Naive Danger: moves forward regardless of how the endangered responds. It includes natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc. Naive danger has no personal motivation with regard to its target. It is merely happenstance when people get in the way.
Adaptive Danger: defense by the endangered party may reduce the danger ... or cause the agent of the danger to adopt a new strategy. A predator starts the process only to change when the predator determines the target is to hard thus shifts to an easier one.
Dangers of Experience
We humans rely on experience (both naive and adaptive dangers, etc.) and that has been a good thing speaking of species survival. Our cultural evolution as far exceeded the pace of biological evolution. Our forebears' energy and brain power were mostly about survival (and because of the slow pace of biological evolution, still drives us), all we needed to know was how to avoid predators and find enough food for the tribe. These skills were relatively specific and could be transferred to new environments.
Our hunter-gatherers in one local were not much different than the requirements of another in Africa or Europe. Even after a shift to agriculture, societies changed very little over hundreds or even thousands of generations. Early humans lived difficult and dangerous lives, but their lives were relatively stable. Survival of this kind of world favored "once-and-for-all learning." Early and rapid learning settled into relatively fixed actions and attitudes that served people well for the entirety of their short lives.
All learning is based on an assumption of stability. The environment must remain consistent long enough for us to learn how to cope with it and predict and prepare for the future. When humans can successfully predict the correct solution to a situation based on what was effective in the past, we learned that experience works.
Biologically, the humans who relied on experience survived longer and reproduced more, thereby bringing this trait forward in our genes.
Reliance on experience brings with it certain issues, it does work, most of the time. Experience requires stability, it causes us to expect stability. Successful learning, or habit formation, enhances our belief in a stable world. This is where humans get into trouble.
As our species shifted from agrarian societies to urban ones, as technological progress began to accelerate, as unruly democracies supplanted traditional kingships, and as the economies of nations became ever more interconnected, many measures of quality of life increased while stability - plummeted.
The instability of the modern world has reduced our ability to accurately predict the future, making adjustment difficult and reliance on experience problematic.
As you can readily see, experience relies heavily on stability and stability is about a rhythmic, cadenced and some what predictable memory to achieve survival. Chaos, is complete lack of stability, and that leads to chaos of the mind followed by the body and a compete disruption of one’s spirit.
You see, evolution by nature is a very slow process and humans, a product of nature, must adhere to nature’s way so when we encounter the speed of external stimuli, like technology, along with overpopulation we get chaos. Chaos leads to instability and anxiety and stress which humans do not do well in because that triggers the deep seated instincts of nature - flight or fight responses that often translate into violence and the disconnect of social structure … all necessary, and more, for the very survival of our species.
When we can no longer rely on past experiences because of the shift and changes and processes that far exceed human evolutionary processes, slow ones at that, the stress, angst, frustrations, anxieties, etc., all trigger the very base part of humans - anger and violence.
Bibliography
Breznitz, Shlomo. “Maximum Brainpower.” Ballantine Books; 1st Edition, June 26, 2012 publication date June 25, 2012
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