Doesn't seem perplexing to me either. Humans are tribal and their survival depends on teamwork of about ~100 people or so. This is natural on intimate scale.

What perplexing is to think about how humans can cooperate effectively on a scale of billion people to solve humanity biggest problems.

As we can see, empathy for humans outside of the tribe is limited and so different gangs fight each other, let alone different countries.

Maybe we can think about techniques to create empathy among strangers.

If the world is divided into many super-tribes made up of millions of people (based on ethnicity, religion, etc), try to encourage mixture of those super-tribes at school, work, and socially. Then people have a maximum composition of different super-tribes within their personal 100-person tribe. This way people will be less likely to identify everyone from another super-tribe as part of the outgroup.

I think its in the human nature that we form groups and fight each other, heck we do it for fun too in games. For all humans on the planet to come together we would need a common opponent.

sars-cov-2?

Naively, how about a global tree? Suppose you have a group of 25 people, of which 1 (or more, all these numbers are fluid) is also a member in a group one "level" up which also contains 25 people all representing their own 25-person group. Then just keep adding more levels until everyone's in the tree.

Importantly, these are not rulership positions. They're representatives representing the interest of their group one "level" down, which means these interests are sourced from the largest side of the tree and then negotiated/compromised as far up as is necessary.

The reason I think 25 is the right number is because IIRC people are only capable of maintaining 50 close relationships, so the idea is generally most people are friends with their home group + extras. But doing the math on the number of groups required, let's say 8 billion / 25 = 320 million groups needing representation, and log_25(320000000) gives us a little over 6 levels required to represent them all (if I mathematically modeled that correctly), so even a top-tier representative can easily have a couple of close friends per level.

> Maybe we can think about techniques to create empathy among strangers.

Small scale trial, a world exchange program where you could sign up, and basically you swap with someone random for a year. Before the swap happens both people get a week where they meet and discuss what is going on in their life. This can happen in a vacation resort somewhere.

Then the two people take over the life of the other person. It would be assumed that everyone would sorta- help the swapped person out a bit. The swap would need to have very specific requirements: Probably no spouse, the job needs to be similar, friends/coworkers need to be on board, finally the swappers need to blog once per day about the experiences.

Bank accounts would be locked out - the experiment pays the two individuals from a fresh account. Bills and Mortgages are locked or payed through other mechanisms during the experiment.

I think that even starting out with maybe 100 people, then scale to 1000 a year later, 10000 after that. I don't know if those numbers are unrealistic... but wouldn't it be interesting to see if empathy for other countries or even ways of life start to develop?

I watched a TV series once where people swapped family (including spouse) with someone from a different country. Pretty interesting

> What perplexing is to think about how humans can cooperate effectively on a scale of billion people to solve humanity biggest problems.

I think the opposite is true. We cannot properly cooperate effectively on a large scale to solve humanity's biggest problems. Just look at the attempts for global nuclear disarmament, it has been a failure. Look at the accelerating impact of carbon on the environment, it has been a catastrophic failure.

I think while the article shows an interesting bit about human psychology, that we are all secretly altruists at heart, which I believe is true.. But what governs the important global decisions isn't humanity. They're massive organizations and these massive organizations (whether a nation state or mega-corp) are made of humans, but they're not human.

They operate in another way, just like an ant colony, the emergent behavior of many ants, operates in an entirely different way than an individual ant.

>"Maybe we can think about techniques to create empathy among strangers."

It's all about abolishing hierarchical leadership, and the "one-to-many" dynamic. People who foment tribalism like Trump, for instance, are only effective in a mediated environment in which they are immune to any criticism and can pontificate from on high. In a one on one social situation, his behavior and attitude would be laughed at and ostracized because the vast majority of people are generally good and wish to be peaceful. But when they are able to atomize individuals and speak directly to them, the power of their rhetoric is irresistible, because it appeals directly to the person's identity. That's why Trump supporters will follow him off a cliff. He is them. His thoughts are their thoughts. And the basic human survival instinct kicks in when anyone attacks something you identify with so intimately.

