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What is Ubuntu? 
The Ubuntu Party believes that gradual change, combined with firm empirical analysis of outcomes, will permit them to be achieved in decades or centuries. However, the Party encourages open and constant debate even within its own ranks, and its goals are constantly criticized, challenged, and interpreted. Moreover, their program appears to be working. Citizens of Earth raised under Ubuntu show profound psychological changes compared to historical baselines. They refuse all orders in the Milgram paradigm. They are at times disobedient and uncooperative to the point of accepting their own deaths, but at other times highly cooperative and structured. They show reduced speaker attribution error. They do not exhibit the fundamental attribution error in experimental tests. They consciously compensate for the availability heuristic. They exhibit reduced self-serving bias, confirmation bias, and hindsight bias (the latter is particularly remarkable as it was believed to be strongly neurally determined). They show enhanced need for cognition, reduced need for closure, and no omission bias (a core component of their moral philosophy). Hyperbolic discounting is decreased, as is endowment effect, which may contribute to smooth free-market economics. They still exhibit strong loss aversion and mere exposure effect. They show fewer negative implicit attitudes on extrinsic association tasks and remote association tasks with Vasudans and outgroup members. For those uninitiated in modern cognitive science, Ubuntu citizens display, to varying degrees, a change in what were generally considered universal human heuristic biases. This appears to be an explicit result of education about these biases and how to control them, rather than a product of any form of biological selection. It is, in short, a specific form of discipline. How did such a government gain power? Why are we at war with it? Why is it an illegitimate organization? What is the relationship between the Party and the Federation? What is the Council of Elders? Who are the Fedayeen? What is the UEF's military history? What are the psychological strengths of Federation citizens? What are the weaknesses? What is our strategy against the UEF? What are the potential consequences of a failure to secure Sol? |