Tag Archives: Farm

True Em Grit

By Robin Hanson · January 6, 2011 2:00 pm · Comments (23)

The new movie True Grit is a well-done celebration of the central farmer value of self-control. Not that foragers didn’t use self-control, but farmers took it to a whole new level, to get folks to act in quite un-forager-like ways. George Will’s latest column echos that gritty farmer theme, with a standard conservative warning that wealth and modernity tempts us to excess:

Daniel Akst['s] … book “We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess” notes that the problems of freedom and affluence – of “managing desire in a landscape rich with temptation” – are desirable problems. But they are problems. …

American life resembles “a giant all-you-can-eat buffet” offering “calories, credit, sex, intoxicants” and other invitations to excess. … Life in general has become what alcohol is – disinhibiting. … Today capitalism has a bipolar disorder, demanding self-controlled workers yet uninhibited shoppers. … The inhibiting intimacy of the village has been supplanted by the city’s “disinhibiting anonymity.” … As traditional social structures have withered under disapproval, and personal choice and self-invention have been celebrated, “second careers, second homes, second spouses, and even second childhoods are commonplace.” …

Pondering America’s “aristocracy of self-control,” Akst notes that affluent people, for whom food is a relatively minor expense, are less likely than poor people to be obese. Surely this has something to do with habits of self-control that are conducive to social success generally.

Before you dismiss Will’s concerns as the no-longer-relevant paranoid fears of a sad stick-in-the-mud, consider that when I recently discussed future Malthusian ems, several commentors responded that em poverty wouldn’t be so bad because very vivid and luxurious video games and virtual reality would cost only a tiny fraction of their subsistence cost. Also, since ems wouldn’t eat food, get sick, or have biological bodies, they needn’t feel hunger or pain. But I think this image misses the revival of farmer-style grit in an em world:

Ems, or whole brain emulations, are my best guess for the next big transition on the order of the farming and industry transitions. Farmer-style stoicism, self-sacrifice, and self-control, detached as needed from farmer specifics like love of land or sexual monogamy, might well be more effective [than a forager-style] at creating acceptance of em-efficient lifestyles. Religious ems might, for example, better accept being deleted when new more efficient versions of themselves are introduced. “Onward Christian robots” might be the new sensibility. And em’s low incomes might help farmer-style fear-based norm-enforcement to gain traction.

Ems would need some resources, and their bodies and minds would collect defects and errors, even if none of these resources or defects are biological. So it would be functional for ems to redirect their hunger systems to track the collection of needed resources, and redirect their pain systems to monitor possible defects and errors. They might of course sometimes enjoy pleasant vivid daydreams when their minds need non-shut-down rest, but it would be more functional for ems to daydream about variations on their own lives, rather than about completely alien lifestyles. They might also, if possible, redirect their needs for sex and kids toward em style reproduction activities.  If so, ems should feel hunger, pain, desire, and deep frustration, because such things are useful to feel.

As with our ancestors, it might be functional for much of em leisure to be devoted to relatively functional social bonding and mutual signaling of abilities, shared loyalty, and values. Farmer leisure differs from rich forager leisure, for good functional reasons. Compared to us, ems might prefer leisure that more celebrates self-control, religion, honor, loyalty, submission, grit, and determination. They might on average be happy, but with a grittier farmer style happiness. Whether such lives seem worth living to you probably depends on how fiercely you side with foragers in the forager-farmer divide.

Added 11a: Many commenters think direct modification of em brains would quickly lead to “happy slave” ems. Seems likely we’d try such modification, and they’d probably add some degree of cooperativeness, but my guess this will be a minor contribution.  The ability to select just a few of the billions of humans to make em copies will allow big changes between ems and humans, but I expect most of that to be used to select very high ability em minds, and that relatively little will need be spent on a willingness to submit to low incomes and high work regimentation. The farming revolution has already selected humans for plasticity in that direction, and it wouldn’t have been possible if humans didn’t already have a lot of such plasticity.

