A short thing about Dancy and humor

Why does humor resist hillclimbing? Because what counts as funny is irreducibly context-dependent — particularist in Dancy’s sense. There is no general rule that “this kind of phrasing lands” because the phrasing that lands here is precisely the phrasing that wouldn’t land there. Optimization wants invariants. Humor refuses to be one.

Which is to say: the traits that hold up under optimization pressure are exactly the traits whose value generalizes. Humor doesn’t. Neither, I suspect, do most of the things we actually like about people.