J.
You don’t address the point that Wilsons trait-group selection mechanism is
actually an INHERITANCE mechanism. Is that because you don’ get it, or because
you don’t like it and are being polite.
n
Nick Thompson
thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
<https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>
*From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Jochen Fromm
*Sent:* Tuesday, January 4, 2022 3:59 PM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Group Selection Redux?
:-) D.S. Wilson is one of the few who is on the right path. What he gets right is that
social groups can sometimes be treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be
reduced to individuals or individual interactions [1]. This is what he emphasizes in his
articles about group selection and in his book "Darwin's Cathedral" [2].
The question is what is selected? In natural selection a genotype is selected
if the phenotype has high fitness and lots of offspring. For individual animals
it is clear. For groups we can argue that successful groups are selected if
their phenotype has high fitness and attracts lots
of new members. This naturally leads to the question "what is the genotype and the
phenotype for groups" ?
The phenotype is apparently the group character which is characterized by group
traits as you mentioned. The group traits are in turn created by the common
rules of the group, which can be commandments or norms or laws. The only thing
that I miss in Wilson's work is that these rules are identified as what they
are (as the genes that can create a group if they are expressed and applied
regularly).
If we define and identify the genotype and the phenotype correctly, then we can
really shift the metaphor of the selfish gene and the metaphor of natural
selection to the group level, as the title of your paper says.
[1] David Sloan Wilson, Elliott Sober, "Reintroducing group selection to the human
behavioral sciences". Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4) (1994) 585–654
[2] David Sloan Wilson, "Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of
Society", University of Chicago Press, 2002
-J.
-------- Original message --------
From: thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
Date: 1/4/22 01:26 (GMT+01:00)
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Group Selection Redux?
Dear Jochen,
Thank you so much for your comments. So nice to know that I am not the only
person to have spent the last decade pounding on the locked conceptual doors of
our profession’s minds.
Two quick responses:
Wilson is very much on my mind as I talk about things. I think part of why
Wilson didn’t get as much traction as he should have is that he failed to
understand that his “trait-group” selection mechanism was not a selection
mechanism but an inheritance mechanism. My claim, here, is that if he had
said that group traits can be selected for and have played an enormous role in
the evolution of species when they are endorsed by the inheritance of
individual traits of differentiability.
Second, I regret that Wilson and Richerson and Boyd all went for the cultural
variance enhancement hypothesis because I think that hypothesis begs the
question how group selection so clearly works again and again to create levels
of organization in biological systems. It amounts, therefore, to another
special creation hypothesis with respect to humans. After thousands of years
of thinking of humans as some sort of special case, I am ready to stop doing
that for a while.
I am sorry to hear about your PhD experience. Give me their addresses and I
will have them killed.
Nick
Nick Thompson
thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
<https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>
*From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>>
*On Behalf Of *Jochen Fromm
*Sent:* Monday, January 3, 2022 5:08 PM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Group Selection Redux?
"how do we get a group emergent property out of the aggregation of individual
properties"
It is indeed an interesting question. I have tried two times to get a PhD,
first in physics and then in computer science. Both times the professors
cancelled the collaboration after one or two years and argued I had failed and
accomplished nothing. This was one of the questions I tried to solve. As you
know it is related to all the SFI topics of emergence, self-organization,
evolution and group selection.
Group selection can be really complex. David Sloan Wilson is an expert in this topic
who already published in 1975 a PNAS article about it...
https://www.pnas.org/content/72/1/143 <https://www.pnas.org/content/72/1/143>
...but even 40 years later the idea is still controversial. I think it is
because it is a complex phenomenon that happens during a transition of
different evolutionary systems where multiple systems overlap, and both have an
effect on the overall fitness
https://blog.oup.com/2015/01/kin-group-selection-controversy/
<https://blog.oup.com/2015/01/kin-group-selection-controversy/>
I believe it is a mistake to believe that stable properties of a complex group
will emerge mysteriously from a few interactions or random fluctuations.
Ephemeral interactions may lead to complex but unstable patterns (i.e. to
short-lived group traits). They most likely will not lead to lasting structures
unless they are recorded and stored somewhere.
A possible answer which I see for the question how a group property can emerge
from individual properties in social systems is that a group agrees to follow
common rules based on its history. Looking back on the shared history, the
group will try to avoid the same mistakes in the future. Rules which prohibit a
behavior are therefore often the result of events which were accidents or
deliberate actions that had really bad consequences.