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Rome As Semi-Foragers

By Robin Hanson · December 28, 2010 8:00 pm · Comments (44)

It seems that an “almost” industrial revolution happened around 500BC. For example, this graph of estimated world population shows a population jump then similar to the start of the ~1800 jump. Also, consider this brief history of the Roman Empire:

~5 century BC: Roman civilization is a strong patriarchy, fathers … have absolute authority over the family.
~1 century BC: … Material wealth is astounding, … Romans enjoy the arts … democracy, commerce, science, human rights, animal rights, children rights and women become emancipated. No-fault divorce is enacted, and quickly becomes popular by the end of the century.
~1-2 century AD: … Men refuse to marry and the government tries to revive marriage with a “bachelor tax”, to no avail. … Roman women show little interest in raising their own children and frequently use nannies. The wealth and power of women grows very fast, while men become increasingly demotivated and engage in prostitution and vice. Prostitution and homosexuality become widespread.
~3-4 century AD: … Roman population declines due to below-replacement birth-rate. Vice and massive corruption are rampant. (more; HT Roissy)

Yes this exaggerates, but the key point remains: a sudden burst in productivity and wealth lead to big cultural changes that made the Greek-Roman world and its cultural descendants more forager-like than the rest of the farmer world. These changes helped clear the way for big cultural changes of the industrial revolution.

These cultural changes included not more political egalitarianism, but also more forager like attitudes toward alchohol and mating:

Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world. … Studies find a positive relationship between alcohol use on the one hand and a more promiscuous and high-risk sexual behavior on the other hand. … The Greek and Roman empires … were the only (and first) to introduce formal monogamy. … Hunting tribes drink more than agricultural and settled tribes. … Hunting tribes … have more monogamous marriage arrangements than agricultural tribes. …

The emergence of socially imposed formal monogamy in Greece coincides with (a) the growth of “chattel slavery” (where men can have sex with female slaves) and (b) the extension of political rights. … The industrial revolution played a key role in the shift from formal to effective monogamy and in the sharp increase of alcohol consumption (more; HT Tyler)

This roughly fits my simple story: forager to farmer and back to forager with industry. The key is to see monogomous marraige as an intermediate form between low-commitment feeling-based forager mating, and wives-as-property-for-live farmer polygamy. Let me explain.

Forager work and mating is more intuitive, less institutional. Mates stay together mainly because they feel like it; there is more an open compeition to seduce mates, and there’s a lot of sneaking around. Foragers drink alchohol when they can, and spontaneous feelings count for more relative to formal commitments. The attitude is more that if you can’t hold her interest, you don’t deserve to keep her. Men show off abilities to obtain resources mainly to signal attractive qualities; most resources acquired must be shared with the rest of the band.

Farmers, in contrast, don’t share much, and are far more unequal in the resources they control, by which they can more directly “buy” wives. Farmer wives so bought are supposed to be committed to their husbands even when they don’t feel like it. Marriage was less about mutal attraction and more about building households and clans. Husbands worry about cheating wives, and so try to limit access and temptations, which includes alchohol. Musicians and artists are also suspect if they excite wives’ passions, which might lead to cheating.

When empires like Greece and Rome achieved sustained periods of prosperity, their elites reverted to more forager-like ways. They had more drinking and art, more egalitarian politics, fertility fell, and [non-slave] mating became more egalitarian and about feelings. If a bit of alchohol was enough to get your wife cheat to on you, well maybe you didn’t deserve her. The Greek-Roman move from polygamy to monogamy was a move in the direction of more forager-like feeling-based mating, though it retained farmer-like lifelong commitment.

The Greeks and Romans became models for Europe when industry made it rich again. In our era, fertility has fallen far, divorce and out-of-wedlock births are common, and alchohol, drugs, and sneaking about are more tolerated. Women need men less for their resources, and choose them more on other grounds. Dropping the lifelong commitment element of marriage, and often the expectation of any sort of marriage commitment, we have moved even further away from farmer wives-as-lifelong-property and toward forager “promiscuity.”

Added: Razib Khan and Jason elaborate.

Added 1Feb: A new study says that in places where marriages are more arranged by parents, there is more mate-guarding. Discouraging alcohol seems a reasonable mate-guarding strategy.

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Gays As Foragers

By Robin Hanson · December 27, 2010 8:00 pm · Comments (42)

Artists are iconic foragers, seen as promiscuous, leisurely, non-materialistic, non-domineering, well-traveled, etc. In our great political conflicts between forager and farmer styles, we expect artists to take the forager side. (more)

Traditionally, gays have also been seen as iconic foragers – promiscuous, artistic, professional, cosmopolitan, well-traveled, with few kids, etc. Meanwhile, marriage and the military are two of our most farmer-like institutions – they are contexts where we most expect long term commitment, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and strong adherence to social norms. These two facts together help explain why gays in the military and gay marriage are so politically combustible – folks who lean farmer may feel uneasy with iconic foragers being openly placed as equals in core farmer institutions.

