Cooperation, And Not Competition, Is Our Thermodynamic Future

Jarman

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I don't think this will ever work. Everyone is different with various desires, wants, needs, cultures, outlook of life. To have one cohesive world is a dystopia IMO.
 

Kyle M

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Yep, even beyond that, both sides have to a agree to a time and place and rules of the game (more cooperation) before the competition can even take place.
Good point. If any of the anti-market people actually knew what it was like to live in a premarket, pre property rights civilization, if such a thing could be called civilization, they would know what true cutthroat competition is.
 

Queequeg

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Few points:
1) The game is rigged.
2) we're not rational agents.
3) defection is hidden.
Game theory doesn't work in a system as complex and scaled up as ours.
Not true for all situations.
1) All games are not rigged. Most are not.
2) We don't have to be 100% rational for game theory to give a good enough approximation of human behavior. Most economic theories are based on rational actors as well.
3) Defection or cheating is not easily hidden in most situations where game theory is applied as you are in direct contact with the opposing parties. You know when you have been screwed.

Game theory is not just an academic theory but has a lot of utility in the real world. If it didn't work people would not make billion dollar business decisions based on its results.

But as for this paper and the field of evolutionary game theory you are basically looking at small bands of our primate ancestors trying to survive on the Savannah. In that type of situation it would have been quite obvious who was cooperating and who was not. Evolutionary pressures would have applied at both the group and individual level to encourage cooperation. If the group didn't figure out how to cooperatively hunt together for example they would have all starved. Individually those who didnt work with the group and pull their share would have been ostracized and left to die on their own. Only the most cooperative and socially interdependent would have passed their genes on to us.

no need to look at higher levels of metabolism for this to play out. I am sure most groups were living on the edge of starvation most of the time and they still had to cooperate to survive. There are also many examples of single celled organisms that have evolved to cooperate.
 
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I agree, our 'civilization' is built on fermentation both figuratively and literally. Actually Ray does not even take the basic truth of the stress paradigm far enough. It's much deeper than anything he writes about.

He does, it's just there's all these doublethinkers who think discussing how to cook mushrooms will be the highest utility of this board. And so he ends up never being asked about these things.

What is this deep truth that we're all missing. please go on.

High heels etc. make women look like prostitutes imo. It's 'stimulating' but not feminine or beautiful.

Nice value signaling. A prostitutes whole image is based off being sexually attractive. But obviously classy gentleman like you is above such base desires.

But as for this paper and the field of evolutionary game theory you are basically looking at small bands of our primate ancestors trying to survive on the Savannah. In that type of situation it would have been quite obvious who was cooperating and who was not. Evolutionary pressures would have applied at both the group and individual level to encourage cooperation. If the group didn't figure out how to cooperatively hunt together for example they would have all starved. Individually those who didnt work with the group and pull their share would have been ostracized and left to die on their own. Only the most cooperative and socially interdependent would have passed their genes on to us.

Alright first of, humanity didn't evolve in the Savannah. Human history is a lot more complicated than you have been led to believe and who fields of science have been built up on false premises and egregious lies.

Second of evolutionary psychology is not a science, it does not make predictions or observations, or perform experiments. It's a creative writing exercise for psychologists who want to pretend they're scientists. It's just so stories built on just so stories.

Third of, we don't live in our ancestral tribal environment. We live in a modern, atomized, high complexity, high scale world. You're doing what I called out in my first post. Enough with the strawman.
I know how game theory works
I know how "evolution" works
I know how economics works
I know how evolutionary psychology works

I'm just saying it's bull****.

Why do soccer players defect? Why do politicians and lawyers and cops and judges and gangsters and drug dealers and poker players and criminals and refugees and priests and dictators and girlfriends and wives and boyfriends and children and business partners and friends defect?

Low metabolism?
 
L

lollipop

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how many of these nihilistic worldviews melt away when the organism is sufficiently energized.
I have actually witnessed this on an individual level in people. I tend to agree with you that it translates into the collective as well.

The selfish behavior is beneficial during the initial stages of the process, we could draw lines with single-celled organisms, for example. Once the drift from glycolysis to oxidation happens, there is a surplus of energy that allows the evolution of a collaborative structure. This happens because it is more beneficial at that point in time.

Honestly haven't you just described a human growing into full mature "humanness"? A culture/society/organization growing into full mature "societyness"?

When an individual or collective has sufficient energy don't those hierarchy of needs grow to more inclusiveness? Over insufficient energy that leads to more contractive taking of what is missing?
 

Queequeg

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Alright first of, humanity didn't evolve in the Savannah. Human history is a lot more complicated than you have been led to believe and who fields of science have been built up on false premises and egregious lies.
The Savannah wasn't the critical part of my argument for cooperation. This evolutionary pressure would be present anywhere there is difficulty for individuals to survive on their own. But I am curious where you think we evolved. Most scientists believe it was either the Savannah or the forest. I have a feeling that we are in for some truly creative writing.
Second of evolutionary psychology is not a science, it does not make predictions or observations, or perform experiments. It's a creative writing exercise for psychologists who want to pretend they're scientists. It's just so stories built on just so stories.
Well this is a contested point but I would say that not all truths come from the scientific method.
Third of, we don't live in our ancestral tribal environment. We live in a modern, atomized, high complexity, high scale world. You're doing what I called out in my first post. Enough with the strawman.
Not sure what your point is as the topic is on the evolution of cooperation. How we live today is not relevant as we stopped evolving long ago.
I know how game theory works
I know how "evolution" works
I know how economics works
I know how evolutionary psychology works

I'm just saying it's bull****.

