But what if our irrationalities aren’t quick-and-dirty heuristics optimized for speed? What known cognitive biases are even applicable to running away from a lion?
What if some of our cognitive biases are evolved adaptations that make human society work better? It would be pretty surprising to me if this weren’t the case!
Just because they are evolved, doesn’t mean they are optimal. An evolved adaptation can be just as “dirty” as a fast cognitive heuristic; the architectural constraints of learning through genes can be just as constraining as those of coming up with something to do fast.
Yes, and let me add to that, just because something was adaptive when humans evolved doesn’t mean it is at all adaptive now. To use a concrete example, the weight humans put on anecdotes is likely connected to the fact that in our ancestral environment, that was the primary source of data about what the risks around us were. However, now this leads to silly things like people being terribly scared of shark attacks precisely due to the rarity of such attacks making them get a lot of news coverage.
You know, you’re right. I was responding to peripheral aspects of your proposal rather than central ones, which is a waste of everyone’s time. My apologies.
So, OK… rolling back: if I’m understanding you, you’re hypothesizing that our biases are not design flaws, but rather adaptations to obtain the group-level benefit of having individuals be more irrational and therefore predictable.
(Is that right? I’m trying to infer a positive claim out of a series of questions, which is always tricky; if I’ve misunderstood your hypothetical it might be helpful to restate it more explicitly.)
Perhaps irrationality does provide a group-level benefit, as you suggest. For example, maybe it’s easier to get valuable group behaviors by manipulating irrational people than by cooperating with rational ones. That doesn’t strike me as too plausible, but it’s possible.
Even granting that, though, I have trouble with the idea that the benefit to individual breeders exceeds the costs to the individual of being more easily manipulated by others.
The more I thought about it … it seemed like rational agents couldn’t trust anyone (the best course is to convince them to trust you and then betray them while never trusting anyone yourself) except in the early and middle stages of iterated games. But a society where everyone irrationally trusted everyone else, and irrationally nobody betrayed anyone else, would be more successful than the ‘rational agent’ community. (all things being equal; if their irrational trust also caused them to irrationally trust lions...) It might stretch the word evolution too much, but I think the term “competitive selection” applies to this process of societies competing with each other for growth and the most effective societies wiping out the less effective societies (wiping out or completely integrating, as the lesser society’s land and resources would already be purposed towards supporting a society, and therefore more desirable than land requiring work).
Basically, what if ‘trust’ is because a society where everyone trusts the other guy to cooperate in a PD was successful enough to dominate the landscape?
NB: Originally I had thought of trust as a sort of greenbearding. Is there an analogous concept in sociocultural evolution?
A population or society in which everyone trusts completely is not an ESS. A population or society in which everyone adopts the slogan “trust, but verify” and cooperates in the punishment of defectors and non-punishing freeriders probably is an ESS, assuming the cost of verification and punishment are low and verification is reasonably effective.
it seemed like rational agents couldn’t trust anyone (the best course is to convince them to trust you and then betray them while never trusting anyone yourself) except in the early and middle stages of iterated games.
In the real world, the iteration never completely ends.
Why are people voting Tim’s comment down so hard? Are there actually three people out there, let alone a majority of LWers, who do not believe it is correct?
Speech, sexual selection rituals, sex itself, cooperation in the social insects … There are many things which seem to require a more complex and subtle narrative for their explanation than the usual simple Darwinian story of a mutant individual doing better than his conspecific competitors and then passing on his genes.
But that doesn’t mean that a died-in-the-wool neo-Darwinian needs to accept the group-selection explanation any more than an Ayn Rand fan confronted with a skyscraper has to admit that Kropotkin was right after all.
However, I am taking your implicit advise and dutifully upvoting Tim’s comment.
I wasn’t suggesting that speech evolved via group selection—just that it evidently did evolve—and so proposing the existence of “evolved adaptations that make human society work better” is not an error.
Tim’s comment doesn’t say that speech evolved via group selection. It could be that it did not; in that case, Tim’s comment would be pointing out that Eliezer was unjustified in calling out a belief in “evolved adaptations that make human society work better” as an error.
I was just thinking how there’s a weird hivemind thing going on with the downvotes. Well-written and cordial posts arguing against the site’s preferred positions are being summarily downvoted to invisibility.
This doesn’t look like a very healthy discussion dynamic.
I have been using the Kibitzer since I started posting, and my handle on this matter is that well-written, cordial posts that don’t use LW techniques are downvoted. That is, they argue against the preferred position, and they are downvoted because they argue badly. Small corroborations: the posts that get summarily upvoted are ones that point out lack-of-rationality in the arguments, upvotes on topics when they aren’t flawed.
If that seems like an unhealthy discussion dynamic then you should review the LW techniques for rationality and make a top level post explaining how using these techniques, or how requiring everyone to use these techniques, could result in unhealthy discussions.
Possibility: Well-written, cordial posts are your criteria for upvotes because cordiality and well-writtenness usually correlate with clear thinking and good reasoning. This is true over most of the blog, except for the edge cases. These cases have their roots in subtle cognitive biases, not gross emotional biases, and it’s possible that lack of writing skill and cordiality points out gross emotional biases but not subtler ones.
What exactly do you mean by groupthink? Let’s taboo the word a bit:
All members of group agree (same answer)
All members of group have same/similar thought process (same process to answer)
Answers or processes are flawed (this could just be a common mistake)
Flaws are not corrected because group consensus is more important (this is the bit that distinguishes groupthink from a common mistake, it perpetuates)
Those last two are important parts of groupthink. Without that last one, mathematicians are guilty of groupthink, because they all apply the same (somtimes flawed) processes and get the same answers. Maths isn’t groupthink because attempts are made to discover and fix flaws, and these attempts aren’t ignored out of hand.
The kibitzer blocks out names and karma scores; so you can’t tell what the group consensus is (either by the person’s name; “the community thinks this guy is a troll” or by vote; “-5? this post must be bad”). I follow the same process as everyone else in evaluating a comment, but I don’t know if I’ve gotten the same answer as them. In practice, when I’ve checked, I do get the same answer, so it satisfies the first two conditions. But is the process flawed? And is meeting the group’s consensus more important than fixing these flaws?
I think I feel the problem is more a mismatch between the subtlety of the problem and the bluntness of the tool. Downvotes are a harsh and low-signal way of pointing problems in arguments, and seem more suited to punishing comments which can be identified as crap at a glance. Since this site isn’t doing the free-for-all comedy club thing Slashdot and Reddit have going, I’m not sure that the downvote mechanic quite belongs here to begin with. Users posting downright nonsense and noise don’t even belong on the site, and bad arguments can be ignored or addressed instead of just anonymously downvoting them.
And yes, this probably should go to a toplevel post, but I don’t have the energy for that scale of meta-discussion right now.
Users posting downright nonsense and noise don’t even belong on the site, and bad arguments can be ignored or addressed instead of just anonymously downvoting them.
Downvoting mechanism is one way of making sure that obvious nonsense-posting gets visibly and quickly discouraged. Without it, there would be more nonsense.
I don’t think that’s actually true. There are very few nonsense posts (or at least, very few that get voted down); and when there are, downvoting doesn’t always discourage the poster. When I see a post with a negative score, it’s more often one that is controversial, or that disagrees with LessWrong dogma, or that was made by someone unpopular here, or that is in the middle of a flamewar between two users, or that is part of a longer conversation where one poster has triggered an “omega wolf” reaction from the rest of the pack by acting conciliatory.
Downvoting wrong comments may be harsh for the person being downvoted, but hopefully in the long run it can encourage better comments, or at least make it easier to find good comments.
There may be some flaws in the karma system or the way it’s used by the community, but I don’t see any obvious improvements, or any other systems that would obviously work better.
Look at mwaser: he complains a lot about being downvoted, but he also got a lot of feedback for what people found lacking in his post. Yes, a portion of the downvotes he gets may be due to factors unrelated to the quality of his arguments (he repeatedly promotes his own blog, and complains about the downvotes being a proof of community irrationality—both can get under people’s skin), which is a bit unfortunate, but not a fatal flaw of the karma system.
Look at mwaser: he complains a lot about being downvoted, but he also got a lot of feedback for what people found lacking in his post. Yes, a portion of the downvotes he gets may be due to factors unrelated to the quality of his arguments (he repeatedly promotes his own blog, and complains about the downvotes being a proof of community irrationality—both can get under people’s skin), which is a bit unfortunate, but not a fatal flaw of the karma system.
I did. The feedback that actually told him something came as replies. I’m not seeing how the use of downvotes actually helped there, and it did seem to add unnecessary nastiness to the exchange.
I agree it’s a bit harsh, and not always useful. It’s a bit of a pity that the karma system doesn’t allow to make a difference between “5 people found this post not-that-great” and “5 people found this post absolutely terrible”.
Maybe it would be nice to have a system that would allow for more nuance, but it would also have to be easy enough to understand and use, and not be easy to game.
Also, I would say that the downvotes did have some utility, by expressing “you should pay more attention to criticism, most people here disagree with you”.
Maybe it would be nice to have a system that would allow for more nuance, but it would also have to be easy enough to understand and use, and not be easy to game.
What about the ability to mark a comment as obsolete if you changed your mind? It will then be under the fold but people won’t be able to downvote it anymore. Or should people who changed their mind be punished infinitely? I noticed that I often delete comments that get downvoted if I changed my mind, e.g. understood where I was wrong, because they keep getting downvoted long after the discussion ended. By deleting it I destroy the context and consistency of the discussion. But I also do not want to be downvoted anymore for something I don’t believe and I want to signal that I changed my mind.
People here tend to reward humility vigorously. (Humility including the strong non-submissive kind that doesn’t base the ego on attachment to being right, not just signals of lower status.)
As Richard suggests editing your comment, leaving the original while adding a retraction is a good idea (and somewhat of a convention). You can make it bold by using two asterices on both sides.
It is also worth adding a reply later on in the discussion explaining your new position and why you changed it. Unless I confuse you with someone else (quite possible) I think I recall you once before changing your mind and acknowleding it publicly. By reading that I gained a lot of respect for your judgement (or that of whoever else it was if I mistake your identity).
Not a bad idea; having all votes public may also be an improvement.
