Conformists may kill civilizations | Hacker News Reader

Conformists may kill civilizations

bioedonline.org

34 pointsrobg15 comments

The paper is available at:

http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/RedNoise.pdf

This quote just about summarizes every post-apocalyptic movie I've ever seen.

"After this fixation of pure horizontal learning, occurring very approximately 12,000 time units from the start, the population completely loses most of its ability to track the environment, and, when the environment changes, mean fitness declines and the population drops (Fig. 2). When the population reaches very low levels, selection may return behavior towards the environmental optimum (as there are very few individuals in the population, and one who is incidentally blessed with suitable behavior, because of the error (σ) around the target behavior, can have many offspring and so change the mean behavior of the population)."

It's quite interesting to think about how much I've learned about nature socially, vs. directly. It seems clear that I learn almost everything socially, and everything I learn directly is probably available socially, probably at a lower cost. In other words, nothing I learn directly is really new, and what is new could very easily be predicted from models - it's hardly even information in the Shannon sense. I'm a university student, but it's not clear to me that I've ever even met anyone who learned anything new themselves either (about the environment). Almost the entire information processing capacity of the species seems to be devoted to internal processing of information and the modeling of internal behavior. It seems like there's no other way it could be, given the sheer number of people, but it does make you wonder how far that can go.

Listening to people like Gwynne Dyer talk about global warming makes it sound like the problem is not so much that we don't have enough people tracking the environment, or even that we don't propagate the information fast enough, but that the sheer inertia of the system makes it so that changes can't be made fast enough to avoid major shakeups.

This is generally true of all complex systems. If a social agent finds a very fit region of the search space, it pulls other agents towards it. If the region maintains fitness over a long period of time, the set of agents becomes homogeneous. Suddenly, a change to the environment alters the fitness function. The system collapses and repair is slow due to search now being random.

Long live Axelrod.

Exactly. Evolution is basically a filtering process that records and compresses memories of past changes to the environment, along with mechanisms for communicating those memories as widely as possible and incorporating the communications of other agents. The better agents are at this, the more resources can be marshaled for recording, compressing, and communicating memories. For this reason larger and more tightly coupled agents are favored, but the complexity of maintaining homeostasis increases with agent size, and increasing size also serves to move agents into new selection environments. In other words, an agent's own actions may cause their fitness function to change in ways that are difficult to predict from past experience of the environment alone, and this may become a bigger problem as agents increase in size. At some scale, agents who do not add models of themselves to the fitness search space may be at a disadvantage. If they are social agents in a society of agents similar to themselves, and if they already model other agents, creating self-models may not be much of a leap.

Or at least that's my half-assed theory. Guess I should probably read up on Robert Axelrod's stuff now. Thanks for the pointer.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/research/Dissemination.pd...

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man" --George Bernard Shaw

Interesting to think that if you are a non-conformist your role in our civilization's survival is to evangelize your new behaviors while trying not to get yourself killed, imprisoned or banned.

I think you latched on to the real lesson here. Most people will be conformist, it's in their nature. So "don't be a conformist" isn't really a lesson that's practical from a societal level.

The lesson I think is that society needs to tolerate non-conformists because they may very well be it's salvation some day. Even if society feels those people are completely undesirable there are ways to separate them without throwing away their accomplishments (Galileo was put on house arrest in 1600 but still allowed to continue his work)

Of course the problem is that 99% of non-conformists are wrong, but all of them believe that they are right, some of them are really dangerous, and some of them are work very hard to be persuasive. Society is a balancing act of incorporating as much diversity as possible without losing structural integrity. Most people disagree with each other about whether we need more diversity or more conformity, to what extent we are unbalanced, and pretty much everything else at any given point in time.

Conformity isn't about nature. It's largely a matter of background, development, social elements, etc.

I don't know where this idea of "either you're a conformist or you're not" came from, but it's wrong. Like anything, there's depth to the idea of conforming. Some people who nonconform do it in ways that happen to match what other people have done because it's a logical progression. Some people nonconform by acting as randomly as possible. Of the people that quote unquote conform, I doubt many think of it as conformity. In fact, I'd go further and suggest that if many of those people were convinced of its being conforming, they would take certain steps to change.

When someone wants to just "fit in," they are consciously trying to conform. So I would argue that most people do this, so most people consciously conform. Most people don't want to be different or weird, which is often what innovation looks like.

"Societies should promote individual learning and innovation over cultural conformity, and the models for social learning should be individuals who have demonstrated that they understand how to live with the current environmental trends," says Whitehead.

The difficulty is to find out who is successful because he or she understands environmental trends and who is successful because of conformity. I doubt that prestige is a good filter.

I am not sure one can use civilization and population interchangeably, for one reason: population either adopts to new conditions or dies, civilization, on the other hand may change environment and survive. That's how human species differ: they are alloplastic, while other are autoplastic.

Individual members of populations of every species alter their environments. Humans may do it more deliberately, but as either civilizations or as a species as a whole it's not clear to me that we're all that much better at anticipating and avoiding environmental disasters than other species; we just do everything at a larger scale (more massive individuals, across the whole planet) than any other single species. Not necessarily longer time scales though - that remains to be seen.

Has to be said http://despair.com/connot.html

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