Why do soccer players defect? Why do politicians and lawyers and cops and judges and gangsters and drug dealers and poker players and criminals and refugees and priests and dictators and girlfriends and wives and boyfriends and children and business partners and friends defect?

Low metabolism?
If you knew how game theory worked you would not be asking these questions or posting many of your other comments on it. Defection is just as big a part of Game Theory as cooperation is. At a very basic level Game Theory tells you whether or not a rational actor will defect or will cooperate. Pointing to examples of defection as a proof against game theory doesn't make any sense. In fact the optimal solution for most single event games is defection. It's only in repetitive games with the same opponents that you get cooperation.
 
OP
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Honestly haven't you just described a human growing into full mature "humanness"? A culture/society/organization growing into full mature "societyness"?

When an individual or collective has sufficient energy don't those hierarchy of needs grow to more inclusiveness? Over insufficient energy that leads to more contractive taking of what is missing?

I agree, there is the realization of a potential over time. It is hard not to see that this potential has a direction and a scope. All kinds of "inherent evil" can be reduced to an energy deficit. Ever since the first aminoacids self assembled, the trend of self-organization has been ongoing, and it is an inclusive process.
 

michael94

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Honestly haven't you just described a human growing into full mature "humanness"? A culture/society/organization growing into full mature "societyness"?

When an individual or collective has sufficient energy don't those hierarchy of needs grow to more inclusiveness? Over insufficient energy that leads to more contractive taking of what is missing?
I agree, there is the realization of a potential over time. It is hard not to see that this potential has a direction and a scope.
William Blake called this "Poetic Genius" and Carl Jung "Selbst"
 
OP
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William Blake called this "Poetic Genius" and Carl Jung "Selbst"
It does appear so. Would be nice for the Politics & Science guy to do an interview about that with Ray Peat. There are features of scale invariance (and I'm sure Blake was talking about more than just one single man) that are crucial to really make these concepts flow with the rest of the ideas.
 

x-ray peat

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Very interesting thread. This gem of a post is hiding just below and very applicable.
Cooperation, Not Competition, Drives Evolution
There was a Russian researcher in the 19th century called Kropotkin, and he formulated a theory that evolution is a process influenced a lot more by cooperation than by competition.
Peter Kropotkin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Unfortunately, his ideas were not popular in the West and up until today the view that "nature is red in tooth and claw" prevails in most academic departments of biology, biochemistry, and of course their offspring medicine.
This latest study casts doubt on the competition as the main driver view, and adds evidence to Kropotkin's views. Ray has also written about both competition and cooperation and how the prevalence of the "competition" view has influenced biology, medicine, and the entire scientific discovery process for the last 100 years.

Cooperation, not struggle for survival, drives evolution
"...Many theories and hypotheses suggest that competition tends to differentiate ecological requirements after repeated interactions and allows biodiversity. Even if the mechanisms that allow species to evolve, coexist, compete, cooperate, or become extinct are becoming more and more understood, the factors that allow species to coexist in a given time within the same environment are still debated. From Gause's principle of competitive exclusion to Connell's ghost of competition in the past, the importance of intra- and interspecific competition for the evolution of biodiversity has been stressed. Recently, the principles based on competitive interactions for the explanation of biodiversity have been criticized from both theoretical and empirical approaches. Since Hutchinson proposed the provocative "paradox of plankton" a series of alternative hypothesis has been proposed to explain why the principle of competitive exclusion is not found in "real nature". The reason probably lies in the fact that ecologists have not questioned some of the principles of evolution. In fact, most ecological models are too simplistic and are often considered outdated.

"...A new conceptual evolutionary model first proposed in 2015 in bioRXiv and then published this year in the journal Biologia by Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, associate professor of ecology and biodiversity at Tomsk State University (Russia), reviewed the debated mechanism of speciation, suggesting that competition and a struggle for the existence are not the main drivers of evolution. This research points out the importance of avoidance of competition, biological history, endogenosymbiosis, and three-dimensionality as the main forces that structure ecosystems and allow the evolution of biological diversity."