Still, I suspect that whatever the system, there would be someone to argue that it sucks, which isnt’t an excuse to not improve it, but a reason to be cautious.
having all votes public may also be an improvement.
The purpose of implementing voting, as opposed to (for example) soliciting critical/praising comments, is to get more information about people’s attitude towards individual comments, by lifting reasons not to signal (and thus lock the community focus better, protecting it from watering down). Commenting would be less frequent because (1) it’s more difficult to comment; (2) if you have little to say, or what you’d say has already been said, you don’t want to create more noise.
Requiring that votes are made public will discourage some of the voters from signaling their attitude, or otherwise distort the signal for image purposes. I’m not even sure whether voluntary public voting is a good idea, because of the image-driven distortion effect, but since it’s presumably no worse than with commenting, it might not be that bad.
Not a bad idea; having all votes public may also be an improvement.
I will oppose that option for as long as I have breath. If it is implemented then I recommend to all participants that they find a way to game that system so as to minimize the damage.
(I’ll not repeat the reasons here but I have mentioned them previously.)
Metafilter has a pretty simple system. Users can favorite posts and comments. The favorite count and the names of the favoriters are public. There are no corresponding unfavorites. Instead, the users may silently flag the post, indicating that it seems to be bad enough that a moderator should probably take a look. The moderators clean up crap comments manually, guided by the flags.
I haven’t read the above thread. But here’s an idea I had about the Karma system: If you want to downvote someone you’re asked to provide a reply explaining why you downvoted the comment. If you downvote 5 times without explaining yourself you’ll lose 1 Karma point.
It always really bothers me if I get downvoted without getting feedback because without feedback I’m unable to improve, refine my writing skills or rationality. What’s the point then? Merely losing Karma score will led people to conclude (unjustified) that they are downvoted for various reasons but not that they may be wrong or that their comment simply does not add anything valuable to the debate. Negative Karma without feedback causes resentment in all people except those who already acquired enough rationality skills and realization to infer that there might be something wrong with their comment and not with the person downvoting it. The Karma system as it is will therefore discourage newcomers and make them conclude that LW is merely an echo-chamber and does not tolerate their precious critique.
It always really bothers me if I get downvoted without getting feedback. … The Karma system as it is will therefore discourage newcomers and make them conclude that LW is merely an echo-chamber and does not tolerate their precious critique.
I felt the same way when I first started posting here. Particularly when I was challenging the local conventional wisdom. But now I realize that anonymous unexplained downvotes are a form of feedback, and a particularly valuable form of feedback to someone prepared to take advantage of it.
Because feedback in the form of comments simply provokes an automatic verbal response from you. You learn nothing from the experience. You just get some practice at constructing rationalizations. But feedback in the form of anonymous downvotes forces you to stop and reflect: Just what does this mean? What do I need to change so as to prevent this? What experiments should I undertake?”
ETA:
Negative Karma without feedback causes resentment in all people except those who already acquired enough rationality skills and realization to infer that there might be something wrong with their comment and not with the person downvoting it. The Karma system as it is will therefore discourage newcomers …
A good point. So for LW regulars, it may be worth remembering that it is more informative to upvote explicit criticism of newbie mistakes than to downvote the mistakes themselves.
So for LW regulars, it may be worth remembering that it is more informative to upvote explicit criticism of newbie mistakes than to downvote the mistakes themselves.
A good suggestion. I expect whether I follow it or not will depend on how arrogant the newbie is. Unless, of course the explicit criticism is ‘you are being arrogant and annoying. We are more fussy about that sort of thing here than in many other places on the internet’. Then I suppose the same principle would apply. :)
But now I realize that anonymous unexplained downvotes are a form of feedback, and a particularly valuable form of feedback to someone prepared to take advantage of it.
But if you were posting a comment about cooking wouldn’t you weigh the Karma of a chef differently than that of someone who has merely joint your culinary community to read up on some recipe?
But feedback in the form of anonymous downvotes forces you to stop and reflect: Just what does this mean? What do I need to change so as to prevent this? What experiments should I undertake?”
I don’t expect most of all people to conclude this naturally. I believe there is some evidence for this, as for example this Wiki entry states:
It’s unclear whether Descartes, Spinoza or Leibniz would have lasted a day without being voted down into oblivion.
And that is actually from a ‘Rationality Wiki’, so what might John Doe conclude?
It’s unclear whether Descartes, Spinoza or Leibniz would have lasted a day without being voted down into oblivion.
I loved that line. It was put in there among ‘the ugly’ but I consider it one of the best features of lesswrong. Just because they talk about some guy in high school doesn’t mean their thinking is any good! Eat downvote burn until your thinking gets up to scratch Descartes. Read the damn sequences!
(I wonder if Descartes would end up getting into arguments with Mitchell… “I thought I was me, I still think I’m me, therefore I am still me!”)
But if you were posting a comment about cooking wouldn’t you weigh the Karma of a chef differently than that of someone who has merely joint your culinary community to read up on some recipe?
My experience with comments has been that it is wisest to ignore the reputation of the source and simply focus on the words. (One exception: interpreting irony).
So I doubt that knowing the source of up- and down- votes would be particularly useful either. If I know that a great chef has downvoted my chili recipe, I still don’t know whether it is because he doesn’t like my spelling, doesn’t like my ingredients, or simply doesn’t care for chili.
If a chef downvotes your chili recipe, it could be because he doesn’t like your spelling, your ingredients, or chili.
If a random person downvotes your chili recipe, it could also be because she doesn’t like your spelling, your ingredients, or chili.
The first downvote is still more informative even given any particular reason for downvoting, because the chef is more likely than a random person to know how to spell “roux”, cook a perfect pot of pinto beans, or have good reasons to dislike chili as a class of food (e.g. “tried seven versions, don’t like any” v. “had it when I was a kid and didn’t like it”).
I personally believe I am usually better off not knowing who downvoted me. Quite often (although not always) when people downvote my comments I hold their judgement in contempt. This includes those comments that receive initial downvotes but rebound to become significantly positive once the better (and less impassioned) judgement of the broader community sets in.
If the comments justifying their downvote disgust me then I just end up losing respect for the individual. Since it isn’t all that much of a benefit to me to know who has objectionable judgement in such matters and it is far more pleasant to converse with people I respect I prefer to not know.
(Oh, and if I had to comment every time I downvoted things would get downright spammy!)
Negative Karma without feedback causes resentment in all people except those who already acquired enough rationality skills and realization to infer that there might be something wrong with their comment and not with the person downvoting it. The Karma system as it is will therefore discourage newcomers and make them conclude that LW is merely an echo-chamber and does not tolerate their precious critique.
This is a very good point. I upvoted your comment for this point even though I don’t believe your suggestion would work well as a general practice. I agree that there are times when explanations are beneficial and in the case of new users this is definitely something to remember.
Example—while I was writing this my previous comment went to −1. This is not a big deal at all and nor is it particularly surprising. But all the same I am glad I don’t know who the culprit was (‘culprit’ framing intended to convey perspective) and have no difficulty at all in inferring either what their actual motivations likely are or what reasons they would actually express.
The mere fact of a downvote is of some use to me in as much as it informs me that it is a topic on which it will be beneficial to me to replace personal sincerity with political optimisation. ie. Use the kind of language that makes critics look bad for criticizing (instead of casually leaving a wide open target). Present whatever statements are most likely to achieve a desired outcome rather than just saying what I believe.
I don’t think anyone would benefit if someone went and justified their voting decision and I would be surprised if I found it much more informative than the integer representation.
EDIT: While I was writing this comment the ‘-1’ in question changed to ‘+2’. That did surprise me!
I’m aware that you do not support making votes public, so forcing people to comment is something you don’t support either. I haven’t read up on your reasons yet. But consider that as any community grows more popular the number of people that do not indentify with its motto will grow too. This might ultimately result in a reputation system that does not reflect the base and therefore the intended standards of the community, in this case the refinement of rationality. More so if the number of people previously equipped with the sufficient skills required in any given community is very low. And for those reasons I believe that making votes public gives people a chance to spot unreasonable votes based on differing matters of taste or bias.
Any resentment is better directed at certain individuals, as you are able to inquire about their reasons, than the community as a whole, as people will rather just leave.
The biggest downside I see to public voting would be the emergence of a pattern of reciprocity—both “you downvoted my post, so I’ll downvote yours” and “you upvoted my post, so I’ll upvote yours”.
Any resentment is better directed at certain individuals, as you are able to inquire about their reasons, than the community as a whole, as people will rather just leave.
I don’t think so -- 10 downvotes from one single individual is much harder to forget than 10 downvotes from the community in general. 100 downvotes from the community in general might make you want to leave, but 100 downvotes from a single guy might have the same effect too (and you’ll start hating him way before that).
I’m aware that you do not support making votes public, so forcing people to comment is something you don’t support either.
I suppose it does at that. Although I note that I wouldn’t like explanations to be forced even if comments are public. The main reason is that it makes things more personal and emphasizes disagreement. I also anticipate that I will quite often not believe the explanation! People’s justifications for their opinions and particularly their social judgments are generated by a different mechanism to what gives them that opinion. The question “is that their excuse or their real reason?” will always apply and quite often warrant the answer ‘excuse’.
This might ultimately result in a reputation system that does not reflect the base and therefore the intended standards of the community, in this case the refinement of rationality.
But consider that as any community grows more popular the number of people that do not indentify with its motto will grow too.
What do you suggest I do to discourage this? ;)
(I note that it is also likely true that the number of people who agree with me may increase too, particularly if it is a position I expect people to appreciate more as they gain a more sophisticated grasp of lesswrong social dynamics.)
More so if the number of people previously equipped with the sufficient skills required in any given community is very low.
Errr.… that seems to suggest that-which-is-lesswrong has already been lost!
And for those reasons I believe that making votes public gives people a chance to spot unreasonable votes based on differing matters of taste or bias.
Err… that isn’t ‘for those reasons’ so much as it is an independent point. But it is a good point and something that would be the most prominent advantage to sacrificing anonymity. For related reasons some forums make the karma impact of votes dependent on the karma of the voter (stepped approximately logarithmically proportional).
A possible alternative is to have only manually approved voters (like moderators, but more numerous), with other things staying the same. Requiring commenting is not a good option.
