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Simulating Green Beard Altruism

Primer · 4.5M views · 2021-03-27 · 13:23

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Overview

Primer simulates green beard altruism, where individuals recognize and help others carrying a shared marker, and shows how imposters affect its evolution. It is an animated evolution simulation based on published papers.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as part of Primer's strong series of evolution and emergence simulations.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2021–2021

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What people said

jedimastert · 2021-03 · Strong recommendation

Coding Aventure is one of my favorite intellectual(?) exploration channels, along with Primer, who's had a great string of genetic/evolution simulation videos exploring the emergent evolution of society [VIDEO]

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qvrjuec · 2021-06 · Recommendation

Also, "The Selfish Gene". Super fun read. Also, there are a bunch of really interesting videos made to demonstrate concepts like the evolution of altruism on youtube: [VIDEO]

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ghgdynb1 · 2021-04 · Recommendation

Happy you found it helpful! The final section (imposters) of this [1] simplified exploration of “green beard altruism” might be of interest to you if you want to explore this further. If you’re interested in thinking about things like this generally, these are Nash equilibrium problems and the field is called game theory. In answer: if we do discard the assumptions of game theory and we imagine nobody would ever think to “cheat,” it could work. But in reality it wouldn’t be just that some countries have huge advantages in some industries— they would have huge advantages in every industry. People and companies looking to maximize their opportunities would flee to the country with the lowest effective (nominal doesn’t matter) tax rate which could also guarantee their safety. This is actually part of how the US ended up burying the Soviet Union/eastern Bloc with economic productivity— we kept poaching all their best engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and entrepreneurs. [1] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Primer, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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