If a condition actually causes you to do a better job of spreading your genes, then to call it a disease seems like to miss the entire point of evolution.
This is technically correct, but misleading in context. James’ point is, I think, directed towards the idea that for a culture to embrace values that decrease its fitness has a cost, and increases the odds of your culture going extinct. More relevant to us in practice is that such values have an economic cost that inevitably reduces our individual happiness. This is correct regardless of whether you are at equilibrium.
for a culture to embrace values that decrease its fitness has a cost, and increases the odds of your culture going extinct
Correct, by so what? We’re are talking about what to call a “disease”, in the medical sense. You don’t want to medicalize “wrong” kinds of culture, do you?
such values have an economic cost that inevitably reduces our individual happiness
That’s not obvious to me at all. The point of human life is not to minimize economic costs and I can easily see economically inefficient values generating much happiness.
I was talking about the fitness of a culture. That’s why I said I was talking about the fitness of a culture. Individual happiness is not fitness, but it is of interest to us.
I know you were talking about the fitness of a culture. But James was talking about the fitness of individuals (that is what is allegedly not harmed by stupidity, after all). Which is why I pointed out that the two are different.
Maybe I misunderstood you; I confess it wasn’t very clear to me what actual point you were making. I took you to be defending James (even though he was disagreeing with your original proposal). Perhaps that wasn’t your intention?
I agree that we are interested in happiness as well as fitness (and that was kinda my point in distinguishing our values from evolution’s values). I’m not sure exactly what you’re intending to say about happiness. On the face of it you seem to be saying that values that reduce a culture’s fitness necessarily bear an economic cost (I don’t see why that need be true, on timescales shorter than those on which the culture goes extinct as a result) and that economic cost necessarily implies reduced happiness (which also seems doubtful, at least on a timescale of say 50-100 years) but again maybe I’ve misunderstood.
That’s basically what I’m saying—well, I think it was; I can’t see my original text now. But IIRC I misused the word “necessarily” because I thought doing so was closer to the truth than not using any modifier at all. I wanted to imply a causative link, and the notion that, even in cases where it appears there is no economic cost, the length of and multiplicity of paths from a nation’s values to its economic health are so great that the bias towards finding an economic cost on each such path make it statistically very unlikely that the net economic impact is not negative.
But it still sticks around. Simple adaptationism is wrong and all kinds of other processes are also at work in evolving systems, especially in multicellular animals with structured populations and piddlingly tiny population sizes compared to microbes.
That can happen in two ways: we can give up our own values and embrace evolution’s, or we can force our own values on the evolutionary process. The latter seems like the better option to me. Or we could go extinct (in the long run we are all dead). Or we could decouple ourselves from evolution entirely (mumble uploading mumble).
In the really long run the only stable equilibrium is for us and everything around us to turn into a super-low-density scattering of photons and leptons, too tenuous for gravity to outweigh metric expansion or for any other interactions to occur more than vanishingly often. Does that mean that we should consider something a disease if it tends to move us further away from the condition of being composed of a tenuous gas of photons and leptons?
I’m not sure this response is actually coherent. “Force our own values on the evolutionary process” is probably impossible in principle, as is “decouple ourselves from evolution entirely”; uploading would still result in creatures that would make imperfect imitations of themselves, which would mean still more selection, and even faster than before.
“Consider something a disease if it tends to move us further away from the condition of being composed of a tenuous gas of photons and leptons”… I do not see a real question here, because nothing can tend to move us further away from that condition. We are always moving toward that condition. In fact when we do things that seem better to us, we are usually moving towards it faster, by expending more energy.
“Force our own values on the evolutionary process” is probably impossible in principle
Really? Consider, for a particularly clear-cut instance which I am not especially endorsing, eugenics.
(I don’t mean to imply that we could hope to force all our values on the evolutionary process. Any more than evolution can reasonably be said to have, as it were, opinions on most questions of value.)
nothing can tend to move us further away from that condition
We could move towards it faster or slower. Obviously we should blow ourselves up as violently as possible, in order to be more in tune with the Values of the Universe.
I disagree that blowing ourselves up violently would be in tune with the Values of the Universe in the sense we are talking about, for the reason I suggested at the end: if we build Dyson spheres we will generate entropy at a far higher rate and therefore progress far faster towards the tenuous gas. Blowing ourselves up is slow; the high tech things we might really want to do would be fast.
Why? Reproductive fitness just doesn’t seem relevant.
“Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”
If a condition actually causes you to do a better job of spreading your genes, then to call it a disease seems like to miss the entire point of evolution.