Today’s cultural elites lean heavily forager, however, and often go out of their way to deny any downsides to promoting gays. The Post has a weekly “5 myths” editorial, and out of ~250 myths “busted” in 2010, they chose this as one of ten to emphasize at year’s end:

Some defenders of the Catholic Church’s response … say that homosexual priests are responsible for the majority of abuses, in part because more than 80 percent of the victims are male. They argue that true pedophiles – adults who are pathologically attracted to pre-pubescent children – constitute a small minority of offenders. … Such assertions have numerous flaws. For one thing, research shows that gay men are no more likely to molest children than straight men. (And celibacy doesn’t seem to be a determining factor, either.) Yes, 80 percent of the victims were male, but many offenders assaulted children of both sexes. (more)

This seem a bizarrely weak argument to emphasize. If a) straight men don’t molest boys, b) straight men molest as much as gays, c) gays are a small fraction of men, d) priests have contact with similar numbers of girls and boys, and e) priest selection and monitoring treat gays and straights alike, then it is hard to see how f) 80% of victims could be boys. Surely something in the process favored gay molestation.

Attitudes toward gays and polygamists offer an interesting contrast. Gay sex was illegal not that long ago, while polygamous sex has long been legal. Yet today gay marriage is much closer to being legal than polygamous marriage. “Save the children” is one of the main arguments against polgamy; young girls are supposedly unfairly persudaded to marry. Yet boys seduced by gays fail today to motivate much of a “save the children” impulse among elites against gays.

Polygamists are usually framed as rural, religious, fertile, etc. – much more farmer than forager. As forager attitudes rose, framed-as-forager gays became favored over framed-as-farmer polygamists.

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On Sex & Violence

By Robin Hanson · December 21, 2010 9:30 pm · Comments (10)

Sex and violence, the most-complained-of classic movie draws, also seem to draw the most complaints re my forager-farmer hypothesis, that many non-functional industry-era trends are due to a natural human tendency to return from farmer to forager ways with increasing wealth and comfort. So let me try again to clarify.

On violence, Bryan Caplan “suspect[s] forager societies had plenty of internal violence.” But I’ve talked mainly of farmers having more organized violence like war. (Quotes below.) Foragers may well have high murder rates, but those are individual acts of passion and retribution. It is farmers who taught themselves to be professional and organized killers, who could benefit from that, though yes with time farmers learned to have less war.

On sex, I responded to Roissy here, and Razib Khan complained:

Hoe vs. plough agriculturalists shows that a simple hunter-gatherer vs. farmer narrative does not suffice. In some ways the hoe agriculturalist remains more like the hunter-gatherer, and in some ways more like his or her fellow agriculturalist. The most polygynous societies for example are arguably those of hoe based agriculturalists, as well as nomads. In contrast, hunter-gatherers and ploughman tend to be more monogamous, at least in a genetic sense.

On sex, I’ve consistently talked of “promiscuity,” not monogamy vs polygamy. (Quotes below.) The issue is how long relationships lasted, and tolerance for mating outside official relationships. Compared to farmers, foragers had shorter relations, and tolerated more unofficial mating. Polygamy is a stable long-term relation, and by tolerating more inequality is actually more farmer-like.

Now for those promised quotes. Continue reading "On Sex & Violence" »

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Fertility Looks Bad

By Robin Hanson · December 13, 2010 11:20 pm · Comments (21)

Bryan Caplan complains about evo psych folk who say we didn’t inherit “an overwhelming, conscious desire to have children”, and about my suggestion that “It is hard to tell grand hero stories” about high fertility”:

How secure are the premises that people don’t crave children, and can’t frame parenting as a noble quest?  Even nowadays, these claims seem exaggerated. … An ultra-Darwinian yearning to have vast numbers of descendents – and grand hero stories about this yearning – seem like common memes throughout history. [See] these Biblical quotes: …

Genesis 22:17: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven.

