I want to start a science church. (Hear me out.) I don’t even need a building. It would meet one day a week (I’m thinking Wednesday.) At the nearest information exchange to all members of the group at the time of the meeting. (I’m thinking noon.) And each week one person would get up and give a talk about something about science that inspired them, something about science that they discovered that means something to them and to humanity. Something that reminds them that we are all on the same side ultimately an the thing that makes us special is this mainly.
Category: Sociology
Why does selfishness beat altruism within groups?
“Why” to me typically implies purpose but I suspect you’re asking a social science question which is actually a “how” question. If I were to answer “why” I’d say “because the universe sucks.”
But if you’re actually asking something like “How does selfishness confer advantage in groups?” My response is that a cooperative group is defined by denial or at least delay of fulfillment of individual need in favor of group needs.
A good example is planting seeds instead of eating them. If I’m given the town’s supply of grain to plant but instead I make bread for myself I thrive and everyone else starves.
It seems to be an intrinsic facet of the universe that exploitative behavior is inherently profitable in certain contexts.
(Which is why capitalism ultimately will need leg braces: http://underlore.com/one-possible-solution/ )
Think about 3 kids growing up alone in the woods. One kid is selfish, one kid is apathetic, one kid is generous.
As they grow the generous kid will give away more of his food, the selfish kid will steal/take, and the apathetic kid will have his food stolen but also get free food from the generous kid. The selfish kid being better fed will get bigger leading to superiority in those contexts while the other two would wither.
The selfish kid dominates within the group as advantage breeds further advantage.
Now imagine a another group of 3 and these kids act as a team. Economy of scale grants these kids an effective food supply (and everything else) of 4 or 5 kids so that each of them is larger than the average of the first group. They fight. The 3 coordinated kids beat the larger leader of the first group and absorb the other two kids.
The sharing culture beat the selfish culture, but only when the cultures had the opportunity to clash.
I’m sure I could have explained that better, but then again that’s what you get for asking me instead of Google 🙂
Because game theory:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdk
http://adamcurtisfilms.blogspot.com/
Because selfishness:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/evolving-robots-learn-lie-hide-resources-each-other
Dear Politicians
“If they succeed, millions of senior citizens, working families, disabled veterans and children will suffer.” ~Senator Bernie Sanders
Please stop doing that. I’m tired of being reminded that I’m a second class citizen because I’ve:
- Not aged sufficiently
- Been unable to find a job I can do
- Not knocked a girl up
- Not been injured while trying to kill brown people on behalf of the 1%’s profit margins
- Survived my childhood
I’m tired of being punished for my age, gender, race, and frankly GOOD choices. No one cut me a check to go with my penis or handed me a white collar job to match my skin. So please quit acting like I’m a monocle wearing slave owner just because you want votes.
A “voluntaryist” society is a contradiction in terms.
(“voluntaryist” is the dumbest most redundant sounding word ever. Why can’t they just call it a voluntary society like they understand grammar and syntax? But at least I can honestly claim to have independently invented “Volitionism/Volitionist” 🙂 oh well, anyway…)
A “voluntaryist society”…
I find it amazing that people can engage in this level of doublethink. I say doublethink because ignorance alone simply can’t explain it when in fact the ignorance can be cured in a single logically obvious sentence.
The whole point of society is to exploit economies of scale, and you can’t, physically, logically, as in square-circle can’t, have a society of true individuals without some degree of hierarchical control over the individual by the society.
You must do one or the other or your society will be destroyed from within eventually:
1. Edit people in some way such that their desires/will do not induce society destroying actions.
2. Constrain people with such desires/will from doing harm.
The End!
All this claptrap about systems of dispute resolution makes the fatal assumption that there IS a resolution all parties can agree on. But reality is bound by no such edict.
It’s like a meta-myth, a belief that the concept of irreconcilable differences is a myth.
Can society be made more free? Yes, obviously.
Can it be improved by additional freedoms? Yes.
Can punishment itself be feasibly removed from society? Yes.
Can a society be constructed that gives maximum feasible respect to the sanctity of volition? You’re goddamn right it can.
HOWEVER!
Can everybody get what they want? > No. <
I’m so tired of this debate. It’s virtually identical to debating creationists.
Libertarians of this extreme are little more than right wingers who want to build a society around the excuses they need to allow their compassion to atrophy entirely, while having their ego stroked for being good people at the same time.
http://underlore.com/islanders/ (And its links, which are admittedly months of reading.)
The price of civility and the Carlin Paradox.
The truth is I’ve respected my opponents so much that they lost interest.
I used to be much more inclined to tearing into minds individually. Google only made it easier because I quickly had access to surface personal details, and I would use them to attack credibility and character as I was attacking ideas or false logic. Which would of course enrage my opponents and make them easier prey.
Later I realized this was logically bankrupt and a bit of a cheat, as well as an admission of weakness on the part of my position, because by distracting them with rage I was saying that at their peak ability I might fail to defend my point. It was like getting someone drunk so you could win a debate.
Also it really didn’t matter who they were, because they were not their ideas and assertions individually. Thus I was attacking the messenger.
In learning these things and changing tactics accordingly I lost my audience, pro and con. Pro because many I suspect just liked watching me get my claws wet, and con because when they weren’t being goaded to froth mouthed rage they realized, before I did obviously, that the most useful tactic would be to ignore me since I have no social status that labels me as being worthy of attention. But there is no social status that conveys such worth. You’ll find that it’s not who you are the empowers what you say it’s a combination of what you say and who you are.
