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Matt_Simpson comments on Fight Zero-Sum Bias - Less Wrong
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I think you miss an important part of the ancestral environment that is a likely source of zero-sum bias. In the ancestral environment, material resources are far less important than status once you're not starving. The difference between the top and the bottom of the wealth distribution was much smaller than it is today. But holding more resources was still important - more resources means higher status (roughly anyway). And status is a zero sum game. So since all or most transactions essentially status transactions, zero-sum thinking was a good heuristic.
Of course, like your theory, this is highly speculative.
I agree that there's something to what you're saying.
Your comment gives me occasion to make a point that I had been intending to make later. I anticipate that some people will argue that since status is zero-sum and since humans crave status, zero-sum bias still helps humans get what they want. To this imagined argument (not made by you), I would respond that to a large degree, humans don't crave status, they crave the feelings historically correlated with status, and achieving these feelings is not a zero-sum game.
Similarly, historically the quest for reproductive resources was a zero sum game, but (a) this is no longer the case, and (b) we do not crave reproductive resources for their own sake, we crave the feelings historically correlated with attaining reproductive resources, and the quest for these feelings is not a zero-sum game.
The status game is not entirely zero-sum either.
Could you elaborate or point to a link about status being positive sum?
Sure. You can imagine two seemingly equal tribes. One with much more advanced status structure, where the chief is more revered, where there is a shaman with his own charisma or high status, where every member has it's own higher then zero place. A kind of Vanity Fair, but non the less.
And we can play this game of status in a smaller groups as well. Vote me up, I'll vote you up and we will both gain the status. We will cut together a little bigger piece of karma cake for us.
A nationalist leader may tell his people, that they are special. If they decide to believe him, the status of everybody will go up. At least they will think so, but it's all that counts in the status game, anyway.
So it IS zero, since there is less cake for everybody else.
Helen Parr (to her son): "Everyone's special, Dash." Dash: "Which is another way of saying no one is." -- the Incredibles
Exactly. A person can only be high status by being higher-status than someone else; so one person's high status must lead to another person's low status. So status must be zero-sum.
I have no trouble visualizing a society composed mostly of people with high status, or a society composed mostly of people with low status, with very different sums of total status.
I think we might be using different definitions of status. So instead of status, I'll say that social power is zero-sum.
Many people may share social power, especially if they don't choose to wield it often or to the detriment of others. I suppose you'd say that you count them as having it in exact proportion to their tendency to actually use it, or in terms of the power they'd likely have if they chose to war against one another.
What if you construct more than one cake, then arrange distribution so everybody gets a bigger piece than somebody else on at least one cake. Thus, because of human tendency to emphasize what makes them feel good, people notice their privileged cake(s) and disregard their loss cake(s).
A real-world equivalent would be the religious concept of poorness as a virtue.
I think the issue is whether to use "relative status" or "absolute status".
For example using the karma example, it is not very important what the karma numbers are absolutely but what their relative value is. Thus a couple of friends voting each other up raise the average (+mode + whatever statistical marker one prefers). Thus while their absolute status rises the relative status of other people sinks.
I think we may have different notions of status with me thinking of "relative inside a given group".
I"m not sure it's quite that simple-- some men are interested in raising children as well as conceiving them. And it's plausible that the best reproductive strategy is to attempt to have as much sex (with as many women?) as possible, but also to have a relationship with a woman (who one tries to get to be monogamous) and contribute to raising her children.
I've heard something like this claimed before and it sounds plausible but I haven't seen a reference - can you point me to one?
"Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men."
From an address to the APA on gender differences delivered shortly after the Harvard/Summers business. Long and only tangentially related, but worth a full reading, IMHO.
It's not bulletproof in present context. The author doesn't cite primary sources and isn't an authority in the field. Still, given the extent and... energy of the backlash underway when it was delivered, I doubt that an uncorrected version would still be available from FSU's official web servers if an easy refutation was available.
