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Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

There's no reason every child has to have equal opportunity. A child to a successful couple must have a better hand at life, otherwise why even be trying. Every parent with half a brain wants their child to have the best opportunity. Every group with half a brain joins forces to give their group's children the best opportunity.

Also, modern world-city diversity mostly perpetuates the native group vs the uber driver groups, with some exceptions that are to the detriment of the native group.

The most revered/successful societies on earth are the complete opposite of diverse.

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> The most revered/successful societies on earth are the complete opposite of diverse.

And "primitive" societies, which through evolution shaped how our social capacities operate, also have essentially zero diversity in the modern sense. They are almost by definition culturally uniform, and their members are often closely interrelated.

Hmm sounds like you think a two step process is ideal: evolve independent societies towards uniform, mix the societies and have them compete, reward successful traits with survival. Then rinse/repeat.

Though I think the point of evolution is to avoid uniformity. So perhaps a uniform culture is evolutionarily unfit.

So far in pure evolutionary terms Sub-Saharan Africa is way ahead of everyone else (also made up of quite uniform groups). What traits thereof do you reckon the rest of the world could pinch?

I've only ever visited Sub-Saharan Africa through the fiction of various countries, though admittedly that's self-selected by whatever imports are financially successful here. The only common themes I can identify are diversity, vivacity, gregariousness and corruption, and those are hardly what I would deem evolutionary traits. But there's always so much diversity - so many disparate languages and ethnic groups - it seems like urban Africa is quite the melting pot.

From this brief list of recently evolved traits [1] (which I can't narrow by geographic region), I honestly can't say that any characterize the zeitgeist of a modern improved homo sapiens.

What modern biological traits do you think were evolved in Africa?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

There's no reason every child has to have equal opportunity.

Wow, that’s bleak.

Perhaps it’s true if you’re operating in an amoral framework.

The society I was raised in has aphorisms such as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “love thy neighbor” as pretty basic tenets (not that they’re often completely lived up to). Pretty much every human society has similar basic rules. I like to think they’re meaningful.

They are meaningful within a group where you can expect reciprocity. There is no expectation of that in a diverse society.

Evolution doesn't know morality, unwarrantedly nice guys finish last.

> There is no expectation of [reciprocity] in a diverse society.

[citation needed]

> Evolution doesn't know morality, unwarrantedly nice guys finish last.

Incorrect. Citation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperation_(evolution)

This is about the few cases where it's not unwarranted, i.e. kin selection and related matters.

It's not, a cursory review of the literature would tell you otherwise.

If you want narratives: the introduction of agriculture to human society is a cooperative effort which generalizes labor such that some can provide for the food supply and others can pursue other forms of labor, e.g. intellectual labor. The strictly competitive approach would not favor the establishment of agriculture. Human progress is measured in cooperation; in fact our cooperative nature it is one of the distinguishing traits of humanity and is largely responsible for the establishment of complex society, which was the greatest evolutionary achievement of humanity over the rest of the animal world.

Would the device you wrote your comment on have been possible without a nigh-incomprehensible level of human cooperation?

If you wish to build a society without cooperation, you are welcome to start your potato farm on a free plot of land out west. The potatoes you grow, by the way, were a product engineered by millennia of cooperative bioengineering on the part of indigenous farmers, but feel free to disregard that in your daydreaming.

Such human cooperation always had tight rules of tit for tat.

You couldn't just rock up to an ancient village and expect to be fed for you intellectual labour. That's the whole point - outsiders are not part of the village until proven otherwise.

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness_in_humans

Quoting your own source:

> However, independently of the emergence of inclusive fitness theory, from 1960s onwards many anthropologists themselves had reexamined the balance of findings in their own ethnographic data and had begun to reject the notion that human kinship is 'caused by' blood ties (see Kinship). Anthropologists have gathered very extensive ethnographic data on human social patterns and behaviour over a century or more, from a wide spectrum of different cultural groups. The data demonstrates that many cultures do not consider 'blood ties' (in the genealogical sense) to underlie their close social relationships and kinship bonds. Instead social bonds are often considered to be based on location-based shared circumstances including living together (co-residence), sleeping close together, working together, sharing food (commensality) and other forms of shared life together. Comparative anthropologists have shown[6] that these aspects of shared circumstances are a significant component of what influences kinship in most human cultures, notwithstanding whether or not 'blood ties' are necessarily present (see Nurture kinship, below).