A stop sign for example exists because there has been at least one accident at
a similar place where a vehicle has not been stopped in time and another
vehicle was hit. A do-not-steal rule exists because there has been at least one
real property loss by theft, a do-not-murder rule exists because there has been
at least one terrible loss of a life by a murder, etc. What is aggregated are
rules to avoid events which are bad for the group.
From the countless ephemeral interactions of the group only those stand out
which have very good or very bad consequences for the group. They are
remembered and can become the foundation of basic moral rules if it becomes
clear in hindsight what is good and bad for the group. These cultural norms can
be encapsulated in myths, stories or fairy tales that can be passed from
generation to generation. When these rules are written down, it is possible to
reach an evolutionary transition to a new dimension
https://blog.cas-group.net/2020/07/the-fractal-dimension-of-group-selection/
<https://blog.cas-group.net/2020/07/the-fractal-dimension-of-group-selection/>
Does this make sense? I believe the uncertainty what constitutes a group trait
is not a problem of finding the right definition. It is part of the group
creation, which can be an evolutionary transition process (from random
interactions to verbally transmitted myths to written rules which define a
successful ethnic or religious group and become the genes of a new evolutionary
systen).
-J.
-------- Original message --------
From: thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
Date: 1/3/22 19:00 (GMT+01:00)
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
Subject: [FRIAM] Group Selection Redux?
Ok, I am still in the freezing cold room.
Narcissist that I am, I want to explore the implications of my own insight – yes, it was mine, all mine, hooo-ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaahl—that the key to group selection is emergent properties of groups based on quantitative inheritance between “generations” of groups. Sooooo, how do we get a group emergent property out of the aggregation of individual properties. Not many individual properties are suitable. But one is. TRACTIBILITY. We see this in the immune system, or in bee hives, or in brain cells, etc. What nature selects for at the group level is functional organization but that is achieved at the lower level by selection for tractability. So, the human ability to learn is foundational to our capacity for “altruism”. And vice versa. This is all laid out in the final pages of Shifting the Natural Selection Metaphor to the Group Level <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288818273_Shifting_the_natural_selection_metaphor_to_the_group_level>. Published in the
mid-oughts, you could be the first to read it. Download it, and I will come to your house [masked, of course] and autograph it. C’mon. What could be better than that?! Hooo-ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaahl
Ah. The room temperature is up to 65 degrees. Things are looking up.
Nick Thompson
thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
<https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>
*From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>>
*On Behalf Of *David Eric Smith
*Sent:* Monday, January 3, 2022 5:15 AM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??
This is an interesting direction.
How small a minority does one have to be in, for it to count as an arbitrage
opportunity? In the El Farol and Minority Game abstractions, any minority is
enough.
If we think about the dichotomy in public health, or in reason vs. hormonal
aggression, the split in the US (at least by political commitments) is not so
far from 50/50. But as far as “profiting from the committed wrong”, that
market seems to be cornered already by a very tiny percent, who have priced in
much of the available surplus. The difference between the dupes and the honest
but powerless seems unimportant compared to the difference between both of
those and the insiders with power, access, and control. Somehow these richly
structured extensive-form games with coalitional solution concepts seem very
far from the market model in which we often think about arbitrage.
I am also reminded of the aphorism in that other realm “The market can stay
irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” Or in the case of climate,
agricultural, and social instability, alive.
I wonder what makes an adequate toolbox of concepts and analogies with which to
think about this (at least somewhat) systematically.
Eric
On Jan 2, 2022, at 2:58 PM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com
<mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
Nick writes:
< So, what does a healthy 2040 community look like. What are we working
TOWARD, here. Once of the things that the Mcnamee podcast highlighted for me was my
feeling that, in a chaotic world, people like me, /planners, /are just out of tune
with the world. >
I don't think it really matters how people interact in social media or what
they think. What will matter is how people adapt to climate change and the
exhaustion of food and energy, and the migrations resulting from climate
change. That's where the opportunities will be. If there are millions of
people that deny it is happening like they deny pandemics, then things simply
must be arranged so that the natural accounting occurs. The planners will
look past the chaos and make their investments.. and wait.
Marcus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:*Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> on behalf
ofthompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com><thompnicks...@gmail.com
<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>>
*Sent:*Sunday, January 2, 2022 1:32 PM
*To:*'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
*Subject:*Re: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??
So, what does a healthy 2040 community look like. What are we working
TOWARD, here. Once of the things that the Mcnamee podcast highlighted for me
was my feeling that, in a chaotic world, people like me,/planners,/are just out
of tune with the world.
