Re: group-based judgement

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Jun 05 2002 - 19:10:40 MDT


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.

-- -- -- -- --
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