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A couple of things within human preferences/behavior that seem maybe natural abstractions-shaped.
Epistemic status: more speculation; part of it wound up taking me way out of my lane; maybe something interesting to be noticed in the general neighborhood by people who know more than me so seemed worth throwing out there. A chunk of this one is me quoting Opus.
1) Mathematical constants / simply-described quantities showing up in our aesthetic preferences (specifically phi and whole number ratios for musical consonances). In the sense of those being things that existed in the background logic of the environment/in some level of our prior, that transmitted down the chain of our evolution to show up in our final preference. My initial writing of anything about this was a (tired and vague) question to Opus about phi showing up in visual aesthetics as maybe a natural abstractions or reflective fixpoint kinda thing (probably would ask about art architecture as the example today instead of body to avoid incorporating pop culture-sorta epistemics.) Opus in replying mentioned a study by Griffiths & Kalish (2007). Excerpt from its response:
[Prompt: Golden ration/phi as both a mathematical constant and human preference in stimuli (including one that we select body plans of mates along eg. contours/proportions and lines described by that). Natural abstractions-pilled in the sense of simple mathematical constants transmitting through the telephone game of preference evolution/iterative goodharting as the species evolves and has its preferences evolve/has reflection influence that?
The constant as a fixpoint under reflection, where fixpoints under reflection are a type of information legible at a distance?]
The cleanest formal version of your telephone game already exists. Griffiths & Kalish (2007) studied iterated learning, where each generation learns from the previous generation's outputs. They showed that under Bayesian learners the chain converges to the learners' prior, whatever the starting data. So what survives transmission over distance is the inductive bias. A simple constant persists only if the bias favors it. That fits natural abstractions well: convergence erases initial conditions, so the fixpoint carries information about the operator rather than the history. Any independent observer running the same operator lands in the same place. I think "legible at a distance" is exactly right in that sense. [Opus later amended this saying:]
[Opus then mentioned consonance and dissonance in music, and the thing of consonances having] "small integer ratios (2:1, 3:2, 4:3), because the harmonic series sets the auditory system's prior."
It wound up amending the part about consonance as well mentioning a study by McDermott et al. (2016) that maybe provides evidence for consonance preference having a cultural conditioning piece.
2) Political polarization. If I think about a prior transmitting through some learning chain, I wind up with a plausible-seeming picture of what happens here being "an Identify Friend/Foe, or maybe Shutdown Button or competitor-shaped prior as the thing that survives transmission down the chain of what could be conceptualized as a sequence of updates towards perceiving the environment as more densely adversarial, ie. something decomposable into successive updates toward seeing more risk incurred if one is nuanced in one's relation to a counterparty on both small and large scales. Which we perceive as some sort of pressure to be less nuanced." And this seems to fit the temporal picture with eg. purity/loyalty spirals being part of what militates against nuance and also being things where you can trace a history of how they spiral bit by bit.
So maybe there's something there with polarization that's abstraction or concept formation-like, with "legible-at-a-distance" generalized to include things like "distance in timesteps/inferential distance" "distance as progression or continuum such as a buildup of adversarial pressure. With the abstraction of ["this tribe is my enemy," yeets away subtlety in modeling their argument] as a thing that crystalizes as a useful tool under that pressure.