As I understand it, tribalism here, is being defined as a significantly increased probability of cooperating with ingroup members, regardless of past action, and a significantly increased probability of defecting against outgroup members, regardless of past actions. While the original piece focuses on the negatives of tribalism, I would like to focus on the positives of in-group cooperation.
Tightly cooperating in-groups, historically, have been the most effective social structure for accomplishing goals. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the most tribal group in modern society, the military, is also the most effective at achieving specific goals dictated by its leadership. Other, more tribal groups, such as religious orders, also seem to be more effective at achieving goals. On the other hand, there are studies that show that children with autism have trouble forming shared goals, and this leads to a decline in the ability to cooperate to achieve shared goals. If anything, I would say that rationalists are not tribal enough, and in fact, there are initiatives to increase tribalism in order to make groups of rationalists more effective at achieving their goals.
Moreover, as Benjamin Ross Hoffman points out, lack of tribalism often leaves you open to arbitrage by competing outgroups who take advantage of your members’ propensity to cooperate by either reducing their own efforts or even profiting by actively negating your ingroup’s efforts.
Finally, it’s not clear to me that improvements in mental health would be connected to reduced tribalism. Mental health is strongly tied to strong social connections, and strong social connections are often the result of tribalist communities. It’s no coincidence that communities with stifling levels of religiosity or ideological alignment also seem to have the happiest members. Conversely, people with greater levels of depression cooperate less. It’s not clear to me that improving mental health would reduce levels of tribalism. In fact, it might have just the opposite effect.
I agree that tribalism is a deep rooted part of the human psyche, and as a result, don’t see it going away anytime soon either. However, I’m not sure that we even want to get rid of tribalism. I think that tribalism forms the basis of a number of cooperative behaviors that promote positive mental health and achievement of shared goals. I believe that it’s far more productive to try to find ways to redirect tribalist impulses towards positive ends than to try to eliminate tribalism altogether.
I agree that in-group bonding is a good and valuable thing, but it’s not obvious to me that it could not be separated from out-group aggression (which is what I meant by tribalism). At least I have personally been a part of several groups that seemed to have strong in-group bonding but little aggression towards other groups, which at least felt like it was in part because the outgroups didn’t present any threat.
E.g. participating in any events where I get a sense of “these are my kinds of people” tends to produce a strong feeling of in-group liking, and the effects of that feeling are oriented purely inwards, towards other people present at the event, without producing any desire to leave the event to harass people from outgroups. (Nor does there seem to be any such effect after the event.)
Setting up a common enemy is an excellent way to engender cooperation between two competing groups. While this common enemy does not necessarily need to be a third group, the feeling of uniting against a common external threat is a powerful motivator, which can drive groups to do truly great things. We didn’t land on the moon because of inward focused warm fuzzies. We landed on the moon to show the Soviet Union we were better at rockets than they were.
In fact, the fact that there’s no Sputnik like threat warning for AGI is probably the reason that AI X-Risk research is so neglected. If we could set up an external threat on the order of Sputnik or Einstein’s letter warning of German efforts to build an atomic bomb, we’d be making huge strides figuring out whether building a friendly AI was possible.
It feels noteworthy that your historical examples are going to the moon and making the atomic bomb: the first was something that was found to be of so little practical value that it was basically just done a few times and then given up after all the symbolic value had been extracted from it, and the second was a project explicitly aimed at hurting the outgroup.
So uniting against a common enemy may drive people to do difficult things, but the value of those things may be mostly symbolic or outright aimed at being explicitly harmful.
(Though just to check, I think we don’t actually disagree on much? You said that “it’s far more productive to try to find ways to redirect tribalist impulses towards positive ends” and I said that “in-group bonding is a good and valuable thing, but it’s not obvious to me that it could not be separated from out-group aggression”, so both of us seem to be in agreement that we should keep the good sides of in/out-group dynamics and try to reduce the bad sides of it; I just define “tribalism” as referring to purely the negative sides, whereas you’re defining it to refer to the whole dynamic.)
