People are getting to be okay at applying the anthropic principle, or realizing that sometimes we get deceived by upstream sampling.

We're slightly learning that things like: judging wars by the reports of people who came back isn't that reasonable. because, if the war were super lethal with say 99% mortality, by asking the survivors how it affected them and then projecting that onto the population who went, we're ignoring the non-settable viewpoints of those who didn't come back, which mostly might be something like: "do I feel happy your life was ended and I never had a chance to live? no."

i.e. that we should weigh our interpretation strategies by taking into account everything which distorts our sample.

Life history sample space distortion

But, we are still pretty bad at doing this genetically. i.e. if you are from a country which killed off huge percentages of its people due to socialism or war, and you are descended from them, you should probably think about it. Like, if your grandfather was an engineer, say, and Stalin killed half of his graduating class, and those guys also would have had kids, but they didn't - you are the descendant of one who did - and then you go ahead "trusting your intuition", well, that's pretty wrong. You can't just accept everything you're told.

It seems like Jewish people who escaped the holocaust do this well sometimes; they either directly inherited the paranoia which led their ancestors to successfully escape, or are consciously promoting that value in themselves despite their "intuition"

A description of Tribe-space

Let's talk about a competitive system, where individuals compete alone or with family/social groups;

And where outcomes are partly determined by fighting against nature and partly against other people; this fighting can be physical or social (stories, rumors, betrayals) or just direct violence. Fighting vs nature is things like: resisting infection, figuring out how not to get wet and die of cold by using technology; noticing environmental risks with your sharp eyesight; etc.

Performance here is based on cultural traits, as well as biological traits; that is; on how information is transmitted; consider genetic information as just another format; genetic info can almost only be transmitted by sexual reproduction, while other types of info could be cultural, or learned by observation, etc. e.g. I treat the actual DNA and full living biological systems including things like: immune system traits, genetic architecture for height, body plan, neurons, brain construction on the same plane as other transmitted info: cultural values, language, fairly tales for kids, literacy, books, traditions, attitudes. And in the middle there are other things like bacteria which may infect everyone there and influence behavior.

• not all of the information they is "good"
• non-ideal traditions and practices can survive within human culture
• things like "just be smarter" aren't actually easy to just do
• there's also canalization, getting trapped in a dead end which is hard to step out of since the first N steps towards a better location are uphill
• exactly the same thing, genetically, too. bad mutations will keep showing up, and either you filter them out, or you have them. rates of filtering vary, as do mutation rates, and nobody is managing that relationship. And if you reduce mutation, generally, an outside group can now specialize in parasitizing you and you won't be able to stop them.
• there are continuous principal-agent problems at every level - parasitic viruses which don't want to kill their hosts, but some variants of them will sometimes risk the host life, in order to outcompete their fellow viruses. some families will betray a cultural group to get ahead, sometimes even at total genetic cost, etc.

Almost groups are actively undergoing some level of selection. So, they can't be infinitely bad (instant self-suiciding groups are really hard to find & observe; they're already gone. Yet, we can find things which are on unstable paths. It's statistical. "this time it's different" is generally false, but can be true. Groups do die, bur rarely)

The actual claims about what this means, & how we should try to distinguish "something actually happening" from "always has been"

My claim is that with this distribution of traits, we'll see people in certain quadrants advocating different things.

Most groups simultaneously compete:

• against nature
• against themselves
• against other groups
• And this can be multi-level. e.g. siblings vs clan vs nation vs cultural region is a series of inner groups competing within a larger pool

There will be groups specializing in each type, although everyone exists at all levels. i.e. even cult leaders in the real world, who mostly parasitize people on the social level, also still have to eat. Within this, some people will be "good at" each type of competition relative to the others. Over time genetic+cultural skill levels (informationally) generally equalize since both are valuable and they're mutually selected. Even in our world, we have a hugely difficult time distinguishing within attractive people as to what part is nature and what part is nurture. So over time, the smartest people will also look best (this is not the only effect relating to attractiveness, obv., and that goes for all claims)

This, all under a regime of constant mutation and variation; The group itself can influence this, but only partially; infinite stasis will be locally beneficial but will lose since others, if they can adapt, can specialize in killing this group. But too-fast change loses more info than it gains.

