Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Here's a potentially useful (if it really reflects reality as much as it seems to at first glance) or harmful (if it perpetuates a mistaken idea of how minds work) combination of a meme and a useful phrase to describe that meme: "chimping out".

Rowan T. Hamilton wrote in talk.bizarre back in 1999:

"[...] if you raise a human baby and chimpanzee baby in exactly the same environemnt, then the two infants progress intellectually at the same rate until a certain point. After this, the chimpanzee infant's progress rolls off, while the human infant continues on to whatever we call intelligence.

"I immediately recognized that this was a pattern I'd seen throughout my life. People 'chimp out'. That guy you knew in Junior High who ate locusts to gross chicks out and went on to be busted for child molestation - he chimped out at fourteen. That girl in highschool who got a job at the cineplex 8, and later became the manager. She chimped out seventeen.

"It's not a value judgement - it's a fact. I've had professors who obviously chimped out in their early thirties. Some people just stop learning, stop growing, at some age. They lock in, and lock out. I hope this never happens to me - hope it hasn't happened to me.'"

When I first read it, I thought it seemed to explain a lot, but wondered whether it was a) too simplistic, or b) just a new spin on a geek-superiority-complex. While I'm still not sure about either of those, the more I think about it, the more it does seem to fit many observed behaviours.

The rest of the thread contains, in addition to a good quote from merde, interesting musings on the effects of chimping-out or not chimping-out on long-term relationships, and the idea that one can sort of "stall" -- chimp out for a while but start growing again later.

I'm still pondering. But if you hear me say the phrase "chimped out" in the future, this is where it comes from.

(I saw a link to this someplace maybe a month or two ago -- probably in somebody else's journal -- and had been trying to decide whether it was something to comment on and post a link to (maybe in a "link sausage" entry). But I got sidetracked. Then a recent-ish thread on a mailing list made me think of it again; that it would explain something somebody else had just mentioned. But I didn't get around to finding it again, and now I've forgotten what thread that was in. Having just rolled around to this window in Opera on my Win95 box, I decided I had enough I wanted to say about it to post it as a separate entry, not as part of the next link-sausage.)