Do you never consider yourself part of a group which is smaller than "all humans"? Would you lose nothing if that group became smaller and less powerful?
The fact that a nation disappear doesn't mean that there aren't any descendents of members of that nation.
Biological descendants, yes, but they were usually much worse off (usually enslaved, having a higher chance to be genocided, or just having fewer rights or fewer possibilities)
Is is an topic where you can argue both the pro-group selection and the contra-group selection position
If you define group selection as the theory that genetic traits in individuals develop for the main purpose of making the group fitter, then I was never talking about group selection at all.
As a result no argument that doesn't cite any papers will convince me.
If you only consider hard sciences as being exclusively important, and believe that all we know about and can infer from history and culture to be completely useless, than I doubt we have much chance to speak the same language in this case. People before the last century or so didn't write much scientific papers in the modern sense, but they did write down what they've seen happening, and while there might be inaccuracies, it would be a waste to throw away everything which was ever written down which is not an article in scientific journal. The information content of old historical documents (and even the information content of myths) is not zero.
Values can chance fast culturally in a way that has nothing to do with genes. A few hundred years in which a nation forms has creates little distinct genetics that produce long-term evolutionary effects.
Of course, I completely agree with that. But I was never talking about genetics in the first place. I used the term of evolution as ... I can't find a better word... not strictly as a metaphor, but you get the idea. Would you also attack the term "stellar evolution" as it is used in astronomy because evolution only means genetics? If not, than think about that my usage, while still distinct from the genetic meaning you were talking about, is still closer to it than the term of "stellar evolution".
People before the last century or so didn't write scientific papers, but they did write down what they've seen happening, and while there might be inaccuracies, it would be a waste to throw away everything which was ever written down which is not an article in scientific journal. The information content of old historical documents (and even the information content of myths) is not zero.
In cases where modern science disagrees with what's written in historical documents, there are usually strong reasons to prefer the conclusions of modern science.
Notice a...
This sort of thinking seems bad:
This sort of thinking seems socially frowned upon, but accurate:
Similar points could be made by replacing a/b with [group of people]. I think it's terrible to say something like:
But to me, it doesn't seem wrong to say something like:
Credit and accountability seem like good things to me, and so I want to live in a world where people/groups receive credit for good qualities, and are held accountable for bad qualities.
I'm not sure though. I could see that there are unintended consequences of such a world. For example, such "score keeping" could lead to contentiousness. And perhaps it's just something that we as a society (to generalize) can't handle, and thus shouldn't keep score.