9 Comments

I'm not quite following you...

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In a Malthusian world, quality of life is less important than quantity of life, as far as long-term selection effects go.

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In Great Filter news: http://phys.org/news/2015-0...

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Moreover, we know the transition also happened, independently, in the Americas.

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Robin, what do you think caused hunter-gatherers to become farmers? We know farmer quality of life only surpassed forager quality of life in the 20th century, and it seems reasonable that the first few generations of farmers still had the option of becoming foragers again. So why did the transition stick? Was it a religious matter (early sites like Gobekli Tepe were easier to construct by people who lived more sedentary), was it a necessity from a security standpoint (sedentary societies could field more warriors, so even if only one tribe decided to go sedentary all the others had to follow, similar to nations with nuclear weapons or businesses with lower prices or lower ethical standards)? Or something completely different?

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No, folks promote victim stories when the perp is in their out-group and/or the victim is in their in-group (where group is defined more by belief congruency than demographics). It's a coalition politics thing not a general impulse.

And for some reason many powerful people are so desperate for stories about regular white men behaving badly that they regularly fall for hoaxes that were blatantly suspicious from the getgo.

http://www.unz.com/isteve/h...

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Alyssa Rosenberg explains the Rolling Stone's debunked frat-rape story this way: "The impulse to magnify the voices of people who report being victims of violence is a powerful one." ( http://www.washingtonpost.c... )

Such a proclivity would inflate the power of people reporting victimization. But do humans really have this proclivity; if so, why (in evo psych terms)?

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Anyone have links to papers or code of economic simulations where lots of agents with various and specifiable preferences, loss aversion, time discounting, uncertainty, productivity of different goods, consumption needs of various goods, etc make trades with each other of various goods with specified storage loss, transaction costs, etc?

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