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Notes -
And this is obviously adaptive, for the simple reason that even if you can’t affect the world very much, behaving better can affect it at least a little bit, and probably make life better for you as well. Traditional ideologies have an upper limit to how maladaptive they can be because they have by definition been around long enough to weed out the worst ones.
On the other hand novel or progressive ideologies have no such upper limit; the failures of communism are the obvious example, but there’s thousands of others. Lobotomies, alcohol prohibition, these things died out because they turned out to be bad ideas. That’s not to say absolutely everything new is going to kill millions of people; that’s to say most ideas which go on to kill millions of people are new-ish at the time they’re tried.
So we should generally expect traditional ideologies to tend towards adaptive beliefs, and novel ideologies to have no particular tendency, irrespective of truth value in any which way. And that being said, while adaptive beliefs encourage adaptive behavior, they don’t necessitate it. Most people have at least some disconnect between their actions and beliefs, and we should expect adaptive behavior to be more associated with adaptive ends.
That is, I think, what the thread notes.
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