The premise of The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) is that the unit of evolution isn't the individual but the gene. Individuals need not be selfish, their genes are, and genes compete with each other.

It's then easy to justify altruistic behavior when the best interests of an individual isn't up for considerations but the best interests of a gene. Selfishness isn't competing against yourself.

Use this drive to work with the evolutionary dynamics of populations in a "cheating" vs. "cooperating" and you get an arms race of cheaters vs cooperators which tends around some equilibrium which, going back to selfish genes, tends to balance the costs and rewards of selfishness which in lots of different creatures tends towards cooperation between individuals quite a lot.

It's pretty frightening that he's an "an associate professor of sociology" and he doesn't even know basic under-grad evolutionary theory, yet thinks it's ok for him to talk about it.

Basically spent his life and a bunch of money rediscovering the wheel when biologists could have told him this was the expected result.

Worse still, he talks about ants, which share 75% of their genes so actually do have a clear evolutionary reason to co-operate.

There's tons of research on altruism, decades of debates on group selection, kin selection etc.

Nowadays it's much less of a mystery than the popular opinion thinks. I guess the popular zeitgeist is a few decades lagging behind science.

Robert Sapolsky's course on human behavior and its evolution is on YouTube and it's great. Or read books on human ethology.

I've seen him on JRE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obmt_PkIfBE). I liked his observations on the baboon troupe and how changing group makeup led to a change of dynamics and the establishment of a more cooperative equilibrium.

Daniel Batson spent his academic life researching altruism. His work is wonderful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Batson

I have benefitted from Dr. Sapolsky's video series as well. I recommend it to others fairly often.

Rutger Bregman's new book 'Humankind' is on this topic -- he poses that people are fundamentally good, and makes the point that the 'people are selfish by nature' mindset benefits certain ideologies, and increases the concentration of power.

But it’s clearly not one or the other. People are not entirely good or entirely selfish. I would agree that most people do the right thing most of the time, but all it takes is for a few % to do the selfish thing for the system to become dysfunctional.

Plus, sometimes (in some societies and professions) you really need to become a jerk, kick downwards and bootlick upwards. It's best to avoid such places and careers but it's very real.

Also I think most people are very blind to their own selfish and "bad person" behavior. This is why stories look so one sided and somehow the person telling the story always comes out as angelic.

The truth is, most people have things in their past where they benefited from some thing that left another person worse off. It's just rationalized as "tough luck, that's the rules, life is hard and I was stronger" or something.

The "Elephant in the brain" book has examples for this.

And weirdly enough I'll say an advice that you never ever hear: sometimes being selfish is okay. There actually are people, like myself, who are by default too soft/compassionate/justice-sensitive/honest/literal/ignorant of what the actual social and socially accepted behavior are vs what is explicitly stated.

The thing is, if you want to achieve success you will need to screw over some people in the process. Not constantly and all the time but maybe 2-3 times in your life? You have to be really lucky or extremely good to honestly keep that at 0. But as I said, most people err on the side of being blind to cases when they do this so they'd benefit from the standard advice. And of course many are just like "well, fuck him, I don't like him anyway, he rubs me the wrong way" and don't lose any sleep on the matter.

The cynical recipe could be: screw someone over, don't really introspect while doing it, reap the benefits, then admit to yourself that you did wrong, forgive yourself and promise to be nice later, noting that humans are sinful, fallible and imperfect and continue enjoying the benefits you reaped. You will be ahead, and now you have a nice story of how you did wrong things in the past but have wisened up since then. An ex-murderer who is now a normal citizen can become a hero or do motivational speaking, a normal guy who just never murdered is just a normal guy. (This is obviously not advocating murder or crime, I'm simply describing the pattern)

> Even after performing the experiment, the researcher still can't really fathom the possibility that his views should be reassessed.