Yes, people do try to tell parenting hero stories. But this was lots easier among Biblical herders. Herder men who grew their herd well could afford to take many wives, while impressive herder women could attract successful herder men, who could afford to feed many children. Women who grew their herd well could also support more kids. For the folks of Genesis, having more kids was in fact a strong positive signal about your qualities; having many kids looked good.

Not so much today. Imagine you had a child who seemed extremely talented in some area, such as music, writing, analysis, or sport. Imagine that he or she was young, say early twenties, and was considering having her first child. Compared to a kid of ordinary talent, would you encourage them more or less to wait before having a baby?

Now imagine you had a child who seemed of unusually low ability. Loving and caring, with a good stable spouse, they would probably never be much more than the janitor, driver, receptionist, etc. of their current position.  While they would never get much respect on the job, their kids would probably love and respect them. Compared to a kid of ordinary ability, would you encourage them more or less to start a family?

Seems to me that in our modern world, the obvious answer is: more. The more talented your kid is, the more you’d encourage them to put off having kids. Which creates a signaling effect: having kids earlier tells other folks that you see yourself as being less talented. This effect encourages delayed fertility, which tends toward reduced fertility.

Alas, as I’ve suggested before (1 2 3 4), in the modern world trying to making parenting seem heroic runs into a signaling problem that having more kids earlier tends to make you look bad.

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Renew Forager Law?

By Robin Hanson · December 6, 2010 11:00 am · Comments (32)

Foragers lived close, in groups of a few dozen. They slept close, and hunted and gathered in groups. They knew each other very well. So when one had a complaint against another, “law” was basically the rumor mill. The group would discuss the problem, taking everything they knew about the parties into account, form an informal consensus on what to do, and then do it. Punishments ranged from warnings to cold shoulders to exile to death.

Farmers developed stronger social norms, and then created formal law to standardize those norms on larger social scales. But since we seem to be returning to foraging ways in many ways as we’ve become rich, it is interesting to consider adopting a more foraging style law.

Imagine that whenever anyone had a complaint about another, we convened a jury of a dozen to study the issue full time for an entire year. (Forget about the cost of this for a moment, and just consider the kinds of decisions that would result.) This jury would have a budget to hire experts of various sorts, could interview all the people involved, and browse ubiquitous surveillance videos. They would have complete discretion to offer any punishments or rewards they thought appropriate; any precedents or written rules would only be suggestions.

Yes, you might want to discourage jurors taking bribes, favoring folks like themselves, or deviating too arbitrarily from precedent, but such complaints would be dealt with through exactly the same system – yet another jury would be convened to deal with each complaint. Same goes for complaints on excessive complaining.

Now let’s deal with the costs. Given a complaint, let’s convene such a jury rarely and randomly, perhaps as one in a thousand times. Before we “roll the dice” to see if a jury will be convened, let us have an open betting market on the jury’s decision. If we happen to convene a jury in this case, the bets will pay off, and punishments will be enacted, according to that decision. If we don’t convene a jury, the bets are called off and we’ll randomly select a punishment using the probability distribution given by the betting market odds.

OK, now that we have the outlines of a workable system, the most interesting question is: would you want a legal system like this? Even setting aside the issue that this might work especially badly for very specialized or technical complaints, I think most folks are rather uncomfortable with the idea. Which just shows how deeply we have internalized certain key farmer values.

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Khan on Forage v Farm

By Robin Hanson · December 3, 2010 8:00 am · Comments (8)

Razib Khan on foragers vs. farmers:

Cultures which are the most developed and least developed have the most equitable relations between the genders, while those in the middle are generally more conventionally male-dominated. … Plough farming societies tend to be more patriarchal [than hoe societies], all things equal. … Immigrants to the United States impart to their descendants the same values. … The majority of the world’s population are no longer primary producers, but most are recent descendants of primary producers.

Ultimately this goes back to the foragers & farmers debate. I have argued for years that the “traditional” and “conservative” values which emerged after the rise of agriculture, and crystallized during the Axial Age, are actually cultural adaptations to existence in the Malthusian mass societies which arose as the farmers pushed up against the production frontier. … Social controls needed to be more powerful so as to keep the masses of humanity in some sort of meta-stable equilibrium. The rise of institutional religions, conscript armies, and national identities, all bubbled up as adaptations to a world where a few controlled the many, and the many persisted on the barest margin of subsistence. …

The above is a rather materialist economic reading of power relations. One could create a narrative of moral evolution over time, and the expansion of the arc of humanity with the spread of universal religions. I think the two variables are related, and in any case the description of what happened remains the same. But now we’re in a third age. We’re not trapped by Malthusian parameters, because gains in economic productivity haven’t been swamped by population growth. Rather, on the contrary a demographic transition has occurred across much of the world, producing mass affluence.