Slightly OT, but it might be wise to have some sort of automatic limit on voting too often just after acquiring an account here. If LW should happen to attract the negative attention of Pharyngula, or the chan hordes, or the Conservapedia crowd, or yaoi fangirls, or tea partiers, or some other populous constituency, they could vote each other up in karma and then be pretty disruptive.
That’s mostly a community reanimation measure. If quality of voting merely starts to deteriorate, a moderate karma cutoff that enables voting might do the trick.
I’d like to see total upvotes and downvotes, not just the sum.
I thought for a minute that votes made using the kibitzer could count for more. But this would be a feature that would favor dishonest users (who could game it) over honest users.
A notion for a slightly more informative karma system. Each person can apply 1, 2, or 3 karma points (plus or minus).
Instead of just giving the number of points, the slot after the date has total points, number of plus points, number of minus points, and number of voters.
I realize there’s a little redundancy, but I think that would be alright to make it more convenient for anyone who doesn’t want to be constantly doing routine arithmetic.
The idea would probably be a little graph showing point accumulation over time, but that seems like too much added work for the site.
I’ve never made the claim that the downvotes are “proof” of community irrationality. In fact, given what I believe to be the community’s goals, I see them as entirely rational.
I have claimed that certain upvotes are irrational (i.e. those without any substance). The consensus reply seems to be that they still fulfill a purpose/goal for a large percentage of the regulars here. By definition, that makes those upvotes rational (yes, I AM reversing my stand on that issue because I have been “educated” on what the community’s goals apparently are)..
I am very appreciative of the replies that have substance. I am currently of the opinion, however, that the karma system actually reduces the amount of replies since it allows someone to be easily and anonymously dismissed without good arguments/cause.
By curiosity, what do you consider to be the community’s goals?
I am currently of the opinion, however, that the karma system actually reduces the amount of replies since it allows someone to be easily and anonymously dismissed without good arguments/cause.
1) In itself, reducing the amount of replies is a feature, not a bug; I expect most readers would prefer few comments of high quality than many comments of varying quality.
2) the only instances of ’someone being dismissed without good arguments/cause” have been obvious spam and cranks. I don’t think it’s a fair description of the reaction to your comments, however; you’ve had plenty of detailed criticism.
The stated goal of the community is to refine the art of human rationality. Unfortunately, rationality is an instrumental goal dependent upon the next-level-up or terminal goal. Most people, including me (initially, at least), assume that the next goal up is logical argumentation or discovery of how to reason better.
Most of the practices here are rational in terms of a specific individual’s goals (mostly in terms of maintaining beliefs) but are strictly contrary to good argumentation techniques. The number of ridiculous strawmen, arguments by authority, arguments by pointing to something long and rambling that has nothing to do with the initial argument, etc. is nothing short of overwhelming.
So the next goal up clearly isn’t rational argumentation. Assuming that it was was the mistake that I made in the post Irrational Upvotes (and why I subsequently retracted my stand that they were irrational). They are rational in relation to another goal. My error was in my assumption of the goal.
One of Eliezer’s main points is learning how to learn where you go wrong. This community is far worse at that than most I’ve seen. Y’all know how to argue/debate “logically” much better—but it’s normally to the purpose of retaining your views, not discovering where you might have gone wrong or where you might do better.
(I’ll cover 1 and 2 in subsequent comments—thanks for a high-quality response)
the number of ridiculous strawmen, arguments by authority, arguments by pointing to something long and rambling that has nothing to do with the initial argument, etc. is nothing short of overwhelming.
Some things to consider on these points (mostly because I have not noticed a prevalence of these issues)
Strawmen. If, at point X, Y looks like a strawman of a position, then at point Y, X will look like a strawman. I think. If that’s the case, it could be that many of us are at point X (LW rationality techniques, etc) and you are at point Y—making valid, credible arguments that we are countering with strawmen, as it were.
Arguments by authority. A hallmark of LessWrong is linking back to the sequences or to other posts; this could very easily look like we are saying “Eliezer said that’s not the case”. We aren’t; he just produced a very good explanation of why it isn’t the case, and it’s easier to link to that explanation rather than fumble through our own duplication. Another point is that the average LWer is far more capable of deferring to people they know to be often correct—their judgement as a Bayesian reasoner is itself evidence. This looks even more like argument from authority, but there are subtle differences.
Links to long, rambling segues that aren’t related. They are related, mostly. A combination of decompartmentalised thinking, skill with readily drawing analogies, and skill with (very) long inferential distances can produce relationships that seem bizarre or unlikely.
Lastly, this comment:
it’s normally to the purpose of retaining your views, not discovering where you might have gone wrong or where you might do better.
is definitely a concern for ALL LWers. I suspect you have stumbled onto a case analogous to theism: it is not the case that we wish to retain our atheism and therefore we argue to keep that view—we really, truly, have considered all the evidence and all the arguments, and we reject it on those grounds.
Has it got to the point where replying to this would be a violation of the ‘Do not feed the trolls’ convention? I had written a brief response but realize it may be better to ignore instead. But I will defer to the judgement of others here… if there are people who are still taking mwaser seriously then I will engage as appropriate.
Has it got to the point where replying to this would be a violation of the ‘Do not feed the trolls’ convention?
mwaser does not sound trollish here to me:
This community is far worse at that than most I’ve seen. Y’all know how to argue/debate “logically” much better—but it’s normally to the purpose of retaining your views, not discovering where you might have gone wrong or where you might do better.
There are users whom I think this describes well, including a few very active and usually-correct ones.
Good point. An important distinction. Trolling is entirely different in nature (and much more normatively objectionable). Although one way to create trolls is to feed the crackpots after midnight.
Yes, reducing the total amount of replies is a feature. Reducing the amount of good replies (and/or the diversity of replies) is a bug. Making it easy to make a mistake is a major bug. Too many people don’t bother to understand a post before they upvote or downvote it—they go with their initial prejudices. To form a coherent reply requires reading and understanding a post—assuming, of course, it is a post with substance (which is why I “complain” about substanceless posts).
Look at my most recent post here. It’s down to −5 and has exactly one pretty useless comment. I have gotten some really good criticism. I’ve also had posts where the only comments are endless repetitions of “he is obviously making this assumption”—regardless of how many times I say, “No, I don’t believe that. I am deriving my point from this other direction.” (Though, I must also admit that some of my original replies were not that clear, courteous, or cool-headed ;-)
It seems as though you don’t like karma systems. But surely they do much more good than bad. Poor karma has precious few consequences around here. Maybe there should be more—like throttling comments.
Lest people think that I’m mellowing out, I will continue to argue that upvotes are unwise (shortsightedly “rationally” fulfilling one goal while overlooking a number of the voter’s own goals—not to mention being rather unsocial/discouraging particularly when perceived as piling onto mindless/substanceless arguments).
Well-written and cordial posts arguing against the site’s preferred positions are being summarily downvoted to invisibility.
I haven’t seen any recent examples of this recently (since the last times cryonics evangelism was considered, of course.) I suspect that instead you do not recognise the kinds of error in reasoning that have been detected and responded to.
I have seen people observe that they tend to be inclined to downvote tim readily, having long since abandoned giving him the benefit of the doubt. (This is not my position.)
Are there actually three people out there, let alone a majority of LWers, who do not believe it is correct?
Absolutely—when considering what it means in multiple level context which Tim explicitly quoted he is wrong on a group-selection-caps level of wrongness. (I was not someone who voted but I just added mine.)
I thought your (PhilGoetz) post on group selection was a good one, particularly with the different kinds of (subscripted) group selection that you mentioned and mentions of things like ants. But now that I see what prompted the post and what position you were trying to support I infer that you actually are confused about group selection, not merely presenting a more nuanced understanding.
ERROR: POSTULATION OF GROUP SELECTION IN MAMMALS DETECTED
It surely is an unsympatthetic reading to conclude from: “What if some of our cognitive biases are evolved adaptations that make human society work better?”—that those adaptations did not also benefit social human individuals, and may have evolved for that purpose.
You may note that I took care to emphasize that my reply was to what you were conveying in the context. Phil’s comment does postulate group selection. While as a standalone sentence your comment is literally correct I downvoted it because it constitutes either a misunderstanding of the conversation or a flawed argument for an incorrect position.
I do not. That would be a bizarre position to take (or assume, for that matter). I elsewhere indicated my appreciation for your post on the subject, with particular emphasis on an example you gave where group selection does apply. My support does not extend to the position your comment here conveys and I instead (obviously) repeat Eliezer’s objection.
(Equally obviously there is nothing to be gained by continuing this conversation. It is based on nothing more than what meaning some unimportant comments convey and whether or not people have cause to accede to your demand (implied request?) to up-vote Tim.)
You are reading in too much context. You only have to look at the portion reproduced in Tim’s comment. Eliezer asserted that there is no such thing as evolved adaptations that make human society work better. Tim provided an example, proving Eliezer wrong.
If you think I’m confused, try to say why. So far, no one has presented any evidence that I am “confused” about anything in the group selection post. There is some disagreement about definitions; but that is not confusion.
Eliezer asserted that there is no such thing as evolved adaptations that make human society work better.
Close, but not exactly correct. My interpretation of what Eliezer EMOTED is that there are no adaptations which evolved because they make human society work better. That would be group selection by Eliezer’s definition. Eliezer might well accept the existence of adaptations which evolved because they make humans work better and that incidentally also make society work better.
ETA. Ok, it appears that a literal reading of what EY wrote supports your interpretation. But I claim my interpretation matches what he meant to say. That is,
he was objecting to what he thought you meant to say. Oh, hell. Why did I even decide to get involved in this mess?
Using “because” on evolution is tricky—particularly when co-evolution is involved—and society and humans are definitely co-evolving. Which evolved first—the chicken or the chicken egg (i.e. dinosaur-egg-type arguments explicitly excluded).
Close, but not exactly correct. My interpretation of what Eliezer EMOTED is that there are no adaptations which evolved because they make human society work better. That would be group selection by Eliezer’s definition. Eliezer might well accept the existence of adaptations which evolved because they make humans work better and that incidentally also make society work better.
I believe this to be correct representation of Eliezer’s meaning and that meaning to be be an astute response to the parent.
Even though I wrote the parent, and already told you that’s not what I meant?
