But most of all—why on Earth would any human being think that one ought to optimize inclusive genetic fitness, rather than what is good? What is even the appeal of this, morally or otherwise? At all?
I don’t think you ought to try to optimise fitness. Your opinion about fitness might be quite wrong, even if you accept the goal of optimising fitness. Say you sacrifice trying to optimise fitness and then it turns out you failed. Like, you try to optimise for intelligence just before a plague hits that kills 3⁄4 of the public. You should have optimised for plague resistance. What a loser.
And what would you do to optimise genetic fitness anyway? Carefully choose who to have children with?
Perhaps you would want to change the environment so that it will be good for humans, or for your kind of human being. That makes a kind of sense to me, but again it’s hard to do. Not only do you have the problem of actually changing the world. You also have the problem of ecological succession. Very often, species that take over an ecosystem change it in ways that leave something else better able to grow than that species’ own children. Some places, grasses provide a good environment for pine seedlings that then shade out the grass. But the pines in turn create an environment where hardwood saplings can grow better than pine saplings. Etc. If you like human beings or your own kind of human beings then it makes some sense to create an environment where they will thrive. But do you know how to do that?
If you knew all about how to design ecosystems to get the results you want, that might provide some of the tools you’d need to design human societies. I don’t think those tools exist yet.
On a different level, I feel like it’s important to avoid minimising mimetic fitness. If you have ideas that you believe are true or good or beautiful, and those ideas seem to kill off the people who hold them faster than they can spread the ideas, that’s a sign that something is wrong. It should not be that the good, true, or beautiful ideas die out. Either there’s something wrong with the ideas, or else there should be some way to modify the environment so they spread easier, or at least some way to modify the environment so the bearers of the ideas don’t die off so fast. I can’t say what it is that’s wrong, but there’s something wrong when the things that look good tend to disappear.
If they’re good then there ought to be a way for them to persist until they can mutate or recombine into something better. They don’t need to take over the world but they shouldn’t just disappear.
I don’t like it when the things I like go extinct.
So I don’t want to maximise the fitness of things I like, but I sure do want that fitness to be adequate. When it isn’t adequate then something is wrong and I want to look carefully at what’s wrong. Maybe it’s the ideas. Maybe something else.
Similarly, if you run a business you don’t need to maximise profits. But if you run at a loss on average then you have a problem that needs to be fixed.
But most of all—why on Earth would any human being think that one ought to optimize inclusive genetic fitness, rather than what is good? What is even the appeal of this, morally or otherwise? At all?
I don’t think you ought to try to optimise fitness. Your opinion about fitness might be quite wrong, even if you accept the goal of optimising fitness. Say you sacrifice trying to optimise fitness and then it turns out you failed. Like, you try to optimise for intelligence just before a plague hits that kills 3⁄4 of the public. You should have optimised for plague resistance. What a loser.
And what would you do to optimise genetic fitness anyway? Carefully choose who to have children with?
Perhaps you would want to change the environment so that it will be good for humans, or for your kind of human being. That makes a kind of sense to me, but again it’s hard to do. Not only do you have the problem of actually changing the world. You also have the problem of ecological succession. Very often, species that take over an ecosystem change it in ways that leave something else better able to grow than that species’ own children. Some places, grasses provide a good environment for pine seedlings that then shade out the grass. But the pines in turn create an environment where hardwood saplings can grow better than pine saplings. Etc. If you like human beings or your own kind of human beings then it makes some sense to create an environment where they will thrive. But do you know how to do that?
If you knew all about how to design ecosystems to get the results you want, that might provide some of the tools you’d need to design human societies. I don’t think those tools exist yet.
On a different level, I feel like it’s important to avoid minimising mimetic fitness. If you have ideas that you believe are true or good or beautiful, and those ideas seem to kill off the people who hold them faster than they can spread the ideas, that’s a sign that something is wrong. It should not be that the good, true, or beautiful ideas die out. Either there’s something wrong with the ideas, or else there should be some way to modify the environment so they spread easier, or at least some way to modify the environment so the bearers of the ideas don’t die off so fast. I can’t say what it is that’s wrong, but there’s something wrong when the things that look good tend to disappear.
If they’re good then there ought to be a way for them to persist until they can mutate or recombine into something better. They don’t need to take over the world but they shouldn’t just disappear.
I don’t like it when the things I like go extinct.
So I don’t want to maximise the fitness of things I like, but I sure do want that fitness to be adequate. When it isn’t adequate then something is wrong and I want to look carefully at what’s wrong. Maybe it’s the ideas. Maybe something else.
Similarly, if you run a business you don’t need to maximise profits. But if you run at a loss on average then you have a problem that needs to be fixed.