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Comment by fopen64 | Hacker News Reader

That was the major ugliness of slavery, the double fault - keeping humans in captivity because it was believed the economy would collapse and even the slaves themselves would starve if freed.

Racism is a similar double-fault prejudice: "jobs are limited in number [wrong] so let's reserve them to 'our' kind of people [wrong and immoral]".

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It's a common trope, unfortunately. Same arguments were trotted out in defense of serfdom in Russia, once abolitionist talk became more mainstream.

The problem with racism is that it works - populations that act preferentially towards their own have an advantage over those that do not: http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html.bak

Only as long as "us" is defined racially, which is itself racist.

You are free to define 'us' any way you wish - it will not eliminate the advantage of races that define it to their benefit. Unless you believe other races have left racism behind them.

Races don't exist.

That paper does an excellent job of describing what I usually refer to as tribalism.

Interesting. I note the simulation doesn't have repeated interactions between individuals with memory... Yes, it acknowledges this. "Importantly, our decision to study a one-shot PD framework, where agents have no memory of previous interactions, significantly reduces the cognitive assumptions placed on our agents. A number of simulations have demonstrated how cooperation may emerge in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma framework, where agents remember the outcomes of previous interactions (Axelrod 1997; Fogel 1993; Sandholm & Crites 1996). We opted for Hammond and Axelrod's (2006) memoryless model because we are interested in ethnocentrism in its most elemental form."

You need memory to implement tit for tat, which is the classical case of something like moral behavior evolving spontaneously.

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