this, some novice students of historical mammology inquire: why be secretive? Surely if the squirrels were to pool their knowledge together, and build on each other's successes, they could accumulate ever-greater mastery over their environment, and possibly even spark their world's ascension?! -To which it is replied: evolution wouldn't necessarily select for that. Survival-relevant opportunities are often rivalrous: two squirrels can't both eat the same nut, or hide in the same one-squirrel-width hole. Or as it was put in a joke popular amongst the west-valley ground squirrels (according to Harrod's post-habilitation thesis on pre-intelligence in the days of auld lang syne): I don't need to outrun the _predator_, I just need to outrun my _conspecifics_. Thus, secrecy instincts turned out to be adaptive: a squirrel keeping a valuable secret to itself and its friends would gain more fitness than a squirrel who shared its knowledge freely with anysquirrel who could listen. +To which it is replied: evolution wouldn't necessarily select for that. Survival-relevant opportunities are often rivalrous: two squirrels can't both eat the same nut, or hide in the same one-squirrel-width hole. As it was put in a joke popular amongst the west-valley ground squirrels (according to Harrod's post-habilitation thesis on pre-intelligence in the days of auld lang syne): I don't need to outrun the _predator_, I just need to outrun my _conspecifics_. Thus, secrecy instincts turned out to be adaptive: a squirrel keeping a valuable secret to itself and its friends would gain more fitness than a squirrel who shared its knowledge freely with anysquirrel who could listen. A few students inquire further: but that's a _contingent_ fact about the distribution of squirrel-survival-relevant opportunities in the Valley of of Plain Speech in the days of auld lang syne, right? A different distribution of adaptive problems might induce a less secretive psychology? -- 2.17.1