Claiming that the parent invoked group selection means claiming that human societies can’t evolve adaptations that make society work better except via group selection. Claiming that the parent should thus be criticized means claiming both that, and that group selection is not a viable hypothesis. Tim provided a counter example to the first claim; my later post on group selection provided a counterexample to the second.
FWIW, I agree that a careful reading of your comment suggests the possibility that group selection was not in your mind and therefore that EY jumped to a conclusion. I believe your claim now that group selection was not on your mind. But, I have to say, it certainly appeared to me at first that your point was group-selectionist. I almost responded along those lines even before EY jumped in with both feet.
I do not agree. In particular I don’t accept your premises.
It is not necessary for you to persuade me because this conversation is not important. I observe that the likelyhood that either of us succeeding in persuading the other of anything here is beyond negligible.
Error: Most of human history is a recounting of group selection in humans. Every time one group of people displaces another group by virtue of superior technology or social organization, that’s group selection.
Having a belief in, or at least openness to, group selection, is one of my rationality tests.
In related news, this weeks Science has the clearest demonstration of group selection that I’ve seen: The ability to self-pollinate in plants gives individuals a great reproductive advantage; but also increases the likelihood of the entire species going extinct. The presence of a feature (self-pollination) that provides an advantage to the individual, provides a disadvantage to the species, that causes species-level selection.
Most of human history is a recounting of group selection in humans. Every time one group of people displaces another group by virtue of superior technology or social organization, that’s group selection.
That is one definition of “group selection”. However, there is another definition—according to which “group selection” must refer to a different theory from “individual selection”—a theory that makes different predictions. For that you would need to show that the genetic traits that led to technological mastery benefited groups in a way that was systematically different from the way that they benefited the individuals that composed those groups.
I think it suffices to show that selection can operate at the level of the group. Even if all of the traits involved provide some advantage to individuals, if they also provide an advantage to the group, then group-level selection needs to be considered.
It is more interesting if you can show that a trait that does not confer an advantage to an individual, has an effect on group selection. But it is an unreasonable bias to demand that group selection requires traits that do not provide any advantage to an individual, and yet at the same time not insist that the theory of individual selection requires traits that do not provide any advantage to the group.
I should clarify—“group selection” connotes what Tim is describing: Selection for altruistic traits in individuals, by selection at the group level. That’s because, historically, group selection has been invoked only to explain things that individual selection can’t.
However, this has led to people excluding selection at the group level from models and simulations, because “group selection bad”.
This is something of a quibble, but you really shouldn’t think of species-level selection as a kind of group selection. In both group and individual selection, it is the species that evolves. But in species-level selection, the species does not evolve. It is selected—it either lives or dies.
Another key difference—the usual argument against group selection is that it is ineffective since individual selection is a stronger force. That is, individual selection is said to push harder and change the species more than does group selection. But comparing species-level selection and individual selection, it makes no sense to say that one is more powerful than the other. They are playing different games.
This is something of a quibble, but you really shouldn’t think of species-level selection as a kind of group selection. In both group and individual selection, it is the species that evolves. But in species-level selection, the species does not evolve. It is selected—it either lives or dies.
Sorry, but I think this is completely wrong. Species-level selection isn’t “like” group selection. It is group selection. In group selection, groups are selected for or against. That is the mechanism for group selection. That is the mechanism for group initially described by Darwin in chapter 4 of Descent of Man, and defended by Edward Wilson. It just happens not to be the straw-man depiction used by some opponents of group selection. They chose to ignore selection at the group level because it is easier to rebut group selection if you first assume that it doesn’t happen.
This is something of a quibble, but you really shouldn’t think of species-level selection as a kind of group selection. In both group and individual selection, it is the species that evolves. But in species-level selection, the species does not evolve. It is selected—it either lives or dies.
Just because we are dealing with one individual, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t evolve. Check with the definitions of the term “evolution”—they (mostly) refer to genetic change over time. You could argue that they also (mostly) talk about a “population”—and one individual doesn’t qualify as a “population”—but if you think through that objection, it too is essentially wrong.
Perplexed: In both group and individual selection, it is the species that evolves. But in species-level selection, the species does not evolve. It is selected—it either lives or dies.
Tim: Just because we are dealing with one individual, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t evolve.
Uh, I’m pretty sure I just stated that an individual—the species—does evolve. It evolves by way of organism-level or group-level selection. It just doesn’t evolve by going extinct or not.
As for whether one individual qualifies as a population, I’ve thought about that and completely failed to imagine a population of one individual evolving by way of the standard mechanisms of evolutionary population genetics. That kind of population cannot evolve by differential birth, death, or migration. (I suppose it can change by mutation).
The thing you have forgotten in trying to extrapolate the meaning of ‘population’ in this way is that the essential feature of a biological evolving population is that its size is not fixed and its membership changes in time, whereas a population of exactly one entity by definition does not change its membership count in time.
Now, I will agree that a population of entities (say, the population of biological species within a genus) can evolve by selection even though its membership count occasionally fluctuates through having only a single individual. The genus does evolve. But the evolution of the genus as a population of individual species and the evolution of the component species as (possibly structured into groups) populations of
individual organisms are conceptually distinct processes.
But here is not the place to continue this discussion. If you wish, please bring it up on sbe, and Dr. Hoeltzer can join in. I think he is getting probably lonely over there since we left, and the newsgroup is dominated by John, Tom, and Peter.
Perplexed: In both group and individual selection, it is the species that evolves. But in species-level selection, the species does not evolve. It is selected—it either lives or dies.
Tim: Just because we are dealing with one individual, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t evolve.
Uh, I’m pretty sure I just stated that an individual—the species—does evolve. It evolves by way of organism-level or group-level selection. It just doesn’t evolve by going extinct or not.
“Does NOT evolve” was the term you used. However, with your clarification, it now looks as though this was mostly just a misunderstanding.
IMO, it is mostly OK to think of species level selection as a type of group selection—where the “groups” are species. Maybe there are some meanings of “group selection” for which this is bad—but I would say: mostly OK.
Yes, a population of 1 changes by mutation. Self-directed evolution is an example of that.
If you A) insist on a population having more than 1 member and B) define evolution in terms of genetic change in populations, then the conclusion is that one big organism would no longer be “evolving” when it changed—which I think would be a totally absurd conclusion—a sign that you had got into a terminology muddle.
That may not be a big deal for today’s organic evolution—but it makes a big difference for the study of cultural evolution. There, populations with only 1 member are much more common.
But comparing species-level selection and individual selection, it makes no sense to say that one is more powerful than the other. They are playing different games.
They are both attempting to influence the same germ line. They are both attempting to influence the same set of traits. It makes reasonably good sense to look at a trait—and to ask whether it is more for the benefit of the individual or the species.
For example, one such trait might be: a love of swimming. That might be bad for an individual (drowning), but good for the species (island speciation).
My apologies. Most theorists say species selection is a subclass of group selection; but Stephen J. Gould says it is not. See the long explanation here.
But comparing species-level selection and individual selection, it makes no sense to say that one is more powerful than the other. They are playing different games.
That is true if you’re talking about features that groups have and individuals don’t, or traits that aren’t inherited genetically. But all the literature on group selection is about the competition between individual and group (including species) selection, within the same game of selecting genes.
I appreciate the effort you are putting into this, but I fear the terminological and theoretical confusion regarding group selection run far too deep. One enthusiastic person is not going to straighten things out in a forum where evolutionary biology is not the central focus. And now that academian has weighed in, the cause is hopeless. ;)
I agree with you (and Tim) that Eliezer’s opposition to group selection was a bit naive and under-informed. But not completely wrong-headed. Many incorrect arguments in favor of group selection have been made over the years. A lot of them were incorrect because they simply did not work. Others were “epistemologically incorrect” because, though they worked, they could be reinterpreted more “parsimoniously” as individual-level selection.
D.S. Wilson’s “Truth and Reconciliation” blog series strikes me as an example of extremely dishonest labeling. What he is really saying is that if everyone who disagrees with him would just accept his version of the truth, then reconciliation will take place. And his book “Unto Others” strikes me as even more dishonest. He defines “group selection” extremely broadly, provides examples of corner cases in which his “trait group selection” mechanism works, and then (here is the dishonest part) claims that if group selection works even in this extreme case, then it will obviously work in other cases.
Then he proceeds to discuss the case which every non-professional has in mind when he thinks of group selection—human evolution with groups = tribes, group death = tribe extinction, and group birth = split-up of a successful and populous tribe. The trouble is that the math of group selection really doesn’t work in this case.
The only cases I know of where the group selection models do work are (1) Species level selection (Gould/Eldredge), examples like your non-selfing plants; and (2) the examples that Wilson gives in which “groups” are rather short-lived entities which “succeed” by keeping their members alive for a while and then returning them safely to the general population, where the individuals reproduce. A good example of a group that Wilson might use as an example of trait-group selection would be a flock of geese conducting a seasonal migration. Such a group might be selected against if it got seriously lost, or blundered into a tornado, or suffered some other collective catastrophe.
A human hunting party is another example of a “group” such that the mathematics of group selection works. A human tribe of hunter-gatherers is not, unless it is so reproductively isolated from other tribes so as to qualify as a species. I’m pretty sure that this degree of isolation (less than two cross-tribe matings per generation) has never held over any long period of time in human history.
But group selection for cultural traits is another question. If genes get transferred between tribes, but memes do not, then selection at the level of tribes may well help to determine the course of human cultural/memetic evolution.
Well, I seem to have provided you with a long response, which, unlike your own efforts, does not include any links/citations. Sorry about that. You are under no obligation to trust or believe me on this stuff. I will merely assert that I (and tim_tyler as well) have been a serious amateur enthusiast for evolutionary theory for many years. Clearly, you have been too. I do recommend though, that you take a second look at D.S. Wilson’s work in light of my criticisms. He really is pulling something of a bait-and-switch. See if you agree.
It sounds as though I like multi-level selection a bit more than you do.
Evidence from our own species suggests habitat variation can cause significant morphological differences (despite gene flow) which selection can then act upon.
I also find things like this one interesting:
“Senescence as an adaptation to limit the spread of disease”
It sounds as though I like multi-level selection a bit more than you do.
