{"id":6586,"date":"2014-12-19T11:23:30","date_gmt":"2014-12-19T16:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6586"},"modified":"2014-12-19T14:00:07","modified_gmt":"2014-12-19T19:00:07","slug":"open-source-theory-is-rooted-in-evolutionary-psychology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6586","title":{"rendered":"Open source theory is rooted in evolutionary psychology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I realized, quite a few years after I should have, that I have never identified in public where I got the seed of the idea that I developed into the modern economic theory of open-source software &#8211; that is, how open-source \u201caltruism\u201d could be explained as an emergent result of selfish incentives felt by individuals. So here is some credit where credit is due.<\/p>\n<p>Now, in general it should be obvious that I owed a huge debt to thinkers in the classical-liberal tradition, from Adam Smith down to F. A. Hayek and Ayn Rand. The really clueful might also notice some connection to Robert Trivers&#8217;s theory of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reciprocal_altruism\">reciprocal altruism under natural selection<\/a> and Robert Axelrod&#8217;s work on tit-for-tat interactions and the evolution of cooperation.<\/p>\n<p>These were all significant; they gave me the conceptual toolkit I could apply successfully once I&#8217;d had my initial insight.  But there&#8217;s a missing  piece &#8211; where my initial breakthrough insight came from, the moment when I realized I <em>could<\/em> apply all those tools.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The seed was in the seminal 1992 anthology <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Adapted_Mind\">The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture<\/a>. That was full of brilliant work; it laid the foundations of evolutionary psychology and is still worth a read.<\/p>\n<p>(I note as an interesting aside that reading science fiction did an excellent job of preparing me for the central ideas of evolutionary psychology.  What we might call &#8220;hard adaptationism&#8221; &#8211; the search for explanations of social behavior in evolution under selection &#8211; has been a central theme in SF since the 1940s, well before even the first wave of academic sociobiological thinking in the early 1970s and, I suspect, strongly influencing that wave. It is implicit in, as a leading example, much of Robert Heinlein&#8217;s work.)<\/p>\n<p>The specific paper that changed my life was this one: <cite>Two Nonhuman Primate Models for the Evolution of Human Food Sharing: Chimpanzees and Callitrichids<\/cite> by W.C.McGrew and Anna T.C.Feistner.<\/p>\n<p>In it, the authors explained food sharing as a hedge against variance. Basically, foods that can be gathered reliably were not shared; high-value food that could only be obtained unreliably was shared.<\/p>\n<p>The authors went on to observe that in human hunter-gatherer cultures a similar pattern obtains: gathered foods (for which the calorie\/nutrient value is a smooth function of effort invested) are not typically shared, whereas hunted foods (high variance of outcome in relation to effort) are shared. Reciprocal altruism is a hedge against uncertainty of outcomes.<\/p>\n<p>I think I read this in 1993 or 1994. When I was casting about for a generative explanation of open-source commons behavior a few years later, what came to mind is that coding is like hunting rather than gathering \u2013 a high-variance activity (sometimes you succeed, sometimes you fail spectacularly, and outcomes are uncertain) which thus evokes instinctive reciprocal gifting.<\/p>\n<p>That idea &#8211; software cooperation as risk-hedging &#8211; would drive every other central theme in my analysis.  Rapid release cycles?  Process transparency? Open source itself? Check, check, and check &#8211; all ways to maximize the effectiveness of reciprocal altruism as a hedge against risk. <\/p>\n<p>By the time I got this far, I realized that I already knew how to reason about the resulting cooperative equilibria.  I could bring in the entire apparatus of neoclassical and Austrian economics!  Applying it was a little tricky because the relevant markets weren&#8217;t monetized, but my long history as a libertarian helped &#8211; it meant I had actually been paying attention when people like Gary Becker and David D. Friedman explored reciprocal altruism in non-monetized markets.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the fact that I developed a model that made sense in the language of economics later became tremendously important.  It made the pitch to the business mainstream intellectually almost trivial.  Took a lot of hard work and propaganda to get the message across, but almost no serious thinking.<\/p>\n<p>Part of the point of this explanation, though, is that the evolutionary-psych insight actually came first and the economics second. I never lost sight of the fact that none of the market mechanisms supporting open-source behavior would work quite the way they do if we weren&#8217;t genetically pre-adapted to <em>feel<\/em> reciprocally altruistic in the presence of high variance of outcomes.<\/p>\n<p>There you have it, intellectual historians.  You no longer have to speculate about the effect of evolutionary psych on my thinking.  The connection was short,  straight, and solid. I&#8217;ve sent email to  McGrew (I couldn&#8217;t find an email address for Feistner) because he deserves to know too.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Dr. McGrew has sent me a surprised and pleased reply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I realized, quite a few years after I should have, that I have never identified in public where I got the seed of the idea that I developed into the modern economic theory of open-source software &#8211; that is, how open-source \u201caltruism\u201d could be explained as an emergent result of selfish incentives felt by&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6586\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Open source theory is rooted in evolutionary psychology<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6586"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6592,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6586\/revisions\/6592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}