People Behave Socially and 'Well' Even Without Rules

[Angrboda]

If people form social circles so well without rules, then why do I and the other mods have to be constantly weeding out bad members?

I find this study deficient in that it doesn't study a real world group of greater numbers than a small tribe.

Games are easy to derive bullshit from. I know, I develop on them. And I can tell you that a LOT of it is contrived and mostly without innate value (as in, you don't have much to lose from it).

Yes. A friend in one of my philosophy groups was telling us about an online game where the evolved ethos is kill or be killed.

But this overlooks the underlying pattern, in which human groups gravitate toward stasis points, some violent, some peaceful. The human brain evolved over several million years in which the African continent was undergoing frequent and radical climate change and unrest. The human mind is an engine of change, adapting quickly to whatever the environment presents us with. In violent, changeful climate, behaviors adapted to flourishing under those conditions presents itself; if that environment changes, so does the behavior.

It might be more useful to look upon human behavior as a specific fitness landscape, with points of stability at various places on that landscape. Local minima and maxima. I doubt our species is in any sense fine tuned for a specific form of social organization or social fabric; I suspect there are multiple profitable points. (There's a beautiful section in Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker in which he's discussing the mechanics of sexual selection in certain birds, and how male plumage in that species forms a whole family of individual tail lengths which the genetic machinery will gravitate toward, and that assuming that adaptation approaches a single, optimized point is to misunderstand the complex and nuanced behavior of genetic systems. The mathematics of evolution is far richer than the story book accounts of it that most people absorb from popular culture; there is enormous complexity just below the surface.)