I think so. I’m not quite so purist as Dawkins, but I am pretty close. But I do realize that it is not really an empirical scientific question. It is really simply a matter of what kind of models you prefer. Most cases in which group selection models work can also be explained just as well by individual-level selection or kin-selection.
Speaking of which:
I also find things like this one interesting:
“Senescence as an adaptation to limit the spread of disease”
Yes. Very interesting. Red Queen strikes again. But since they are already thinking about Bill Hamilton, why don’t they take the further step and realize that the senescent death of an old individual not only reduces the population density for the benefit of the group—the death specifically is beneficial to those individuals in the group who are the most immunologically similar to the deceased.
In other words, this mechanism ain’t Red Queen + Group Selection; it is Red Queen + Kin Selection.
Their model exhibits locality (with limited diffusion—V.N. or 5x5 neighbourhood) as well.
So: a death benefits kin not just through immunological similarity—but also because neighbours are likely to be kin—and death takes an adjacent pathogen load out of circulation.
In related news, this weeks Science has the clearest demonstration of group selection that I’ve seen: The ability to self-pollinate in plants gives individuals a great reproductive advantage; but also increases the likelihood of the entire species going extinct. The presence of a feature (self-pollination) that provides an advantage to the individual, provides a disadvantage to the species, that causes species-level selection.
I realize your views may have changed by now, but isn’t that obviously caused by Red Queen effects? Just like all other sexual reproduction?
“Adaptations that make people thrive” can be interpreted in two ways: “adaptations that make people [who possess those adaptations] thrive” or “adaptations that make people [in general, including those who don’t possess the adaptation] thrive.”
As I understand it, the latter interpretation is essentially equivalent to group selection; the former is not. So it helps to be clear about what exactly you’re saying.
Your original formulation (“make society work better”) implies the latter pretty strongly. Your rewording is more ambiguous.
In any case, if you are proposing the former—that is, if you are proposing that some of our biases have evolved to make the individuals expressing that bias more successful—there’s no group selection error, and I agree that it would be pretty surprising if that weren’t the case.
Of course, as has been said several times, that doesn’t mean those biases currently make individuals expressing them more successful.
If group selection wasn’t responsible for naked mole rats, what would be the right term for it? Kin selection seems like too much of an understatement for them.
But what if our irrationalities aren’t quick-and-dirty heuristics optimized for speed? What known cognitive biases are even applicable to running away from a lion?
What if some of our cognitive biases are evolved adaptations that make human society work better? It would be pretty surprising to me if this weren’t the case!
Just because they are evolved, doesn’t mean they are optimal. An evolved adaptation can be just as “dirty” as a fast cognitive heuristic; the architectural constraints of learning through genes can be just as constraining as those of coming up with something to do fast.
Yes, and let me add to that, just because something was adaptive when humans evolved doesn’t mean it is at all adaptive now. To use a concrete example, the weight humans put on anecdotes is likely connected to the fact that in our ancestral environment, that was the primary source of data about what the risks around us were. However, now this leads to silly things like people being terribly scared of shark attacks precisely due to the rarity of such attacks making them get a lot of news coverage.
I’ve put forward a hypothetical, not claimed a proof. What’s the point of responding, “But that isn’t necessarily the case”?
You know, you’re right. I was responding to peripheral aspects of your proposal rather than central ones, which is a waste of everyone’s time. My apologies.
So, OK… rolling back: if I’m understanding you, you’re hypothesizing that our biases are not design flaws, but rather adaptations to obtain the group-level benefit of having individuals be more irrational and therefore predictable.
(Is that right? I’m trying to infer a positive claim out of a series of questions, which is always tricky; if I’ve misunderstood your hypothetical it might be helpful to restate it more explicitly.)
Perhaps irrationality does provide a group-level benefit, as you suggest. For example, maybe it’s easier to get valuable group behaviors by manipulating irrational people than by cooperating with rational ones. That doesn’t strike me as too plausible, but it’s possible.
Even granting that, though, I have trouble with the idea that the benefit to individual breeders exceeds the costs to the individual of being more easily manipulated by others.
Okay, not evolved adaptations, but how about culturally/socially imprinted cognitive biases? Something about
clicks with Nancy’s comment here.
The more I thought about it … it seemed like rational agents couldn’t trust anyone (the best course is to convince them to trust you and then betray them while never trusting anyone yourself) except in the early and middle stages of iterated games. But a society where everyone irrationally trusted everyone else, and irrationally nobody betrayed anyone else, would be more successful than the ‘rational agent’ community. (all things being equal; if their irrational trust also caused them to irrationally trust lions...) It might stretch the word evolution too much, but I think the term “competitive selection” applies to this process of societies competing with each other for growth and the most effective societies wiping out the less effective societies (wiping out or completely integrating, as the lesser society’s land and resources would already be purposed towards supporting a society, and therefore more desirable than land requiring work).
Basically, what if ‘trust’ is because a society where everyone trusts the other guy to cooperate in a PD was successful enough to dominate the landscape?
NB: Originally I had thought of trust as a sort of greenbearding. Is there an analogous concept in sociocultural evolution?
A population or society in which everyone trusts completely is not an ESS. A population or society in which everyone adopts the slogan “trust, but verify” and cooperates in the punishment of defectors and non-punishing freeriders probably is an ESS, assuming the cost of verification and punishment are low and verification is reasonably effective.
In the real world, the iteration never completely ends.
ERROR: POSTULATION OF GROUP SELECTION IN MAMMALS DETECTED
Speech seems like an evolved adaptation that makes human society work better.
Why are people voting Tim’s comment down so hard? Are there actually three people out there, let alone a majority of LWers, who do not believe it is correct?
Speech, sexual selection rituals, sex itself, cooperation in the social insects … There are many things which seem to require a more complex and subtle narrative for their explanation than the usual simple Darwinian story of a mutant individual doing better than his conspecific competitors and then passing on his genes.
But that doesn’t mean that a died-in-the-wool neo-Darwinian needs to accept the group-selection explanation any more than an Ayn Rand fan confronted with a skyscraper has to admit that Kropotkin was right after all.
However, I am taking your implicit advise and dutifully upvoting Tim’s comment.
I wasn’t suggesting that speech evolved via group selection—just that it evidently did evolve—and so proposing the existence of “evolved adaptations that make human society work better” is not an error.
Tim’s comment doesn’t say that speech evolved via group selection. It could be that it did not; in that case, Tim’s comment would be pointing out that Eliezer was unjustified in calling out a belief in “evolved adaptations that make human society work better” as an error.
I was just thinking how there’s a weird hivemind thing going on with the downvotes. Well-written and cordial posts arguing against the site’s preferred positions are being summarily downvoted to invisibility.
This doesn’t look like a very healthy discussion dynamic.
I have been using the Kibitzer since I started posting, and my handle on this matter is that well-written, cordial posts that don’t use LW techniques are downvoted. That is, they argue against the preferred position, and they are downvoted because they argue badly. Small corroborations: the posts that get summarily upvoted are ones that point out lack-of-rationality in the arguments, upvotes on topics when they aren’t flawed.
If that seems like an unhealthy discussion dynamic then you should review the LW techniques for rationality and make a top level post explaining how using these techniques, or how requiring everyone to use these techniques, could result in unhealthy discussions.
Possibility: Well-written, cordial posts are your criteria for upvotes because cordiality and well-writtenness usually correlate with clear thinking and good reasoning. This is true over most of the blog, except for the edge cases. These cases have their roots in subtle cognitive biases, not gross emotional biases, and it’s possible that lack of writing skill and cordiality points out gross emotional biases but not subtler ones.
The kibitzer does nothing to protect people from groupthink.
What exactly do you mean by groupthink? Let’s taboo the word a bit:
All members of group agree (same answer)
All members of group have same/similar thought process (same process to answer)
Answers or processes are flawed (this could just be a common mistake)
Flaws are not corrected because group consensus is more important (this is the bit that distinguishes groupthink from a common mistake, it perpetuates)
Those last two are important parts of groupthink. Without that last one, mathematicians are guilty of groupthink, because they all apply the same (somtimes flawed) processes and get the same answers. Maths isn’t groupthink because attempts are made to discover and fix flaws, and these attempts aren’t ignored out of hand.
The kibitzer blocks out names and karma scores; so you can’t tell what the group consensus is (either by the person’s name; “the community thinks this guy is a troll” or by vote; “-5? this post must be bad”). I follow the same process as everyone else in evaluating a comment, but I don’t know if I’ve gotten the same answer as them. In practice, when I’ve checked, I do get the same answer, so it satisfies the first two conditions. But is the process flawed? And is meeting the group’s consensus more important than fixing these flaws?
I think I feel the problem is more a mismatch between the subtlety of the problem and the bluntness of the tool. Downvotes are a harsh and low-signal way of pointing problems in arguments, and seem more suited to punishing comments which can be identified as crap at a glance. Since this site isn’t doing the free-for-all comedy club thing Slashdot and Reddit have going, I’m not sure that the downvote mechanic quite belongs here to begin with. Users posting downright nonsense and noise don’t even belong on the site, and bad arguments can be ignored or addressed instead of just anonymously downvoting them.
And yes, this probably should go to a toplevel post, but I don’t have the energy for that scale of meta-discussion right now.
Downvoting mechanism is one way of making sure that obvious nonsense-posting gets visibly and quickly discouraged. Without it, there would be more nonsense.
I don’t think that’s actually true. There are very few nonsense posts (or at least, very few that get voted down); and when there are, downvoting doesn’t always discourage the poster. When I see a post with a negative score, it’s more often one that is controversial, or that disagrees with LessWrong dogma, or that was made by someone unpopular here, or that is in the middle of a flamewar between two users, or that is part of a longer conversation where one poster has triggered an “omega wolf” reaction from the rest of the pack by acting conciliatory.
Downvoting wrong comments may be harsh for the person being downvoted, but hopefully in the long run it can encourage better comments, or at least make it easier to find good comments.
There may be some flaws in the karma system or the way it’s used by the community, but I don’t see any obvious improvements, or any other systems that would obviously work better.
Look at mwaser: he complains a lot about being downvoted, but he also got a lot of feedback for what people found lacking in his post. Yes, a portion of the downvotes he gets may be due to factors unrelated to the quality of his arguments (he repeatedly promotes his own blog, and complains about the downvotes being a proof of community irrationality—both can get under people’s skin), which is a bit unfortunate, but not a fatal flaw of the karma system.
