> Or should be, and that’s why we should, that’s why our shoulding has a selective advantage in organising groups, individuals survive better if we should ourselves into groups, and will do so as long as they get along. Groups help individuals survive better than individuals not in a group, i.e. not in the world we should into existence.
OK this is very playful, but it's understandable here - you're saying simultaneously that:
* individuals survive better in groups
* this is more effective if the drive to join and protect the group has a moral component
> Groups do not should, attempts to do so are world-building rather than worlding, and ideological rather than getting along.
Wait, really? Aren't we ourselves groups of organs, groups of cells, groups of bacteria and eukarya all getting along together so well that we *seem* like individuals?
> Group selection is not not a thing. Group selection is not of the world. Group selection would only work if groups were already around to be selected from among. Group selection does not create groups in the first place. So it has nothing to select from. Group selection can only be a parasite unless it can find another job to do.
Now I either don't understand anymore, or else I don't agree. This is, I suspect, what makes things so difficult for me; I want to pin down what a person means in terms of propositions P, Q, and R, which have truth values that I want to evaluate.
> Lip-service is the agreeableness of those trying to get along with each other, you never know, it might be good.
This reminds me of the way Confucius said that morality consisted of attention to ritual, but I can't get at what is being said well enough to know whether you're saying that, or you're criticizing that, or you're trying to express something else.
" drive to join and protect the group has a moral component"
the drive is not that specific, the drive is to organise, or feel it should be organised, because that is the world. Groups are one way to organise the world, and in a social species it makes a great deal of sense to do so socially, but "to join and protect" are derivative to this, and must be socially negotiated. They varying greatly across time and geography. Further derivatives are things like the religion/identity/tribe nexus of extended non-kin forms/formations, that i label outcomes. The outcomes are not the causes (directly selected for). The urge is very powerful because it is weakly "typed". I do not think Baldwinian evolution has had the time to act in this matter (compared to a simple mutation like retaingin lactic acid metabolisation into adulthood).
If it had I suspect we would have had egalitarian tribal groups hardwired in the paleolithic and not the some narcissistic hierarchy that many empires try to turn the world into and re-brand as "civilization", e.g. Русский мир https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_world
My evidence for this in terms of intuitive introspection is how often Kant is felt to make sense for peeps. That is feeling the urge directly. So abstract,, so clear, so rainbowed nebulous. Such that empires have to one-nify it (one folk, one (sky)god, one leader etc etc)(nomad tech), as imperative.
""""Hunter-gatherer communities are relatively strong in their situational strength. This may help to illuminate why people in complex societies have peculiar personality structures. The evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich and others have pointed out that although psychologists have long thought there were five personality factors, researchers have failed to identify the Big Five dimensions in non-student adult populations in Bolivia, Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Macedonia, among other non-WEIRD locations. Instead, researchers often find only two:
Industriousness (tendency to work hard on useful skills like weaving and hunting)
Prosociality (Inclination to cultivate rich social relationships).
This is likely because in WEIRD societies, which have relatively weak situational strength, people are freer to express their underlying traits.
Returning to hunter-gatherers, the fear of group opinion—and of punishment—keeps men humble. “In effect,” Boehm notes, “the group is dominating its would-be alphas,” and that “arrogance amounts to a crime.” """
"The uneasy tension between the human desire for dominance and the desire not to be dominated means that humans will never be able to live in relaxed egalitarian societies. They must be constantly alert to upstarts hungry for power. "
So what a re the rest of us 'doing' to do when they are not around?
"Group selection is not not a thing. Group selection is not of the world. Group selection would only work if groups were already around to be selected from among. Group selection does not create groups in the first place. So it has nothing to select from. Group selection can only be a parasite unless it can find another job to do."
The pre-'exception' to this are kin & (possibly) extended kin groups. Bands of unrelated individuals have no existence outside the world they should together. See football teams example below.
I think modern primatology & evolutionary anthropology have nutted out how we got from family (kin) in an expanded group to include unrelated kith in the band. Basically it is a cross insurance market, more than "altruism". Altruism is an outcome and something we like to should on peeps. If one like the insurance model then there is no just-so story required for altrusim (agreeableness is another matter).
It is so strong an urge, to gertorganised, that we often feel we should organise it more to even betterer it all even more-r,
but we produce mostly self-important doctrine and dogma instead, which in turn provides a social substrate that narcissists step onto and grease themselves up the pole (which may or may not be actually there until they get there.) (opportunistic infection).