"...This model remained a theoretical and hypothetical, but intriguing, explanation for less than a year. A few weeks ago, researchers from the University of Bern in Switzerland published an empirical experiment that proves it. David Marques and colleagues demonstrated that a population of stickleback fish that breed in the same lake (Lake Constance, where they were introduced around 150 years ago) was splitting into two separate species before their eyes, and at rapid speed. The study shows that even if both types of fish breed in the same streams at the same time of year and have been interbreeding all along, they are splitting into two genetically and physically different types."
 

x-ray peat

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The belief that civilization after civilization has been destroyed by extra-terrestrial extinction events and that we face such an event in our near future is not nihilistic...it is fact.
Can you share these facts? What event is being hidden from us? When will this happen? My guess is that all of this end of the world propaganda is the real psyop to keep everyone in fear and waste their time and money on survival gear and training. If the elite were trying to keep this secret then why so much media focused on our downfall? Why are there no happy movies about the future? Seems like a mind **** to me.
 
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DaveFoster

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Not to mention the hidden defection of the elites. How is it that a handful of people own as much wealth as 50% of humanity. Defection. Defection. Defection.
Dude, c'mon. You think that Rockefeller stole his wealth?
 
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But I am curious where you think we evolved. Most scientists believe it was either the Savannah or the forest. I have a feeling that we are in for some truly creative writing.

I wish I was that creative. The true story tellers are the people that come up with big bangs and primordial soups and evolution to explain out existence.

The banal truth is that modern, intelligent, advanced human beings are millions of years old. Unfortunately for us, and the other unhabitants earth, we happen to live on a planet that regularly experiences extinction level events. These extinction level events are cyclical and driven by the motion of the planets above. Also sirius.

When they happen all civilizations are wiped out. Only a few survive, tasked with rebuilding humanity from the ashes. They pass down what they can, and mark the momentous occasion by hiding it in religion and myth, but ultimately we have to start from scratch.

In some of our prior instances we have had greater civilizations than we have today. Men were smarter, larger, and lived for hundreds of years. They had better engineering and science than we have today. They made spaceships and left the planet. They colonized mars and another planet that no longer exists. They had space wars. Mars was nuked barren. The other planet was destroyed.

Then Sirius came....

Not sure what your point is as the topic is on the evolution of cooperation. How we live today is not relevant as we stopped evolving long ago.
Evolution doesn't work like that. It doesn't stop.

If you knew how game theory worked you would not be asking these questions or posting many of your other comments on it. Defection is just as big a part of Game Theory as cooperation is. At a very basic level Game Theory tells you whether or not a rational actor will defect or will cooperate. Pointing to examples of defection as a proof against game theory doesn't make any sense. In fact the optimal solution for most single event games is defection. It's only in repetitive games with the same opponents that you get cooperation.
we're not discussing game theory we're discussing the eventuality of worldwide cooperation due to punishment of defection. The point of my pointing out successful defection is to point out how naive that is

Can you share these facts? What event is being hidden from us? When will this happen? My guess is that all of this end of the world propaganda is the real psyop to keep everyone in fear and waste their time and money on survival gear and training. If the elite were trying to keep this secret then why so much media focused on our downfall? Why are there no happy movies about the future? Seems like a mind **** to me.

If I started I wouldn't be able to stop. Have you ever watched Indiana jones.

Dude, c'mon. You think that Rockefeller stole his wealth?[/Jones.

Yes.
 

Tenacity

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@Such_Saturation I completely agree with you that better energy flow is conducive to a less nihilistic worldview. It was one of the first things I noticed when I started utilising strategies inspired by Peat.

Also, you can't deny that the direction of life as a whole is that of cooperation - as organisms become more complex (in terms of energy flow and metabolism) they also become more cooperative - just compare reptiles to mammals, or chimps to humans, and you'll understand what I mean. If better energy flow = more cooperation, then as organisms become more complex they will become more cooperative. If we think of a species as having 'ultimate complexity' (however that may take form), that species must also be the most cooperative.
 

Kyle M

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Dude, c'mon. You think that Rockefeller stole his wealth?
The current Rockefellers do, not the first. Most people have just about zero knowledge of the history of the Rockefeller family. He started off, the original John, as the co-owner of a grocery.
 

Tarmander

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I wish I was that creative. The true story tellers are the people that come up with big bangs and primordial soups and evolution to explain out existence.

The banal truth is that modern, intelligent, advanced human beings are millions of years old. Unfortunately for us, and the other unhabitants earth, we happen to live on a planet that regularly experiences extinction level events. These extinction level events are cyclical and driven by the motion of the planets above. Also sirius.

When they happen all civilizations are wiped out. Only a few survive, tasked with rebuilding humanity from the ashes. They pass down what they can, and mark the momentous occasion by hiding it in religion and myth, but ultimately we have to start from scratch.

In some of our prior instances we have had greater civilizations than we have today. Men were smarter, larger, and lived for hundreds of years. They had better engineering and science than we have today. They made spaceships and left the planet. They colonized mars and another planet that no longer exists. They had space wars. Mars was nuked barren. The other planet was destroyed.

Then Sirius came....

Evolution doesn't work like that. It doesn't stop.


we're not discussing game theory we're discussing the eventuality of worldwide cooperation due to punishment of defection. The point of my pointing out successful defection is to point out how naive that is



If I started I wouldn't be able to stop. Have you ever watched Indiana jones.

Did you just describe the plot to the second Matrix movie?
 

Herbie

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matrix Ray.jpg
 
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