It sounds like you’re thinking about “adaptivity” in terms of what’s good for the group, not the individual. In a malthusian equilibrium, the world is largely zero-sum, so uprooting the trees of slightly more well-off neighbors could plausibly increase the odds of survival for one’s own offspring. It’s the next best thing to eating the neighbor’s babies, as far as evolutionary fitness goes. And over time, it’s the families with the most individual fitness which will dominate the constituency of the group.
(On the other hand, the fact that there was space to plant more apple trees indicates that the world was not perfectly zero sum; there were nonzero gains to be had from tree-planting. But the broader idea still applies: the culture can be a Nash equilibrium without being particularly good at the group level.)
It sounds like you’re thinking about “adaptivity” in terms of what’s good for the group, not the individual.
The phrase “good for the group, not the individual” feels ambiguous to me; I usually interpret it to mean something that hurts some individuals while improving the group’s chances to survive (e.g. norms that make some individuals sacrifice themselves to make the rest of the group better off). That at least wasn’t what I meant; by “more adaptive” I meant something like an approximate Pareto improvement (in the long term) for the people adopting it.
E.g. if everyone—including spouses! - is stealing from each other all the time, then it seems hard to believe that it’s advantageous for people to marry while it not being advantageous to commit to a no-theft policy at least when dealing with your spouse. Even if the village was largely zero-sum, it still seems like being able to reliably cooperate with one person would give you an advantage in trying to steal things from everyone else. Or if things are so zero-sum that it’s not even beneficial to cooperate with your spouse, why is there still an institution of marriage?
the fact that there was space to plant more apple trees indicates that the world was not perfectly zero sum; there were nonzero gains to be had from tree-planting
I would think that the fact that people are socially interacting in a village in the first place implies that the world is not perfectly zero-sum and that there are gains to be had from cooperation. If that wasn’t the case, I think the optimal strategy would be for one family to try to murder or enslave everyone else?
the culture can be a Nash equilibrium without being particularly good at the group level
I read this as indicating disagreement with my comment, but isn’t it expressing the same thought as the dictatorless dystopia example and my remark that no rule requires cultures to hit particularly good local optimums?
Maybe in given culture the idea of not stealing from your spouse is so counter-intuitive that...
most people don’t even get the idea, ever;
those who do, find it extremely difficult to convince their spouses that it is a good idea;
even those who agree, usually succumb to the temptation, because they have spent their entire life building an opposite habit.
In other words, cooperation is actually so hard, that it is almost impossible even for two people to cooperate unless their culture has already provided them some basic training in this skill.
Yeah, this sounds much more like the kind of thing that I’d expect to be the cause, as opposed to mutual theft being somehow a beneficial/adaptive response to poverty.
One of the consequences of being in stressful circumstances is that it makes you less open to trying out new things—understandably, given that if resources are sparse, it makes sense for the brain to stick to tried and true behaviors for extracting those resources rather than risk trying a novel behavior that might extract nothing. (And in a village where you’ve grown up treating all social interactions as more or less adversarial, someone suggesting something new is probably just trying to trick you somehow.) So once a culture hits this kind of a situation, it may become stuck there and be incapable of evolving anything better unless the material situation gets somehow drastically better.
It sounds like you’re thinking about “adaptivity” in terms of what’s good for the group, not the individual. In a malthusian equilibrium, the world is largely zero-sum, so uprooting the trees of slightly more well-off neighbors could plausibly increase the odds of survival for one’s own offspring. It’s the next best thing to eating the neighbor’s babies, as far as evolutionary fitness goes. And over time, it’s the families with the most individual fitness which will dominate the constituency of the group.
(On the other hand, the fact that there was space to plant more apple trees indicates that the world was not perfectly zero sum; there were nonzero gains to be had from tree-planting. But the broader idea still applies: the culture can be a Nash equilibrium without being particularly good at the group level.)
The phrase “good for the group, not the individual” feels ambiguous to me; I usually interpret it to mean something that hurts some individuals while improving the group’s chances to survive (e.g. norms that make some individuals sacrifice themselves to make the rest of the group better off). That at least wasn’t what I meant; by “more adaptive” I meant something like an approximate Pareto improvement (in the long term) for the people adopting it.
E.g. if everyone—including spouses! - is stealing from each other all the time, then it seems hard to believe that it’s advantageous for people to marry while it not being advantageous to commit to a no-theft policy at least when dealing with your spouse. Even if the village was largely zero-sum, it still seems like being able to reliably cooperate with one person would give you an advantage in trying to steal things from everyone else. Or if things are so zero-sum that it’s not even beneficial to cooperate with your spouse, why is there still an institution of marriage?
I would think that the fact that people are socially interacting in a village in the first place implies that the world is not perfectly zero-sum and that there are gains to be had from cooperation. If that wasn’t the case, I think the optimal strategy would be for one family to try to murder or enslave everyone else?
I read this as indicating disagreement with my comment, but isn’t it expressing the same thought as the dictatorless dystopia example and my remark that no rule requires cultures to hit particularly good local optimums?
Maybe in given culture the idea of not stealing from your spouse is so counter-intuitive that...
most people don’t even get the idea, ever;
those who do, find it extremely difficult to convince their spouses that it is a good idea;
even those who agree, usually succumb to the temptation, because they have spent their entire life building an opposite habit.
In other words, cooperation is actually so hard, that it is almost impossible even for two people to cooperate unless their culture has already provided them some basic training in this skill.
Yeah, this sounds much more like the kind of thing that I’d expect to be the cause, as opposed to mutual theft being somehow a beneficial/adaptive response to poverty.
One of the consequences of being in stressful circumstances is that it makes you less open to trying out new things—understandably, given that if resources are sparse, it makes sense for the brain to stick to tried and true behaviors for extracting those resources rather than risk trying a novel behavior that might extract nothing. (And in a village where you’ve grown up treating all social interactions as more or less adversarial, someone suggesting something new is probably just trying to trick you somehow.) So once a culture hits this kind of a situation, it may become stuck there and be incapable of evolving anything better unless the material situation gets somehow drastically better.