A new study further supports my Universalism-Tribalism conceptualization. Cultures historically defined as collectivist are instead tribal cultures where one's duties and responsibilities are toward family and friends rather than toward society as a whole. As such, people from tribal cultures tend to be more willing to lie to help a friend and less willing to return a lost wallet to help a stranger

Source: doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-0…

The problem with Entropic Altruists controlling AI is that they will weave kind lies into the fabric of social reality, and kind lies make systems dysfunction. Dysfunction means your life gets worse. This happens because their model of what makes countries functional or corrupt, rich or poor, is wrong. Their understanding is based on the Acemoglu institutions model. This model predicts that sustained immigration from perpetually poor and corrupt countries would have no lasting ill effects on the quality of institutions. Data say otherwise. The truth about advanced civilization is that it ultimately depends on people with the traits conducive to large-scale cooperation, and that disposition is not evenly distributed around the world. Rather, people high in honesty toward strangers, cognitive ability, and patience are most commonly found among populations shaped by millennia of cold winters and agricultural history. Cooperate with non-kin or die. I love my psychologically exceptional tropical kings and queens, and many of them love me back, but mass unselected immigration from their ancestral homelands would tilt the West toward small-scale cooperation and, thus, corruption and lower living standards. Contra Acemoglu, the sum of the evidence shows that people shape institutions more than institutions shape people. Just as bottlenecks rule manufacturing, Meijer’s Law rules human systems. What’s slowest and hardest to change—biology, psychology, culture—shapes human systems most because everything else is built on top of it. You can’t build a liberal democracy on top of tribal dispositions. It has been tried many times and failed every time. If you don't anchor yourself in reality, you will optimize for entropy, regardless of how altruistic you purport yourself to be

The trick leftists use to deceive you (and, most importantly, themselves) is to focus solely on proximal causes rather than intermediate and distal causes. Leftists do so because proximal causes look plausibly environmental, and the solution to environmental problems is more power to themselves. In truth, the modern environment is strongly influenced by genetics. It is one of the most replicable within-country findings in behavioral genetics. It is also what the between-country economic data show from 500 years of human migration. As for the ancestral environment, it shaped population genetics at a time when the environment was less malleable than genes. In economics, this leftist trick translates into Acemoglu winning the 2024 Nobel Prize for the idea that institutions [proximal cause] are the fundamental cause of wealth, even while the Committee for the Nobel Prize acknowledges that his empirical strategy cannot disentangle the effects of inclusive institutions from the independent effects of the European settlers' human capital [intermediate cause]. The truth is that populations with the biopsychological traits conducive to large-scale cooperation, such as honesty toward strangers, cognitive ability, and patience, tend to be better at developing strong institutions and thus richer. It used to be that we could tell the truth in academia, but leftist capture means we now need to post on X