
Conformists may kill civilizations - robg
http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=5382
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eggoa
The paper is available at:

<http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/RedNoise.pdf>

This quote just about summarizes every post-apocalyptic movie I've ever seen.

"After this fixation of pure horizontal learning, occurring very approximately
12,000 time units from the start, the population completely loses most of its
ability to track the environment, and, when the environment changes, mean
fitness declines and the population drops (Fig. 2). When the population
reaches very low levels, selection may return behavior towards the
environmental optimum (as there are very few individuals in the population,
and one who is incidentally blessed with suitable behavior, because of the
error (σ) around the target behavior, can have many offspring and so change
the mean behavior of the population)."

~~~
toadpipe
It's quite interesting to think about how much I've learned about nature
socially, vs. directly. It seems clear that I learn almost everything
socially, and everything I learn directly is probably available socially,
probably at a lower cost. In other words, nothing I learn directly is really
new, and what is new could very easily be predicted from models - it's hardly
even information in the Shannon sense. I'm a university student, but it's not
clear to me that I've ever even met anyone who learned anything new themselves
either (about the environment). Almost the entire information processing
capacity of the species seems to be devoted to internal processing of
information and the modeling of internal behavior. It seems like there's no
other way it could be, given the sheer number of people, but it does make you
wonder how far that can go.

Listening to people like Gwynne Dyer talk about global warming makes it sound
like the problem is not so much that we don't have enough people tracking the
environment, or even that we don't propagate the information fast enough, but
that the sheer inertia of the system makes it so that changes can't be made
fast enough to avoid major shakeups.

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chasingsparks
This is generally true of all complex systems. If a social agent finds a very
fit region of the search space, it pulls other agents towards it. If the
region maintains fitness over a long period of time, the set of agents becomes
homogeneous. Suddenly, a change to the environment alters the fitness
function. The system collapses and repair is slow due to search now being
random.

Long live Axelrod.

~~~
toadpipe
Exactly. Evolution is basically a filtering process that records and
compresses memories of past changes to the environment, along with mechanisms
for communicating those memories as widely as possible and incorporating the
communications of other agents. The better agents are at this, the more
resources can be marshaled for recording, compressing, and communicating
memories. For this reason larger and more tightly coupled agents are favored,
but the complexity of maintaining homeostasis increases with agent size, and
increasing size also serves to move agents into new selection environments. In
other words, an agent's own actions may cause their fitness function to change
in ways that are difficult to predict from past experience of the environment
alone, and this may become a bigger problem as agents increase in size. At
some scale, agents who do not add models of themselves to the fitness search
space may be at a disadvantage. If they are social agents in a society of
agents similar to themselves, and if they already model other agents, creating
self-models may not be much of a leap.

Or at least that's my half-assed theory. Guess I should probably read up on
Robert Axelrod's stuff now. Thanks for the pointer.

~~~
chasingsparks
[http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/research/Dissemination.pd...](http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~axe/research/Dissemination.pdf)

------
known
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man" --George Bernard Shaw

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jonmc12
Interesting to think that if you are a non-conformist your role in our
civilization's survival is to evangelize your new behaviors while trying not
to get yourself killed, imprisoned or banned.

~~~
TomOfTTB
I think you latched on to the real lesson here. Most people will be
conformist, it's in their nature. So "don't be a conformist" isn't really a
lesson that's practical from a societal level.

The lesson I think is that society needs to tolerate non-conformists because
they may very well be it's salvation some day. Even if society feels those
people are completely undesirable there are ways to separate them without
throwing away their accomplishments (Galileo was put on house arrest in 1600
but still allowed to continue his work)

~~~
unalone
Conformity isn't about nature. It's largely a matter of background,
development, social elements, etc.

I don't know where this idea of "either you're a conformist or you're not"
came from, but it's wrong. Like anything, there's depth to the idea of
conforming. Some people who nonconform do it in ways that happen to match what
other people have done because it's a logical progression. Some people
nonconform by acting as randomly as possible. Of the people that quote unquote
conform, I doubt many think of it as conformity. In fact, I'd go further and
suggest that if many of those people were convinced of its being conforming,
they would take certain steps to change.

~~~
chrischen
When someone wants to just "fit in," they are consciously trying to conform.
So I would argue that most people do this, so most people consciously conform.
Most people don't want to be different or weird, which is often what
innovation looks like.

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fauigerzigerk
_"Societies should promote individual learning and innovation over cultural
conformity, and the models for social learning should be individuals who have
demonstrated that they understand how to live with the current environmental
trends," says Whitehead._

The difficulty is to find out who is successful because he or she understands
environmental trends and who is successful because of conformity. I doubt that
prestige is a good filter.

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rimantas
I am not sure one can use civilization and population interchangeably, for one
reason: population either adopts to new conditions or dies, civilization, on
the other hand may change environment and survive. That's how human species
differ: they are alloplastic, while other are autoplastic.

~~~
toadpipe
Individual members of populations of every species alter their environments.
Humans may do it more deliberately, but as either civilizations or as a
species as a whole it's not clear to me that we're all that much better at
anticipating and avoiding environmental disasters than other species; we just
do everything at a larger scale (more massive individuals, across the whole
planet) than any other single species. Not necessarily longer time scales
though - that remains to be seen.

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zimbu668
Has to be said <http://despair.com/connot.html>

