Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
From: mfriedma@uucp (Michael Friedman)
Subject: Re: The Moat around God's Eye
Organization: Oracle Corporation
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 18:22:47 GMT
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In article <691@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen) writes:
>In article <1992Jul18.233515.28827@oracle.us.oracle.com> mfriedma@uucp (Michael Friedman) writes:
>|Mind telling us why we have absolutely no records of any losers in any
>|even semi-modern war doing this?  It would have been quite attractive
>|to people like Hitler or the Japanese in WWII.  If the Emperor had
>|gone into hiding we couldn't have taken away his god-hood.

>Hmm, you haven't heard of the Japanese soldiers that hid out for years
>after the war was over on remote Pacific islands?

You bet.  Isolated individuals living like natives without even
gunpowder who would be totally incapable of imposing their will on the
rest of the world even if a nuclear war knocked the rest of us back to
the stone age.

This supports my point.

>Also, in some cases where this sort of thing was tried, the ones doing it
>*won* the war (read Vietnam).

Note that we didn't have the will to nuke them.  That won;t be a
problem in a Motie style disaster.

>Remember, it is largely a matter of motivation.  I suspect that the Emporer
>was not really all that enamored of being a god.  He certainly seemed to
>have a genuine concern for the Japanese people, instead of just for his own
>comfort.  But if he had thought the Americans would ruthlessly eliminate
>Japanese culture?  What would have happened then?  Oh, we might well have
>won the war, but I suspect that many Japanese nationalists would have
>buried themselves deep in the mountains, just like the individual soldiers
>did further out in the Pacific.

Well, you can suspect anything you want but can you provide any
evidence that this is possible?  So far you haven't.

>|High fecundity is difficult or impossible for large species.  The
>|majority of species, however, are microorganisms and they tend to rely
>|on fecundity.

>Yep, but the Moties are a *large* species, which is the point.

Much like us.  Mind explaining why we aren't going to hit a Motie
style disaaster in a hundred years or less?  Maybe they are just like
us but only a little faster.  

>|Anyway, the key point was the assumption of the prior poster that
>|unlimited fecundity was avoided by species to avoid crashes.  This is
>|clearly incorrect if you know anything about genetics.  The poster is
>|falling into the old and hackneyed evolution for the good of the
>|species trap.

>No, I was not.  Large scale starvation is bad for *each* *individual*,
>and having fewer kids to avoid this is an *individual* advantage.

But having more kids while your stupid relatives are nicely having
fewer is an individual advantage.  Where is the disincentive for
cheaters in your model?

>|>Almost all of the species called 'K-strategists' do so, though not
>|>*consciously*, or by *intent*, but merely due to programming.

>|Incorrect.  They restrain growth for a different reason - because it
>|is a better survival strategy for their offspring as opposed to the
>|offspring of other humans, not because it avoids a crash that is bad
>|for all humans.

>The point is that it is the *crashes* that *make* it a bad individual
>strategy.  K-strategy species do quite well ate establishing stable
>population sizes.

Wrong.  The crashes never happen so they have no effect on evolution.
What makes it a bad individual strategy is the difficulty of providing
for your offspring in a near-crash environment.

To make this a bit clearer, if it is the crash that is key please
explain why cheating is not a winning evolutionary strategy.
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Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA