[From Bill Powers (2011.04.15.0840 MDT)]
[I'm not going to respond to much here. This is getting to be too much like adversarial legal proceedings, where each side is supposed to minimize points against it and emphasize anything it can find to suggest it is right. This is not a good way to find out how things really work or what really happened. Yet another reason to focus on modeling: models behave as they behave and there's nothing you can do about it but change the model if it doesn't behave like the real system. Models don't care who wins.]
ML: More babies is just one strategy, greater investment in few babies is another, the key is that they survive to reproduce.
No. That's turning a quantitative principle into a qualitative one. The actual key, according to the concept as defined and used, is that fitness is determined strictly by HOW MANY offspring one has, not what quality of life is the result. According to current wisdom, the poor are far more fit than the rich because there are so many of them.
BP earlier: The owners get something like 60% of the claim, the customers around 40%. It is that split that is the chief object of negotiation between management and labor. That split explains how a few people can end up with almost all the buying power.
ML: Very few businesses have a 60% margin, without some kind of government granted monopoly.
You see the result of adversarial argument. You have countered a point I didn't try to make, by talking about "margins" instead of "share" which was my subject. Companies have a certain total income after taxes, maintenance, and production and sales costs (excluding wages). That total is split 60% for the owners and management, 40% for labor costs (the split varies, but not a lot).
But I do worry about "let individuals be free and succeed and fail on their own merits." I can see that if they succeed, we can generously applaud and be happy for them. But what if they fail? Do they just become examples to spur others to try harder? Do we let them descend to the lowest levels of poverty and misery, while saying to the others, "See? See what will happen to you if you don't buckle down and do your work instead of complaining all the time?"
They usually try again and again. Most success stories involved multiple failures, and even credit what they learned from those failures for their success. One of the implications of evolution is that we are all descended from a long unbroken line of winners. Children are born to parents who successfully survived.
Now you're saying it's only survival that matters, not quality of life, which nullifies what you said above. Rich and poor, fat and starving, happy and despairing, we all survived, so you see, there's no difference, is there?
In my experience "nice guys" get ahead faster than the nerds. Popularity and the social intelligence required to achieve it is often as good a recipe for success as academic achievement. We've all been to high school reunions where the real estate agent or auto or insurance sales person has been the greatest success. Humans tend to both trust and cultivate reputation, just as a small percentage can get by through deceit, merely by having the appearance of it. Humans evolved an ability to detect deceit as well, it is an arms race of sorts.
So you're saying that those who get to the top are less corrupt than those who don't. I say the opposite. How do you think we might go about finding out which view is right? Obviously they can't both be right.
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BP: Couldn't agree more. But we have to have that model, or this whole conversation will just be a lot of hot air.
There should be social values that people control for, honesty, reputation, trust, and detection of trustworthyness. loyalty to those they value, detection of vulnerability to exploitation in others, recognition of such opportunities, wanting to be part of a team, enjoying belonging and contributing, wanting to be a star or hero, want to support a star or hero, appreciating the beauty of good teamwork, honoring sacrifice and heroism, resenting cheaters, resenting unfairness, making the groups goals ones own with furvor and fanaticism, a willingness to sacrificially discipline those who don't conform, appreciating the unique contributions of the nonconformist. It is complex mileau, and people have these qualities in varying degrees. Every emotion has a genetic and biological based, but every emotion probably is subject to environmental pressures for enhancement, suppression or control. Populate your model PCT hierarchies well, validate your models by reproducing the range of individual behavior and emergent collective phenomena.
This is an odd collection for someone who claims to prize individualism. It's mostly about living your life to fit in with and please others, and applying whatever kinds of pressure are needed (including "sacrifical discipline", which sounds a bit grim) to force conformity. You say it's "complex," but it just looks to me as though it's full of contradictions and conflicts, like the first draft of an idea before any debugging. It seems, in fact, to have all the most despicable features that you ascribe to "government" (and that I ascribe to "corporations").
Anyway, that's enough of that. I'm sure you have just as much ability as I do to dream up counterarguments, and we could entertain each other, and bore the audience, until corporations start deciding what we can say on the internet, which they're currently trying to do.
With that inflammatory remark sinking slowly in the west, I recommend that we bid farewell to this idyllic Land of the Endless Argument and look for something better to do with our time.
Best,
Bill P.
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At 08:40 PM 4/14/2011 -0600, Martin Lewitt wrote: