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Imagine a situation where there are more competitive governments, whether through seasteads or charter cities. In that milieu, do you think that asians would do better or more or less the same as now?

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Rule avoidance or rule breaking is as important cultural component inside Asia as anywhere. That said, the reality is the Asian elites press their entitlements, cling to their privileges, and fight against modern elements who threaten to break their hold on society and the economy.

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I third this. I see the evidence that there's lots of hypocrisy. But Robin Hanson wrote "human brains are huge mainly to hypocritically evade rules". "Mainly"? That I don't see.

Off the top of my head, humans make fire and clothing and weapons and traps, humans make tools to support all of those things, humans pass down adaptive knowledge by language and diagrams, humans are shrewd enough to reputedly do things like driving prey animals to stampede to their deaths that other pack hunters are physically capable of but don't (AFAIK) do very much, and humans may also naturally be able to keep larger bands stable (against various kinds of cheating and defection) than other pack hunters. Those are quite a few selective advantages that seem to be very strongly dependent on large brains, and conversely I'm having trouble thinking of many of the traits that helped our ancestors take over the world that didn't depend on large brains. I can understand how people get puzzled about chicken and egg issues early in the takeoff of intelligence in the human lineage when a lot of the obvious advantages would seem to depend on big coadaptations like bipedalism. Possibly at some time in that early period social skills like hypocrisy were key in getting the big brain ball rolling. But when considering any period when humans already had fire, clothing, and weapons, I think we should require strong evidence for the proposition that human brains are large mainly for social reasons, and even stronger evidence that they are large mainly for the single social reason of hypocritically evading rules.

I do think it's likely that human brains are huge in large part to outcompete other humans. But why should I think that hypocrisy is the key advantage that big brains bring in that competition? More important than being better at communication, or being better at toolmaking, or being better at planning, or being better at fighting, or being better at keeping track of a large amount of data about the other humans that one interacts with and synthesizing conclusions from it?

Finally, it seems to me that Wu's report actually suggests a difficulty for the hypothesis that human brains are large primarily for hypocrisy. If Wu is correct that people of Chinese extraction are at a disadvantage in Western countries due to less hypocrisy, we could combine that fact with the observation that people of Chinese extraction do reasonably well in Western countries by many measures, and conclude that hypocrisy seems not to be the most effective thing for a competitive human to devote neurons to.

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Defining the difference between "work" and "leisure" in economics is actually a complex problem with a whole literature behind it.

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Ah, so apparently it's okay to speculate on whether or not Asians are passive and uncreative, but the second someone ponders whether blacks are lazy and dumb all political correct hell breaks loose.

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Rule avoidance or rule breaking is as important cultural component inside Asia as anywhere. That said, the reality is the Asian elites press their entitlements, cling to their privileges, and fight against modern elements who threaten to break their hold on society and the economy.

There are hardcore, historical structural elements in Asia that don’t correspond easily to the more egalitarian West. An American quarterback is selected by his skill for the job. As far as I know there are no quarterbacks playing professional football who ‘inherited’ their position. Or were awarded the position because of their family influence.

Culture in the West has traveled a long distance from the hierarchical social, political and economic that underscores the cultural system in Asia. It is a different game that is being played. Asian concepts about rank and status based on family and tight knit social networks have created a web of hypocrisy (to rationalize a system that otherwise appears badly dated) and the resulting cognitive dissonance has placed the ruling classes under considerable pressure in many Asian countries.

The upshot is, in my opinion, the correspondent of the article while addressing rule breaking in the American context should be assumed to speak about breaking the rules inside an Asian culture.

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Schneierhas a book on security and hypocrisy coming out. From how he describes it here http://www.schneier.com/blo...

it seems like he defends homo hypocricus as necessary or at least inevitable.

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It's an interesting question. I would say Asians would fare somewhat worse. A lot of the Asian success I see after the immigrant generation comes from the professions: accountants, doctors, lawyers, academics, scientists.

These are government subsidized and government protected career fields (which is why risk averse Asian parents push their kids to grind away for years to achieve entry in these cartels). In competitive government, the government has less power to award rents to groups.

In contrast, non-immigrant White success seems more concentrated in corporate management and owning small to medium sized businesses. Those would fare better in a more competitive environment, since they benefit from lower taxes and competition.

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Diet rich in omega 3 fats lifted nutritional requirements; complex social life, communication and cultural inheritance create the pressure, no pelvic bottleneck worth mentioning and many millions of years head start.

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Open question to the group here.

Imagine a situation where there are more competitive governments, whether through seasteads or charter cities. In that milieu, do you think that asians would do better or more or less the same as now?

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You can link to a specific part of a youtube video this way:http://www.youtube.com/watc...Append #t=ms

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Never trust a dolphin.

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Robin (and everyone who reads), do you read/listen to Steven Pinker?

Watch: 55:00 - 61:00, more specifically, 59:00 - 61:00

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

He basically summarizes linguistic evidence of hypocrisy, motivations for these uses of hypocrisy in our language, and how it relates to status/relationship types.

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Well, for one thing, current Western cultures grew originated from more traditional cultures, and the changes - lower social capital, increased focus on ie the value of confidence - are visible in the historical record and indeed within the lifetimes of many people still alive. "Random happenstance" might be a good explanation if cultures were relatively static, but this shift, in tandem with changing social landscapes, looks mighty adaptive.

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I just want to note that "recreation" is an interesting word, it seems inherently Christian. The whole idea that after work you are supposed to rest, and that there is supposed to be this division between work and rest, might not be assumed by other cultures.

Leisure, on the other hand, isn't necessarily free from labor. It is time that isn't obligated to someone else. In my opinion, leisure seems to be primarily a status thing, like the way we understand "travel", for traveling isn't traveling just anyplace, but only certain places. Golfing is also high-status. Maybe the problem with the western concept of leisure is that it is too much about social signaling.

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PeterW - what makes you so sure that it's a case of better adaptation, rather than a difference that came about chaotically as the two systems grew? Not everything is adaptive, sometimes things just happen...

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