I did. The feedback that actually told him something came as replies. I’m not seeing how the use of downvotes actually helped there, and it did seem to add unnecessary nastiness to the exchange.
I agree it’s a bit harsh, and not always useful. It’s a bit of a pity that the karma system doesn’t allow to make a difference between “5 people found this post not-that-great” and “5 people found this post absolutely terrible”.
Maybe it would be nice to have a system that would allow for more nuance, but it would also have to be easy enough to understand and use, and not be easy to game.
Also, I would say that the downvotes did have some utility, by expressing “you should pay more attention to criticism, most people here disagree with you”.
For example, make ‘terrible’ votes cost karma.
What about the ability to mark a comment as obsolete if you changed your mind? It will then be under the fold but people won’t be able to downvote it anymore. Or should people who changed their mind be punished infinitely? I noticed that I often delete comments that get downvoted if I changed my mind, e.g. understood where I was wrong, because they keep getting downvoted long after the discussion ended. By deleting it I destroy the context and consistency of the discussion. But I also do not want to be downvoted anymore for something I don’t believe and I want to signal that I changed my mind.
If you change your mind, just edit the comment to say so.
Preferably by adding that statement, without changing the original comment, so that existing discussion doesn’t break.
People here tend to reward humility vigorously. (Humility including the strong non-submissive kind that doesn’t base the ego on attachment to being right, not just signals of lower status.)
As Richard suggests editing your comment, leaving the original while adding a retraction is a good idea (and somewhat of a convention). You can make it bold by using two asterices on both sides.
It is also worth adding a reply later on in the discussion explaining your new position and why you changed it. Unless I confuse you with someone else (quite possible) I think I recall you once before changing your mind and acknowleding it publicly. By reading that I gained a lot of respect for your judgement (or that of whoever else it was if I mistake your identity).
Not a bad idea; having all votes public may also be an improvement.
Still, I suspect that whatever the system, there would be someone to argue that it sucks, which isnt’t an excuse to not improve it, but a reason to be cautious.
The purpose of implementing voting, as opposed to (for example) soliciting critical/praising comments, is to get more information about people’s attitude towards individual comments, by lifting reasons not to signal (and thus lock the community focus better, protecting it from watering down). Commenting would be less frequent because (1) it’s more difficult to comment; (2) if you have little to say, or what you’d say has already been said, you don’t want to create more noise.
Requiring that votes are made public will discourage some of the voters from signaling their attitude, or otherwise distort the signal for image purposes. I’m not even sure whether voluntary public voting is a good idea, because of the image-driven distortion effect, but since it’s presumably no worse than with commenting, it might not be that bad.
I will oppose that option for as long as I have breath. If it is implemented then I recommend to all participants that they find a way to game that system so as to minimize the damage.
(I’ll not repeat the reasons here but I have mentioned them previously.)
Metafilter has a pretty simple system. Users can favorite posts and comments. The favorite count and the names of the favoriters are public. There are no corresponding unfavorites. Instead, the users may silently flag the post, indicating that it seems to be bad enough that a moderator should probably take a look. The moderators clean up crap comments manually, guided by the flags.
I haven’t read the above thread. But here’s an idea I had about the Karma system: If you want to downvote someone you’re asked to provide a reply explaining why you downvoted the comment. If you downvote 5 times without explaining yourself you’ll lose 1 Karma point.
It always really bothers me if I get downvoted without getting feedback because without feedback I’m unable to improve, refine my writing skills or rationality. What’s the point then? Merely losing Karma score will led people to conclude (unjustified) that they are downvoted for various reasons but not that they may be wrong or that their comment simply does not add anything valuable to the debate. Negative Karma without feedback causes resentment in all people except those who already acquired enough rationality skills and realization to infer that there might be something wrong with their comment and not with the person downvoting it. The Karma system as it is will therefore discourage newcomers and make them conclude that LW is merely an echo-chamber and does not tolerate their precious critique.
I felt the same way when I first started posting here. Particularly when I was challenging the local conventional wisdom. But now I realize that anonymous unexplained downvotes are a form of feedback, and a particularly valuable form of feedback to someone prepared to take advantage of it.
Because feedback in the form of comments simply provokes an automatic verbal response from you. You learn nothing from the experience. You just get some practice at constructing rationalizations. But feedback in the form of anonymous downvotes forces you to stop and reflect: Just what does this mean? What do I need to change so as to prevent this? What experiments should I undertake?”
ETA:
A good point. So for LW regulars, it may be worth remembering that it is more informative to upvote explicit criticism of newbie mistakes than to downvote the mistakes themselves.
A good suggestion. I expect whether I follow it or not will depend on how arrogant the newbie is. Unless, of course the explicit criticism is ‘you are being arrogant and annoying. We are more fussy about that sort of thing here than in many other places on the internet’. Then I suppose the same principle would apply. :)
But if you were posting a comment about cooking wouldn’t you weigh the Karma of a chef differently than that of someone who has merely joint your culinary community to read up on some recipe?
I don’t expect most of all people to conclude this naturally. I believe there is some evidence for this, as for example this Wiki entry states:
And that is actually from a ‘Rationality Wiki’, so what might John Doe conclude?
I loved that line. It was put in there among ‘the ugly’ but I consider it one of the best features of lesswrong. Just because they talk about some guy in high school doesn’t mean their thinking is any good! Eat downvote burn until your thinking gets up to scratch Descartes. Read the damn sequences!
(I wonder if Descartes would end up getting into arguments with Mitchell… “I thought I was me, I still think I’m me, therefore I am still me!”)
My experience with comments has been that it is wisest to ignore the reputation of the source and simply focus on the words. (One exception: interpreting irony).
So I doubt that knowing the source of up- and down- votes would be particularly useful either. If I know that a great chef has downvoted my chili recipe, I still don’t know whether it is because he doesn’t like my spelling, doesn’t like my ingredients, or simply doesn’t care for chili.
If a chef downvotes your chili recipe, it could be because he doesn’t like your spelling, your ingredients, or chili.
If a random person downvotes your chili recipe, it could also be because she doesn’t like your spelling, your ingredients, or chili.
The first downvote is still more informative even given any particular reason for downvoting, because the chef is more likely than a random person to know how to spell “roux”, cook a perfect pot of pinto beans, or have good reasons to dislike chili as a class of food (e.g. “tried seven versions, don’t like any” v. “had it when I was a kid and didn’t like it”).
I personally believe I am usually better off not knowing who downvoted me. Quite often (although not always) when people downvote my comments I hold their judgement in contempt. This includes those comments that receive initial downvotes but rebound to become significantly positive once the better (and less impassioned) judgement of the broader community sets in.
If the comments justifying their downvote disgust me then I just end up losing respect for the individual. Since it isn’t all that much of a benefit to me to know who has objectionable judgement in such matters and it is far more pleasant to converse with people I respect I prefer to not know.
(Oh, and if I had to comment every time I downvoted things would get downright spammy!)
This is a very good point. I upvoted your comment for this point even though I don’t believe your suggestion would work well as a general practice. I agree that there are times when explanations are beneficial and in the case of new users this is definitely something to remember.
Example—while I was writing this my previous comment went to −1. This is not a big deal at all and nor is it particularly surprising. But all the same I am glad I don’t know who the culprit was (‘culprit’ framing intended to convey perspective) and have no difficulty at all in inferring either what their actual motivations likely are or what reasons they would actually express.
The mere fact of a downvote is of some use to me in as much as it informs me that it is a topic on which it will be beneficial to me to replace personal sincerity with political optimisation. ie. Use the kind of language that makes critics look bad for criticizing (instead of casually leaving a wide open target). Present whatever statements are most likely to achieve a desired outcome rather than just saying what I believe.
I don’t think anyone would benefit if someone went and justified their voting decision and I would be surprised if I found it much more informative than the integer representation.
EDIT: While I was writing this comment the ‘-1’ in question changed to ‘+2’. That did surprise me!
I’m aware that you do not support making votes public, so forcing people to comment is something you don’t support either. I haven’t read up on your reasons yet. But consider that as any community grows more popular the number of people that do not indentify with its motto will grow too. This might ultimately result in a reputation system that does not reflect the base and therefore the intended standards of the community, in this case the refinement of rationality. More so if the number of people previously equipped with the sufficient skills required in any given community is very low. And for those reasons I believe that making votes public gives people a chance to spot unreasonable votes based on differing matters of taste or bias.
Any resentment is better directed at certain individuals, as you are able to inquire about their reasons, than the community as a whole, as people will rather just leave.
The biggest downside I see to public voting would be the emergence of a pattern of reciprocity—both “you downvoted my post, so I’ll downvote yours” and “you upvoted my post, so I’ll upvote yours”.
I don’t think so -- 10 downvotes from one single individual is much harder to forget than 10 downvotes from the community in general. 100 downvotes from the community in general might make you want to leave, but 100 downvotes from a single guy might have the same effect too (and you’ll start hating him way before that).
I suppose it does at that. Although I note that I wouldn’t like explanations to be forced even if comments are public. The main reason is that it makes things more personal and emphasizes disagreement. I also anticipate that I will quite often not believe the explanation! People’s justifications for their opinions and particularly their social judgments are generated by a different mechanism to what gives them that opinion. The question “is that their excuse or their real reason?” will always apply and quite often warrant the answer ‘excuse’.
What do you suggest I do to discourage this? ;)
(I note that it is also likely true that the number of people who agree with me may increase too, particularly if it is a position I expect people to appreciate more as they gain a more sophisticated grasp of lesswrong social dynamics.)
Errr.… that seems to suggest that-which-is-lesswrong has already been lost!
Err… that isn’t ‘for those reasons’ so much as it is an independent point. But it is a good point and something that would be the most prominent advantage to sacrificing anonymity. For related reasons some forums make the karma impact of votes dependent on the karma of the voter (stepped approximately logarithmically proportional).
A possible alternative is to have only manually approved voters (like moderators, but more numerous), with other things staying the same. Requiring commenting is not a good option.
Slightly OT, but it might be wise to have some sort of automatic limit on voting too often just after acquiring an account here. If LW should happen to attract the negative attention of Pharyngula, or the chan hordes, or the Conservapedia crowd, or yaoi fangirls, or tea partiers, or some other populous constituency, they could vote each other up in karma and then be pretty disruptive.
