r/K Selection Theory

[MSimon]

I have yet to see this one answered:

Libertarianism is merely the flip side of communism. Both are creeds of material plenty and thus r-selection.

Please explain then how limited government was our founding creed? Was prosperity so great? Was it an r favoring era?

[williatw]

As to economic functions, industrial, financial and service cartels with state sponsorship are not especially creative, but they can endure at sufficient if not impressive levels of economic efficiency for a good long time. The Byzantine Empire ran its economy on state-client craftguilds of similar type. IOW, I expect the West's next collapse to be one of Republic into Empire, not a general economic collapse into medieval chaos. The economy will be finessed back to moderately efficient function. Expenses will be defrayed by looting vulnerable border areas and demanding taxes (tribute) from the client states. Between 'Tribune of the World' and 'Tribute of the World' lies but a single letter.

As to general technology levels... technics once gained are rarely totally lost. There may be some retrogression in SOTA, but the iron age was not repealed in Western Europe during the medieval period, even if no one was building ships of the extravagance and technical refinement seen in the Nemi ships for a millennium. If modern industrial civilization were to collapse, I doubt the SOTA goes much farther down than 1920s era crystal radios and light prop aircraft. Civilization can rebuild from such a floor, given some time.

If after each rise then collapse/reversal we "floor" at a higher and higher level let’s say after this fall we end up with roughly 1950 level (instead of your 1920's floor) tech; then the general trend is still onward and upward. Sounds a bit like Heinlein's future history; we are in for the "crazy years". As for the K vs r selection it is people's perception of their wealth/decline that will drive the selection; if people "feel" poor at the 1950 level after having gotten use to the 2014 level then that would favor K selection over r. To people used to Medicare/free housing/food stamps/internet/cellphone a 1950 level would look like the dark ages to them. Suddenly aggressive competition is back in vogue; women choosing mates based on perceived chances of successful acquisition, money status gaining behaviors/genes heavily gaining favor. People thinking about having/raising kids to take care of them in their old age etc.; cuz they don't trust the government to do it. The bounce back could come fairly quickly then; one or two more up cycles and you could have AI good enough to run things and manage pesky K vs r human selection problems competently. Maybe it (AI) and or enhanced humans could learn to use the up down selection advantageously for all concerned.

[hanelyp]

one or two more up cycles and you could have AI good enough to run things and manage ...

Skynet? Or some other cybernetic overlord?

I'm a computer guy, and I wouldn't trust a computer with unlimited rule any more than I'd trust any human or group of humans.

[williatw]

Skynet? Or some other cybernetic overlord?

I'm a computer guy, and I wouldn't trust a computer with unlimited rule any more than I'd trust any human or group of humans.

Trust is a relative term; I am sure once our future silicon lords and masters are done correcting your defects you will be full of "trust"; after all how much trust does a neither "K" or "r" selected cyborg drone need?

[djolds1]

Libertarianism is merely the flip side of communism. Both are creeds of material plenty and thus r-selection.

Please explain then how limited government was our founding creed? Was prosperity so great? Was it an r favoring era?

Good question.

It might have been.

The great states tend to last around ten generations -250ish years. The mouse utopia collapsed to extinction in ten generations - 600 days. Humans are not mice, and so there will be great differences in detail. But the hypothesis that the formation of a state marks the beginning of an r-selection era has merit. The disorganized and feudal times in which the proto-state's culture was gelling being K-selected.

Of course, the great civilizations tend to last around 1500 years - 60 generations. There have to be a whole other order of longwave variables at work there.

Libertarianism is merely the flip side of communism. Both are creeds of material plenty and thus r-selection.

Please explain then how limited government was our founding creed? Was prosperity so great? Was it an r favoring era?

Easy enough. Life was so hard that people didn't have time for stupid indulgences like puffing their brains out.

As there was no problem, there was no need for a solution.

Too simple. r/K selection is a function of resources, and the universal desire for "more!" is a drive to increase resources. There must be some sort of tipping point where K-selection switches to r-selection due to resource availability.

Libertarianism is merely the flip side of communism. Both are creeds of material plenty and thus r-selection.

Libertarianism at least of the economic/political freedom kind helped produce the wealth we have now; the difference of the Pilgrims who abandoned their communal property after they nearly starved and instead allowed people to own their on land and keep whatever they grew on said land.

Small-l liberalism built the 19th century, not libertarianism. Libertarianism is an explicitly socially radical philosophy, and the mirror opposite of communism.

The rational-secular creeds that seek to displace the legacy faiths in all civilizations are born amid the growing optimism of the late K-selected phase, and always achieve their victories in the high density world-cities during periods of demographic stability and then collapse. And as pacifism and enervation are artifacts of r-selection, I don't see the initiative to drive "new births." Certainly, sadly, not new births of freedom. A new birth of authority, maybe.

Would have to agree with you on that one. Especially since we will likely not get the "rational-secular creeds that seek to displace the legacy faiths", but more likely one of the "isms" (Communism, Fascism, Nazism, etc.) or default to some virulent religion like fundamentalist Islam imposed on Europe by their ISIS like eventual displacers/conquerors. If something like that case happened here my guess is that people would turn to a then rapidly resurgent kind of fundamentalist Christian faith; which haven't nowhere near died out yet here; that's what people would likely rapidly turn to when/if things start going south far enough for long enough.

The "isms" are the "rationalist-secular creeds" I was speaking of. Communism, Fascism and Nazism are one side of the economic-determinist coin; Libertarianism and Objectivism are the flip side. There are other contenders as well, but they have thusfar been secondary to the resource creeds. Which makes perfect sense for a resource-rich age.

