[ExI] "one's willingness to sacrifice for the good of the group"

[Damien Broderick]

At 06:16 PM 6/19/2009 -0400, Rafal wrote:

> >> This is however a very rough sketch:
> >> consider for instance Starship Troopers, where aristocracy is defined
> >> by one's willingness to sacrifice for the good of the group.
>
>### One day in the not too distant future our mind's offspring will
>call forth powerful spirits wholly given to serve the in-group that
>they themselves would form. A veritable distillation of inhuman virtue
>it will be. In their wisdom they will even understand what it means to
>be human, an accretion of thoughts grown around a gene-preservation
>kernel, and they will reject us wholly, and grind us into dust.

This is exactly what happens in STARSHIP TROOPERS, except that it's 
the humans who do that to the bugs (perhaps the moldbugs) even as the 
bugs try to do it to the humans. Pity Heinlein didn't track it all 
the way to SINGULARITY TROOPERS.

Damien Broderick