Edward O. Wilson, in his book “The Meaning of Human Existence”, posits that there exists a natural tendency for humans to act selflessly when the in-group is endangered by an out-group, but selfishly when there is no danger, as a selfish action that negatively impact’s the group’s fitness would not harm his or her survival.
This implies that human societies have nursed a dual-cooperation strategy, which selects for traits that create fertile, productive, high trust societies to guard against threats, but creates in those societies fertile ground for exploitation by selfish behaviors, the genes coding for which are passed on more and thus become more common in successive generations.
Cooperation is powerful, but even the smartest, most cooperatively adept groups are susceptible to exploitation. There are things that non-psychopathic people just couldn’t stomach doing that psychopaths could easily do. The magnitude for material, reproductive and social success is too high for a highly productive, amoral agent to ignore the benefits. The only way for a cooperative society to guard against it is to be, by default, zero-trust.
Your point about negative pleiotropy makes sense and will likely be a huge hurdle for genetic modification that seeks specific metrics. However there are just too many low-risk low-hanging fruit in the human gene pool to make it necessary for genetic modification to venture into the more extreme territories to get the benefits it needs. There already exist natural born humans 5 standard deviations above any given average trait: the success of serendipitously fit humans by pure natural chance is enough of a basis for artificial traits to be easily pushed to a reasonably higher level. Winning the genetic lottery isn’t about hitting one giant bullseye, it’s about avoiding 1,000,000 micro bullets.
Also, regarding this common chain, my comment got a very strong immediate negative reaction, but I’m unsure what people’s main dismissal of it stems from. The belief that I’m veering towards false alarmism?
I think that a relative weakness of psychopaths is that they have to be rare in the population, because (a) an interaction between two psychopaths is likely detrimental for one or both of them, and (b) the psychopaths lose the element of surprise as people become more familiar with them.
So if we genetically engineer superintelligent children, some of them psychopathic, some of them not, I suppose the interactions between them will lead to some stable ratio.
People have adaptations against exploitation, such as trusting people you know for a long time or someone you trust knows them for a long time, or getting drunk together (it is difficult to fake non-existing emotions when drunk, and the next day people will remember weird behavior). In a high-trust society we often stop relying on them, but as the trust reduces, they can become more popular again.
Edward O. Wilson, in his book “The Meaning of Human Existence”, posits that there exists a natural tendency for humans to act selflessly when the in-group is endangered by an out-group, but selfishly when there is no danger, as a selfish action that negatively impact’s the group’s fitness would not harm his or her survival.
This implies that human societies have nursed a dual-cooperation strategy, which selects for traits that create fertile, productive, high trust societies to guard against threats, but creates in those societies fertile ground for exploitation by selfish behaviors, the genes coding for which are passed on more and thus become more common in successive generations.
Cooperation is powerful, but even the smartest, most cooperatively adept groups are susceptible to exploitation. There are things that non-psychopathic people just couldn’t stomach doing that psychopaths could easily do. The magnitude for material, reproductive and social success is too high for a highly productive, amoral agent to ignore the benefits. The only way for a cooperative society to guard against it is to be, by default, zero-trust.
Your point about negative pleiotropy makes sense and will likely be a huge hurdle for genetic modification that seeks specific metrics. However there are just too many low-risk low-hanging fruit in the human gene pool to make it necessary for genetic modification to venture into the more extreme territories to get the benefits it needs. There already exist natural born humans 5 standard deviations above any given average trait: the success of serendipitously fit humans by pure natural chance is enough of a basis for artificial traits to be easily pushed to a reasonably higher level. Winning the genetic lottery isn’t about hitting one giant bullseye, it’s about avoiding 1,000,000 micro bullets.
Also, regarding this common chain, my comment got a very strong immediate negative reaction, but I’m unsure what people’s main dismissal of it stems from. The belief that I’m veering towards false alarmism?
I think that a relative weakness of psychopaths is that they have to be rare in the population, because (a) an interaction between two psychopaths is likely detrimental for one or both of them, and (b) the psychopaths lose the element of surprise as people become more familiar with them.
So if we genetically engineer superintelligent children, some of them psychopathic, some of them not, I suppose the interactions between them will lead to some stable ratio.
People have adaptations against exploitation, such as trusting people you know for a long time or someone you trust knows them for a long time, or getting drunk together (it is difficult to fake non-existing emotions when drunk, and the next day people will remember weird behavior). In a high-trust society we often stop relying on them, but as the trust reduces, they can become more popular again.