Christianity will likely see a faux resurgence (the Second Religiousness) at some point later this century as Gaianism and Progressivism consistently fail to fill the spiritual void. Likely a new(er) mystery cult displaces it a few centuries down the line; Mormonism would be my candidate today, tho others may arise.

If after each rise then collapse/reversal we "floor" at a higher and higher level let’s say after this fall we end up with roughly 1950 level (instead of your 1920's floor) tech; then the general trend is still onward and upward. Sounds a bit like Heinlein's future history; we are in for the "crazy years". As for the K vs r selection it is people's perception of their wealth/decline that will drive the selection; if people "feel" poor at the 1950 level after having gotten use to the 2014 level then that would favor K selection over r. To people used to Medicare/free housing/food stamps/internet/cellphone a 1950 level would look like the dark ages to them. Suddenly aggressive competition is back in vogue; women choosing mates based on perceived chances of successful acquisition, money status gaining behaviors/genes heavily gaining favor. People thinking about having/raising kids to take care of them in their old age etc.; cuz they don't trust the government to do it. The bounce back could come fairly quickly then; one or two more up cycles and you could have AI good enough to run things and manage pesky K vs r human selection problems competently. Maybe it (AI) and or enhanced humans could learn to use the up down selection advantageously for all concerned.

Tainter's collapse model works into my thinking as well. In the human case, collapse wipes away the accreted idiot complexity and debt of the previous regime, as well as a whole lot of humans. So society starts anew from a fresh floor, tho yes, the basic technics of the previous age endure. Not sure about AI moderated nanotopias however - those seem custom-designed for permanent ennui. I doubt we learn how to use historical cycles to our advantage, however. The lesson of history is that even if we learn, we are never able to bring ourselves to implement the lessons. The costs are too painful, and so we keep on keeping on until collapse solves the problem for us, albeit with the fuss and muss of mass death and suffering.

[williatw]

The lesson of history is that even if we learn, we are never able to bring ourselves to implement the lessons. The costs are too painful, and so we keep on keeping on until collapse solves the problem for us, albeit with the fuss and muss of mass death and suffering.

How many people died during the Dust bowl and Great Depression?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_di ... death_toll

Wikipedia lists the death toll for both as "unknown" doesn't even look like they were willing to even hazard a guess.

Study: Life and death during the Great Depression

The Great Depression had a silver lining: During that hard time, U.S. life expectancy actually increased by 6.2 years, according to a University of Michigan study published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Life expectancy rose from 57.1 in 1929 to 63.3 years in 1932, according to the analysis by
U-M researchers José A. Tapia Granados and Ana Diez Roux. The increase occurred for both men and women, and for whites and non-whites.

"The finding is strong and counterintuitive," said Tapia Granados, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). "Most people assume that periods of high unemployment are harmful to health."

http://phys.org/news173371667.html

Great Depression Had Little Effect on Death Rates

But a new study in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health questions that idea. The researchers examined mortality rates from 114 U.S. cities in 36 states between 1929 and 1937 along with data on bank suspensions, which were used as an indicator of the impact of the financial crisis in the individual states.

They found declines in deaths due to pneumonia, flu and tuberculosis and increases in deaths from heart disease, cancer and diabetes. But none of those causes of death were associated with bank suspensions, and only the increase in deaths from heart disease could plausibly relate to the economic depression, the scientists write.

Two causes of death did correlate with the pattern of bank suspensions: suicide rates rose but motor vehicle accidents declined, so much so that they outweighed the increase in suicides.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... -46713514/

Came across another probably questionable source that claimed 7 million died during depression:

Researcher: Famine Killed 7 Million in U.S. During “Great Depression”

Another online scandal has been gathering pace recently. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, deleted an article by a Russian researcher, who wrote about the USA’s losses in the Great Depression of 1932-1933. Indignant bloggers began to actively distribute the article on the Russian part of a popular blog service known as Livejournal. The above-mentioned article triggered a heated debate.

The researcher touched upon quite a hot topic in the article – the estimation of the number of victims of the Great Depression in the USA. The material presented in the article apparently made Wikipedia’s moderators delete the piece from the database of the online encyclopedia.

The researcher, Boris Borisov, in his article titled “The American Famine” estimated the victims of the financial crisis in the US at over seven million people. The researcher also directly compared the US events of 1932-1933 with Holodomor, or Famine, in the USSR during 1932-1933.

In the article, Borisov used the official data of the US Census Bureau. Having revised the number of the US population, birth and date rates, immigration and emigration, the researcher came to conclusion that the United States lost over seven million people during the famine of 1932-1933.

[Diogenes]

Skynet? Or some other cybernetic overlord?

I'm a computer guy, and I wouldn't trust a computer with unlimited rule any more than I'd trust any human or group of humans.

Trust is a relative term; I am sure once our future silicon lords and masters are done correcting your defects you will be full of "trust"; after all how much trust does a neither "K" or "r" selected cyborg drone need?

Getting to be less and less of a far out scenario with each passing year.

[Diogenes]

Please explain then how limited government was our founding creed? Was prosperity so great? Was it an r favoring era?

Easy enough. Life was so hard that people didn't have time for stupid indulgences like puffing their brains out.

As there was no problem, there was no need for a solution.

Too simple. r/K selection is a function of resources, and the universal desire for "more!" is a drive to increase resources. There must be some sort of tipping point where K-selection switches to r-selection due to resource availability.

I agree that there is, but that tipping point would not appear to be in 1776 America. Yes, my response was over simplified, but it was more intended to be funny and pointed than it was to be serious. I find I have little interest in taking seriously the latest sermon from the church of the green weed.