Conformists may kill civilizations
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Conformists may kill civilizations
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Re: Conformists may kill civilizations
#2The paper is available at:
http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/RedNoise.pdf
This quote just about summarizes every post-apocalyptic movie I've ever seen.
"After this fixation of pure horizontal learning, occurring very approximately 12,000 time units from the start, the population completely loses most of its ability to track the environment, and, when the environment changes, mean fitness declines and the population drops (Fig. 2). When the population reaches very low levels, selection may return behavior towards the environmental optimum (as there are very few individuals in the population, and one who is incidentally blessed with suitable behavior, because of the error (σ) around the target behavior, can have many offspring and so change the mean behavior of the population)."
Re: Conformists may kill civilizations
#3This is generally true of all complex systems. If a social agent finds a very fit region of the search space, it pulls other agents towards it. If the region maintains fitness over a long period of time, the set of agents becomes homogeneous. Suddenly, a change to the environment alters the fitness function. The system collapses and repair is slow due to search now being random.
Long live Axelrod.
Re: Conformists may kill civilizations
#4Interesting to think that if you are a non-conformist your role in our civilization's survival is to evangelize your new behaviors while trying not to get yourself killed, imprisoned or banned.
Re: Conformists may kill civilizations
#5Interesting to think that if you are a non-conformist your role in our civilization's survival is to evangelize your new behaviors while trying not to get yourself killed, imprisoned or banned.
I think you latched on to the real lesson here. Most people will be conformist, it's in their nature. So "don't be a conformist" isn't really a lesson that's practical from a societal level.
The lesson I think is that society needs to tolerate non-conformists because they may very well be it's salvation some day. Even if society feels those people are completely undesirable there are ways to separate them without throwing away their accomplishments (Galileo was put on house arrest in 1600 but still allowed to continue his work)
Re: Conformists may kill civilizations
#6I am not sure one can use civilization and population interchangeably, for one reason: population either adopts to new conditions or dies, civilization, on the other hand may change environment and survive.
That's how human species differ: they are alloplastic, while other are autoplastic.
Re: Conformists may kill civilizations
#7This is generally true of all complex systems. If a social agent finds a very fit region of the search space, it pulls other agents towards it. If the region maintains fitness over a long period of time, the set of agents becomes homogeneous. Suddenly, a change to the environment alters the fitness function. The system collapses and repair is slow due to search now being random. Long live Axelrod.
Exactly. Evolution is basically a filtering process that records and compresses memories of past changes to the environment, along with mechanisms for communicating those memories as widely as possible and incorporating the communications of other agents. The better agents are at this, the more resources can be marshaled for recording, compressing, and communicating memories. For this reason larger and more tightly coupled agents are favored, but the complexity of maintaining homeostasis increases with agent size, and increasing size also serves to move agents into new selection environments. In other words, an agent's own actions may cause their fitness function to change in ways that are difficult to predict from past experience of the environment alone, and this may become a bigger problem as agents increase in size. At some scale, agents who do not add models of themselves to the fitness search space may be at a disadvantage. If they are social agents in a society of agents similar to themselves, and if they already model other agents, creating self-models may not be much of a leap.
Or at least that's my half-assed theory. Guess I should probably read up on Robert Axelrod's stuff now. Thanks for the pointer.
Re: Conformists may kill civilizations
#8This is generally true of all complex systems. If a social agent finds a very fit region of the search space, it pulls other agents towards it. If the region maintains fitness over a long period of time, the set of agents becomes homogeneous. Suddenly, a change to the environment alters the fitness function. The system collapses and repair is slow due to search now being random. Long live Axelrod.
Exactly. Evolution is basically a filtering process that records and compresses memories of past changes to the environment, along with mechanisms for communicating those memories as widely as possible and incorporating the communications of other agents. The better agents are at this, the more resources can be marshaled for recording, compressing, and communicating memories. For this reason larger and more tightly c…
Re: Conformists may kill civilizations
#9Interesting to think that if you are a non-conformist your role in our civilization's survival is to evangelize your new behaviors while trying not to get yourself killed, imprisoned or banned.
I think you latched on to the real lesson here. Most people will be conformist, it's in their nature. So "don't be a conformist" isn't really a lesson that's practical from a societal level. The lesson I think is that society needs to tolerate non-conformists because they may very well be it's salvation some day. Even if society feels those people are completely undesirable there are ways to separate them without thr…
Of course the problem is that 99% of non-conformists are wrong, but all of them believe that they are right, some of them are really dangerous, and some of them are work very hard to be persuasive. Society is a balancing act of incorporating as much diversity as possible without losing structural integrity. Most people disagree with each other about whether we need more diversity or more conformity, to what extent we are unbalanced, and pretty much everything else at any given point in time.
Re: Conformists may kill civilizations
#10I am not sure one can use civilization and population interchangeably, for one reason: population either adopts to new conditions or dies, civilization, on the other hand may change environment and survive. That's how human species differ: they are alloplastic, while other are autoplastic.
Individual members of populations of every species alter their environments. Humans may do it more deliberately, but as either civilizations or as a species as a whole it's not clear to me that we're all that much better at anticipating and avoiding environmental disasters than other species; we just do everything at a larger scale (more massive individuals, across the whole planet) than any other single species. Not necessarily longer time scales though - that remains to be seen.