Surreal

I think it has more to do with the ability to be anonymous. More people = less accountability.

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CaleVinson

Well, I am at least:

My reading of the discussion thus far is that everyone apart from me was horribly depressing , and argued that you couldn't do much with our current societies. I then wondered if that was because of the conflict between different groups in our society (see Beebo's earlier comments), and to test that out, proposed the above thought experiment.

So, no, no-one will be wandering around crying "if only we'd been less sinful, this would never have happened to us" , at least not in "my" experiment. Or, more accurately, no-one would be like that when they *arrived* on the island, the question is how/if they might change, and how well such a society would work.

Surreal

It might work well for a generation or even two, I'm not convinced that by the 3rd generation we wouldn't see a drift towards the human behavioral mean.

CaleVinson

Ah yes, but *which* mean - the global population mean, or the island population mean?

To take a specific example of the general question I'm trying to frame: is open-mindedness in people just an unstable fluke, always destined to die out? Or, would the children of a Gilliganite society that began as open-minded, themselves be pretty much guaranteed to be open-minded too?

Surreal

How are you defining open mindedness? Skeptical, critical reasoning? Or astrology and faith healing and Bruno, the volcano god. Even if your nurture is uniformly biased towards critical reasoning, there are an awful lot of threads that make up the human psyche, native intelligence being one of them.

CaleVinson

Well, the original model was that the Gilliganites were people whose "brain could go there", to allow them to live and thrive in a society without authoritarianism (see Beebo's earlier comments). Thus, the Gilliganites are open-minded enough to accept differences in others (they have to be, because there's no simple authority through which difference can be crushed) *and* skeptical (again, they have to be, because there's no simple authority to which they can refer for "the truth").

Cindy Claveau

I think the open-mindedness of this hypothetical utopia would last only until the first stressors appeared, be they natural (climactic, geological, etc) or manmade. The natural tendency of human groups is to form sub-groups aligned on self-interest. Doesn't matter if it's the vegans vs the meat-eaters, the farmers vs the hunters, or the parents vs the childless. Groups will fracture to some degree along the lines of that self-interest.

The most effective way to unite the group is if it's faced with external threats. But even if it's not, it is Basic Tenet #1 of Human Nature that we require adversity in order to thrive and excel. Without our aggressiveness and competitive spirit, we become depressed, meek, and submissive - and eventually would cease to care enough to live. If there are no external threats, then internal threats will be created, even if it's the Checkers vs. the Chess crowds

Cindy Claveau

Edit to add: It wasn't until Man figured out how to automate our own survival needs that we came by any significant leisure time. And it's leisure time that allows us to philosophize, recreate, and probably THINK too much.

Surreal

Establishing one's place in a ranked order appears to be a hard-wired primate characteristic. I think you would quickly develop authorities.... people who had mastered a particular body of knowledge essential to the survival of the tribe. How quickly that morphed into leadership by a single individual would depend I think on what challenges faced the group.

Bard Jameson

Cale, maybe you are confusing "authoritarianism" with "authority"? People are different, no matter how carefully you selected your tribe of Gilliganites, and some will be a greater authority than others in X or Y area. As such, they would rise as "natural" leaders within the group. Such authority could (theoretically) be exercised legitimately, or it could degenerate into the illegitimate exercise of "authoritarianism".

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Beebo Brink

I saw that Star Trek episode too!










*The Apple

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Hypatia Callisto

While I agree with this, and I would even go as far to say, that highly advanced civilisation generally needs some adversity to really advance, I think that having a fairly easy life doesn't make you depressed, meek or submissive -- maybe just mellow and not so motivated to like, invent the calculus in order to design weapons to deal with the Roman threat (Archimedes )



But given the nature of our planet, and if we ever want to beat extinction which is inevitable for our species one day if we don't develop some better foresight: some natural adversity is going to happen somewhere, sometime, so we'll always have something to strive against I think. I just think we should get better about choosing what exactly to strive against.

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"To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"

"I suppose so," said Alice.

"Well, then," the Cat went on, "you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."

"I call it purring, not growling," said Alice.

"Call it what you like," said the Cat.

CaleVinson

I take the general point you're making - one has only to look at the rate of technological progress during wartime.

But I do think (well, more accurately, feel ), that you may be overstating the case a little. Perhaps I'm naive (yet again ), but I do think that many of the really great achievements of mankind have little to do with competition. That a lot of scientists are motivated primarily by a desire to understand, artists by a desire to create, etc, etc, and that they would pursue these passions even without competition.

I believe its also true that competition isn't "free", that there's wastage associated with duplication of effort in the competing groups. For competition to be efficient, the extra motivation it generates has to be greater than the loss of productivity associated with the duplication of effort.

As I've bored everyone with countless times in the past, my own expertise is in modelling, mostly of fluids. I love going to the numerical weather prediction (NWP) guys talks at conferences, because they have to deal with this really rigorous problem - every day their computer simulations are compared to reality. And for years now, the leaders in NWP have been the Europeans, via the ECMWF (About ECMWF)

US NWP lags quite a way behind, and organisationally is characterised by a high degree of fragmentation - for example, the US Navy has its own independent NWP effort (Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Now for the record, let me also point out that Australian NWP models bring new meaning to the word "lamentable", so this is not in anyway intended to be a US-bashing-exercise. And one gloriously isolated data-point does not a conclusion make. And I'm sure people can find counter-examples to the NWP one.
But, for complex problems, I remain to be convinced that a competitive approach to formulating solutions is the optimal one.

Surreal

I'm sure you're correct about the desire to know or to create, but the desire to eat and keep a roof over your head probably trumphs it for a lot of people. Somebody has to pay the bills and in a lot of cases, it's the War Dept doing so.

Hypatia Callisto

yea, but even the most primitive societies have had art, and as long as the weather and geology are fickle and hard to predict... we are constantly under pressure to understand and predict the world around us so we don't end up dead in a volcanic eruption, crushed by our house in an earthquake, or swept away by hurricane force wind

CaleVinson

Agreed, but there are also a lot of people who accept a lot less material reward than they might otherwise have been able to gain, in order to pursue that desire to understand or create.

Perhaps here we're starting to tap into different cultural perspectives, and I'm happy to admit to my own pinko-commie prejudices.

That said, its also a difficult topic to discuss in the abstract at the moment, given all the uncertainty and suffering associated with the current economic state.

Beebo Brink

Even though my brain is already starting to curl at the edges, I'm throwing in more fuel for the fire of our debate. It's precisely forcings such as economic state, resource depletion and environmental shifts that stress a society's responses and reveal the limits of governance.

Case in point is the raging debate over climate change: to what degree are human actions responsible, to what degree are we in danger, and can we effectively do anything to retard or reverse the mechanisms that are already in motion?

There is a large degree of consensus among scientists concerning the first two points (less on the 3rd), but their alarm is not unanimous. Even accounting for the paid interests who are muddling the debate, no one can say with 100% certainty that the dire consequences that are predicted will actually come to pass. This edge of ambiguity has been enough to justify political and economic inaction even though the consequences are possibly fatal to our species if the "worst case" predictions pan out.

Even at its best, the democratic process isn't strong enough to mobilize the populace to quickly make extremely disruptive, painful changes to every aspect of our lives because it is prudent to do so.