From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Fri Jul 11 2003 - 04:16:43 MDT
On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 02:50:41AM -0400, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> That this template has been carried out successfully so frequently in our
> own, literate, suspicious times, to say nothing of a tribe of
> non-timebinding hunter-gatherers, suggests that it has been operating as a
> successful strategy over evolutionary time. Evolution constructs
> phenotypes to believe that they are acting for the good of the tribe,
> because that is what wins public support.
This all sounds very reasonable, but there is still a big piece of the
puzzle missing: why does believing that one is acting for the good of
the tribe win public support? Why doesn't evolution make the public
realize that the person is self-deceived (or "evolutionarily deceived")
when he says that the public good is served by him taking absolute
power?
We seem to still lack a theory of self-deception that explains why it is
an evolutionarily stable strategy. Without this I'm starting to have
doubts on the whole concept. Perhaps the dictator erroneously believing
that taking absolute power is good for the public is simply a case of
maladaptation, not self-deception, and in ancestral environments it was
actually good for the tribe?
Robin thinks self-deception explains why people undergo journeys of
self-discovery. But a simpler explanation may be that the optimal
weighting of health, comfort, status, etc., depends on the environment and
one's genetic endowment, and the "journey" is just a process of figuring
out the optimum.
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