One reason I champion mediocrity is that alternative is obviously dystopian: Upper class of exceptional superhumans Middle class of robots Lower class of broken, institutionalized people who failed to be exceptional, and regressed right past human mean to “driven crazy.”
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The polyannish hope is basically Lake Wobegon: almost everybody “above average” in some magical sense with maybe a few broken people in nice, humane 5-star mental institutions. This does not track with regression to the mean.
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Human basic material well-being floor can and does improve (everything from infant mortality to protein intake to height) but the amount of mediocrity in the system decreases much more slowly and I think has a hard lower limit. Why?
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Dimensionality of human experience! Well-known statistics fact: high dimensional distributions have more “weight” at the extremes. You need more “ways to human” to move more people from mediocre to exceptional (if you want to do that at all).
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You can have Lake Wobegon if there’s as many ways to excel as people. Everybody gets humaning participation trophy for being best at something. The problem with this is a) there’s no grounding in survival/adaptation truth signal b) it’s not actually a fun human condition
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Replying to @vgr
Survival/adaptation truth signal is entirely about what helps you breed. By this standard the only thing worth being good at is bedding the ladies/gents and protecting your offspring. Everything else we trophy for is arbitrary.
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That’s selfish gene for biological evolution across generations. I’m mainly talking life-scale and memetic evolution which has similar dynamics but has little to do with reproduction.
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