10 ms·

This reminds me of a story about hen breeding: Selecting the hen who lays the most eggs doesn't necessarily get you the most efficient egg-laying metabolism.

This reminds me of a story about hen breeding: Selecting the hen who lays the most eggs doesn't necessarily get you the most efficient egg-laying metabolism. It may get you the most dominant hen, that pecked its way to the top of the pecking order at the expense of other hens. Individual selection doesn't necessarily work to the benefit of the group, but a farm's productivity is determined by group outputs. Indeed, for some strange reason, the individual breeding programs which had been so successful at increasing egg production now required hens to have their beaks clipped, or be housed in individual cages, or they would peck each other to death. While the conditions for group selection are only rarely right in Nature, one can readily impose genuine group selection in the laboratory. After only 6 generations of artificially imposed group selection - breeding from the hens in the best groups, rather than the best individual hens - average days of survival increased from 160 to 348, and egg mass per bird increased from 5.3 to 13.3 kg. At 58 weeks of age, the selected line had 20% mortality compared to the control group at 54%. A commercial line of hens, allowed to grow up with unclipped beaks, had 89% mortality at 58 weeks. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KE8wPzGiX5QPotyS8/conjuring-an-evolution-to-serve-you https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KE8wPzGiX5QPotyS8/conjuring-...

