Comic #5195: modules

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Description

Here’s the text from the comic:

Panel 1: Person 1: "I think if I became a primatologist and studied chimps, it’d change my view of humans." Person 2: "I bet I’d believe humans have more hard-wired traits than I currently do. I bet I’d see more human behaviors as explicit status-seeking."

Panel 2: Person 1: "So, logically, in my own brain I should just implement those perspective shifts without having to go through the trip to Africa and the years of study." Person 2: "The problem is I’m adding a mental module based on a half-informed guess, so I’d probably overcorrect. I might have the basic insight but none of the nuances."

Panel 3: Person 1: "The really freaky part is that this is probably true of every field I know about." Person 2: "I probably have thousands of mental modules created from what I imagine I would think if I knew what I was talking about!"

Panel 4: Person 1: "We all do this! We walk around all day with big heads filled with broken modules!" Person 2: "We make buildings, we start wars, we have babies, we go to space, we tell other people they’re definitely wrong, but we know less than nothing! We know heaps and heaps of anti-facts!"

Panel 5: Scene of two silhouettes against a starry sky.

Panel 6: Person 1: "All of what we say or seem is but a crappy-built machine." Person 2: "I know you’re riffing on Poe but I honestly can’t remember anything else in that poem." Person 1: "Beautiful, right?"

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