Dipping into politics, some individually will profit more by whining and rabble rousing; other, gifted ones, will be more individualistic. Most societies don't have a raw edge of visible conflict on this line, although the current USA does. The complainers think they're being ironic when they state "you elite guys have an unfair advantage; you're acting like you could just kill us off, and you don't even care about inequality" but actually that's true; below the living complainers are already billions of already dead individuals who on average weren't as good. So it's not ironic, and they should be more careful about pointing out how they actually resemble the (gigantic number of) individuals who didn't make it. And it's not like anything else could have happened.

all those claims of "this is unequal" should take more care to realize that social inequality would fall if the lower class also just went away! So, don't complain about not having been made to go away, please! And your historical claims that the past is full of injustice, too, if honored, would also increase inequality! if the winning coalition of some historical struggle hadn't killed off the laggards, the weak (along with many nice, deserving people), and those groups were still here, still lagging, stubbornly still trying to use stone axes, stubbornly refusing to intermarry to receive the genetics updates, our society today would be even more unequal. So seriously, be careful with those kind of inequality arguments! And it's not even about the so-called crimes of elites; it's part of the fabric of the universe; think of every "darwin award" winner; in every society, the elites are generally less prone to that kind of thing (think: florida man). By complaining about elites greater success, you're just pointing out that they are the best known solutions to "how to survive on earth" and that others aren't. It's not current elites fault when people make objective mistakes leading to failure, like misjudging the distance to safety while on a cliff, or whatever. Ofc some people DO claim it is and that all problems of all type are the fault of elites/westerners. And ofc not all elites; corruption obviously exists and tons of elites don't deserve the position. A characteristic mistake we make is not distinguishing between aristocracy and oligarchic elites. Conveniently forgetting how almost all our current wealth elites actually ARE relatively self-made people, and forgetting that there really is quite a lot of filtering by ability at high-level positions in our society is a failure.

Let's deal with the "it's all nepotism/-isms of another kind" complaint here: I think I can avoid this in general by positing a completely neutral sample, all the same sex, origin, age, everything, raised together with no parental contact, and still not all clones. No matter what, this group would eventually have its 1% (since this is often defined dynamically!) too; all kinds of power would combine, there would be an adoption curve, there would be some level of "how easy it is to survive despite not being updated/aware", whether brutally harsh (e.g. the navy seals, astronauts) or extremely soft (a society which is ultra-kind etc.) but regardless, people still die, and that's associated with one edge of the distribution more than the other, so it really doesn't matter for the question of whether filtering happens. And in this world, people would still die, and I can make it arbitrarily hard for you to blame the emergent 1% in that world for it. I claim to have demonstrated that even in the most clear sample, avoiding all the old blood-libels against colonialism etc. that life is still hard and cruel, that implicit competition still happens even in perfectly peaceful and fair-as-can-be societies. (because people are still mutating; mutations need filtering; being mutated is unattractive; people filter on attraction; unattractive people still exist (and that is a good, moral thing, and that we should be tolerant - being tolerant is not only morally required, but also actually adaptive, too; do you think all-clone societies, doomed to be parasitized, are tolerant? they aren't.)).

Imagine being a really bad team in baseball and complaining when the yankees win: "you guys were just too good, it's not fair, we had no chance". Far from being an argument for society to equalize the situation, you're just telling people that like the 99% of all other men who already have had their MLB careers killed, dead, forever you are also really quite bad at baseball! and indeed you probably will not be returning next year. If instead they do some kind of forced equalization of playtime in the MLB, well, waiting in the wings is a class, 10x as large as yours, of "guys who are now the next marginally best MLB players" who aren't quite good enough, who can make the exactly identical argument as you.

So, I don't approve of some kind of "breaking up the 1% best baseball players" scheme.

Furthermore: if you allow it, you will ALWAYS see this kind of argument, which sounds like "It's not fair, you guys have all the luck, you were born with advantage, etc"

Does that mean there's no such thing as unfairness? Of course not!

I shouldn't need to, but okay, I'll give a gross example of unfairness

Imagine an art market; artists make things; once a month on sunday they go to a certain rock; art fans attend too; everyone has food (gathered from the forest); there is no violence (a much superior force is monitoring them and penalizing it lethally and everyone's already adapted to it). They all trade art for fruit, stories, etc. You can go or not as you will; you can trade or not, freely. This is "fair" and humans have this concept because it's shorthand for a locally stable situation which produces benefits.

If now someone figures out how to cheat the monitor force and force people to do things they don't want, like take bad deals, or trade away art they didn't want to trade, that's bad.

If you doubt me, you might ask "Why don't you just say, like above, 'life was always this way, get used to it'"?

And I reply that I am not a hypocrite, and there is a real distinction.

The art-trading situation was "doing" something - survival was gated by the force controlling violence, which allowed exploration of art-space. Breaking that stops the exploration; the answer will be everyone leaving, or war. Even in art-world, bad artists were still bad.

