[FRIAM] Democracy and evolution

[Marcus G. Daniels]

PPARYSKI at aol.com wrote:
> In my experience those societies that have some homogeneity also are 
> the most tolerant and therefore diverse ideas do emerge. Sweden and 
> even Poland.
>  
Make the group like the individual and vice versa and then 
self-preservation is group-preservation, and vice versa.
It risks making the group slower moving, but a collective cognition is a 
potential economy of scale.  Does one want to optimize for diverse ideas 
or strong execution on a few ideas?  The latter can be very profitable 
and have excellent survival characteristics, especially in the United 
States.

David Breecker wrote:
> If Paul is correct, this is fascinating.  Perhaps there is some 
> minimum threshold of confidence in the integrity of our "self," beyond 
> which we can afford to be tolerant of the "other"
Not just integrity of self, but more-seriously the reliability of the 
leadership of the collective.   There's no point in serving an ideal 
that isn't individually beneficial if the ideal it serves has been 
compromised by corruption.    It seems to me a society (or organization) 
with sufficient wealth to nurture the development of complex skills, and 
a culture that valued full utilization of the individual, could be very 
healthy and still protect itself from competing strategies.  However, 
it's not clear that psychological health and performance are tightly 
correlated.   I mean, even if corporate workers are miserable, it 
depends whether they are operating at 20% or 80% mental efficiency 
compared to their peers in a more Utopian system.