alt Hacker News> I think you're forgetting to control for the fact that the former would be severely punished for doing so, and the latter would be severely punished for not doing so? > What if you paid them equally to do the same things?
I think the larger point is that rewarding bombing, or paying bank officers to evict people from their homes is how the superorganism functions. Your counter examples are like saying 'what if fire was cold instead of hot', well then it wouldn't be fire anymore.
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I dispute that? There are plenty of e.g. countries that don't bomb others, especially not for "no reason". (!) And the whole point here was about individuals behaving differently when part of the collective, not about the collective having been set up with different incentives and rules than the individuals were in the first place. You can have collectives with better incentives set up and achieve more humane outcomes. Like I said, such examples really exist, they're not hypothetical.
It is carrots and sticks all the way down...
There is no human superoganism, and the reason we’re doomed as a temporary species is precisely that humans cannot act eusocially as a superorganism.
By your definition the Moscow Metallica show, Jan 6th riots, etc… were superorganisms and that’s not even barely applicable
Humans expressing group behaviors at some trivial number for a trivial period (<1M people for <2 days is the largest sustained group activity I’m aware of) is the equivalent of a locust swarm not even close to a superorganism
To use a quote from of those large corporate leaders (Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger):
"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome"