God, dominion, and delusion
How heuristic shortcuts give humans excuses to justify the unjustifiable
Our mental blind spots cause pointless human suffering
I need to start this essay with a definition.
Heuristics: Heuristics are mental shortcuts that can facilitate problem-solving and probability judgments. These strategies are generalizations, or rules-of-thumb, reduce cognitive load, and can be effective for making immediate judgments. However, they often result in irrational or inaccurate conclusions.1
Heuristics can be valuable in saving time when making life’s choices, but they can also result in disastrous personal and group outcomes. This essay is about the heuristics that led to global colonization by Europeans of a huge swath of the rest of the world. Most it is American focused because that’s where I have lived for most of my adult life and because that is where I realized how common it is for large groups of humans to inflict immense suffe…
