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  "map_content": "The reason that conservatives are such losers is that everything they want to conserve is doomed from the start. \n\nIn biology there is a mostly discredited idea called group selection which was a theory about how biologists attempted to explain altruism in animals back in the early 20th century. What biologists have understood since then is that individual selection is much stronger than group selection, which means that an animal's instincts will be much more attuned to its own survival and reproduction and it will not sacrifice its own reproduction for the survival of the group. Any behavior that appears to be something like self-sacrifice for the survival of the group is actually going to serve the animal's individual reproduction in some way that is not visible unless you look closer. \r\n\r\nFor example, suppose that there is a group  of animals and we observe that they risk their own lives by exposing themselves to act as guards that will warn the rest of the group if there is a predator. This behavior appears to be self-sacrifice and early 20th century biologists may have proposed a group selectionist theory for this behavior by saying that the reason the animals are guards is because if they were not, the group would be exterminated by predators, and therefore they would die and fail to reproduce. However, you would probably find, if you looked into it, that a better explanation for guarding is that the guards are male and that the females prefer successful guards because guarding tends to eliminate bad DNA (bad guards get eaten by predators) and therefore successful guards have more offspring. Thus, the animals are not really self-sacrificing in order to product the group. Really they cannot reproduce unless they are guards and successfully avoid predators. Biology is individualist, not collectivist. \r\n\r\nIt seems that the idea of group selection, though theoretically flawed, is enshrined into human instinct, which means that people prefer group selectionist explanations out of proportion to the facts and that they make similar mistakes over and over again that they wouldn't if they were doing some other kind of science that is farther removed from everyday experience. \n\nGoing back to animals, let's say something happens that makes it impossible for females to keep track of who was a successful guard. Then it no longer makes sense for males to be guards. Conservatives are like animals who are saying \"we need to bring back guarding because otherwise our group will be overrun by predators\". Unfortunately, that argument makes no sense and if you keep trying to be a guard, you just increase your chances of getting eaten. \n\nThe difference between humans and animals is that human groups are based on ideas rather than a physical separation. That means their value to you in  in terms of promoting your own reproduction can change really quickly, over the span of a lifetime. There is no group that can offer reproductive benefits forever and nothing can rescue it after it is done because of the opportunity cost. Conservatives are group selectionists who prefer to kill themselves trying to rescue things that are already dead. \n\nInstead of doing that, let's start an individualist group that's based on strategizing about reproduction together. That would be an empire that could really take over the world and undermine all other groups.",
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  "timestamp": "2024-01-12T17:05:40.000Z",
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