My best guess at what’s inside the sacredness black box is along the lines of Robin’s Is Fairness About Clear Fitness Signals? Roughly, people feel that success is deserved by those with high fitness, and trade is low status because someone can benefit from trade without having high fitness. That explains not only people’s attitudes to competition, but also why people insist that personal relationships must not be about trade—trade means your fitness isn’t high enough to get stuff for free. It also explains the disgust for ugly rich people, etc.
I think our preference for fitness mindset (sacredness/fairness/competition) over win-win trade mindset is pretty much a bias, with a simple evo psych explanation: our savannah brains don’t understand that the pie can grow. Overcoming that bias is beneficial both individually and collectively, as I describe in this comment.
That’s definitely going on and a good chunk (although far from all) of what’s in the box, especially if you generalize fitness signals for all sorts of signals. I debated being more explicit about the signaling part of the story and decided not to, and Robin does a great job (as always) of drawing it out explicitly. This is actually a reasonably valuable thing, having accurate signals, but no question we go overboard if that’s all that’s going on.
I’m a big fan of trade—I wasn’t kidding calling it Actual Best Thing Ever. And as per your linked comment it’s key to individual success, not only group success. But I don’t think that ‘be better’ is wrong, either, as a key path (the mind hacks are great, but not as central), so the progression is more that one needs all three. As with many biases, though, it’s doing some things that correct for other mistakes, and it’s worth thinking about what they are.
There’s a class of things that take the form of ‘doing this the hard way (doing it yourself, doing it without overly explicit trade or too much use of capital) creates positive side effects or creates a defense’ that I think contains a lot of valuable stuff, especially social benefits (both in the interaction, and building social capital and connection), skill development and preventing exploitation. Definitely worth saying more but out of time/space.
My best guess at what’s inside the sacredness black box is along the lines of Robin’s Is Fairness About Clear Fitness Signals? Roughly, people feel that success is deserved by those with high fitness, and trade is low status because someone can benefit from trade without having high fitness. That explains not only people’s attitudes to competition, but also why people insist that personal relationships must not be about trade—trade means your fitness isn’t high enough to get stuff for free. It also explains the disgust for ugly rich people, etc.
I think our preference for fitness mindset (sacredness/fairness/competition) over win-win trade mindset is pretty much a bias, with a simple evo psych explanation: our savannah brains don’t understand that the pie can grow. Overcoming that bias is beneficial both individually and collectively, as I describe in this comment.
That’s definitely going on and a good chunk (although far from all) of what’s in the box, especially if you generalize fitness signals for all sorts of signals. I debated being more explicit about the signaling part of the story and decided not to, and Robin does a great job (as always) of drawing it out explicitly. This is actually a reasonably valuable thing, having accurate signals, but no question we go overboard if that’s all that’s going on.
I’m a big fan of trade—I wasn’t kidding calling it Actual Best Thing Ever. And as per your linked comment it’s key to individual success, not only group success. But I don’t think that ‘be better’ is wrong, either, as a key path (the mind hacks are great, but not as central), so the progression is more that one needs all three. As with many biases, though, it’s doing some things that correct for other mistakes, and it’s worth thinking about what they are.
There’s a class of things that take the form of ‘doing this the hard way (doing it yourself, doing it without overly explicit trade or too much use of capital) creates positive side effects or creates a defense’ that I think contains a lot of valuable stuff, especially social benefits (both in the interaction, and building social capital and connection), skill development and preventing exploitation. Definitely worth saying more but out of time/space.