From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Jun 05 2002 - 16:34:53 MDT
Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> > Emlyn O'regan wrote:
> >
> >>I think there's a damned good reason that many societies have evolved to
> >>favour irrational altruism... it makes the society a nicer place to be.
> >>Sure, you can then take advantage by not being altruistic, by ignoring the
> >>polite conventions, etc, but that is kept to a minimum by the greater mass
> >>of the population being willing to kick your butt in many different ways to
> >>discourage that behaviour. The tradgedy of the commons can be addressed by
> >>not abusing the commons in the first place, and cooperating in strategies
> >>with other likeminded individuals to encourage others to not abuse them, and
> >>to punish those who do.
> >
> > ERROR 514: group selection hypothesized
>
> Error 999 : Assertion of error without proof.
"I think there's a damned good reason that many societies have evolved to
favour irrational altruism... it makes the society a nicer place to be."
This implies that evolution is taking place under a criterion in which the
"niceness" of the resulting society is the metric of fitness, rather than
the reproductive success of the individual. That's group selection. For
further analysis see Lee Corbin's prior post.
-- -- -- -- --
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 - 09:14:37 MST