Comment by nakedneuron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nakedneuron | Hacker News Reader

Quality (or the lack thereof) as a hidden property seems to be a man-made artifact. Are there any examples in nature (excluding mankind) coming up with this? Evolution doesn't seem to choose this path. Why do we?

Plummage and other external indicators of fitness, which animals use to game the mating game?

Still, nature is first and foremost red in tooth and claw. Fighting for survival has a magical ability to cut through all the bullshit and reveal things for what they are. Quality won't stay hidden for long if it's directly relevant to you eating your next meal, instead of becoming one.

Related, I believe this is why humanity seems to have made major leaps in science and technology during and after military conflicts. But the stakes matter. When people ordering and funding the research are really worried about losing, you get amazing pace of innovation. When they're not, you get amazing pace of fraud.

> this is why humanity seems to have made major leaps in science and technology during and after military conflicts

Did it? I can't really find numbers on that.

I think it’s broadly accepted that WW2 forced or accelerated inventions such as: jet planes, radios, synthetic rubber, radar, the Jeep, duct tape, nukes.

The cold war -> the space race.

Drone tech/military AI in Ukraine is perhaps a more recent example.

I think immediacy is key here. A bad sofa that falls apart after five years of use is a delayed loss (that fallacy has to have be discovered already). A small investment, prospects of gambling it and the inability to see through seem to play a role so lottery (poor people's tax) comes to mind.

> pace of fraud

Isn't it if the stakes are high more eyes are watching and thus quality control works (better)? I'm at a loss for scenarios that would raise the bar for the sofa game. A shabby sofa could signal something about the owner that might be indirectly relevant to the mating success. But on the other hand there seems to be a niche for that market where low quality fits quite well.

What I meant by pace of fraud: think of US military R&D around World War II and the Cold War, vs. now., and whether they translate into anything actually useful for the soldiers in the field. What I think is a big part of the difference is that back then, US was fighting with peer powers and it was possible for it to lose. Over time, it transitioned to only fighting wars with much weaker opponents - wars with no "lose" condition, where the only variable is how much money the US is going to spend on any particular conflict before getting bored and recalling soldiers home. The latter kind of conflict doesn't create much of pressure to deliver working solutions, or even test bed to verify them.

I know little of U.S. foreign policy, but here's my unoriginal take. Those conflicts the U.S. engage in are the test beds for its military industry. Wheels need to spin and shrinking the industry is not an option. What's at stake is deterrence, thus yes survival, and I think it works quite well for them. In regards to "fraud".. you mean corruption.. or defunct machinery?.. in the former case I'd say it's a bonus for standing by.

Thanks for standing by.. :)

Some animals pretend to be more dangerous than they are by mimicking colors etc.

I asked ChatGPT and it came up with these cases of deception strategies in nature (I wasn't excluding mankind, it thinks man, and probably itself doesn't belong there):

Mimicry/false signaling/bluffing (look more dangerous, look inpalatable, distract attention, attract prey), camouflage (avoid being preyed), brood paratism (cokoos get parenting for free).

None of them involve deceiving partners into pretending higher level of fitness.

Thinking about this it becomes a little clearer why this is.

When you're buying a sofa the seller usually doesn't buy a sofa made by you. So there is an assymmetry. The sofa dealer not only monopolizes most information about the deal (factual quality, costs; competitors are shared information). Also, the dealer can influence what you think. Economies of scale at play both in advertising and production.

Secondly, only if those two sofas you exchanged were to be used to produce the next generation of sofas and only if those newly merged sofa designs would be the sole base of contemporary sofa design would this comparison hold.

Then it becomes clear that if both parties engage in deceiving each other the species as the hypthetical owner of all evolving sofa designs must lose.

If you don't mind another Wikipedia page, there's the (biology) theory of honest and dishonest signals in general:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

I don't mind at all. Thanks for sharing, it looks like a very interesting read!

r/K selection is about the tradeoff between quantity and quality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

Quality of care is distinct from fitness (gene quality if you will). It seems like offspring without much care is more needy of fitness than K-strategists.

Uh, sort of? Genetic variants are like gambles or conjectures. You can spew a lot of them out, let most of them die, and adapt quickly - that's the low-quality (and modern-sounding) r-strategy. It's not that the variants necessarily lack quality (here meaning fitness), it's just that you aren't banking on it, you aren't investing in them individually.

I don't see the connection to intentionally banking on lower quality across the board here.

Well yeah, there's no potential to cheat the environment by pretending to be fit (as somebody already commented), except mimicry is a way to do that (as also already mentioned). But you can be successfully unconcerned about quality, hoping for returns on rare successes, like with the Chinese Santa snowglobes mentioned elsewhere in the comments.

Could you point to the example you mentioned, I couldn't find it.

Seems to have vanished somehow. In short: person visits Greece, finds nasty Xmas baubles on sale among tourist items, mind boggles that people buy these and furthermore that there are enough sales to justify bringing them to Greece from China, postulates some logic like a 1000% profit per sale making it worthwhile even if only 20% ever sell.

Thanks for pointing out, I see now what you meant. Also thanks for sharing the Wiki article.. it was a difficult read with, I think, sometimes overly simplified examples that to this day seem to be mere hypotheses. But it also provided some valuable insights.. It's one of those rare reads where afterwards you see it everywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com