Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dllthomas 4292 days ago
Only if we let it be.
1 comments

That's not really true. There's a very serious collective action problem and limits on what humans (can) find genuinely attractive.

Which is why I added "in the modern world." In a tight-knit community sociopathic traits are probably much less beneficial than in an atomized, largely anonymous society.

We address some collective action problems, with varying degrees of success (certainly, some things we fail horribly at are collective action problems).

My statement wasn't meant to say, "Oh, it's simple, we just X!" Just that it's not necessarily outside the realm of things we could address. In particular, "adaptive" - when it comes to humans - is only relevant at time scales of many generations. Much changes over those time scales.