It’s what I’ve come to think of as the Carlin paradox. In order to gain an audience one must adopt a label or persona that annihilates the power to change things. The more credibility I attempt to garner for myself the more easily my position is assimilated and thus de-clawed. Real power can only be exercised from the shadows. Bernays understood this which is why despite his parties, no one among there rank and file could spot him on the street.
For a quick example of how sober professional efforts at amassing social respect are none the less impotent in the face of trying to actually get meaningful attention I need only point here: http://www.ae911truth.org/ Their collective credibility is quite good, but what they are saying regardless of veracity is no match for its opposition.
I call it the Carlin paradox because he wasn’t a comedian so much as a sociologist on a mission later in life and the only way he could get an audience was to don the jester cap and surrender all chance of actually influencing social policy. There really is no way to transition this audience either. Just look at Al Franken. Promptly declawed/assimilated/marginalized.
“I used to believe that any theory, once published with supporting evidence, then became open to discussion and debate. But I’ve learned how envious, vindictive, and vicious the academic community can be. They’re swine. Polite swine, but swine none the less. Convincing the world fairly to consider a new idea takes patience, perseverance, and a willingness to fight the good fight in any media forum one can find.” ~Dr. Timothy Flyte, Phantoms
What Dr Flyte didn’t realize was that “any media forum” which has an audience won’t have any credibility.
There are only two forces that change the course of human policy. Environment and volition engineering.
Technology is our only hope, because PR cannot be used for good by its nature.
Much like television. Its very structure lends itself most easily to misuse. In many real ways a gun is less dangerous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television
“What’s wrong with this country, Marty? Money. You taught me that. Evil defense contractors had it, noble causes did not. Politicians are bought and sold like so much chattel. Our problems multiply. Pollution, crime, drugs, poverty, disease, hunger, despair; we throw gobs of money at them! The problems always get worse. Why is that? Because money’s most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don’t have it.” ~Cosmo, Sneakers
And all that is why no one is reading this.
Open Response to Words of Encouragement
I appreciate your words of encouragement, and your heart is clearly in the right place but I’ve misspent my life learning to debate since I was 16.
When I got access to the Internet the very first thing I did with it was find a place to debate what I considered to be at the time the most important issue facing humanity, religion.
I never stopped. I simply changed topics and my views as information forced me to evolve.
See, I actually don’t feel that strongly about most topics by default. I realize now I have a nature and nurture trait allowing me to be critically open minded. All it takes to change my position is fact.
Establishing that fact and what that might require depends on the subject of course but I’m always willing to revise my position in favor of reality.
Ironically my desire to climb into my filter bubble is proof of this fact.
I am admitting that I’ve wasted my life for the most part laboring under a false assumption. That people from their opinions rationally and then invest emotionally, when in fact they invest emotionally first and then rationalize that emotional position, regardless of facts.
I’ve been called flavors of autistic my entire life. I realize now that this emotional difference in me is what allows for critical thinking.
In effect I’ve been writing for humanity thinking humanity operated like off duty scientists when in fact if I wanted to influence humanity I should have utterly abandoned logical rigor and instead learned music and public relations.
I realize that controversy is not the opposite of persuasion. But look at my blog, look at my book. I’m not being opposed, I’m being ignored. That’s the real opposite of persuasion.
I and my work are non factors.
Maybe in the distant future when this era’s Internet is downloaded and parsed by an AI, my memetic legacy if any will be noted and recorded, that is I’ll be recognized as having gone on record ahead of the curve, assuming the future plays out remotely like I expect, but little else.
These things I’ve written about will come to pass, or will be taken care of being of people far better at influencing the mob than I am, people who already agree with me and don’t need my logic to inform them.
People like you for example. Clearly you have more patience and more people skills. I can’t even drive or make a phone call. All I can do is write and I’ve been writing the wrong things, especially considering my social position, or lack there of.
I have ~1000 followers on G+and around 500 daily visitors to my blog but 99% of my comments come from a group of readers who I can count on my fingers. A group that tellingly doesn’t even include my family. Though in their defense we speak in person.
The people who agree with me don’t feel the need to read my work because they agree, the people who don’t have no desire to challenge their views, and if they do they’ll pick a more meaningful socially opponent than me.
The sad fact is when it comes to the expression of a fact or piece of logic, it really doesn’t matter what is said, but rather who is saying it. This fact is sad because if I had believed that when I was 16 maybe I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to explain the obvious to the oblivious.
There are over a billion English speaking people on earth. And exactly one person has downloaded my book on smashwords and no one has reviewed my book on amazon.
I’ve gotten one outsider comment on my blog in the last 6 months, and the ads on my blog made literally less than a penny’s worth of bitcoin in a similar amount of time.
The offhand remarks of even the most vapid super model or brain damaged athlete or drug addled rock star influence humanity more than my entire body of work.
My only consolation is that being open minded has allowed me to join sides with the winning team (technology.) The world will turn out as I expect or better or I’ll be too dead to care. Though I must admit it probably will have nothing to do with my efforts.
I am rebuilding my life and trying to recover from or work around my disabilities. I’m in my 30s but I feel about 15 in terms of life progress, only I’ve already had my chances to build social circles and accidentally start a family.
Any progress I make now is going to be fiscal or deeply personal.