[ExI] EP posting from another list

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Mon Jun 13 22:01:30 UTC 2016


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.
​  keith​


I seem to recollect (which counts as once having amassed an incredible
array of excellent studies proving my point) that wars do not in fact
reduce population by much, and replacement tends to be quick.

bill w

On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 4:20 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.
>
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