For people who like Yudkowsky’s fiction, I recommend reading his story Kindness to Kin. I think it’s my favorite of his stories. It’s both genuinely moving, and an interesting thought experiment about evolutionary selection pressures and kindness. See also this related tweet thread.
Surely the central premise is not true in our world? Many animals are kind to non-kin, and this seems to continue alongside increased animal intelligence. I don’t see why the default path to higher intelligence would not look like homo sapiens, where the initial ancestors capable of forming a society are “stupid” and don’t optimize completely for genetic fitness, allowing pro-social patterns to take hold.
I suspect “friendships” form within the psyche, and are part of how we humans (and various other minds, though maybe not all minds, I’m not sure) cohere into relatively unified beings (after being a chaos of many ~subagents in infancy). Insofar as that’s true of a given mind, it may make it a bit easier for kindness to form between it and outside minds, as it will already know some parts of how friendships can be done.
Spoiler block was not supposed to be empty, sorry. It’s fixed now. I was using the Markdown spoiler formatting and there was some kind of bug with it I think, I reported it to the LW admins last night. (also fwiw I took the opportunity now to expand on my original spoilered comment more)
Because in this model, kindness to kin evolved because we share a significant fraction of our genes with our close kin (1/2 for children, siblings, and parents; 1⁄4 for grandchildren, grandparents, uncles/aunts/nieces/nephews; etc.). If there’s instead an ant queen, then all ants in this particular colony are siblings, but genetic relatedness to other hives is very low. Then you don’t get kindness to kin but something else, like kindness to hive or self-sacrifice for hive.
EDIT: I think the above holds, but the justification in EY’s Twitter thread is different, namely that “Human bands and tribes are the right size for us to need to trade favors with people we’re not related to” but scaled-up ant colonies are not.
For people who like Yudkowsky’s fiction, I recommend reading his story Kindness to Kin. I think it’s my favorite of his stories. It’s both genuinely moving, and an interesting thought experiment about evolutionary selection pressures and kindness. See also this related tweet thread.
I like the story, but (spoilers):
Surely the central premise is not true in our world? Many animals are kind to non-kin, and this seems to continue alongside increased animal intelligence. I don’t see why the default path to higher intelligence would not look like homo sapiens, where the initial ancestors capable of forming a society are “stupid” and don’t optimize completely for genetic fitness, allowing pro-social patterns to take hold.
I suspect “friendships” form within the psyche, and are part of how we humans (and various other minds, though maybe not all minds, I’m not sure) cohere into relatively unified beings (after being a chaos of many ~subagents in infancy). Insofar as that’s true of a given mind, it may make it a bit easier for kindness to form between it and outside minds, as it will already know some parts of how friendships can be done.
This comment confuses me:
Is the spoiler block supposed to be empty, as it appears to be?
Spoiler block was not supposed to be empty, sorry. It’s fixed now. I was using the Markdown spoiler formatting and there was some kind of bug with it I think, I reported it to the LW admins last night. (also fwiw I took the opportunity now to expand on my original spoilered comment more)
Nitter version of that thread: https://nitter.net/ESYudkowsky/status/1660623336567889920
I’m curious about the following line (especially in relation to a recent post, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vqfT5QCWa66gsfziB/a-phylogeny-of-agents)
Why are scaled-up ant colonies unlikely to be nice?
Because in this model, kindness to kin evolved because we share a significant fraction of our genes with our close kin (1/2 for children, siblings, and parents; 1⁄4 for grandchildren, grandparents, uncles/aunts/nieces/nephews; etc.). If there’s instead an ant queen, then all ants in this particular colony are siblings, but genetic relatedness to other hives is very low. Then you don’t get kindness to kin but something else, like kindness to hive or self-sacrifice for hive.
EDIT: I think the above holds, but the justification in EY’s Twitter thread is different, namely that “Human bands and tribes are the right size for us to need to trade favors with people we’re not related to” but scaled-up ant colonies are not.