Name: Supercooperators
ISBN: 9781451626636

Supercooperators

"Everyone is familiar with Darwin's revolutionary idea about the survival of the fittest, and most people agree that it works, but Darwin's famous theory has one major chink. If life is about survival of the fittest, then why would we risk our own life to jump into a river to save a stranger? Some people argue that issues such as charity, fairness, forgiveness and cooperation are evolutionary loose ends, side issues that are of little consequence. But as Harvard's celebrated evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak explains in this ground-breaking book, cooperation is central to the four-billion-year-old puzzle of life. Cooperation is fundamental to how molecules in the primordial soup crossed the watershed that separates dead chemistry from biochemistry. Cooperation is the key to understanding why language evolved, an event that is as significant as the evolution of the first primitive organism. The book also brings to light Nowak's game-changing work on disease. Cancer is fundamentally a failure of the body's cells to cooperate but organs are cleverly designed to foster cooperation and, as Nowak explains, this new understanding can be used in novel cancer treatments. In his first book for a wide audience, this hugely influential scientist explains his cutting-edge research into the mysteries of cooperation, from the rise of multicellular life to Good Samaritans.

What Hacker News says

hackrnusrMar 2023

If you believe that the child of this donor

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/07/mit-gets-a-140m-anonymous-...

has the same chances of being accepted to MIT as yours or mine, regardless of test scores, then "I've got some property overlooking South Beach down on Martha's Vineyard that I'd like to sell you," as Alan Dershowitz recently told a news reporter :)

Regarding your degree of faith in the ability of humans to cooperate without ever defecting, let me refer you to this aptly entitled book:

https://www.amazon.com/SuperCooperators-Altruism-Evolution-O...

How do you think Harvard and MIT helped Mr. Jeffrey Epstein evade prosecution on the child sex-trafficking charges for over thirty years?

Type into your favorite search engine: "Martin Nowak Jeffrey Epstein Alan Dershowitz and the legal definition of a Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization" if you need a refresher.

And quite frankly, I could care less who MIT or Harvard accepts these days. Admission to these schools has become nothing more than a modern-day equivalent of the 'beauty pageants' of yesteryear ... for all of the nerdy teenagers who don't look good enough in a bathing suit for Mr. Epstein apparently:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/fbi-want...

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locopatiAug 2011

SuperCoorperators is an interesting book exploring these ideas

http://www.amazon.com/Supercooperators-Mathematics-Evolution...

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psychoslaveFeb 2023

>It is not conscious or "sentient" but it certainly is able to build answers to queries that utilize true understanding of the query it was given.

What do you mean with "true understanding" here? Asking a computer to solve say, multiplication of large numbers, and it will provide the correct expected answer, with speed and and accuracy that outperform any human out there.

Should we say that such a calculator application "understand" arithmetic?

>I don't know why people are constantly downplaying the AI.

Maybe that’s in a balance with "everybody seeing the raise to conscious understanding of AI" each time a new credibly-human-like-output is generated?

Just like pareidolia: "yes there is obviously something that evokes a visage in that rock" doesn’t have to be interpreted as a sign that Nature loves to purposefully sculpt human faces.

From an evolutionary perspective, we see faces everywhere just like we see sign of understanding in surrounding agents because it makes our species more efficient in social cooperation, which to my mind is by a very large margin our best asset.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human...

https://www.amazon.com/SuperCooperators-Altruism-Evolution-O...

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throwaway21210Jan 2020

Harvard Professor Mark Newman also has similar shading dealings with Epstein. His own book, SuperCooperators [1], has nearly 3 whole pages dedicated to describing his experiences on Jeffery Epstein's Island, thanking him for all his support and basically sucking up to him by describing his (Epstein's) incredible intelligence. Stephen Hawking even makes an appearance in these stories with a talk about how Epstein rented a submarine so Hawking could experience being underwater. Epstein occurs so frequently in Newman's own book that he even is listed in the index (you can view the index on amazon for free). The book was published in 2011 after Epstein's first convictions.

I find it very hard to believe all these scientist didn't know what was going on nor would I be surprised to find out they participated in it.

[1] (https://www.amazon.com/SuperCooperators-Altruism-Evolution-O...)

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