That's... not how evolution works at all? I almost want to think this is satire.

Modern humanity hasn't existed for an eye blink compared to the everything that led up til now, so there's two kinds of people:

- People who understand we all have these blind spots and understand account for them

- People who don't even realize how often they run into these blind spot.

You're much better off learning to be the former, but I'm sure it feels good to proclaim from on high how you're just sloppy for not checking every dialog you come across...

That is exactly how evolution works. Now if you wanted to argue that evolutionary pressure no longer applied due to modern medicine and safety regulations... you'd still be wrong, but at least you'd look less silly. So there's two kinds of people:

- People who've heard about about the marshmallow impulse control study + the effects that medieval-plagues/cousin-marriage has had on the human gene pool

- People who say silly things like "Modern humanity hasn't existed for an eye blink compared to.."

You're much better off reading a long term study on the life trajectories of people who had their impulse control quantified as children - spoiler: they do not do well in the modern world relative to everyone else enjoying a reduced probability of incarceration.

There's an incentive to ignore the trivial BS that other humans relentlessly waste your time with. Reading EULAs and watching ads are not the path to success. People are trained to ignore information constantly.

Intelligent apes surrounded by wiggling bushes stop paying attention to wiggling bushes and get munched on by a predator eventually, no?

> Reading EULAs and watching ads are not the path to success.

Agreed, but unlike a login prompt, those things are there for the benefit of others - not you. To continue the analogy: blowing through a login (or changing traffic signal, regardless of color) is like an ape exposing his belly to any silhouette vaguely shaped like a trusted member of the troop.

> ..stop paying attention to wiggling bushes..

Dunno, he could also have a breakdown - lab rats are known to practically lay down and die when you suddenly reverse the role of external stimuli in a system of punishment and reward. But I don't see how that fits here, the user isn't being plagued by nonsensical login prompts constantly springing into existence.

My point was just that whatever mental heuristics we use to decide whether information is worth parsing or not are built up over our lives. As with all such approximating things, there is trade-off between false positives and false negatives. The large amount of junk information one encounters in modernity could lead to aggressively-tuned heuristics, resulting in more false positives relative to negatives, effectively sending useful information to a mental spam folder.

And now I want to listen to Running up that Tree, by Ape Bush

You got me, I thought for a moment that I accidentally channeled Weird Al instead of Pearl Jam's Do the Evolution.