From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2003 - 15:26:01 MDT
On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 04:01:13PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
>
> In Miller's view, ethics is primarily about signaling, so whether the
> ethical investments are well spent is largely irrelevant to his story.
Yes. There might be another reason for the strong move towards ethical
investment in the scenario, and that is genetically built in altruistic
biases.
I just read the paper
http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/wpabstract/200305031 "The
Evolution of Cooperation in Heterogeneous Populations" by Samuel Bowles
and Herbert Gintis, which gives a fascinating model account of the
evolution of cooperation in tribal groups where ostracism is the only
punishment. The result is not just stable emergence of reciprocal
altruism but strong reciprocity where people are willing to spend some
fitness in punishing selfish individuals. This could then be transmitted
both genetically and memetically.
> It is analogous to the signaling theory of education, which says that
> you don't learn much useful in school, but since the better workers
> find it easier to put up with school, you can infer who is the better
> worker by seeing who got more school.
Sounds frighteningly plausible.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jul 17 2003 - 15:31:15 MDT