goodpoint 8y ago
> the most dominant hen, that pecked its way to the top of the pecking order at the expense of other hens. Individual selection doesn't necessarily work to the benefit of the group but wait... our entire economical system is based on this.
- crimsonalucard 8y ago
  It's not just our economy. It's the duality of human nature. We function better as a group yet we are competitive at the same time. As a result in practice a hybrid system of capitalism and communism tends to work the best aka socialism. See Scandinavia.
  - chatmasta 8y ago
    Work best according to whom? Just because something works in a tiny and homogenous country, under the shadow of a few hegemonic superpowers, does not mean that same thing will work in a super power like the US, which is larger, more heterogenous, and already contributes expenses to world society that benefit Scandinavia. Take the military for example. In any real world war, Scandanavia would depend on the help of NATO; and yet their contributions to NATO are significantly smaller than those of the larger countries. Would the Scandinavian system work if any of the Scandinavian countries had a population as large and heterogenous as the US? Or if Scandinavia did not save costs by relying on the power projection of larger allied countries?
    - flukus 8y ago
      If the country is too large and heterogeneous to be governable then the obvious solution is to break it apart, not to accept horrible outcomes.
      - SubuSS 8y ago
        Let's extend that obvious line of thought: what would the basis of this division be? What about the benefits reaped from the heterogenous nature of giant countries like USA? Are you willing to give all that up for this single goal? All said and done, I strongly believe USA as it is moves the humanity forward considerably in the mid-long outlook. Hence my questions.
    - crimsonalucard 8y ago
      Works best according to the best available data we have. I dont have data on whether or not the system will function well as a big country or not because the data doesnt exist. The nonexistence of said data unsubstantiates any claim I can make or you can make and pushes it into the realm of speculation. But speculate we shall. Military seems like an arbitrary choice. Socialist countries can choose to either spend on military or education and they have chosen the latter probably because there has never been a century where human society is more at peace than ever before according to all available data we have. Why has the current century broken all records for peace on earth? Perhaps it's because, unlike previous centuries, war no longer offers spoils as it once did. A country that goes to war in the past had a net gain in wealth while a country that does the same in modern times will have a massive net loss. Information and technology have replaced territory and gold as our treasure and such a treasure can only be destroyed during war. Either way, data shows that conflict as a percentage of human population is currently massively smaller than all previous eras. Still america chooses to build a huge army. Probably because of something called the military industrial complex. Powerful capitalist entities infiltrate a deliberately weak government and proceed to manipulate it into building an impressive yet uneeded military. Maybe? Just speculation. Would such capitalist powers be able to influence a socialist government? What industrial complex tells Scandinavia to redirect those tax dollars towards free education instead of war? All speculation.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  How so? Naively, it seems like capitalism is a means of “top group” selection, so long as there is relatively high chance for social mobility and opportunity. The method which worked better for chickens still involved selecting the best cohort (capitalism), and this improved over open breeding (socialism) or winner-take-all (monarchy).
  - lordnacho 8y ago
    How often do people get promoted on the basis that they will make the team better? Have you ever heard of that? How often do you hear "the IT guys kept things running well, enabling the sales people to bring the money in, so they get a piece of that?" Most of the time people who get stuff are the ones who have been attributed the most output individually.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      That depends on the management and is part of what makes a good manager. I have heard of many accounts of successful and well liked technical managers admitting their job is to be a shield to their team/abstraction layer to allow them ability to focus and explore appropriately while not being buffeted by contradictory direct commands and meetings - all while not ignoring them unduly either. Upper management was perfectly okay with that because they had good release quality and time tables.
      - stnmtn 8y ago
        But how often do people who do the work that brings in money (in this example, the people coding the project) get a fair share of that profit?
        chooseaname 8y ago
        Define "fair". Surely the CEO is worth 800 times what any single coder is.
        8y ago
- rjf72 8y ago
  Imagine I happen to think that social and group dynamic factors are more important than individual competence. So I decide to start hiring prioritizing these characteristics over individual ability. If my hypothesis is correct, I'm going to be able to outcompete other companies in my industry and grow, achieve success, and so on. Having a large array of amicable charismatic employees at my disposal would even help for things such as favorably lobbying government to my benefit. It's win win all around. This is the nice thing about capitalist systems. It simply selects for whatever works. At times this is not a good thing (e.g. - perhaps convincing people to buy drugs they don't need could be more profitable than making drugs people genuinely need), but in general it tends to be better, and more organic, than what any individual or group might try to dictate as what should be desired.
  - StrictDabbler 8y ago
    Prisoner's dilemma, tragedy of the commons, etc. Local maxima. The best approach for the well-being of everybody is not always the most competitive approach. Your hypothetical co-operative company agrees to not testify and gets screwed over by the company that testifies against it. Capitalism selects for what works for certain individuals. We don't know that the success of capitalism isn't just a pyramid scheme that has yet to destroy the biosphere. We only know that on the scale of a few lifetimes, modern capitalism has worked ok-ish for us in the first world. It's been pretty rough on the former colonies and the proxy states. Capitalism is very new. Mercantilism is just in the rear-view mirror. Capitalism has been subsidized by the simultaneous rise of industrial technology. There have been flourishings of sudden well-being in the past. The Romans, the Mayans, etc. They discovered new techniques of agriculture, shipping, weapons manufacture, bloomed and expanded and collapsed and died. Capitalism has not yet matched the long-term success of the Roman republic or the subsequent empire, let alone the Egyptian and Chinese systems of successive dynasties supported by a civil service. It's a huge mistake to assume that capitalism works better just because we've been doing ok with it for a while and because it's the system embraced by the country that won WWII by being across an ocean. That gave capitalism a big leg up but the headstart is running out. Kleptocracy has a good chance of out-competing managed capitalism in the next fifty years by using regulatory capture. If you want to avoid regulatory capture by deregulating, remember that an unfettered market has always degenerated into kratocracy (government by the powerful) and kratocracy tends to turn into aristocracy. Capitalism: Doing OK for now!
- golergka 8y ago
  Yes, because farm chickens and human societies are optimized for different things. We value only farm production and don't care about individual feelings of the chickets. In a society, however, we not only value the group effort, but also individual freedom and one's ability to freely compete with others. There were a couple of leftist experiments when societies were managed like farms, but they are now considered atrocities.
