Agreed that it’s related, and I do think it’s part of the explanation.
I will go even further: while in that post the selection happens at the level of properties of individuals who participate in some culture, I’m claiming that the selection happens at the higher level of norms of behavior in the culture, because most people are imitating the rest of the culture.
This requires even fewer misaligned individuals. Under the model where you select on individuals, you would still need a fairly large number of people to have the property of interest—if only 1% of salesmen had the personality traits leading to them being scammy and the other 99% were usually honest about the product, the scammy salesmen probably wouldn’t be able to capture all of the sales jobs. However, if most people imitate, then those 1% of salesmen will slowly push the norms towards being more scammy over generations, and you’d end up in the equilibrium where nearly every salesman is scammy.
Come to think of it, I think I would estimate that ~1% of academics are explicitly thinking about how to further their own career at the cost of science (in ways that are different from imitation).
This seems related to the ideas in this post on unconscious economies.
Agreed that it’s related, and I do think it’s part of the explanation.
I will go even further: while in that post the selection happens at the level of properties of individuals who participate in some culture, I’m claiming that the selection happens at the higher level of norms of behavior in the culture, because most people are imitating the rest of the culture.
This requires even fewer misaligned individuals. Under the model where you select on individuals, you would still need a fairly large number of people to have the property of interest—if only 1% of salesmen had the personality traits leading to them being scammy and the other 99% were usually honest about the product, the scammy salesmen probably wouldn’t be able to capture all of the sales jobs. However, if most people imitate, then those 1% of salesmen will slowly push the norms towards being more scammy over generations, and you’d end up in the equilibrium where nearly every salesman is scammy.
Come to think of it, I think I would estimate that ~1% of academics are explicitly thinking about how to further their own career at the cost of science (in ways that are different from imitation).