[ExI] EP posting from another list

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 11:57 AM, Ben Collins ben at bencollins.me
[lifeboatfoundation] <lifeboatfoundation at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
> Every day I feel more like an alien.

Know the feeling, for me it dates back to the late 50s.

> All these people with degrees and accomplishments and super-serious-sounding-speeches…
>
> Listen up, human beings,
>
> The truth is that war is stupid and everyone knows it, yet we stand around like asshat clowns who were born yesterday.

You are fundamentally wrong about war itself being stupid.  It is a
species wide trait, and such behavior does not become a species wide
trait without there being a damn good and rational reason at the gene
level as to why it evolved.  War behavior, as a response to certain
perceived environment conditions, is wired into human brains by
evolution.  I have been talking about this for a long time.  It's
something people don't want to accept.

Now it is entirely possible for behaviors that evolved long ago to
become maladaptive.  Plenty of examples, like mass charges into an
enemy when technology has advance to them having machine guns.

> Nuclear weapons are the stupidest thing that stupid could stupid.

> Every Single Human Besides Like Twelve Of Them: “War is stupid.  In particular, nuclear weapons are stupid. Go away."
>
> The Twelve: “Well, we like war.  And, you can’t do anything about it. Deal.”
>
> Billions of humans: “WWWWWWHhhhhhhyyyyyYYY???”

You are making another fundamental error, thinking that war is
something that happens from the top down.  That's just not the case.
The driver for war was and still is bottom up, really bottom up. Here
is what Azar Gat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azar_Gat says about it.

"In conclusion, let us understand more closely the evolutionary
calculus that can make the highly dangerous activity of fighting over
resources worthwhile. In our societies of plenty, it might be
difficult to comprehend how precarious people's subsistence in
pre-modern societies was (and still is). The spectre of hunger and
starvation always loomed over their heads. Affecting both mortality
and reproduction (the latter through human sexual appetite and women's
fertility), it constantly, in varying degrees, trimmed down their
numbers, acting in combination with disease. Thus, struggle over
resources was very often evolutionarily cost-effective."

A longer expansion of his can be found here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100530133845/http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf

snip
>
> I see failure after failure.

Which is about what you should expect when the nature of the problem
is not understood.

Unfortunately, while the EP approach leads to understanding, I have
not found it really useful to proposing solutions.

For example, the EP analysis of why the IRA went out of business is
that they lost the population support.  Why?  The local economy
started to improve faster than the population growth.  From EP models,
you expect that to reduce then finally shut off the spread and effect
of xenophobic memes.  The key here is "faster than the population
growth", improving income per capita. Population growth slowed down
because (for reasons not that well understood) the Irish women reduced
the number of kids they had, eventually to the European norm of
replacement that developed after WW II.  Again, lots of speculation,
no real understanding of why that happened, though educating women is
strongly correlated with small families.

If the EP model is right, then we can shut off the spread of
xenophobic memes (that lead in the direction of war) by improving the
prospects for higher income per capita.  It doesn't matter which, the
Chinese have done both.

It is hard see how this might happen to some cultures.  It does seem
to be happening to Persian/Islamic culture.  The women there have the
birth rate coming down to replacement.  It's hard to imagine it
happening soon enough to matter to Arab/Islamic culture where in some
places women have a status not much different from slaves.

The other side, improving world wide income by cheap energy from space
or something else, I work on.  But it's not likely to have much of an
effect (except on perceptions) before war takes off and seriously
reduces the population.