- jayd16 8y ago
  In a perfect economic system, greedy, self interested parties would recognize this and hire accordingly. The reality is far from it, though.
- aylmao 8y ago
  > but wait... our entire economical system is based on this. Hence our problems. If there's something I've learned to notice recently is that most world issues are or were very profitable for someone. I think we're past the point where "nature" is really that big of an issue, and now it's mostly just us pecking each other down either in the smaller scale, or in large, systematic ways.
  - dzhiurgis 8y ago
    > most world issues are or were very profitable for someone Can you elaborate a bit more?
    - JetSpiegel 8y ago
      Where to start? Wars? Global Warming?
    - babyloneleven 8y ago
      We offload to others the externalities of our activities as much as possible. We are not sustaintable, and nobody is eager to bear the costs of whatever they are doing. This is a result of our narrow vision. Slavery - treating people as property, like we treat animals - is an extreme example of this, and to this day we are still facing the consequences. But we still treat animals that way - as things that are bought and sold and exploited to death. Even after such animal slavery is abolished, we will still experience its consequences, for a long time.
- aaavl2821 8y ago
  I don't think that's entirely true. I think the idea that the only way to "win" in business is by pushing others aside is incorrect. This thinking assumes that the economy is a zero sum game and there's plenty of reason to question that assumption. There are certainly elements in the economy that take value from others without creating any value in the process, but there are also people / companies that get wealthy by creating value, then capturing some of that value themselves. Even at the most level of the most fundamental unit of the economy -- the worker -- being a team player is just as important as being a good individual contributor. For most jobs, "fit" is a huge factor in hiring.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0db532a0 8y ago
    It’s neither true nor false, and value is subjective.
  - zawazzi 8y ago
    US Productivity grows by 2% a year which suggests in aggregate, most people are playing a zero sum game.
    - dasil003 8y ago
      That just suggests disposable income is a zero sum game. Within GDP you can have massive disparities in value generated.
    - sjjshvuiajhz 8y ago
      I think productivity is better conceived as the first derivative of value wrt. time. So productivity growth is the second derivative. It’s good news if that number is positive at all.
  - AngryData 8y ago
    Over an undefined time span it isn't zero-sum, but on a day-to-day or year-to-year basis it might as well be zero-sum unless you can somehow get the world economy to grow faster than a few percentage points at a time. Especially when so much of that growth is tied up with not very liquid capital assets of a much smaller demograph of wealthy people.
- hnuser123457 8y ago
  Nonsense. The rich do not have larger families, just the opposite. "Our entire economical system" subsidizes and incentives high birthrates among the poor and low ones among the educated and successful.[0] [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
- natalyarostova 8y ago
  Our economic system is based on the ability for Capitalism and Democracy to, together, deliver us the best of Capitalism, with the protections of a democracy. While we tend to spend more time reflecting on failure modes (in order to continue expanding the necessary protection set), we also take for granted so many protections democratic legislation have provided us from the raw algorithmic selection of capitalism.
- HenryBemis 8y ago
  > but wait... our entire economical system is based on this. This is a difference between those who believe in Scarcity from those who believe in Abundance (at least in theory). The Takers and Makers.
  - ramblerman 8y ago
    can you elaborate, I don't understand what point you are making in relation to the OP.
- roenxi 8y ago
  If we can find a better system we'll use it, but this chicken system isn't it. It relies on an all-powerful farmer with the power to arbitrarily reshape chicken society. It isn't based on getting best welfare for the chickens, and from the chicken's perspective isn't optimised for their welfare. It would be very easy to outperform capitalism if you could find leaders who care more about the output of the system than their personal power. There is no evidence that it is possible to find such leaders, and lots of evidence that capitalism resists bad leaders for extended periods of time.
pvaldes 8y ago
This is not because hens are getting more vicious, is because they live crowded. We had positively selected chicken for agressivity since 1000 years, we have sumatrans, aseels, old english game, cubalayas, the most vicious animals possible for generations and generations of people. All of these are really terrible layers. There is a lot of variability in character also between different individuals from the same chicken race.
pasabagi 8y ago
I guess the rub is, hens aren't adversely affected by being members of underperforming groups, whereas humans tend to feel demoralized.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
psadri 8y ago
I really like this insight. However, just to play the devil’s advocate, software engineering is not like chickens laying eggs (a commodity skill). Sometimes, you have problems that most normal people can’t solve on their own and the only people who can solve them happen to be brilliant but toxic. The existence and importance of these very difficult problems can give rise to a higher ratio of toxic brilliance in a field. Of course, you can get lucky and have brilliant and nice. I am so grateful to have worked with some of these as well.
- Jtsummers 8y ago
  It's about costs though, not skills per se. Like the aggressive hens, you'd want to isolate those toxic employees or accept the lower retention rate (higher mortality). At some point the one is not worth the other. Isolating a toxic employee can be costly (giving them a private office gives a sense of favoritism, do you give offices to the rest or alienate them?). Permitting them in general population causes good, but lower pain threshhold, employees to leave (they know they don't have to put up with it, they can get a job anywhere). You can afford to lose some, but how many is this toxic employee worth? > Sometimes, you have problems that most normal people can’t solve on their own and the only people who can solve them happen to be brilliant but toxic. If it's occasional, consultants on retainer. They aren't around long enough to drive (many) people away, and if you isolate them to a seemingly nice office/area people know it's temporary.
Jtsummers 8y ago
That is a perfect example of individual part optimization creating a suboptimal system. To optimize a system you have to think globally (all parts). In manufacturing environments, this might mean running some pieces of equipment or processes at a slower-than-potential rate to reduce errors or variance. Accelerating that process may seem to make things go faster, but increases the amount or frequency of later rework.
AbyormPiranha 8y ago
The moral of the story is not that the needs of the many (group selection) outweigh the needs of one (individual selection). The moral of the story is that some incentives come with perverse effects. In India, the British government issued a law paying people by the weight of cobras they killed. They came back next year and found cobra farms nationwide. That was a perverse effect of their incentive system. And Yudkowsky jumped to a conclusion prematurely: group selection must be immune to perverse effects because switching from individual selection to group selection eliminated the perverse effects in one singular instance. There are ways perverse effects can emerge from and supervene over group selection.