According to Tierney, Baumeister's source is Wilder-Mobasher-Hammer (not gated, but also). An intermediate observation is that local mitochondrial Eves tend to be twice as old as local Y-Adams. The paper goes on to draw the conclusion that the effective sex ratio was 2:1. (which is not quite the same as a male mode of 0.) I would be pretty negative about this deduction, except for the last couple of sentences (the ones citing Shen et al and Hedrick) which claim that this is compatible with autosomal observations.
I think you have wildly false beliefs about universities. Can you point to documents that were pushed off of university servers or corrected due to political pressure in the context of that backlash?
Er, shouldn't wrong papers be corrected or withdrawn, even in the absence of political pressure?
Anyway, I'm not insinuating anything here. I'm just pointing out that controversial statements get aggressive fact-checking
Does that statistic (in so far as you remember) include males who died before growing old enough to implement a reproductive strategy?
That's pretty suggestive, but male infants and children are less robust that females, so it's not conclusive (to me, anyway, because my background knowledge isn't good enough for even order-of-magnitude estimates of the numbers involved).
The average number is 2. For every man that had more, other men had fewer.
I am quite sure you are correct and the mode is 0.
If males who died in childhood are included it almost certainly has to be correct. It must be correct if childhood mortality is 50% or greater.
I think that Roko's claim is that the mode among men who survive to adulthood is zero. See Roy Baumeister's Is There Anything Good About Men?
You seem to be describing a median average. If 1 man has 100000, while 999 men have 0, then the (mean) average is 100 per man. But for every man that has more than that average, there are 999 who had fewer.
If someone says average without specifying, I take them to mean "mean average".
Jonathan, you are discribing a situation that never happened. The gender ratio is about 1:1. The average number of children is 2 because a different number than 2 results in numbers of humans we know did not happen.
If one man had 100,000, then 49,999 men would have to have zero to make the averate equal to 2.
Thus "if".
No, I didn't, and I second the request for a cite.
If true, what does it say about the best individual strategy?
How sure are you that the evolutionary pressure is about the extreme long haul rather than just for a generation or three?
If it is zero, any estimate of how much is the result of ingroup competition versus outgroup? To put it another way, how much should a reproduction-optimizing male invest in defending his group?
Is selection for having the most grandchildren, or is it for having the most descendants a millennium later?
I'm not sure that's a real distinction, but I'm not sure that it isn't, either.
For most purposes, selection should be on the long time scale. If the environment is uniform, long-term fitness should be the same as short-term fitness (though less random). If there are occasional catastrophes and population bottlenecks, then being adapted to them may be more important than being adapted to the usual environment. Even with a uniform environment, there may be a long tail to male fitness which is not easily observed in the short-term. Genghis Khan demonstrates that there is, at least occasionally, a long tail to human male reproductive success. If genetic factors were relevant and the opportunity arose reasonably often, then we should expect those genes to spread, even if they impede normal reproduction.
No, and it's not even to have as many offspring as possible. It's to have as many copies of his genes in future members of the species.
Consider to male proto-humans, Adam and Bob. Adam has sex with his sister, they have 6 children, but all die without reproducing.
Bob never has sex, but is a good uncle to his brothers' and sisters' kids, 4 more of which survive to reproduce than would have done without his interventions.
Which one was more effective at passing on his genes?
This is an important point, but can be stated directly, rather than bringing in the "ancestral environment" thing as justification.
"Status" - or, more concretely, power over others - corresponds a great deal in our (and probably every actualizable) society to wealth. A society with big wealth differentials is going to be one where some members wield great power over others; it's not simply a question of differential consumption rights. I think this is basically motivates people to find wealth differentials unjust: as supporting evidence, consider that people don't consider happiness differentials that can't be translated into power differentials unjust - nobody thinks it unjust that Alice has a better native appreciation for classical music than Bob - and that the people who are most likely to consider huge wealth differentials just, libertarians, are the most likely to narrowly map power differentials to the exercise of physical force.