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Comment by sdenton4 | Hacker News Reader

Giant asteroid extincts a bunch of species... Sure, the now vanished mega fauna were not adapted to asteroids. But as a once in a hundred thousand years event, it doesn't mean they were otherwise unfit.

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The last time all their planes were sitting about was 9/11, and they were openly talking about the need to be prepared for another such occurrence. This seems like something we should expect on the scale of decades, rather than some vast timescale.

The thing is that rare events occur frequently enough on evolutionary time scales that not being able to handle them as a species is equivalent to not being fit. This is connected to one of the theories of why humans evolved our rather strange intellectual capacities. It was a way to be fit in a rapidly changing environment. We may not have been the fittest in any specific situation, having no claws, bad eyes and weak stomachs and all, but when the environment changed we were able to retool ourselves better than animals that were optimized for specific and no longer existing environmental conditions.

Whoa whoa who says humans have bad eyes? Our color vision is like animal kingdom best practices, and we invest a ton of brainpower into visual processing.

Humans are great at throwing too, and traveling long distances.

They were unfit because a giant asteroid is as much a part of the environment as anything else.

I question whether it is possible to be "fit" in this analogy, or just lucky.

Also, let's not forget that "fitness" and "conformance to our values" are separate dimensions. It is not necessarily the case that we humans want to optimize companies for their ability to withstand once in ???? year events without government assistance. Companies optimized along such criteria would be more fit for an environment where government assistance doesn't exist, but crucially that is not necessarily the actual environment that companies exist in in the real world. And it is not obvious to me that the citizenry benefits from companies optimized that way.

It's a good analogy because fit and lucky are hard to tell apart in evolution too.

Homogeneity leads to effecency and hedrogeneity leads to resiliance. The stability the fed provides allows them to do what they want in hugely optimized and complex ways, it just turns out what they want to do doesn't align with the interests of the population sometimes. I don't think they would be any less likely to do what they are doing they would just do it less effecently.

The fed doesn't want to use the stick anymore, and business gets a carrot when it throws a tantrum. The insentives are perverse.

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