goodpoint 8y ago

> the most dominant hen, that pecked its way to the top of the pecking order at the expense of other hens. Individual selection doesn't necessarily work to the benefit of the group but wait... our entire economical system is based on this.

crimsonalucard 8y ago
It's not just our economy. It's the duality of human nature. We function better as a group yet we are competitive at the same time. As a result in practice a hybrid system of capitalism and communism tends to work the best aka socialism. See Scandinavia.
- chatmasta 8y ago
  Work best according to whom? Just because something works in a tiny and homogenous country, under the shadow of a few hegemonic superpowers, does not mean that same thing will work in a super power like the US, which is larger, more heterogenous, and already contributes expenses to world society that benefit Scandinavia. Take the military for example. In any real world war, Scandanavia would depend on the help of NATO; and yet their contributions to NATO are significantly smaller than those of the larger countries. Would the Scandinavian system work if any of the Scandinavian countries had a population as large and heterogenous as the US? Or if Scandinavia did not save costs by relying on the power projection of larger allied countries?
  - flukus 8y ago
    If the country is too large and heterogeneous to be governable then the obvious solution is to break it apart, not to accept horrible outcomes.
    - SubuSS 8y ago
      Let's extend that obvious line of thought: what would the basis of this division be? What about the benefits reaped from the heterogenous nature of giant countries like USA? Are you willing to give all that up for this single goal? All said and done, I strongly believe USA as it is moves the humanity forward considerably in the mid-long outlook. Hence my questions.
  - crimsonalucard 8y ago
    Works best according to the best available data we have. I dont have data on whether or not the system will function well as a big country or not because the data doesnt exist. The nonexistence of said data unsubstantiates any claim I can make or you can make and pushes it into the realm of speculation. But speculate we shall. Military seems like an arbitrary choice. Socialist countries can choose to either spend on military or education and they have chosen the latter probably because there has never been a century where human society is more at peace than ever before according to all available data we have. Why has the current century broken all records for peace on earth? Perhaps it's because, unlike previous centuries, war no longer offers spoils as it once did. A country that goes to war in the past had a net gain in wealth while a country that does the same in modern times will have a massive net loss. Information and technology have replaced territory and gold as our treasure and such a treasure can only be destroyed during war. Either way, data shows that conflict as a percentage of human population is currently massively smaller than all previous eras. Still america chooses to build a huge army. Probably because of something called the military industrial complex. Powerful capitalist entities infiltrate a deliberately weak government and proceed to manipulate it into building an impressive yet uneeded military. Maybe? Just speculation. Would such capitalist powers be able to influence a socialist government? What industrial complex tells Scandinavia to redirect those tax dollars towards free education instead of war? All speculation.
FakeComments 8y ago
How so? Naively, it seems like capitalism is a means of “top group” selection, so long as there is relatively high chance for social mobility and opportunity. The method which worked better for chickens still involved selecting the best cohort (capitalism), and this improved over open breeding (socialism) or winner-take-all (monarchy).
- lordnacho 8y ago
  How often do people get promoted on the basis that they will make the team better? Have you ever heard of that? How often do you hear "the IT guys kept things running well, enabling the sales people to bring the money in, so they get a piece of that?" Most of the time people who get stuff are the ones who have been attributed the most output individually.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    That depends on the management and is part of what makes a good manager. I have heard of many accounts of successful and well liked technical managers admitting their job is to be a shield to their team/abstraction layer to allow them ability to focus and explore appropriately while not being buffeted by contradictory direct commands and meetings - all while not ignoring them unduly either. Upper management was perfectly okay with that because they had good release quality and time tables.
    - stnmtn 8y ago
      But how often do people who do the work that brings in money (in this example, the people coding the project) get a fair share of that profit?
      - chooseaname 8y ago
        Define "fair". Surely the CEO is worth 800 times what any single coder is.
        8y ago
rjf72 8y ago
Imagine I happen to think that social and group dynamic factors are more important than individual competence. So I decide to start hiring prioritizing these characteristics over individual ability. If my hypothesis is correct, I'm going to be able to outcompete other companies in my industry and grow, achieve success, and so on. Having a large array of amicable charismatic employees at my disposal would even help for things such as favorably lobbying government to my benefit. It's win win all around. This is the nice thing about capitalist systems. It simply selects for whatever works. At times this is not a good thing (e.g. - perhaps convincing people to buy drugs they don't need could be more profitable than making drugs people genuinely need), but in general it tends to be better, and more organic, than what any individual or group might try to dictate as what should be desired.
- StrictDabbler 8y ago
