Personality variation eroded by simple social behaviors in collective foragers | Hacker News Reader

Personality variation eroded by simple social behaviors in collective foragers

journals.plos.org

56 pointsPaulHoule17 comments

From the title it sounds like research on humans but the paper is actually all about a simple software model of a group of entities going 'foraging'

The model is using a program called NetLogo

https://github.com/NetLogo/NetLogo

https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/index.shtml

Source code for the model used in this paper

https://figshare.com/articles/software/Netlogo_code_supporti...

Seems like a fun program, you set up 'turtles' and give them attributes and rules and then watch them roam around

I thought this was interesting:

    ;adding individual noise into the speeds of individuals, to avoid computational problems caused by all individuals being on top of each other in a cell
    ask turtles [                               
        set individual-speed 0.95 + random-float 0.05
    ]

Like, seems like a good idea to add the random speed but why does having all the turtles in one cell cause such a problem?

Or why not program them to wait (or whatever other behaviour, from turning around/re-routing to fighting) when they see the cell in front of them is already occupied by another turtle?

I'd assume there's some sort of collision/overlap detection going on. If all the turtles are in a single cell all of the turtles are touching all of the turtles, which runs into O(n^2) issues real quickly.

We keep horses and can see they are always watching each other to decide what to do next.

Is this the beginning of Psychohistory. Wonder when we'll combine all the advances in psychology, anthropology, machine learning, marketing, etc... We've been manipulated for a long time, but this seems like a start in really dialing it in. Move the manipulation out of the dark ages and start doing some deep manipulation of society.

It's more like flocking with a little game theory mixed in. It's not even coming close to psychohistory.

gota start somewhere. why can't flocking and game theory be part of psychohistory? I always thought of psychohistory as mathematical calculations on crowds, statistics of large groups of people. Flocking and game theory would naturally be a part of it, maybe the basics, or one branch. But, I read Foundation many years ago, so maybe I'm just remembering more to it.

Play the game Foundation on Steam and you can see how the evolution of a society really flows, including the resouce production supply chains.

This is a (simple) model that shows how social behavior could moderate individual behavior. It’s not a realistic model of human behavior. There are many other models like this.

Guess I should have read the entire article. Read first few paragraphs and thought it was talking about real humans. "Leadership Characteristics" and mirroring behaviors and such. Seems like simple computer models would be inaccurate, and this was some new insight on studying real humans.

Well, if they're going to study real humans, they'll also use computer models for doing that.

And simpler than real humans too, kind of like mechanical and engineering models use particle descriptions simpler than real particles, but still work for their purposes...

You think some eventually "psychohistory" wont involve computing simulations? At least to spare Seldon all this paper math work...

Think I wasn't clear. Psychohistory would all be based on models, because as you say, all science is really about finding models that fit reality. And I think computer models are a part of that. Its just I was mistaken and I thought that this study was more about finding some new insight into human behavior, and the model had helped identify it or understand the human side. And having this new better model would allow psychohistory, and better manipulation.

Guess, I thought that the computer model had been used to find some new insight into humans, rather than just finding a better fit to something already known.

Simple social behaviour moderates the shit out of my individual behaviour. I'd love to go on cool trespassing adventures or maybe pull off a fancy art caper, but then the incentive structures of society (vis a vis jailtime) hold me back. Not complicated at all.

You're not gonna go to jail over doing urbex unless you fuck up real bad.

You don't even have to go that far into "far out" behaviour to see this at play. How many people would choose to dress or wear their hair as they do today if it were not for the prevailing fashions?

It's also interesting to reflect on things like gender norms in this context.

I definitely feel that I'm Man first and Me second, and I like to think of myself as good at questioning such things.

Just look at how values are different across societies to get a sense. We are currently fighting wars of what we call democracy vs what we call authoritarianism. In some sense inflamed by them worrying about “woke culture” as presented locally by their media. We support capitalism and react with triggered indignation if someone suggests an alternative too strongly. We used to fight religious wars.

And for domestic consumption, the top-down control or manipulation of the media often plays a part. Sometimes they find a way to spin these differences to explain why we must be at war (“they hate us for our freedoms”, or “they just hadn’t had a taste of true democracy”). Other times they spin these differences to inculcate in you a national pride and make you be a good consumer — the “American Dream” comes to mind:

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8

But if you want to go further, about how people are controlled here and around the world, by centrally planned movements, I have collected some of the most hard-hitting documentaries most of you have probably never heard Of:

2. Century of the Self (on Burnays and the PR industry): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04

3. Merchants of Cool (marketing to kids) https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-merchants-cool/

4. NAM, von Mises and Austrian School: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-am...

5. The Shock Doctrine, Disaster Capitalism (the Chicago School): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aL3XGZ5rreE

And this is just the beginning — without personalized AI!

What if the article has it backwards: I doubt that a random samples of same-aged people from a western and from a hunter gatherer society will end up with similar distributions of personality types.

I'd guess that some traits (e.g. being very individualistic, competitive or narcissistic) might only emerge in more settled societies where wealth can be built up and inherited.

At least Richard Rohr mentions this as anecdotal experience in his book about the Enneagram.

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