With mass affluence has come liberalism, post-materialism, and all sorts of ideas and movements predicated on self-actualization. The converse is that the traditional values and social controls necessary for the proper maintenance of human civilization during the millennia of the ploughman have come under attack, and those who defend them style themselves conservatives and reactionaries. Ironically the flowering of the individualist ethos has resulted in a reversion to the relative lack of mass conformity, which replicates the diversity across small-scale societies, … e.g., the rise of “urban tribes”.

We should not proliferate categories beyond what is needed. But the story of hoe vs. plough agriculturalists shows that a simple hunter-gatherer vs. farmer narrative does not suffice. In some ways the hoe agriculturalist remains more like the hunter-gatherer, and in some ways more like his or her fellow agriculturalist. The most polygynous societies for example are arguably those of hoe based agriculturalists, as well as nomads. In contrast, hunter-gatherers and ploughman tend to be more monogamous, at least in a genetic sense. We need to evaluate human nature and society at its true joints. That may require more complexity than is pithy, but so be it.

Sound familiar?  Razib seems to present himself as if he’s disagreeing with me, but we largely agree. Yes of course there were many important distinctions within farmers, including herders vs. hoe-folk vs. plough-people, just as there were many types of foragers. There also were many transitional forms during the foraging to farming transition. But acknowledging detail shouldn’t keep us from summarizing key overall patterns.

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Why Are Rich Stingy?

By Robin Hanson · November 8, 2010 1:00 am · Comments (14)

A month ago I suggested that left vs. right political attitudes roughly correspond to forager vs. farmer attitudes:

We acted like farmers when farming required that, but when richer we feel we can afford to revert to more natural-feeling forager ways. The main exceptions, like school and workplace domination and ranking, are required to generate industry-level wealth.

Today I should acknowledge some apparently conflicting data:

Data are from 31 nations and 66,777 individual respondents … In poor countries, but not in rich, most believe that family needs legitimate higher pay. Within countries—particularly English-speaking ones—low SES groups endorse family needs, but high SES groups reject them. (more)

Across 4 studies, lower class individuals proved to be more generous (Study 1), charitable (Study 2), trusting (Study 3), and helpful (Study 4) compared with their upper class counterparts. Mediator and moderator data showed that lower class individuals acted in a more prosocial fashion because of a greater commitment to egalitarian values and feelings of compassion. (more)

Two kinds of processes should interact here, and may work at cross-purposes. While on the one hand humans may be programmed to develop different attitudes when rich, on the other hand some attitudes may be more effective than others at creating wealth. While my forager-farmer hypothesis suggests that humans naturally return to more-forager-like egalitarian attitudes when rich, observed correlations between wealth and egalitarian attitudes should also be influenced whether egalitarian attitudes assist or hinder the accumulation of wealth.

So the above data showing that rich people and nations tend to be less egalitarian could still be consistent with my forager-farmer hypothesis if forager-style egalitarian attitudes tend on average to hinder the creation and accumulation of wealth, relative to farmer-style attitudes. And if this tendency is stronger than the other wealth causing attitudes tendency I postulate. For example, perhaps egalitarian envy discourages entrepreneurial risk, or prevents more efficient ventures from displacing less efficient ones.

Added 10a: Another response is to just consider this to be part of the “main exceptions” clause of my claim – a way in which we do not move to forager ways when rich, because it is central to what makes us rich.

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Response to Roissy

By Robin Hanson · October 18, 2010 9:30 pm · Comments (41)

Roissy disagrees with me. I respond at length here.

Robin Hanson has been beating the drum on his liberaltarian wet dream known as the forager/farmer thesis in a series of posts. Basically, “liberal” values and lifestyle are a reflection of humanity’s ancient forager (hunter-gatherer) ways, while “conservative”, or traditional, values and lifestyle are emergent properties of our relatively more recent 10,000 year old farmer (agricultural) heritage.

Yup, so far so good.