  Prisoner's dilemma, tragedy of the commons, etc. Local maxima. The best approach for the well-being of everybody is not always the most competitive approach. Your hypothetical co-operative company agrees to not testify and gets screwed over by the company that testifies against it. Capitalism selects for what works for certain individuals. We don't know that the success of capitalism isn't just a pyramid scheme that has yet to destroy the biosphere. We only know that on the scale of a few lifetimes, modern capitalism has worked ok-ish for us in the first world. It's been pretty rough on the former colonies and the proxy states. Capitalism is very new. Mercantilism is just in the rear-view mirror. Capitalism has been subsidized by the simultaneous rise of industrial technology. There have been flourishings of sudden well-being in the past. The Romans, the Mayans, etc. They discovered new techniques of agriculture, shipping, weapons manufacture, bloomed and expanded and collapsed and died. Capitalism has not yet matched the long-term success of the Roman republic or the subsequent empire, let alone the Egyptian and Chinese systems of successive dynasties supported by a civil service. It's a huge mistake to assume that capitalism works better just because we've been doing ok with it for a while and because it's the system embraced by the country that won WWII by being across an ocean. That gave capitalism a big leg up but the headstart is running out. Kleptocracy has a good chance of out-competing managed capitalism in the next fifty years by using regulatory capture. If you want to avoid regulatory capture by deregulating, remember that an unfettered market has always degenerated into kratocracy (government by the powerful) and kratocracy tends to turn into aristocracy. Capitalism: Doing OK for now!
golergka 8y ago
Yes, because farm chickens and human societies are optimized for different things. We value only farm production and don't care about individual feelings of the chickets. In a society, however, we not only value the group effort, but also individual freedom and one's ability to freely compete with others. There were a couple of leftist experiments when societies were managed like farms, but they are now considered atrocities.
jayd16 8y ago
In a perfect economic system, greedy, self interested parties would recognize this and hire accordingly. The reality is far from it, though.
aylmao 8y ago
> but wait... our entire economical system is based on this. Hence our problems. If there's something I've learned to notice recently is that most world issues are or were very profitable for someone. I think we're past the point where "nature" is really that big of an issue, and now it's mostly just us pecking each other down either in the smaller scale, or in large, systematic ways.
- dzhiurgis 8y ago
  > most world issues are or were very profitable for someone Can you elaborate a bit more?
  - JetSpiegel 8y ago
    Where to start? Wars? Global Warming?
  - babyloneleven 8y ago
    We offload to others the externalities of our activities as much as possible. We are not sustaintable, and nobody is eager to bear the costs of whatever they are doing. This is a result of our narrow vision. Slavery - treating people as property, like we treat animals - is an extreme example of this, and to this day we are still facing the consequences. But we still treat animals that way - as things that are bought and sold and exploited to death. Even after such animal slavery is abolished, we will still experience its consequences, for a long time.
aaavl2821 8y ago
I don't think that's entirely true. I think the idea that the only way to "win" in business is by pushing others aside is incorrect. This thinking assumes that the economy is a zero sum game and there's plenty of reason to question that assumption. There are certainly elements in the economy that take value from others without creating any value in the process, but there are also people / companies that get wealthy by creating value, then capturing some of that value themselves. Even at the most level of the most fundamental unit of the economy -- the worker -- being a team player is just as important as being a good individual contributor. For most jobs, "fit" is a huge factor in hiring.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- 0db532a0 8y ago
  It’s neither true nor false, and value is subjective.
- zawazzi 8y ago
  US Productivity grows by 2% a year which suggests in aggregate, most people are playing a zero sum game.
  - dasil003 8y ago
    That just suggests disposable income is a zero sum game. Within GDP you can have massive disparities in value generated.
  - sjjshvuiajhz 8y ago
    I think productivity is better conceived as the first derivative of value wrt. time. So productivity growth is the second derivative. It’s good news if that number is positive at all.
- AngryData 8y ago
  Over an undefined time span it isn't zero-sum, but on a day-to-day or year-to-year basis it might as well be zero-sum unless you can somehow get the world economy to grow faster than a few percentage points at a time. Especially when so much of that growth is tied up with not very liquid capital assets of a much smaller demograph of wealthy people.
hnuser123457 8y ago
Nonsense. The rich do not have larger families, just the opposite. "Our entire economical system" subsidizes and incentives high birthrates among the poor and low ones among the educated and successful.[0] [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
natalyarostova 8y ago
Our economic system is based on the ability for Capitalism and Democracy to, together, deliver us the best of Capitalism, with the protections of a democracy. While we tend to spend more time reflecting on failure modes (in order to continue expanding the necessary protection set), we also take for granted so many protections democratic legislation have provided us from the raw algorithmic selection of capitalism.
HenryBemis 8y ago
> but wait... our entire economical system is based on this. This is a difference between those who believe in Scarcity from those who believe in Abundance (at least in theory). The Takers and Makers.
- ramblerman 8y ago
  can you elaborate, I don't understand what point you are making in relation to the OP.
roenxi 8y ago
If we can find a better system we'll use it, but this chicken system isn't it. It relies on an all-powerful farmer with the power to arbitrarily reshape chicken society. It isn't based on getting best welfare for the chickens, and from the chicken's perspective isn't optimised for their welfare. It would be very easy to outperform capitalism if you could find leaders who care more about the output of the system than their personal power. There is no evidence that it is possible to find such leaders, and lots of evidence that capitalism resists bad leaders for extended periods of time.

