The Crypto Winter

[Jim Choate]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, Thomas Lyon Gideon wrote:

> The point about emergent behavior is excellently made.  A corollary that
> occurs to me is that one of the prime motivators in the emergent quality of
> human society may well be the pursuit of non-zero sum games.

Of course people want to take advantage of others. This realization is
what is behind the CACL objection to 'government' (which after all is an
emergent behaviour - ponder that one for a moment and your thrill may fall
away quickly). Their failure is recognizing that the 'government' is
itself an emergent behaviour (albeit an intentional one now - one can't
really speak to how they first came about, it very well could have been
very ant-like with respect to large family groups).

> This assumption is based on my reading of Robert Wright's _Non Zero_.  
> I think Sunder hits this on the head as well when he goes off about how 
> self interest does not necessarily harm others, that as humans we are not
> typically bound by win-lose scenarios.  Rather some behavior may result in
> poor or no gains on a societal scale and others may result in increased
> benefits for all.

Actually it isn't a well made point at all. To compare programmed
behaviour and biological caste systems to a bunch of humans with
self-referential views is the worst case of begging the question. He's
certainly made a hypothesis, no evidence has been forthcoming for it and
there is a very large body that would argue against it.

In addition, emergent behavior may or may not actually help the individual
components of the population. Remember the concept of 'evolution'. To get
the ants and bees we have now required a bunch of ants and bees which
didn't survive because their programming didn't work. It's also worth
noting that the understanding we have of emergent systems are for
reletively simple systems. Something that can't be said about any group of
humans irrespective of size. This 'evolution' argument could actually be
used against CACL theories because governments didn't always exist, at
some point they emerged.

Sunders comparison is fundamentaly flawed, the only thing he hit on the
head was himself.

> In this light, seemingly altruistic behavior can be re-interpreted as
> banking favors against future need.  One of Wright's better examples is the
> practice in certain tribal societies of giving away excess food.  Usually
> the food wouldn't keep long, anyway, and by helping a neighbor out today
> help is usually secured against future need when a neighbor may be the one
> with the excess.

Altruistism is cloaked self-interest. The only reason one helps another is
because at some level it helps themselves (you can talk about % of genes
passed to next generations, getting laid after the prom, or you can talk
about helping another buy a car and getting rides as a result - makes no
diff).


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