By the way, I think “surfing the web” , as it has been used, is a terrible
metaphor. What most of us do is like water skiing the web. Bouncing over the
wake, never actually getting into the water. Gives surfing a bad name. A
surfer finds the few survivable paths through an immense concentration of
hostile forces. Surfing is more like martial arts. In fact we must begin to
surf the web. To realize the manners in which its hostile forces constrain us
and find the few paths that allow us to master those forces and come out of the
curl safely. We thought it was a playground; now we see it’s a minefield.
n
Nick Thompson
thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,-Fd2M0MU4wX5y1N6mhhnNrFlsG64cdcJ8jOErlxB0hvFzR4dcEnKSSt2EqX5s2fb-wPOBqSH4X2Ap1mYP24zv3_muYGYijRLpnFKTxxN3dQyGtSp1B6x&typo=1>
*From:*Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>>*On Behalf Of*Marcus Daniels
*Sent:*Sunday, January 2, 2022 2:18 PM
*To:*The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
*Subject:*Re: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??
Nick writes:
< Imagined a world in which we all worked at home, everything was on zoom,
and everything was delivered by Amazon by drone. I realize this is a reductio,
but hum along with me for a few bars. There would be no intermediate social
landscape between the home and the distribution center. No intermediate human
scales.
I can’t say immediately why this would be a bad thing, but my gut doesn’t like
it.>
I can't think of many examples where the intermediate scales are anything
but wasteful or intrusive. Maybe to see a tailor coupled to the purchase of
certain clothes? I still drive to services (dentist, doctor, hair stylist),
just not to redistributors, because they don't really add anything. There's
still a farmer's market that seems as popular as ever -- but they DO offer
something unique. I can drive five minutes to Home Depot but honestly half
the time their inventory is exhausted for what I want, and I end up ordering it
online.
Marcus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:*Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> on behalf
ofthompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com><thompnicks...@gmail.com
<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>>
*Sent:*Sunday, January 2, 2022 1:03 PM
*To:*'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
*Subject:*Re: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??
Marcus,
I would like to be convinced …. But
Imagined a world in which we all worked at home, everything was on zoom,
and everything was delivered by Amazon by drone. I realize this is a reductio,
but hum along with me for a few bars. There would be no intermediate social
landscape between the home and the distribution center. No intermediate human
scales.
I can’t say immediately why this would be a bad thing, but my gut doesn’t
like it.
Nick
Nick Thompson
thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,p4rsPfl7qCnkvPDXzYT5M-1fZBZKaCDIB1z2Osc-CfFDLgw598S0mD13_Sppk4ua_2uMIZVWNAECmtZ8s2kblHg2quJex4YawfboMGbRTDU_u15bu8836eLAHQ,,&typo=1>
*From:*Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>>*On Behalf Of*Marcus Daniels
*Sent:*Sunday, January 2, 2022 1:38 PM
*To:*'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
*Subject:*Re: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??
I can see living without Facebook (I do), but why can't we live with
Amazon? It seems like they did a pretty good job of displacing the likes of
Walmart. It could happen again. What added inherent value do stores have,
other than as a mechanism to prevent he consolidation of market influence
w.r.t. to prices?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:*Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> on behalf
ofthompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com><thompnicks...@gmail.com
<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>>
*Sent:*Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:03 PM
*To:*'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
*Subject:*[FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??
I just listened to this podcast
https://feeds.megaphone.fm/VMP5489734702
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2ffeeds.megaphone.fm%2fVMP5489734702&c=E,1,G87ToIzgI5DT4ZpiKuXcRc2EHcS4lpVgIftU98yiNor7PFNa9lCoDMtpA2GT4_2eudXeeatF6BgR-Peqwvf8pBQOnsbOiuYBI693rGSZCjDA8-JbvEUZ&typo=1>
a conversation between the former prosecutor, Joyce Vance, and the
musician, financier, turncoat Facebook investor Roger Mcnamee, who likens this
moment with big tech to the moment before the food industry regulations of the
early 1900’s and anti-pollution legislation of the 60’s, moments when Da People
reasserted control over over-weening industry interests. He is author of the
book,/Zucked/.
An hour-long pod cast is a terribly inefficient way to learn about
something, so I hope that one you, for whom none of this is news, can offer a
more condensed source.
We are basically talking about the Amazon paradox, here: can’t live with
it; can’t live without it. How much ARE we willing to pay to have the trains
run on time?
As usual, I am in need of instruction.
Nick Thompson
thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,AekdfP2MBl31iUxGjknOMPY6CLKTWZ0Uy_4dTUwGKgNke6kg7BN0qwu3VC8xzay12y6vtDYGszhL0ussBgpgtjOzZjJu9AWkUutwzgaFOibLSYQ0DDICSZg,&typo=1>
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