pvaldes 8y ago

This is not because hens are getting more vicious, is because they live crowded. We had positively selected chicken for agressivity since 1000 years, we have sumatrans, aseels, old english game, cubalayas, the most vicious animals possible for generations and generations of people. All of these are really terrible layers. There is a lot of variability in character also between different individuals from the same chicken race.

pasabagi 8y ago

I guess the rub is, hens aren't adversely affected by being members of underperforming groups, whereas humans tend to feel demoralized.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

psadri 8y ago

I really like this insight. However, just to play the devil’s advocate, software engineering is not like chickens laying eggs (a commodity skill). Sometimes, you have problems that most normal people can’t solve on their own and the only people who can solve them happen to be brilliant but toxic. The existence and importance of these very difficult problems can give rise to a higher ratio of toxic brilliance in a field. Of course, you can get lucky and have brilliant and nice. I am so grateful to have worked with some of these as well.

Jtsummers 8y ago
It's about costs though, not skills per se. Like the aggressive hens, you'd want to isolate those toxic employees or accept the lower retention rate (higher mortality). At some point the one is not worth the other. Isolating a toxic employee can be costly (giving them a private office gives a sense of favoritism, do you give offices to the rest or alienate them?). Permitting them in general population causes good, but lower pain threshhold, employees to leave (they know they don't have to put up with it, they can get a job anywhere). You can afford to lose some, but how many is this toxic employee worth? > Sometimes, you have problems that most normal people can’t solve on their own and the only people who can solve them happen to be brilliant but toxic. If it's occasional, consultants on retainer. They aren't around long enough to drive (many) people away, and if you isolate them to a seemingly nice office/area people know it's temporary.

Jtsummers 8y ago

That is a perfect example of individual part optimization creating a suboptimal system. To optimize a system you have to think globally (all parts). In manufacturing environments, this might mean running some pieces of equipment or processes at a slower-than-potential rate to reduce errors or variance. Accelerating that process may seem to make things go faster, but increases the amount or frequency of later rework.

AbyormPiranha 8y ago

The moral of the story is not that the needs of the many (group selection) outweigh the needs of one (individual selection). The moral of the story is that some incentives come with perverse effects. In India, the British government issued a law paying people by the weight of cobras they killed. They came back next year and found cobra farms nationwide. That was a perverse effect of their incentive system. And Yudkowsky jumped to a conclusion prematurely: group selection must be immune to perverse effects because switching from individual selection to group selection eliminated the perverse effects in one singular instance. There are ways perverse effects can emerge from and supervene over group selection.