There is no reason why our values need to be evolution’s values.
In the short run yes, but in the long run the only stable equilibrium is for our values to become evolution’s values.
There is no stable equilibrium in the long run.
This is technically correct, but misleading in context. James’ point is, I think, directed towards the idea that for a culture to embrace values that decrease its fitness has a cost, and increases the odds of your culture going extinct. More relevant to us in practice is that such values have an economic cost that inevitably reduces our individual happiness. This is correct regardless of whether you are at equilibrium.
Correct, by so what? We’re are talking about what to call a “disease”, in the medical sense. You don’t want to medicalize “wrong” kinds of culture, do you?
That’s not obvious to me at all. The point of human life is not to minimize economic costs and I can easily see economically inefficient values generating much happiness.
The fitness of a culture is not necessarily the same as the genetic fitness of its individuals.
I was talking about the fitness of a culture. That’s why I said I was talking about the fitness of a culture. Individual happiness is not fitness, but it is of interest to us.
I know you were talking about the fitness of a culture. But James was talking about the fitness of individuals (that is what is allegedly not harmed by stupidity, after all). Which is why I pointed out that the two are different.
Maybe I misunderstood you; I confess it wasn’t very clear to me what actual point you were making. I took you to be defending James (even though he was disagreeing with your original proposal). Perhaps that wasn’t your intention?
I agree that we are interested in happiness as well as fitness (and that was kinda my point in distinguishing our values from evolution’s values). I’m not sure exactly what you’re intending to say about happiness. On the face of it you seem to be saying that values that reduce a culture’s fitness necessarily bear an economic cost (I don’t see why that need be true, on timescales shorter than those on which the culture goes extinct as a result) and that economic cost necessarily implies reduced happiness (which also seems doubtful, at least on a timescale of say 50-100 years) but again maybe I’ve misunderstood.
That’s basically what I’m saying—well, I think it was; I can’t see my original text now. But IIRC I misused the word “necessarily” because I thought doing so was closer to the truth than not using any modifier at all. I wanted to imply a causative link, and the notion that, even in cases where it appears there is no economic cost, the length of and multiplicity of paths from a nation’s values to its economic health are so great that the bias towards finding an economic cost on each such path make it statistically very unlikely that the net economic impact is not negative.
Humans are FULL of weird shit that is not adaptive.
But the weird shit that harms reproductive fitness is under negative selection.
But it still sticks around. Simple adaptationism is wrong and all kinds of other processes are also at work in evolving systems, especially in multicellular animals with structured populations and piddlingly tiny population sizes compared to microbes.
That can happen in two ways: we can give up our own values and embrace evolution’s, or we can force our own values on the evolutionary process. The latter seems like the better option to me. Or we could go extinct (in the long run we are all dead). Or we could decouple ourselves from evolution entirely (mumble uploading mumble).
In the really long run the only stable equilibrium is for us and everything around us to turn into a super-low-density scattering of photons and leptons, too tenuous for gravity to outweigh metric expansion or for any other interactions to occur more than vanishingly often. Does that mean that we should consider something a disease if it tends to move us further away from the condition of being composed of a tenuous gas of photons and leptons?
I’m not sure this response is actually coherent. “Force our own values on the evolutionary process” is probably impossible in principle, as is “decouple ourselves from evolution entirely”; uploading would still result in creatures that would make imperfect imitations of themselves, which would mean still more selection, and even faster than before.
“Consider something a disease if it tends to move us further away from the condition of being composed of a tenuous gas of photons and leptons”… I do not see a real question here, because nothing can tend to move us further away from that condition. We are always moving toward that condition. In fact when we do things that seem better to us, we are usually moving towards it faster, by expending more energy.
Really? Consider, for a particularly clear-cut instance which I am not especially endorsing, eugenics.
(I don’t mean to imply that we could hope to force all our values on the evolutionary process. Any more than evolution can reasonably be said to have, as it were, opinions on most questions of value.)
We could move towards it faster or slower. Obviously we should blow ourselves up as violently as possible, in order to be more in tune with the Values of the Universe.
I disagree that blowing ourselves up violently would be in tune with the Values of the Universe in the sense we are talking about, for the reason I suggested at the end: if we build Dyson spheres we will generate entropy at a far higher rate and therefore progress far faster towards the tenuous gas. Blowing ourselves up is slow; the high tech things we might really want to do would be fast.
There’s no reason to presuppose that intelligence correlates with likelihood of spreading genes.