= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Nornagest comments on Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (164)
I don't think this quite flies. There's no particular reason to look for adaptations relating to national politics; that's a scale we didn't evolve to handle. (Interpersonal politics, sure, but young people aren't known for playing long games there.) And putting this down to explicit planning doesn't work either; we generally see shorter planning horizons among young people, e.g. in domains like finance, where we'd normally expect analogous arguments to apply. However, a youth bulge does seem to be correlated with social unrest.
So, what's going on there? I'm not totally sure, but I'd start by looking at risk tolerance.
You don't think we had triibal politics in the ancestral environment? Chimps have them.
I think we had tribal politics. I don't think they're very relevant to revolutionary politics in the sense that you discuss above.
I don't want to make any strong statements about how tribal politics in the EEA worked, since we honestly have very little information about social structure in that context. But I think we can make a few assumptions about them. For example, they're likely to have been stable for timescales of many generations, which means that we're not likely to have evolved intuitions about changing the form of government. Similarly, they're likely to have worked on sub-Dunbar scales, not the scale of a modern nation.
I don't think revolution has to be about the form of government. It is merely the removal of government without its consent. A military coup d'etat could be a revolution in that sense.