I like how easy you and p-e-w are making it to debunk your argument by citing a bunch of sources that don't support you. I think you're just racist conservatives making up facts from whole cloth to support some narrative of deintegration.

I think you're just racist conservatives making up facts from whole cloth to support some narrative of deintegration.

I’ve been trying to discuss with them on the merits of their argument, but having thought on this overnight I agree with you.

All their big argumentation and lofty words are, at their base, seemingly trying to defend a basic position that it’s okay - perhaps even desirable - to base desire to associate with someone solely on their ‘shape’ (obviously, skin color).

Trying to fight innate behaviours doesn't get you far, and this is certainly an innate behaviour. What becomes in-group and out-group depends on nurture, the concept of in-group itself is older than trees.

Ok, unrelated dissimilar people can sometimes become in-group to each other. The fact is they don't more often than they do. People from different cultures rarely find each other suited enough for friendship, naturally stay apart and normally only form this sort of bonds under external circumstances.

Hell, even French-speaking and Dutch-speaking Belgians consider each other "other".

I don't really care that you call me racist (that term has long ago ceased to mean anything other than "I don't like what you say"), and your use of conservative as a slur will be familiar to anyone following political discussions on Reddit or Mastodon. But everything I wrote can be summarized thus: I'm unconvinced by the dogmatic assumption that diversity itself is a positive thing.

It's rather disappointing that on HN, where members regularly congratulate themselves on being able to examine viewpoints on their merits alone, you have chosen to drag this conversation into the mud with personal attacks. I will not engage in such behavior myself, and this pretty much concludes the matter for me.

> There's no reason every child has to have equal opportunity.

No evolutionary reason, that is.

On the other hand, if your descendents are born into such deep disadvantage without hope of redemption, that's another evolutionary black hole. The best hope would be to band together with others of similar circumstances and burn it all down.

It's in everyone's best interest for this not to happen. Which leads me to wonder if there is some optimal equilibrium between advantage and disadvantage.

And interesting corollary is that society has basically trumped evolution. There are so many competing contradictory forces that only the most basic changes have a hope of surviving.

Edit:

In hindsight I somewhat disagree with this. Nearly all post-scarcity fictions depict societies in which all are given equal opportunity to realize their personal ambitions. Status and additional allocation of societal-level resources then depends on the outcomes. So for some definition of opportunity I think it is theoretically possible to afford everyone equal opportunity.

>No evolutionary reason, that is.

So, no reason that would stick a couple of generations down.

>The best hope would be to band together with others of similar circumstances and burn it all down.

They are trying, last seen on 7 Oct 2023. I'd say long odds.

>It's in everyone's best interest for this not to happen. Which leads me to wonder if there is some optimal equilibrium between advantage and disadvantage.

It's indeed undesirable that the evolutionary black hole is in your own group, therefore various safety nets. That's still just the lower bound, removing the higher bound is Harrison-Bergeron-style societal suicide.

>And interesting corollary is that society has basically trumped evolution. There are so many competing contradictory forces that only the most basic changes have a hope of surviving.

It's just the first time that we know of when the fittest don't want to breed. There's plenty of arguments out there to the effect that it sucks.

>In hindsight I somewhat disagree with this. Nearly all post-scarcity fictions depict societies in which all are given equal opportunity to realize their personal ambitions. Status and additional allocation of societal-level resources then depends on the outcomes. So for some definition of opportunity I think it is theoretically possible to afford everyone equal opportunity.

If the parents' success have no bearing on the children the best strategy is to push out as many kids as you can. Something of commons, can't put my finger on it.

> If the parents' success have no bearing on the children the best strategy is to push out as many kids as you can.

Hmm that's an interesting thought. You think that a post-scarcity society is impossible because the evolutionary urge to further one's genes will always outstrip the capacity to produce resources. That there can never be any equilibrium? Very Malthusian. Hopefully we can apply lessons from this article - that subtle social nudges can have outsized and hopefully beneficial effects.

Where is that post-scarcity society you're talking about?

The whole demographic catastrophe unfolding in the West is to do with how hard and expensive it is to raise even 1-2 kids to have good chances at life, and people largely choosing scarce commodities over having kids.

There are no lessons in this article other than that made-up preferences lead to silly outcomes.