I'm sorry? The quote seems pretty clear to me: Melamed is expressing that the result is surprising. He is clearly not refusing to believe it.

The ability to eludidate ones priors and explain their conflicts with data is, in fact, probably the most critical single component of "reassessing ones views".

I don't understand your comment at all, honestly.

> Melamed is expressing that the result is surprising. He is clearly not refusing to believe it.

I didn't say that he's refusing to believe the result. Rather, I found it amusing that he did not reassess his prior beliefs in light of new evidence. He continued to assume that collaborative/mutualistic behavior decreases fitness, even while noticing that many animals engage in it. He saw this as puzzling, when it may simply mean that this type of behavior doesn't actually decrease fitness.

Not sure what you meant by eludidate btw.

You don't think it's appropriate for a scientist to be puzzled by a result?

(Also: please make fun of my typos some more. That absolutely benefits the discussion.)

> You don't think it's appropriate for a scientist to be puzzled by a result?

Definitely. However, there didn't seem to be an attempt to also question his existing theory regarding evolutionary fitness. Again, the results are only puzzling if you assume collaboration decreases fitness, but that assumption should always be open to reassessment.

> please make fun of my typos some more

No need for sarcasm, my comment was not intended to be snarky. The word could have been 'elude', 'elucidate' or smth else. I will go for 'elucidate' since it fits best in the context.

What's so surprising about it when "we see it in bees and ants, and humans and throughout all of nature." His own words.

If it is found throughout all of nature, shouldn't it be expected rather than surprising?

I think it's like PID controllers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller

You have to do things in your own self-interests.

But you also have to do things in the interest of your community.

otherwise you aren't going to converge on survival.

The Bhagavad Gita, a very old story, touches on this specific topic. In particular it mentions that everything is interconnected, everything affects everything else - in a way, we are all one.

Under that context, evolution is just change, it is not the improvement of one entity to the detriment of others. Also, given that everything is connected and we are all one, the more we help others, the more we help ourselves. It also says to widen our view of time and life, we usually think in terms of an animal/entity being born/living/dying, instead of thinking about the cycle of all species over thousands or millions of years.

Not that you need to be told this, but for anyone else curious, the Bhagavad Gita is so much more than an old story. If you are interested in reading it, I recommend having it read to you by a master, else the old cultural symbology and references will be lost on you or otherwise completely impenetrable.

You are totally right on both counts, just didn't want to bias the description.

I'm currently reading the version recommended by another HN user here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155062

It's a fascinating read, also incredibly eye opening to learn things that have been known and taught for thousands of years in other parts of the world, while in the West it seems like we are just beginning to discover them (and maybe have actively rejected them for a long time as well).

Read "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Axelrod. You'll love it, and itll give you further insight on your very point.

There's also almost definitely an evolutionary advantage.

Groups are stronger than individuals. Selfish people are undesirable for a group.

Evolution happens to populations, so it makes sense that the fitness of the population is what evolution affects.

For ants and bees in particular I’ve sometimes heard the theory that it’s the ant/bee colony we should consider the organism, not the individual ants or bees. In large part because it’s the queen that mates and all the others are there to help the queen survive and pass on her genes.

That's in itself just begging the question. The genetic mechanism behind eusociality in bees and ants is haplodiploidy[1], which among other things makes the relatedness of workers up to 75% rather than the 50% between siblings in diploid organisms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy

It's also ignorant. Kin/group selection and altruism has been researched for at least decades. The only debate is the mechanism, not the existent and value of it to the individual.

The point is that it's unintuitive, at least from a naive point of view. Kind of like hormesis, where exposure to harmful substances or radiation can actually be beneficial.

Yeah, specialization and division of labor seem to be the way for a group of genes to evolve beyond the individual.

Yeah. Surprising also since Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene about altruism 40+ years ago.

What a complete misunderstanding of an obvious statement. Astounding.

He's just saying "This result is surprising". The part I cannot fathom is how you can misread this so badly. It genuinely blows my mind.