From: Smigrodzki, Rafal (SmigrodzkiR@msx.upmc.edu)
Date: Thu Jun 06 2002 - 11:35:42 MDT
-----Original Message-----
From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky [mailto:sentience@pobox.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2002 9:11 PM
To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: Re: group-based judgement
Emlyn O'regan wrote:
>
> > ERROR 514: group selection hypothesized
>
> Maybe. I would have said it was individual behaviour selected for in the
> context that there is always a group.
>
> Should I have replaced phrases such as "many societies have evolved to..."
> with "many individual behaviours, which collectively resemble a society,
> have evolved in the context of external social influences to...", and "it
> makes the society a nicer place to be" with "it improves what the
individual
> can expect of his/her social environment"?
It doesn't fix the logical problem, unless you can explain how the behaviors
which improve the social environment collectively also improve reproductive
fitness individually.
### It's true that over the long term the high-level social behaviors have
to affect reproductive fitness of individuals, or else they will be merely a
random drift, without influence on the important structures. Yet, if you try
to optimize your ability to understand, explain, and eventually manipulate
reality, it is very useful (or, as Mr Spock might say, only logical) to
apply concepts like memetic evolution, and group selection. A calculator can
be described in terms of electrons and atoms, but for practical engineering
purposes an explanation on the level of logic gates and maybe even a high
level programming language is better.
It's interesting what Emlyn wrote about societies evolving to be "nicer".
Maybe there are fundamental (or at least locally important) constraints on
the emotional structures compatible with long-term survival. Shaping the
high-level social organization to accomodate emotional needs of the
constituent sentient units might offer benefits not apparent in an analysis
on the individual level, for example by reducing anxiety and allowing a
higher frequency of creative and non-conformist behaviors (ultimately
leading to improved robustness and success of the society and its parts). An
exact explanation of the mechanism connecting the two levels is not even
necessary, as long as there *is* a good correlation.
Logic(broadly speaking) is about putting the biggest amount of purified
truth in as few words as possible, and high-level concepts can be the
destillate of most important ideas.
Rafal
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