I suspect I’m not the only one who would be instinctively averse to that. :)
That’s mostly a community reanimation measure. If quality of voting merely starts to deteriorate, a moderate karma cutoff that enables voting might do the trick.
That would be worth a shot at least.
I’d like to see total upvotes and downvotes, not just the sum.
I thought for a minute that votes made using the kibitzer could count for more. But this would be a feature that would favor dishonest users (who could game it) over honest users.
A notion for a slightly more informative karma system. Each person can apply 1, 2, or 3 karma points (plus or minus).
Instead of just giving the number of points, the slot after the date has total points, number of plus points, number of minus points, and number of voters.
I realize there’s a little redundancy, but I think that would be alright to make it more convenient for anyone who doesn’t want to be constantly doing routine arithmetic.
The idea would probably be a little graph showing point accumulation over time, but that seems like too much added work for the site.
I’ve never made the claim that the downvotes are “proof” of community irrationality. In fact, given what I believe to be the community’s goals, I see them as entirely rational.
I have claimed that certain upvotes are irrational (i.e. those without any substance). The consensus reply seems to be that they still fulfill a purpose/goal for a large percentage of the regulars here. By definition, that makes those upvotes rational (yes, I AM reversing my stand on that issue because I have been “educated” on what the community’s goals apparently are)..
I am very appreciative of the replies that have substance. I am currently of the opinion, however, that the karma system actually reduces the amount of replies since it allows someone to be easily and anonymously dismissed without good arguments/cause.
By curiosity, what do you consider to be the community’s goals?
1) In itself, reducing the amount of replies is a feature, not a bug; I expect most readers would prefer few comments of high quality than many comments of varying quality.
2) the only instances of ’someone being dismissed without good arguments/cause” have been obvious spam and cranks. I don’t think it’s a fair description of the reaction to your comments, however; you’ve had plenty of detailed criticism.
The stated goal of the community is to refine the art of human rationality. Unfortunately, rationality is an instrumental goal dependent upon the next-level-up or terminal goal. Most people, including me (initially, at least), assume that the next goal up is logical argumentation or discovery of how to reason better.
Most of the practices here are rational in terms of a specific individual’s goals (mostly in terms of maintaining beliefs) but are strictly contrary to good argumentation techniques. The number of ridiculous strawmen, arguments by authority, arguments by pointing to something long and rambling that has nothing to do with the initial argument, etc. is nothing short of overwhelming.
So the next goal up clearly isn’t rational argumentation. Assuming that it was was the mistake that I made in the post Irrational Upvotes (and why I subsequently retracted my stand that they were irrational). They are rational in relation to another goal. My error was in my assumption of the goal.
One of Eliezer’s main points is learning how to learn where you go wrong. This community is far worse at that than most I’ve seen. Y’all know how to argue/debate “logically” much better—but it’s normally to the purpose of retaining your views, not discovering where you might have gone wrong or where you might do better.
(I’ll cover 1 and 2 in subsequent comments—thanks for a high-quality response)
Some things to consider on these points (mostly because I have not noticed a prevalence of these issues)
Strawmen. If, at point X, Y looks like a strawman of a position, then at point Y, X will look like a strawman. I think. If that’s the case, it could be that many of us are at point X (LW rationality techniques, etc) and you are at point Y—making valid, credible arguments that we are countering with strawmen, as it were.
Arguments by authority. A hallmark of LessWrong is linking back to the sequences or to other posts; this could very easily look like we are saying “Eliezer said that’s not the case”. We aren’t; he just produced a very good explanation of why it isn’t the case, and it’s easier to link to that explanation rather than fumble through our own duplication. Another point is that the average LWer is far more capable of deferring to people they know to be often correct—their judgement as a Bayesian reasoner is itself evidence. This looks even more like argument from authority, but there are subtle differences.
Links to long, rambling segues that aren’t related. They are related, mostly. A combination of decompartmentalised thinking, skill with readily drawing analogies, and skill with (very) long inferential distances can produce relationships that seem bizarre or unlikely.
Lastly, this comment:
is definitely a concern for ALL LWers. I suspect you have stumbled onto a case analogous to theism: it is not the case that we wish to retain our atheism and therefore we argue to keep that view—we really, truly, have considered all the evidence and all the arguments, and we reject it on those grounds.
Has it got to the point where replying to this would be a violation of the ‘Do not feed the trolls’ convention? I had written a brief response but realize it may be better to ignore instead. But I will defer to the judgement of others here… if there are people who are still taking mwaser seriously then I will engage as appropriate.
mwaser does not sound trollish here to me:
There are users whom I think this describes well, including a few very active and usually-correct ones.
Not exactly, but I would support a “Do not feed the crackpots” convention.
Good point. An important distinction. Trolling is entirely different in nature (and much more normatively objectionable). Although one way to create trolls is to feed the crackpots after midnight.
Yes, reducing the total amount of replies is a feature. Reducing the amount of good replies (and/or the diversity of replies) is a bug. Making it easy to make a mistake is a major bug. Too many people don’t bother to understand a post before they upvote or downvote it—they go with their initial prejudices. To form a coherent reply requires reading and understanding a post—assuming, of course, it is a post with substance (which is why I “complain” about substanceless posts).
Look at my most recent post here. It’s down to −5 and has exactly one pretty useless comment. I have gotten some really good criticism. I’ve also had posts where the only comments are endless repetitions of “he is obviously making this assumption”—regardless of how many times I say, “No, I don’t believe that. I am deriving my point from this other direction.” (Though, I must also admit that some of my original replies were not that clear, courteous, or cool-headed ;-)
It seems as though you don’t like karma systems. But surely they do much more good than bad. Poor karma has precious few consequences around here. Maybe there should be more—like throttling comments.
Downvoted, because a comment suggesting “throttling comments” is exactly the kind of comment I would like to throttle. :P
Lest people think that I’m mellowing out, I will continue to argue that upvotes are unwise (shortsightedly “rationally” fulfilling one goal while overlooking a number of the voter’s own goals—not to mention being rather unsocial/discouraging particularly when perceived as piling onto mindless/substanceless arguments).
I haven’t seen any recent examples of this recently (since the last times cryonics evangelism was considered, of course.) I suspect that instead you do not recognise the kinds of error in reasoning that have been detected and responded to.
That would be a systemic problem that deserves its own top level post.
I have seen people observe that they tend to be inclined to downvote tim readily, having long since abandoned giving him the benefit of the doubt. (This is not my position.)
Absolutely—when considering what it means in multiple level context which Tim explicitly quoted he is wrong on a group-selection-caps level of wrongness. (I was not someone who voted but I just added mine.)
I thought your (PhilGoetz) post on group selection was a good one, particularly with the different kinds of (subscripted) group selection that you mentioned and mentions of things like ants. But now that I see what prompted the post and what position you were trying to support I infer that you actually are confused about group selection, not merely presenting a more nuanced understanding.
… is spot on.
It surely is an unsympatthetic reading to conclude from: “What if some of our cognitive biases are evolved adaptations that make human society work better?”—that those adaptations did not also benefit social human individuals, and may have evolved for that purpose.
You may note that I took care to emphasize that my reply was to what you were conveying in the context. Phil’s comment does postulate group selection. While as a standalone sentence your comment is literally correct I downvoted it because it constitutes either a misunderstanding of the conversation or a flawed argument for an incorrect position.
What is the incorrect position? If you say “that group selection is possible”, please state your reasons for being so certain about it.
In any case, my comment does not postulate group selection. It wasn’t even on my mind when I wrote it.
I do not. That would be a bizarre position to take (or assume, for that matter). I elsewhere indicated my appreciation for your post on the subject, with particular emphasis on an example you gave where group selection does apply. My support does not extend to the position your comment here conveys and I instead (obviously) repeat Eliezer’s objection.
(Equally obviously there is nothing to be gained by continuing this conversation. It is based on nothing more than what meaning some unimportant comments convey and whether or not people have cause to accede to your demand (implied request?) to up-vote Tim.)
Thanks for clarifying that. Not just an unsympathetic interpretation, an innacurate one.
You are reading in too much context. You only have to look at the portion reproduced in Tim’s comment. Eliezer asserted that there is no such thing as evolved adaptations that make human society work better. Tim provided an example, proving Eliezer wrong.
If you think I’m confused, try to say why. So far, no one has presented any evidence that I am “confused” about anything in the group selection post. There is some disagreement about definitions; but that is not confusion.
Close, but not exactly correct. My interpretation of what Eliezer EMOTED is that there are no adaptations which evolved because they make human society work better. That would be group selection by Eliezer’s definition. Eliezer might well accept the existence of adaptations which evolved because they make humans work better and that incidentally also make society work better.
ETA. Ok, it appears that a literal reading of what EY wrote supports your interpretation. But I claim my interpretation matches what he meant to say. That is, he was objecting to what he thought you meant to say. Oh, hell. Why did I even decide to get involved in this mess?
Using “because” on evolution is tricky—particularly when co-evolution is involved—and society and humans are definitely co-evolving. Which evolved first—the chicken or the chicken egg (i.e. dinosaur-egg-type arguments explicitly excluded).
I believe this to be correct representation of Eliezer’s meaning and that meaning to be be an astute response to the parent.
Even though I wrote the parent, and already told you that’s not what I meant?
Claiming that the parent invoked group selection means claiming that human societies can’t evolve adaptations that make society work better except via group selection. Claiming that the parent should thus be criticized means claiming both that, and that group selection is not a viable hypothesis. Tim provided a counter example to the first claim; my later post on group selection provided a counterexample to the second.
FWIW, I agree that a careful reading of your comment suggests the possibility that group selection was not in your mind and therefore that EY jumped to a conclusion. I believe your claim now that group selection was not on your mind. But, I have to say, it certainly appeared to me at first that your point was group-selectionist. I almost responded along those lines even before EY jumped in with both feet.
I do not agree. In particular I don’t accept your premises.
It is not necessary for you to persuade me because this conversation is not important. I observe that the likelyhood that either of us succeeding in persuading the other of anything here is beyond negligible.