Football teams and many forms of socially organised groups are an outcome of that (process)(success). While football teams may compete in a league (they have to cooperate on so much to be able to do that) there is no sign evolutionary selection going on. (Nazis think there is).
Most groupings of humans are more like football teams based on arbitrary identities & doctrines/dogmas. WHY? Teenagers are weird. We are not actively choosing our choices, we just do them because we feel we should do something, so we do. The evidence for this is the vast amount of anthropological literature. In-group out-group boundary riding is a complicating factor obviously, but this really means who is in the insurance market and who is not, but we rarely talk about this directly.
______
What is selected for is the urge to organise, (or at least feel we should do so) which I label with the English word "to should" in a mistaken attempt to use simpler English. The result is an insurance group, the outcome of those succeeded are the variety of football teams, various football codes, various none football sports etc
And not what. (Not what damn ball they use, or racquet, or don't.)
________________
All this provides space for the ideologue, the wowser, the woke, the fashionista priest & nazis.
I call the space the world (more attempts at using simple English, boy was that a mistake) as that is what it is for the rest of us, a grey zone between reality and what is in our heads (an intersubjective experiment and experimental space (solution space if you will) )
carried out on meat computers who communicate through the air in sight & sound, in which intimacy is often lost at scale).
Some of us think the grey zone is real, which it is, but only because it has to deal with what is not real, and all this gets confused. I know I am most of the time.
I learnt about lip-service in a catholic context in first communion classes, about people who turn up on Sunday & life events but do not mean it (not even agnostic). They were barely identitarian about it. That's why I call myself a non-practising agnostic. I think it is a good way to be.
But like Confucius at this notice (being tempted to perhaps romantically praisie the simpler traditional forms) I have already stepped from worlding to world-building, from ritual I slip into dogma, and even when I use paradox, the aporic notice of it, it cannot be avoided.
But hopefully I am now aware of this process (dogmatists will not allow this awareness because choice=heresey&disobedience) perhaps I can gain release from the vicious circle that a sceptical (as in inquiring) agnosticism may allow.
This requires a degree of agreeableness to be honest about the whole 'thing'.
> Or should be, and that’s why we should, that’s why our shoulding has a selective advantage in organising groups, individuals survive better if we should ourselves into groups, and will do so as long as they get along. Groups help individuals survive better than individuals not in a group, i.e. not in the world we should into existence.
OK this is very playful, but it's understandable here - you're saying simultaneously that:
* individuals survive better in groups
* this is more effective if the drive to join and protect the group has a moral component
> Groups do not should, attempts to do so are world-building rather than worlding, and ideological rather than getting along.
Wait, really? Aren't we ourselves groups of organs, groups of cells, groups of bacteria and eukarya all getting along together so well that we *seem* like individuals?
> Group selection is not not a thing. Group selection is not of the world. Group selection would only work if groups were already around to be selected from among. Group selection does not create groups in the first place. So it has nothing to select from. Group selection can only be a parasite unless it can find another job to do.
Now I either don't understand anymore, or else I don't agree. This is, I suspect, what makes things so difficult for me; I want to pin down what a person means in terms of propositions P, Q, and R, which have truth values that I want to evaluate.
> Lip-service is the agreeableness of those trying to get along with each other, you never know, it might be good.
This reminds me of the way Confucius said that morality consisted of attention to ritual, but I can't get at what is being said well enough to know whether you're saying that, or you're criticizing that, or you're trying to express something else.
" drive to join and protect the group has a moral component"
the drive is not that specific, the drive is to organise, or feel it should be organised, because that is the world. Groups are one way to organise the world, and in a social species it makes a great deal of sense to do so socially, but "to join and protect" are derivative to this, and must be socially negotiated. They varying greatly across time and geography. Further derivatives are things like the religion/identity/tribe nexus of extended non-kin forms/formations, that i label outcomes. The outcomes are not the causes (directly selected for). The urge is very powerful because it is weakly "typed". I do not think Baldwinian evolution has had the time to act in this matter (compared to a simple mutation like retaingin lactic acid metabolisation into adulthood).
