Brian Doherty’s history of libertarianism reminded me of a pattern that’s struck me before : When wars break out, there…

Rather, bias should be judged with respect to perception of the truth. Bias impairs accuracy, not success. A bias which achieves goal-success at the cost of hurting our perception of a truth is a bias to be overcome, not celebrated. Whether our biases lead to more or less foreign-policy success, or help or hurt net worldwide welfare, they are still biases and are still distortions that we want to learn to overcome.

This is one of the most ridiculous claims I’ve read in a long time.

In coming years, I wouldn’t be suprised to see people taking on business ventures in Iraq, just to see what it’s like. And many more will do so because they have or know people who have experience in Iraq. I doubt simply lifting sanctions would have been as stimulating for Iraq, or the broader world, as the war will utimately be. The war will be costly for the US, but the net effect will likely be positive.

This is true only on the level of the entire species’s gene pool. Within a tribe, or even within two competing tribes, or a group of competing tribes, who did not constitute the whole of the entire species, the game would not be zero-sum because all genes in play needed to compete with distant other tribes.

This is a great point that is often overlooked in all the antiwar rhetoric. War really is good for some people, generally the victors. The U.S. was helped by entering WWII. North Vietnam and China were helped by the Vietnam war. There is a reason why we keep seeing wars, and it’s because people think it will make them better off.

The other side of this is that war is very likely a net negative activity – the benefits to the victors are less than the costs to the losers, because of all the destruction. So from the abstract perspective, or from the POV of an outsider not involved in a conflict, we would like there to be less war.

You can draw an analogy to interpersonal violence. I’m sure our ancestors were willing to commit rape or murder on occasion, if they could get away with it. It was good for them personally, but a net negative for society as a whole. So today we have institutions to try to suppress this behavior, for a net positive effect.

The same principle could be applied to warfare, and that is presumably the major goal of the United Nations. I suggest that we should analyze our biases in favor of warfare from the perspective of the net benefit to humanity rather than from how it benefits us personally, just as we do for analyzing the costs of interpersonal violence.

Also, many forms of bias are simply not credibly the result of evolutionary advantages, but are merely the inevitable consequences of heuristical analysis of data using the first set of heuristics that evolution produced which yielded the potential, when used in a particular extremely awkward and computationally wasteful manner, to produce a fairly general form of reasoning.

Finally, our ancestors lived in a world where collusion was often possible, but where, from an evolutionary perspective, though not from a hedonic or life satisfaction perspective, competition was always ultimately zero sum. We live in a world where malthusian constraints have been lifted for some time and are likely to remain lifted until after genes themselves have lost in evolutionary competition.