Modern foragers in the form of cafe-loitering SWPLs … are essentially freeriding on the industrial and moral substrates that were created by rules-following and hierarchical farmer ancestors. Thanks to their comfy livings and safe environments, elite cosmopolitan liberals in Western societies are returning to the values and lifestyles of their distant forager forebears, while modern traditionalists hew to more rigid codes of conduct and warn them (in so many words) that all foraging and no farming makes Jack a weak boy.

All of us, liberals and conservatives alike, free-ride on institutions, technology, morals, and inherited from our ancestors. While some conservatives suggest our civilization is on the verge of collapse because we’ve forsaken farmer morals, I make no such claim. Oh I’m a bit worried about risks from moving to forager practices in an industrial world, but being rich we can afford to take some risks. I suspect we’ll find good uses for farmer ways down the road, but there’s no crisis at the moment.

Hanson relies for much of his speculative evidence on the Sex At Dawn book, which I promiscuously manhandled here. But there’s too much wrong with the claims made by that book to sufficiently lend support to the Forager vs Farmer (i.e., liberal vs conservative) thesis of clashing values and lifestyles. For instance, Hanson and Ryan elide the force of jealousy in shaping human sexual dynamics. … Just about every polyamorous, free love utopia/forager commune that has been tried in historical record has utterly failed.

When I say foragers were more promiscuous than farmers, I don’t mean they weren’t picky about sex partners, nor that they didn’t get jealous. I mean they changed partners lots more often than farmers do. On sources, I’ve been reading lots of anthropology books and articles this year, trying to see what they seem to agree on; I’m not relying much on Sex at Dawn at all.

Hanson and Ryan claim foragers are/were nonviolent compared to farmers. But from everything I’ve read on the matter, that is wrong as well.

Perhaps you read S. Pinker and maybe L. Keeley, like the other bloggers?  On war, most anthropologists seem to disagree. Sex at Dawn gets that right.

Finally, a big point of Hanson’s repackaged thesis is that “rich and safe” modern foragers … pursue and advocate a promiscuous lifestyle. Except the data show that isn’t necessarily true. Higher IQ men place greater value on monogamy and sexual exclusivity and are less likely to cheat than lower IQ men.

I don’t see what IQ has to do with this at all. Norms and practices have clearly moved in the direction of increased tolerance for promiscuity over the last century, though of course they aren’t remotely near an extreme free love scenario. My claim has been that we’ve moved in the forager direction as we’ve gotten rich; I’m not claiming we’ve moved all the way there.

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Divide: Forager v Farmer

By Robin Hanson · October 18, 2010 10:00 am · Comments (11)

In August I listed questions “I rarely see adequately answered” about great divides. Here are my first cut answers on the great divide I’ve been discussing: forager vs. farmer styles:

  1. How is this division a key division, underlying many others? Foraging to farming was the most disruptive transition humans so far. Ten thousand years has been enough time for big cultural adaptations to farming, but not enough for full genetic adaptation. Two centuries has been far too little time to adapt to industry.
  2. How do people acquire their sides in this conflict? We have varying degrees of cultural and genetic adaptation to farming styles. And since farming cultural pressures, e.g., fear, are weaker for rich folk, our recently differing wealth also contributes to this divide.
  3. How has this conflict lasted so long, without one side winning? Farming and foraging lifestyles are different enough that it can take millennia for cultural adaptation, and much longer for full genetic adaptation.
  4. How could one side finally win such an old conflict? In the long run, our descendants may become well adapted to their environment. But for now, we act on old instincts.
  5. Why is one side better than the other in an absolute sense? Each side feels right to those raised that way, and remaining in a similar environment. But forager ways feel more naturally right when one is rich and safe.  The farmer side is somewhat better adapted to the modern world, but both are substantially off, and for the rich adaptation pressures feel weaker.
  6. Why can’t those folks be persuaded that their side is bad? Our preferences are in part created by how we are raised. Most of us are unaware of assumptions implicit in such preferences.
  7. Why can’t peaceful compromise replace conflict? Peaceful compromise should replace conflict, but that requires folks to reflect on the source of their intuitions. As we get safer and richer it does make sense to move to more natural-feeling forager ways. But since real risks remain, and a competitive future may demand more adaptation, farmer ways should be preserved; we may need them later.

I encourage others to answer such questions regarding their favorite great divide.

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