As I understand it, tribalism here, is being defined as a significantly increased probability of cooperating with ingroup members, regardless of past action, and a significantly increased probability of defecting against outgroup members, regardless of past actions. While the original piece focuses on the negatives of tribalism, I would like to focus on the positives of in-group cooperation.
Tightly cooperating in-groups, historically, have been the most effective social structure for accomplishing goals. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the most tribal group in modern society, the military, is also the most effective at achieving specific goals dictated by its leadership. Other, more tribal groups, such as religious orders, also seem to be more effective at achieving goals. On the other hand, there are studies that show that children with autism have trouble forming shared goals, and this leads to a decline in the ability to cooperate to achieve shared goals. If anything, I would say that rationalists are not tribal enough, and in fact, there are initiatives to increase tribalism in order to make groups of rationalists more effective at achieving their goals.
Moreover, as Benjamin Ross Hoffman points out, lack of tribalism often leaves you open to arbitrage by competing outgroups who take advantage of your members’ propensity to cooperate by either reducing their own efforts or even profiting by actively negating your ingroup’s efforts.
Finally, it’s not clear to me that improvements in mental health would be connected to reduced tribalism. Mental health is strongly tied to strong social connections, and strong social connections are often the result of tribalist communities. It’s no coincidence that communities with stifling levels of religiosity or ideological alignment also seem to have the happiest members. Conversely, people with greater levels of depression cooperate less. It’s not clear to me that improving mental health would reduce levels of tribalism. In fact, it might have just the opposite effect.
I agree that tribalism is a deep rooted part of the human psyche, and as a result, don’t see it going away anytime soon either. However, I’m not sure that we even want to get rid of tribalism. I think that tribalism forms the basis of a number of cooperative behaviors that promote positive mental health and achievement of shared goals. I believe that it’s far more productive to try to find ways to redirect tribalist impulses towards positive ends than to try to eliminate tribalism altogether.
I agree that in-group bonding is a good and valuable thing, but it’s not obvious to me that it could not be separated from out-group aggression (which is what I meant by tribalism). At least I have personally been a part of several groups that seemed to have strong in-group bonding but little aggression towards other groups, which at least felt like it was in part because the outgroups didn’t present any threat.
E.g. participating in any events where I get a sense of “these are my kinds of people” tends to produce a strong feeling of in-group liking, and the effects of that feeling are oriented purely inwards, towards other people present at the event, without producing any desire to leave the event to harass people from outgroups. (Nor does there seem to be any such effect after the event.)
Setting up a common enemy is an excellent way to engender cooperation between two competing groups. While this common enemy does not necessarily need to be a third group, the feeling of uniting against a common external threat is a powerful motivator, which can drive groups to do truly great things. We didn’t land on the moon because of inward focused warm fuzzies. We landed on the moon to show the Soviet Union we were better at rockets than they were.
In fact, the fact that there’s no Sputnik like threat warning for AGI is probably the reason that AI X-Risk research is so neglected. If we could set up an external threat on the order of Sputnik or Einstein’s letter warning of German efforts to build an atomic bomb, we’d be making huge strides figuring out whether building a friendly AI was possible.
It feels noteworthy that your historical examples are going to the moon and making the atomic bomb: the first was something that was found to be of so little practical value that it was basically just done a few times and then given up after all the symbolic value had been extracted from it, and the second was a project explicitly aimed at hurting the outgroup.
So uniting against a common enemy may drive people to do difficult things, but the value of those things may be mostly symbolic or outright aimed at being explicitly harmful.
(Though just to check, I think we don’t actually disagree on much? You said that “it’s far more productive to try to find ways to redirect tribalist impulses towards positive ends” and I said that “in-group bonding is a good and valuable thing, but it’s not obvious to me that it could not be separated from out-group aggression”, so both of us seem to be in agreement that we should keep the good sides of in/out-group dynamics and try to reduce the bad sides of it; I just define “tribalism” as referring to purely the negative sides, whereas you’re defining it to refer to the whole dynamic.)