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razib
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2 months ago
in The Caveman Roots of Liberal Democracy on Will Wilkinson
Given the plethora of different political beliefs expressed in human history - the vast majority of which have nothing to do with the modern categories of liberal and conservative - do you really think any of them can be hard-wired, even "partly."
yes. read will's post. the absolute position isn't fixed, but the relative position is. in the 3rd century the pagans were conservative by disposition, while the christians felt they were moving onto to 'better things.' in the 21st century it is inverted. i'm pretty sure you're misunderstanding what i'm saying.
yes. read will's post. the absolute position isn't fixed, but the relative position is. in the 3rd century the pagans were conservative by disposition, while the christians felt they were moving onto to 'better things.' in the 21st century it is inverted. i'm pretty sure you're misunderstanding what i'm saying.
1 reply
2 months ago
in The Caveman Roots of Liberal Democracy on Will Wilkinson
will,
tx for the comment. i would add that i strongly suspect there are frequency dependencies, cultural and genetic, to these dynamics. that is, it may be that the success of strategy A or strategy !A naturally leads to the heightened fitness of its inverse, so that over the long term you just have cyclical dynamics.
tx for the comment. i would add that i strongly suspect there are frequency dependencies, cultural and genetic, to these dynamics. that is, it may be that the success of strategy A or strategy !A naturally leads to the heightened fitness of its inverse, so that over the long term you just have cyclical dynamics.
1 reply
Will Wilkinson
Yeah. I was trying to think about how that would work. Intuitively, that sounds a little too neat to me. I'm more inclined to the idea that there's a lot of more or less random wandering down the possible paths of gene-culture coevolution, some forks of which generate a few turns around a "cycle" that is eventually broken out of and some generating sticky path-dependent lock-in that is also eventually broken out of after a good long while. If we are on a relatively locked-in path, looking backwards to an apparently cycling path, we might infer that we'll just continue to cycle, even if we'll never end up anywhere near where we were again. Sheer conjecture. Anyway, why not think it's a random walk?
3 months ago
in Inbreeding is out, Assimilation is in the American Melting Pot on Ben Atlas
What was the Anglican and its many American offshoots policy in regards to the cousin marriages? Does this also explain all the inbreeding jokes about the American South?
they accepted cousin marriage in the anglican church. e.g., charles darwin. the rate of cousin marriage in the south isn't that high. rather
1) the quasi-nobility of the south started practicing it to preserve land, just like in europe
2) isolated mountain communities naturally have a smaller pool of mates
they accepted cousin marriage in the anglican church. e.g., charles darwin. the rate of cousin marriage in the south isn't that high. rather
1) the quasi-nobility of the south started practicing it to preserve land, just like in europe
2) isolated mountain communities naturally have a smaller pool of mates
- 2 points
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Ben Atlas
Thank you, Razib. I will be following your blog with interest.
So to repeat, I see no evidence that any of our core beliefs are "hard-wired," let alone such transient dispositions as liberal and conservative. If anything, I would say that these constellations of ideas produced a corresponding psychology rather than the other way 'round.
I simply do not understand this current fad for crudely reductive explanations for human beliefs. You might as well take phrenology seriously; it has about as much scientific credibility as Haidt, et.al.