The paper they're citing mostly handwaves around the so-called "cure" as well, but that might really be for the best. It does have some more detail, though:
> In his early experiments in the outdoor pens, Calhoun had
witnessed a creative act by his rats that he likened to the discovery of the wheel by man: when building a new burrow they did not simply dig out the dirt as they went, as any normal rat would do, instead they packed it into a large ball which they then rolled out. This innovation had not come from the socially dominant animals but from a highly disorganized and predominantly homosexual group of subordinates, partially withdrawn from the larger social organization. As Calhoun saw it, the repression they had suffered at the hands of their superiors had resulted in deviant, creative, and thus adaptive behaviour. Inspired by this example, in his laboratory at NIMH, Calhoun attempted to design rodent universes that would both stimulate, resulting in “creative deviants,” and ameliorate: removing the worst excesses of crowding pathology.
Probably the most direct section is this:
> Through a variety of methods, such as operant conditioning and determining which of the mice and rats could eat, sleep, live, with whom, he sought to design ever more intelligent and collaborative rodent communities, capable of withstanding ever greater degrees of density. Here, then, was the hopeful agenda: if the wrong environment would drive us to destruction, perhaps the correct environment would be our remedy.
> Calhoun suggested organizing scientists into a global, intercommunicating network composed of independent but interconnected groups and sub-groups. Only then could the necessary conceptual growth to avoid a catastrophic sink be achieved. He claimed it was “toward a concern with science as a world system which must be understood if the human race is to survive.” He saw these attempts to defer social pathology as the centerpiece and real import of his work. Here was the profit, the positive signal from the noise of the behavioral sink.
> It was in through this growth in conceptual space – enabled by
the design of new buildings, new technologies, new social and
intellectual networks – that humanity was presented with a more
desirable future: what Calhoun called “Dawnsday” in opposition to von
Foerster’s “Doomsday.” All of mankind might become part of a single
“world brain,” consisting of numerous and diverse subsystems, each
interlinked to, aware of, and dependent upon, the other.
> As Calhoun saw it, the repression they had suffered at the hands of their superiors had resulted in deviant, creative, and thus adaptive behaviour.
Could it also be that the group was simply different, and suffered because it was different/non-dominant, but it was not the suffering that made them different to begin with? And getting away from the main group allowed them to do those things?
I would posit a utopia where there is such a thing as "dominant group" is not a utopia, after all.
I think there always will be "dominant groups", as long as being in group is more beneficial than not being in one - simply because even an uniform random distribution is not perfectly uniform when you build it point by point.
A dominant group is not one that is merely more beneficial. If there's a rat park somewhere that has happiness level 5, and the other rat park has happiness level 6, that doesn't mean one is dominant over the other. It just means one has more happiness than the other. And in an effort to not cause too many paperclip maximizers, let's define some acceptable margin of difference at which it doesn't really matter who's happier, I don't think the world will explode and the philosophical arguments are seriously not worth it.
Dominance is something else entirely and I staunchly disagree that this strictly evolutionary construct needs to persist forever.
> In his early experiments in the outdoor pens, Calhoun had witnessed a creative act by his rats that he likened to the discovery of the wheel by man: when building a new burrow they did not simply dig out the dirt as they went, as any normal rat would do, instead they packed it into a large ball which they then rolled out. This innovation had not come from the socially dominant animals but from a highly disorganized and predominantly homosexual group of subordinates, partially withdrawn from the larger social organization. As Calhoun saw it, the repression they had suffered at the hands of their superiors had resulted in deviant, creative, and thus adaptive behaviour. Inspired by this example, in his laboratory at NIMH, Calhoun attempted to design rodent universes that would both stimulate, resulting in “creative deviants,” and ameliorate: removing the worst excesses of crowding pathology.
Probably the most direct section is this:
> Through a variety of methods, such as operant conditioning and determining which of the mice and rats could eat, sleep, live, with whom, he sought to design ever more intelligent and collaborative rodent communities, capable of withstanding ever greater degrees of density. Here, then, was the hopeful agenda: if the wrong environment would drive us to destruction, perhaps the correct environment would be our remedy.
> Calhoun suggested organizing scientists into a global, intercommunicating network composed of independent but interconnected groups and sub-groups. Only then could the necessary conceptual growth to avoid a catastrophic sink be achieved. He claimed it was “toward a concern with science as a world system which must be understood if the human race is to survive.” He saw these attempts to defer social pathology as the centerpiece and real import of his work. Here was the profit, the positive signal from the noise of the behavioral sink.
> It was in through this growth in conceptual space – enabled by the design of new buildings, new technologies, new social and intellectual networks – that humanity was presented with a more desirable future: what Calhoun called “Dawnsday” in opposition to von Foerster’s “Doomsday.” All of mankind might become part of a single “world brain,” consisting of numerous and diverse subsystems, each interlinked to, aware of, and dependent upon, the other.
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/1/2308Ramadams.pdf