I.e. sister ants with their parents alive don't need complex social recognition and punishment mechanisms to deal with conflicting individual and group interests, since their best outcomes coincide. That coincidence of interests can be almost as complete as for a group of clones.

Given ant chromosomal structure, an ant is more related to her sisters than her offspring, and a single female can convert food/resources to offspring roughly as well as two females each with half the resources.

Even relatively strong social recognition and coordination systems, as in primates, leave plenty of opportunities to shirk and betray. Behaviors of selective provisioning and parental investment (the cheating that already sometimes occurs and is punished among Babyeaters) serves both group and individual fitness, reducing the strength of group selection needed to maintain the altruistic punishment of shirkers. It would thus be easier for it to evolve, and groups of selective-provisioners would on average have a competitive advantage (since the group-beneficial slow population growth would degrade more slowly) against groups with the dispositions in the story.

Now, if the social coordination mechanisms got absurdly strong, much stronger than in any human society ever, this would no longer be the case. Likewise, if the story's babyeaters became universal, selective-provisioners would not be able to arise among them. So there is no contradiction, but there is a probabilistic surprise.

Re: "MST3K Mantra"

Very improbable evolved beings don't make for good warnings about the precious moral miracle of human values. It would be better to use an example of a plausible 'near-miss,' e.g. by extrapolating from something common in Earth species.

"Why doesn't modern society securitize hard assets into money of zero maturity, instead of using a purely abstract debt-based currency to denominate debts? Because it would be slightly more complicated, that's why." Eliezer,

I think you're mistaken about the relative complexity of parents selectively provisioning their own offspring, versus the baroque and complex adaptations for social intelligence and coordination required for this system to be stable.

"And anyone who tried to cheat, to hide away a child, or even go easier on their own children during the winnowing - well, the Babyeaters treated the merciful parents the same way that human tribes treat their traitors."

This means that the Babyeaters were capable of recognizing and preferring their own children after birth. Selectively provisioning your own offspring is an extremely common adaptation, as is allocating resources preferentially (e.g. starving runts) and most of the necessary complexity already seems to exist among the Babyeaters. Separate pens/nests are simpler than evolving a complex set of adaptations to manage and enforce an even-handed winnowing.

Consider that with pooled offspring in a single pen, we now have two commons problems, aside from even-handed winnowing, Babyeaters have strong incentives to shirk in their agricultural labor. For the Babyeaters to develop a set of immensely powerful adaptations for managing such conflicts of interest (exceedingly strong by the standards of Earth's biodiversity) is going to take evolution a long time, during which selective provisioning/penning/devouring would likely take hold in some groups and then sweep the population.

"makes the large numb" Is obviously a result of an incomplete edit.

Why didn't the Babyeaters develop the practice of separate pens for each family, with tribes redistributing common resources (e.g. erratic, potentially rotting, meat from hunts) among parents, and parents feeding children out of their share? Maybe their brains lacked the capacity to recognize so many distinct off-spring, but why not spray them with a pheromone? Producing vast numbers of offspring with big expensive full-size brains (which is itself implausible) makes the large numb to be destroyed immediately would impose huge metabolic costs relative to privatizing the commons and distinguishing between offspring, then adjusting clutch-size based on parental resources.

Richard,

You missed (5): preserve your goals/utility function to ensure that the resources acquired serve your goals. Avoiding transformation into Goal System Zero is a nearly universal instrumental value (none of the rest are universal either).

Patrick,

Those are instrumental reasons, and could be addressed in other ways. I was trying to point out that giving up big chunks of our personality for instrumental benefits can be a real trade-off.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gz/policy_debates_should_not_appear_onesided/

"Ingroup-outgroup dynamics, the way we're most motivated only when we have someone to fear and hate: this too is an evolved value, and most of the people here would prefer to do away with it if we can."

So you would want to eliminate your special care for family, friends, and lovers? Or are you really just saying that your degree of ingroup-outgroup concern is less than average and you wish everyone was as cosmopolitan as you? Or, because ingroup-concern is indexical, it results in different values for different ingroups, so you wish every shared your precise ingroup concerns? Or that you are in a Prisoner's Dilemma with other groups (or worse), and you think the benefit of changing the values of others would be enough for you to accept a deal in which your own ingroup-concern was eliminated?

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/unwanted-morali.html