Error: Most of human history is a recounting of group selection in humans. Every time one group of people displaces another group by virtue of superior technology or social organization, that’s group selection.
Having a belief in, or at least openness to, group selection, is one of my rationality tests.
In related news, this weeks Science has the clearest demonstration of group selection that I’ve seen: The ability to self-pollinate in plants gives individuals a great reproductive advantage; but also increases the likelihood of the entire species going extinct. The presence of a feature (self-pollination) that provides an advantage to the individual, provides a disadvantage to the species, that causes species-level selection.
That is one definition of “group selection”. However, there is another definition—according to which “group selection” must refer to a different theory from “individual selection”—a theory that makes different predictions. For that you would need to show that the genetic traits that led to technological mastery benefited groups in a way that was systematically different from the way that they benefited the individuals that composed those groups.
I think it suffices to show that selection can operate at the level of the group. Even if all of the traits involved provide some advantage to individuals, if they also provide an advantage to the group, then group-level selection needs to be considered.
It is more interesting if you can show that a trait that does not confer an advantage to an individual, has an effect on group selection. But it is an unreasonable bias to demand that group selection requires traits that do not provide any advantage to an individual, and yet at the same time not insist that the theory of individual selection requires traits that do not provide any advantage to the group.
I should clarify—“group selection” connotes what Tim is describing: Selection for altruistic traits in individuals, by selection at the group level. That’s because, historically, group selection has been invoked only to explain things that individual selection can’t.
However, this has led to people excluding selection at the group level from models and simulations, because “group selection bad”.
This is something of a quibble, but you really shouldn’t think of species-level selection as a kind of group selection. In both group and individual selection, it is the species that evolves. But in species-level selection, the species does not evolve. It is selected—it either lives or dies.
Another key difference—the usual argument against group selection is that it is ineffective since individual selection is a stronger force. That is, individual selection is said to push harder and change the species more than does group selection. But comparing species-level selection and individual selection, it makes no sense to say that one is more powerful than the other. They are playing different games.
Sorry, but I think this is completely wrong. Species-level selection isn’t “like” group selection. It is group selection. In group selection, groups are selected for or against. That is the mechanism for group selection. That is the mechanism for group initially described by Darwin in chapter 4 of Descent of Man, and defended by Edward Wilson. It just happens not to be the straw-man depiction used by some opponents of group selection. They chose to ignore selection at the group level because it is easier to rebut group selection if you first assume that it doesn’t happen.
Can you provide a reference for that usage?
Just because we are dealing with one individual, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t evolve. Check with the definitions of the term “evolution”—they (mostly) refer to genetic change over time. You could argue that they also (mostly) talk about a “population”—and one individual doesn’t qualify as a “population”—but if you think through that objection, it too is essentially wrong.
Uh, I’m pretty sure I just stated that an individual—the species—does evolve. It evolves by way of organism-level or group-level selection. It just doesn’t evolve by going extinct or not.
As for whether one individual qualifies as a population, I’ve thought about that and completely failed to imagine a population of one individual evolving by way of the standard mechanisms of evolutionary population genetics. That kind of population cannot evolve by differential birth, death, or migration. (I suppose it can change by mutation).
The thing you have forgotten in trying to extrapolate the meaning of ‘population’ in this way is that the essential feature of a biological evolving population is that its size is not fixed and its membership changes in time, whereas a population of exactly one entity by definition does not change its membership count in time.
Now, I will agree that a population of entities (say, the population of biological species within a genus) can evolve by selection even though its membership count occasionally fluctuates through having only a single individual. The genus does evolve. But the evolution of the genus as a population of individual species and the evolution of the component species as (possibly structured into groups) populations of individual organisms are conceptually distinct processes.
But here is not the place to continue this discussion. If you wish, please bring it up on sbe, and Dr. Hoeltzer can join in. I think he is getting probably lonely over there since we left, and the newsgroup is dominated by John, Tom, and Peter.
“Does NOT evolve” was the term you used. However, with your clarification, it now looks as though this was mostly just a misunderstanding.
IMO, it is mostly OK to think of species level selection as a type of group selection—where the “groups” are species. Maybe there are some meanings of “group selection” for which this is bad—but I would say: mostly OK.
Yes, a population of 1 changes by mutation. Self-directed evolution is an example of that.
If you A) insist on a population having more than 1 member and B) define evolution in terms of genetic change in populations, then the conclusion is that one big organism would no longer be “evolving” when it changed—which I think would be a totally absurd conclusion—a sign that you had got into a terminology muddle.
That may not be a big deal for today’s organic evolution—but it makes a big difference for the study of cultural evolution. There, populations with only 1 member are much more common.
They are both attempting to influence the same germ line. They are both attempting to influence the same set of traits. It makes reasonably good sense to look at a trait—and to ask whether it is more for the benefit of the individual or the species.
For example, one such trait might be: a love of swimming. That might be bad for an individual (drowning), but good for the species (island speciation).
My apologies. Most theorists say species selection is a subclass of group selection; but Stephen J. Gould says it is not. See the long explanation here.
That is true if you’re talking about features that groups have and individuals don’t, or traits that aren’t inherited genetically. But all the literature on group selection is about the competition between individual and group (including species) selection, within the same game of selecting genes.
I appreciate the effort you are putting into this, but I fear the terminological and theoretical confusion regarding group selection run far too deep. One enthusiastic person is not going to straighten things out in a forum where evolutionary biology is not the central focus. And now that academian has weighed in, the cause is hopeless. ;)
I agree with you (and Tim) that Eliezer’s opposition to group selection was a bit naive and under-informed. But not completely wrong-headed. Many incorrect arguments in favor of group selection have been made over the years. A lot of them were incorrect because they simply did not work. Others were “epistemologically incorrect” because, though they worked, they could be reinterpreted more “parsimoniously” as individual-level selection.
D.S. Wilson’s “Truth and Reconciliation” blog series strikes me as an example of extremely dishonest labeling. What he is really saying is that if everyone who disagrees with him would just accept his version of the truth, then reconciliation will take place. And his book “Unto Others” strikes me as even more dishonest. He defines “group selection” extremely broadly, provides examples of corner cases in which his “trait group selection” mechanism works, and then (here is the dishonest part) claims that if group selection works even in this extreme case, then it will obviously work in other cases.
Then he proceeds to discuss the case which every non-professional has in mind when he thinks of group selection—human evolution with groups = tribes, group death = tribe extinction, and group birth = split-up of a successful and populous tribe. The trouble is that the math of group selection really doesn’t work in this case.
The only cases I know of where the group selection models do work are (1) Species level selection (Gould/Eldredge), examples like your non-selfing plants; and (2) the examples that Wilson gives in which “groups” are rather short-lived entities which “succeed” by keeping their members alive for a while and then returning them safely to the general population, where the individuals reproduce. A good example of a group that Wilson might use as an example of trait-group selection would be a flock of geese conducting a seasonal migration. Such a group might be selected against if it got seriously lost, or blundered into a tornado, or suffered some other collective catastrophe.
A human hunting party is another example of a “group” such that the mathematics of group selection works. A human tribe of hunter-gatherers is not, unless it is so reproductively isolated from other tribes so as to qualify as a species. I’m pretty sure that this degree of isolation (less than two cross-tribe matings per generation) has never held over any long period of time in human history.
But group selection for cultural traits is another question. If genes get transferred between tribes, but memes do not, then selection at the level of tribes may well help to determine the course of human cultural/memetic evolution.
Well, I seem to have provided you with a long response, which, unlike your own efforts, does not include any links/citations. Sorry about that. You are under no obligation to trust or believe me on this stuff. I will merely assert that I (and tim_tyler as well) have been a serious amateur enthusiast for evolutionary theory for many years. Clearly, you have been too. I do recommend though, that you take a second look at D.S. Wilson’s work in light of my criticisms. He really is pulling something of a bait-and-switch. See if you agree.
Thanks for your 2p on D.S. Wilson’s Unto Others.
It sounds as though I like multi-level selection a bit more than you do.
Evidence from our own species suggests habitat variation can cause significant morphological differences (despite gene flow) which selection can then act upon.
I also find things like this one interesting:
“Senescence as an adaptation to limit the spread of disease”
Josh Mitteldorf , John Pepper
http://www.mathforum.org/~josh/Epidemics-JTB.pdf
I think so. I’m not quite so purist as Dawkins, but I am pretty close. But I do realize that it is not really an empirical scientific question. It is really simply a matter of what kind of models you prefer. Most cases in which group selection models work can also be explained just as well by individual-level selection or kin-selection.
Speaking of which:
Yes. Very interesting. Red Queen strikes again. But since they are already thinking about Bill Hamilton, why don’t they take the further step and realize that the senescent death of an old individual not only reduces the population density for the benefit of the group—the death specifically is beneficial to those individuals in the group who are the most immunologically similar to the deceased.
In other words, this mechanism ain’t Red Queen + Group Selection; it is Red Queen + Kin Selection.
Yes: sex and death!
Their model exhibits locality (with limited diffusion—V.N. or 5x5 neighbourhood) as well.
So: a death benefits kin not just through immunological similarity—but also because neighbours are likely to be kin—and death takes an adjacent pathogen load out of circulation.
I realize your views may have changed by now, but isn’t that obviously caused by Red Queen effects? Just like all other sexual reproduction?
Hmmm. Presumably there would be no objection had the speculation been worded “evolved adaptations that make people thrive in human society”.
Now all I need to do is to figure out whether the meanings of the two are really different.
Be careful.
“Adaptations that make people thrive” can be interpreted in two ways: “adaptations that make people [who possess those adaptations] thrive” or “adaptations that make people [in general, including those who don’t possess the adaptation] thrive.”
As I understand it, the latter interpretation is essentially equivalent to group selection; the former is not. So it helps to be clear about what exactly you’re saying.
Your original formulation (“make society work better”) implies the latter pretty strongly. Your rewording is more ambiguous.
In any case, if you are proposing the former—that is, if you are proposing that some of our biases have evolved to make the individuals expressing that bias more successful—there’s no group selection error, and I agree that it would be pretty surprising if that weren’t the case.
Of course, as has been said several times, that doesn’t mean those biases currently make individuals expressing them more successful.
If group selection wasn’t responsible for naked mole rats, what would be the right term for it? Kin selection seems like too much of an understatement for them.