If it had I suspect we would have had egalitarian tribal groups hardwired in the paleolithic and not the some narcissistic hierarchy that many empires try to turn the world into and re-brand as "civilization", e.g. Русский мир https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_world
My evidence for this in terms of intuitive introspection is how often Kant is felt to make sense for peeps. That is feeling the urge directly. So abstract,, so clear, so rainbowed nebulous. Such that empires have to one-nify it (one folk, one (sky)god, one leader etc etc)(nomad tech), as imperative.
read immediately after writing this post https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/reverse-dominance-hierarchies
""""Hunter-gatherer communities are relatively strong in their situational strength. This may help to illuminate why people in complex societies have peculiar personality structures. The evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich and others have pointed out that although psychologists have long thought there were five personality factors, researchers have failed to identify the Big Five dimensions in non-student adult populations in Bolivia, Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Macedonia, among other non-WEIRD locations. Instead, researchers often find only two:
Industriousness (tendency to work hard on useful skills like weaving and hunting)
Prosociality (Inclination to cultivate rich social relationships).
This is likely because in WEIRD societies, which have relatively weak situational strength, people are freer to express their underlying traits.
Returning to hunter-gatherers, the fear of group opinion—and of punishment—keeps men humble. “In effect,” Boehm notes, “the group is dominating its would-be alphas,” and that “arrogance amounts to a crime.” """
The following describes covert narcissist to a T.
"The uneasy tension between the human desire for dominance and the desire not to be dominated means that humans will never be able to live in relaxed egalitarian societies. They must be constantly alert to upstarts hungry for power. "
So what a re the rest of us 'doing' to do when they are not around?
"Group selection is not not a thing. Group selection is not of the world. Group selection would only work if groups were already around to be selected from among. Group selection does not create groups in the first place. So it has nothing to select from. Group selection can only be a parasite unless it can find another job to do."
The pre-'exception' to this are kin & (possibly) extended kin groups. Bands of unrelated individuals have no existence outside the world they should together. See football teams example below.
I think modern primatology & evolutionary anthropology have nutted out how we got from family (kin) in an expanded group to include unrelated kith in the band. Basically it is a cross insurance market, more than "altruism". Altruism is an outcome and something we like to should on peeps. If one like the insurance model then there is no just-so story required for altrusim (agreeableness is another matter).
It is so strong an urge, to gertorganised, that we often feel we should organise it more to even betterer it all even more-r,
but we produce mostly self-important doctrine and dogma instead, which in turn provides a social substrate that narcissists step onto and grease themselves up the pole (which may or may not be actually there until they get there.) (opportunistic infection).
Football teams and many forms of socially organised groups are an outcome of that (process)(success). While football teams may compete in a league (they have to cooperate on so much to be able to do that) there is no sign evolutionary selection going on. (Nazis think there is).
Most groupings of humans are more like football teams based on arbitrary identities & doctrines/dogmas. WHY? Teenagers are weird. We are not actively choosing our choices, we just do them because we feel we should do something, so we do. The evidence for this is the vast amount of anthropological literature. In-group out-group boundary riding is a complicating factor obviously, but this really means who is in the insurance market and who is not, but we rarely talk about this directly.
______
What is selected for is the urge to organise, (or at least feel we should do so) which I label with the English word "to should" in a mistaken attempt to use simpler English. The result is an insurance group, the outcome of those succeeded are the variety of football teams, various football codes, various none football sports etc
And not what. (Not what damn ball they use, or racquet, or don't.)
________________
All this provides space for the ideologue, the wowser, the woke, the fashionista priest & nazis.
I call the space the world (more attempts at using simple English, boy was that a mistake) as that is what it is for the rest of us, a grey zone between reality and what is in our heads (an intersubjective experiment and experimental space (solution space if you will) )
carried out on meat computers who communicate through the air in sight & sound, in which intimacy is often lost at scale).
Some of us think the grey zone is real, which it is, but only because it has to deal with what is not real, and all this gets confused. I know I am most of the time.
I learnt about lip-service in a catholic context in first communion classes, about people who turn up on Sunday & life events but do not mean it (not even agnostic). They were barely identitarian about it. That's why I call myself a non-practising agnostic. I think it is a good way to be.
But like Confucius at this notice (being tempted to perhaps romantically praisie the simpler traditional forms) I have already stepped from worlding to world-building, from ritual I slip into dogma, and even when I use paradox, the aporic notice of it, it cannot be avoided.
But hopefully I am now aware of this process (dogmatists will not allow this awareness because choice=heresey&disobedience) perhaps I can gain release from the vicious circle that a sceptical (as in inquiring) agnosticism may allow.
This requires a degree of agreeableness to be honest about the whole 'thing'.