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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Like Robin, I am pleasantly surprised that this idea has such an ancient and esteemed pedigree. Very cool!

A fancy term for self-made or self-creating is autopoiesis.

One interesting aspect about artificial vs organic or non-self made vs selfmade is that the latter is usually regarded as having an intrinstic and often intangible/difficult to articulate advantage over the former.e.g. the preference for 'organicly grown' food, various forms of environmentalism, small family businesses, respect for primitive societies, etc etc

There are various Hansonian explanations for this phenomenon already but one explanation might be that 'self-made' things are subject to a natural selection while nonselfmade things are not.

In other words self-made things are subject to a mostly hidden optimizing process.This means that 'self-made' things may be more robust in hard to understand ways and would explain the seemingly irrational preference of many folks for self-made and organic things/culture/art/food etc.

One is reminded of Joe Henrich's "Secret of our succes".

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RobinHanson's avatar

Wow, that's great. This is such an old subject I doubt I could be original on it, so the best to hope for is to have converged with high quality others. :)

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