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Comment by anoplus | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't seem perplexing to me either. Humans are tribal and their survival depends on teamwork of about ~100 people or so. This is natural on intimate scale.

What perplexing is to think about how humans can cooperate effectively on a scale of billion people to solve humanity biggest problems.

As we can see, empathy for humans outside of the tribe is limited and so different gangs fight each other, let alone different countries.

Maybe we can think about techniques to create empathy among strangers.

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If the world is divided into many super-tribes made up of millions of people (based on ethnicity, religion, etc), try to encourage mixture of those super-tribes at school, work, and socially. Then people have a maximum composition of different super-tribes within their personal 100-person tribe. This way people will be less likely to identify everyone from another super-tribe as part of the outgroup.

I think its in the human nature that we form groups and fight each other, heck we do it for fun too in games. For all humans on the planet to come together we would need a common opponent.

sars-cov-2?

Naively, how about a global tree? Suppose you have a group of 25 people, of which 1 (or more, all these numbers are fluid) is also a member in a group one "level" up which also contains 25 people all representing their own 25-person group. Then just keep adding more levels until everyone's in the tree.

Importantly, these are not rulership positions. They're representatives representing the interest of their group one "level" down, which means these interests are sourced from the largest side of the tree and then negotiated/compromised as far up as is necessary.

The reason I think 25 is the right number is because IIRC people are only capable of maintaining 50 close relationships, so the idea is generally most people are friends with their home group + extras. But doing the math on the number of groups required, let's say 8 billion / 25 = 320 million groups needing representation, and log_25(320000000) gives us a little over 6 levels required to represent them all (if I mathematically modeled that correctly), so even a top-tier representative can easily have a couple of close friends per level.

> Maybe we can think about techniques to create empathy among strangers.

Small scale trial, a world exchange program where you could sign up, and basically you swap with someone random for a year. Before the swap happens both people get a week where they meet and discuss what is going on in their life. This can happen in a vacation resort somewhere.

Then the two people take over the life of the other person. It would be assumed that everyone would sorta- help the swapped person out a bit. The swap would need to have very specific requirements: Probably no spouse, the job needs to be similar, friends/coworkers need to be on board, finally the swappers need to blog once per day about the experiences.

Bank accounts would be locked out - the experiment pays the two individuals from a fresh account. Bills and Mortgages are locked or payed through other mechanisms during the experiment.

I think that even starting out with maybe 100 people, then scale to 1000 a year later, 10000 after that. I don't know if those numbers are unrealistic... but wouldn't it be interesting to see if empathy for other countries or even ways of life start to develop?

I watched a TV series once where people swapped family (including spouse) with someone from a different country. Pretty interesting

> What perplexing is to think about how humans can cooperate effectively on a scale of billion people to solve humanity biggest problems.

I think the opposite is true. We cannot properly cooperate effectively on a large scale to solve humanity's biggest problems. Just look at the attempts for global nuclear disarmament, it has been a failure. Look at the accelerating impact of carbon on the environment, it has been a catastrophic failure.

I think while the article shows an interesting bit about human psychology, that we are all secretly altruists at heart, which I believe is true.. But what governs the important global decisions isn't humanity. They're massive organizations and these massive organizations (whether a nation state or mega-corp) are made of humans, but they're not human.

They operate in another way, just like an ant colony, the emergent behavior of many ants, operates in an entirely different way than an individual ant.

>"Maybe we can think about techniques to create empathy among strangers."

It's all about abolishing hierarchical leadership, and the "one-to-many" dynamic. People who foment tribalism like Trump, for instance, are only effective in a mediated environment in which they are immune to any criticism and can pontificate from on high. In a one on one social situation, his behavior and attitude would be laughed at and ostracized because the vast majority of people are generally good and wish to be peaceful. But when they are able to atomize individuals and speak directly to them, the power of their rhetoric is irresistible, because it appeals directly to the person's identity. That's why Trump supporters will follow him off a cliff. He is them. His thoughts are their thoughts. And the basic human survival instinct kicks in when anyone attacks something you identify with so intimately.

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