But societies that are very inbreed don’t seem to be very “altruistic” in the way the word is used on LW. They seem to be altruistic towards family members but not very much to random strangers.
Right, for relative strangers in an outbreed society the pay-offs for altruism between them is more favourable than in a more inbreed society.
What I find interesting is that you could get there in several ways, for example you could tweak your tendency to categorise people in outgroup vs. ingroup to make them more likley to classify people in the former, while decreasing how much you want to help any individual of the ingroup. Or you could just tweak up the altruism for outgroup. Actually thinking a bit more about this I’m not sure there is any real difference between the two approaches.
Right, for relative strangers in an outbreed society the pay-offs for altruism between them is more favourable than in a more inbreed society.
What I find interesting is that you could get there in several ways, for example you could tweak your tendency to categorise people in outgroup vs. ingroup to make them more likley to classify people in the former, while decreasing how much you want to help any individual of the ingroup. Or you could just tweak up the altruism for outgroup. Actually thinking a bit more about this I’m not sure there is any real difference between the two approaches.