In the tribe example before, though, it's different. That tribe is exploring "existence-space"; just as in art space there is preference and selection for "good" art in the environment, in the tribe-space there is also selection for "goodness" that is, fitness. And just like how ruining the market for "figuring out" which art is good is "bad", there is an analogy in tribe-space too: things like forcing women to give up their freedom of choice in who they will be with; nepotism; a religious law saying none of the tribe may ever live more than a day's walk from the king's mansion, etc.

So basically the gap is that given that some kind of filtering unfortunately does exist, and that when bad things exist, we can either remove them, let them die out, let them spread or help them spread. Since within each of us are some non-ideal parts, I don't think it'd be convincing with current tech to advocate removal! (this can change with tech, although, we can never know what's actually ideal for any future situation, and a large amount of variation is expected within even ideal states! so don't worry about that!). Options like letting them spread at least accord with "don't actively do bad", but "help them spread" seems beyond the pale.

Within the example, the ruining of the active, but not very harmful filter system, is equivalent to preventing the point of the system from being reached; individuals within it will have noticed that it's a rather good and moral stable system. If the loss of its protections were an intentional act, opposing it and uniting to restore it would be a natural schelling point; but it can also be a random, or "natural" act. i.e. even before humans, under continental drift, lands would be alone, evolve creatures, then re-establish contact - no doubt at such times there was massive extinction, (which, unlike a naturalistic-fallacy-victim, I can just directly say that I oppose without contradiction! because I do not worship filtering or selection; I'm just aware of it).

Although it should also be said, that from the pov of a "desire to be an artist and make art", the above system is ruthlessly cruel and unforgiving. Our modern system, which focuses on "living" rather than art, is MUCH kinder. Even the most moral socialist of human dignity, etc, has no solution to when a person of zero talent wants to be an artist. That self-creative-nature, even under their best proposal, is doomed to cause pain, and die, unfulfilled.

Standing wave economics

So putting all this together:

Just because people are around complaining about this or that, it's totally expected. People who specialize in parasitizing or not, they'll say so. Sometimes the unfairness is real, too, but not always. You still have to actually look at whether their proposals could or would work, do tests, etc.

You observe bad behavior only just beyond what you eliminate.

If a society tolerates mice but kills foxes, there will be a lot of mice.

Most societies evolved under conditions where this rule didn't matter much, since nature killing people off was such a strong background force. That's not the case at the present. So, most societies have a crippled ability to punish (crippled only meaning that they no longer can maintain societal homeostatis since the'd relied on external factors to do so. (This is always the case; there are always external dependencies; but this one is one of the first to show up, for humanity, since we had a dependency on a thing we actually hated (the cruelty of life killing people off in a way which is partly random, partly linked to that person's luck, genetics, or life choices))). In general, having dependencies on things which you hate is bad! Needing pain to grow up, needing cold to kill off the old people; imagine a society of inuit who have a moral philosophy which lets they enact and believe very pure and clear, convincing, and noble virtues about saving all life, but their tech & environment means that they barely have enough calories to survive, and that's true even given that as soon as someone is old, the harshness of life kills them off. All well and good, although cruel. But then add artificial heating from oil, and boom, now there is no way forward. The functioning marriage markets, social systems, political systems, etc which kept alive some of the necessary aspects of their culture just won't work when suddenly there are 10x as many grandmas and grandpas around as before. All the inheritance laws, ceremonial laws for family relationships, etc are thrown off kilter. And before, having a very pure and naive belief set was totally fine; nobody had to think about sociology at all; and they even might have considered thinking that way a sign of being a psychopath. But now, things don't add up and they've got no mechanism to address it.

In the real world, I think something like this led to fascism; their horrible solution, which obviously never could have worked, was something like embracing the chaos and death necessary for our species to live; to consciously, culturally somehow venerate fighting, contests, competition.

This is so obviously not going to work at all. The prior system was like a balanced wall; one one side, everyone in the tribe was pushign with all their might; on the other, a great wind was pulling sails, which imparted huge force. On average, things were stable. When that wind goes away, you can't just tell people to push the other direction, or not push at all. Our former rate of character formation and systems working was literally built on top of the forces of nature scything through the population in horrible ways, along with lots and lots of other things which (partially) filtered in biased ways.

Fascist solutions like just taking on the duty, like "let's just kill them off ourselves" are NOT at all the same as what was happening before! Their entire morality before was about helping people, cooperating, etc. There's no way to easily graft that on anywhere without ruining everything.