Artificially scarce commodities, as any basic inquiry into social economics would illustrate. Naturally no one wants to have kids when they can't afford a home and need two jobs just to feed themselves and pay off their student debt.

Artificially my 50-hectar beachfront mansion ass.

Electronics and factory farm tomatoes are cheap, and near nobody lacks food or a phone.

Good teachers, black caviar, decent real estate away from poor people (lol) are inherently scarce. As for social economics enquiries, they always seem to require people to give up fruits of their labour for no compensation. As much as I like free stuff, I very much find this undersirable.

>Electronics and factory farm tomatoes are cheap, and near nobody lacks food or a phone.

The price of tomatoes has inflated at a rate of about 3.55% per year, up a total of 1,049% since 1953. In that same period, minimum wage rose from $0.75 to $7.25. In 1953, an hour's work would have bought you one tomato with a bit left over, today an hour's work leaves you short. Tomatoes have not become cheaper.

Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/Tomatoes/price-inflation

The 50s were an anomaly (as was the Great Depression).

No they weren't? Look at the graph in my source. In any case, sure, start in 1965; tomatoes cost $0.85 and minimum wage was $1.25, so your purchasing power was even better by comparison to today.

Try 20s.

Or don't bother with canned tomatoes from your link - things like flour, butter, milk and meat all got cheaper relative to the minimum wage.

Fresh tomatoes went from 25-30 cents per pound to 1-2 dollars per pound, i.e. got cheaper too.

> Nearly all post-scarcity fictions depict societies in which all are given equal opportunity to realize their personal ambitions.

Which, as GP pointed out, is a social dead end.

If your opportunities don't depend on your parents' achievements, then your children's opportunities don't depend on your achievements. Even in a positive sense.

Which means that probably the most important motivation to achieve anything is gone.

Such a society would crumble to dust really quickly.

And, of course, equal "opportunity" just means discrimination based on factors such as innate ability, rather than inherited wealth. Which means that talent takes the place that wealth has in our society, but the basic mechanisms of power (and the resulting inequalities) remain the same.

Why is everyone so nihilistic, but only in the short-term? To think success requires winning a zero-sum game, but forgetting that the winner is still a puny human in a meaningless universe.

Of course there are still achievements to strive towards. There are personal goals. There is the appreciation of your peers. There is social capital to convince others.

I think the countless grassroots movements stand as tribute to this. And not just open-source software, but countless online forums and communities dedicated to making the world a better place.

If your children have the best (as discussed above) opportunities thrust upon them, why must you spit in the face of good fortune, claiming your children would be better off if other children had fewer opportunities?

In such a theoretical and hopefully future society, I think power itself becomes much less consequential. What's the point of power if you have everything you want.

Or do you think if everyone's happy, they'll gladly follow some mad power-hungry lunatic into genocide just for shits and giggles?

> What's the point of power if you have everything you want.

To those that seek power, it is an end, not a means.

And there is no limit to what people want. Indeed, it expands faster than real possibilities do. By the standards of a thousand years ago, even today's "poor" people live like kings. But that doesn't mean anything.

A "post-scarcity" society would resemble the society of today far more closely than most people realize.

> To those that seek power, it is an end, not a means.

Perhaps that's just a psychological condition inculcated by modern society.

> today's "poor" people live like kings.

The actual standard of living doesn't matter as relatively poor people continue to make poor short-term economic decisions even after escaping poverty. That's why it's often called a disease.

This is an extremely reductionist take, to infer that all human progress is motivated by a better life for your children. Certainly some people are motivated by that, but human motivations are way, way more complex than this ridiculously simplified (and aggressively conservative) worldview suggests.

The assumption that society would "quickly crumble to dust" if children's opportunities were entirely independent of their parents' efforts and successes is quite possibly the most absurd take I have heard on this website in the 10 years I have been here.

> The assumption that society would "quickly crumble to dust" if we gave more children more opportunities

Another strawman. I wrote that society would crumble if children's opportunities were entirely independent of their parents' efforts and successes, in line with the comment I replied to. That's distinct from what you are claiming.

My reply remains the same with your clarification added, I have edited my comment accordingly. This is absurd.

For 1 Einstein that doesn't care to continue his bloodline the society requires millions who do. You can sure try and fight human instincts, many have tried and failed.

> The most revered/successful societies on earth are the complete opposite of diverse.

[citation needed]

Which societies? Revered by whom? Successful by what metric?

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