From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jun 22 2001 - 10:43:22 MDT
Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
> Spike Jones wrote:
> >
> > In a small town environment, I agree this notion has merit. In a
> > place like this, it is impractical to trust, since you cannot know the
> > reputations of the persons with which one must deal every day.
>
> Spike, big cities are not a new thing, they have been around for
> thousands of years prior to the invention of the credit agency.
> Landlords have been renting, public utilities have been operating, and
> horse traders, general stores, and outfitters have been financing
> purchases for thousands of years as well.
Mike, big cities *are* a new thing. The ten thousand years since the
invention of agriculture is not really an evolutionarily significant
amount of time; at least, I know of no evidence that any adaptation has
occurred in that time. It is almost certainly not enough time for complex
functional adaptation to occur. At most, any existing variance in the
population, at the time of transition to agriculture, would have been
"used up" - in the form of the population moving to one extreme - wherever
that variance suddenly impacted survival in an agricultural society. Thus
it is likely that we are, today, as well-suited to agriculture as the very
best of the hunter-gatherers would have been, but no better than that.
Your reflex reactions will still be those suited to a hunter-gatherer
tribe of a couple of hundred individuals.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:08:15 MST