Are you saying that signaling via healthcare is an instinct? Most ethologists would contend that Homo sapiens has essentially no instincts that operate after infancy. Are you proposing some sort of innate mental facility for tracking healthcare-related altruism? That’s bizarre too.

Anyway, if you’ll forgive me for momentarily donning my evopsych cap, aren’t the sick and injured the least likely to repay one’s efforts on their behalf, in a Paleolithic setting anyway? In my own amateur observation of semi-feral cats, sick and injured individuals seem to receive increased abuse from their fellows. I could imagine some vague evolutionary mechanism for that, but I’ll settle for just wondering why primates would be any different.

How might I personally verify telepathy? I want my nobel prize!

Once I have this verification, I also intend to embarrass all those snotty AI researchers who think they can explain bird flocking without recourse to psychic powers and group minds.

But in your case, let me be harsh. If you are hypothesizing that interest in other’s health is because it helps us build coalitions, which we assume are valuable, does the implication that people will then subsidize others health care anything but obvious? Further, if health care policy is decided at a national level, and voting is done in private, how does this relate to the tribal situation you have described? Its not obvious that a large group like nationalized health care advocates, are a status group like my buddies on the savanna. That group seems too big to be a status group, like aligning with Democrats or Republicans, as opposed to joining the KKK or Black Panthers (both small enough to have monitoring, and an us-versus-them mentality).

Now it is true that some models, like DeLong, Shleifer, Summers and Waldeman’s paper on short-lived speculators (1990), is like yours, in that the model does what the intro says: if you have capital constraints, trend-following noise traders may make it rational to follow trends. They then model this. But that model was never extended by anyone else because it merely did in algebra what everyone expected who read the first two pages. It is often referenced, but only, in my opinion, because it plays into a large thread (efficient vs. inefficient markets).

The attemt to explain these things by inventing a logical flat causative sequence of events is a function of the scientist only being able to use his intellectual thinking side, while being like most other contemporary people, out of touch with his feeling nature.

One basic and wrong assumption of evolutionary thinking is this idea of egoism and separateness. What is pertinent to remember is that while every living entity is an individual, it is also a part of the whole of its species or group in a much more concrete way than presumed. This connection is through the feeling/emotional nature (that is unfortunatly, as i said undeveloped in contemporary man, and perhaps even more in scientistically minded people who’s intellectual, logical side is dominating, making it paradoxically even harder for these people to understand this). The idea of a group mind is to be found in many traditions and can be verified on a personal level. This naturally explains things like empathy, why birds organze so elegantly while flying, telepathy etc. This may be counterintuitive from the point of view of how we sense the world, but isn’t it a while now since physicists discovered that our senses aren’t telling the truth about reality?

The puzzles I consider include a willingness to provide more medical than other assistance to associates and a desire to be seen as providing it; support for nation-, firm-, or family-provided medical care; placebo benefits of medicine; …

One of Robin Hanson’s greatest unpublishable papers has finally been published. “Showing That You Care: The Evolution of Health Altruism”…