I think this is true in so far as there is selection pressure, in that such events are survivable, and in that they don’t require unified coordination of all agents to survive.
The cthulu example isn’t great, only in that the nature of the threat is pretty vague to most readers (at least to me).
A better example would be; a medieval society gets hit by a meteorite; does this cause selection pressure for medieval societies to build meteorite-proof castles? Not if it just kills everyone.
Alternatively; an early-industrial era society that notices an approaching comet might be able to coordinate to invent a redirect-rocket, or nukes, or whatever to save their society, but there is still no selection pressure since the two possible results are everyone survives, or everyone does, and if anything competitive pressure will punish anyone who spends resources on saving the world, since those resources will benefit competitors who spend zero resources on the asteroid redirect mission, just as much as the ones who spent half their GDP to survive. Unless social pressure or similar can effectively reward the heroic resource sacrificing nations, they will be putting themselves at a huge disadvantage and if GDP correlated to representation over time you would expect the selfish nations to actually be the ones that are selected for.
I get that you arguing that a society which was this bad at reasoning ing general should be outcompeted by a society that is better at reasoning, but we should expect both societies to be out competed by one that is both capable of reasoning well when it is competitively valuable, and ignoring such reasoning when it is not competitively valuable. I think might be a good description of the current United States, for example which is great at listening to academics when it is profitable and ignoring them when it is inconvenient for business interests.
this is “chicken” in the theory, right? whoever swerves first (fends off the meteor) loses (pays the cost), but if nobody swerves, then everybody loses big (suffers the impact).
i agree that the decisions here are more complex than “always immediately fund the antimeteor kickstarter” or “always freeride”. both societies should lose to ones that are better at skills like coalition building, etc.
Ya, I agree this should be true in principal; I think given more time, there might be the opportunity for some sort of “Dath Ilan” lite society to rise to the top.
I think this is true in so far as there is selection pressure, in that such events are survivable, and in that they don’t require unified coordination of all agents to survive.
The cthulu example isn’t great, only in that the nature of the threat is pretty vague to most readers (at least to me).
A better example would be; a medieval society gets hit by a meteorite; does this cause selection pressure for medieval societies to build meteorite-proof castles? Not if it just kills everyone.
Alternatively; an early-industrial era society that notices an approaching comet might be able to coordinate to invent a redirect-rocket, or nukes, or whatever to save their society, but there is still no selection pressure since the two possible results are everyone survives, or everyone does, and if anything competitive pressure will punish anyone who spends resources on saving the world, since those resources will benefit competitors who spend zero resources on the asteroid redirect mission, just as much as the ones who spent half their GDP to survive. Unless social pressure or similar can effectively reward the heroic resource sacrificing nations, they will be putting themselves at a huge disadvantage and if GDP correlated to representation over time you would expect the selfish nations to actually be the ones that are selected for.
I get that you arguing that a society which was this bad at reasoning ing general should be outcompeted by a society that is better at reasoning, but we should expect both societies to be out competed by one that is both capable of reasoning well when it is competitively valuable, and ignoring such reasoning when it is not competitively valuable. I think might be a good description of the current United States, for example which is great at listening to academics when it is profitable and ignoring them when it is inconvenient for business interests.
this is “chicken” in the theory, right? whoever swerves first (fends off the meteor) loses (pays the cost), but if nobody swerves, then everybody loses big (suffers the impact).
i agree that the decisions here are more complex than “always immediately fund the antimeteor kickstarter” or “always freeride”. both societies should lose to ones that are better at skills like coalition building, etc.
Ya, I agree this should be true in principal; I think given more time, there might be the opportunity for some sort of “Dath Ilan” lite society to rise to the top.