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by dredmorbius
149 days ago
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Interesting, and thanks for the copy. Thought I've had for a while is that there seems to be a significant difference between exogenous and endogenous selection processes. The biological equivalent would be "mating preferences", which leads to numerous otherwise paradoxical characteristics (peacock's tail, deer antlers, etc.), though those often serve a signalling function. I've long suspected that various ethno-nationalist and eugenics ideologies share a similar fault. I'm not entirely sure that these are distinct from other local-maxima stable points, though I suspect they're not. Exogenous selectors tend not to have confounded biases, one would think. Looking forward to seeing what Bateson's views are here. |
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One way to translate your exogenous/endogenous split into his language is: runaway happens when the “selection function” gets trapped inside the system it’s selecting, so the feedback loop selects for its own reinforcement rather than for wider viability. Sexual selection is the clean biological example because preferences can become an internal amplifier: once a trait becomes a strong signal, the preference and the trait can co-evolve into something locally stable but globally costly (tails, antlers, etc.).
Where Bateson gets especially sharp is on schismogenesis (i.e., interaction patterns that escalate because each side’s behavior becomes the stimulus for more of the same). In that sense, a lot of ethno-nationalist / eugenic thinking looks like an attempt to institutionalize a narrowing selection function (“select for X”), while simultaneously insulating it from the broader ecology of feedback (social, economic, moral, informational) that would normally check it. That’s how you get stable local maxima that are brittle and, often, destructive.
On exogenous selectors, though, I’d be cautious. External selectors can absolutely be less confounded by local identity incentives, but they also bring their own blind spots (mis-specified metrics, distance from consequences, Goodhart effects). Bateson’s recurring warning is basically that the more you collapse your evaluation to a single axis, the easier it is to optimize yourself into a corner.
If you want a specific thing to watch for as you read Ecology, keep an eye on how often he treats “pathology” as a property of relationships and feedback, not of individuals. That’s the bridge between mating preferences, ideology, and organizational dynamics.