For money, my dad was a programmer, and my mom made presentation graphics for a finance firm. On the side they were missionaries, a pastor, and a writer. When she could retire from making money, my mom became a writer full-time, contributing to 30 of the 275 Chicken Soup books; ~20M people have probably read one of her essays there.

My two bothers were most recently a court bailiff and a pool cleaner for money, and on the side a musician and pastor. Their wives were a sales clerk and a legal secretary. My wife was a clinical social worker and her brother was a govt lawyer. ChatGPT (5.4) and Claude (4.7) estimate ~45-55, 50-60 as percentile ranks for this family overall in terms of job prestige.

I’m now a university professor, and my two sons are a programmer and an investment banker, so the three of us together get ~75,90 percentile estimates. Making my family solidly middle class, and me and my sons upper middle.

Workers often face a conflict between how their job has been define by the world and their training, and what their managers tell them to do on that job. Usually people succeed more when they accept boss framings, and higher class folks more tend to have this and other more successful habits.

Both LLMs say that this also happens more specifically in academia, where there’s a conflict between the job defined as intellectual process, i.e., helping the world better understand key abstract topics, and the job defined as what it takes to get prestige and resources. Lower class folks tend more to pursue that first definition. My class background is substantially lower than that of most academics, and I fit this pattern, as I see my job more in terms of intellectual progress, less in terms of resources and prestige.

At my mom’s funeral, I was reminded that such events involve much praising of the dead on various metrics. Which raises the question: what do you aspire to be praised on at your funeral, and in future historical mentions? It also a meta question: why don’t we write periodic essays on what we are trying to achieve in our lives, so that at our funerals folks can discuss how well we achieved our stated goals? Yes of course they could also discuss how well we achieved their other goals for us, but our own goals also seem quite relevant.

I would of course prefer that, at my death and after, and even well before, people praise me for all the usual virtues. But compared to others, I put a much bigger weight on intellectual progress. I want people to say, because it’s true, that I helped the world gain insight on important neglected potent topics. Important because that’s what matters, neglected because it is far easier to find big insights on those topics, and potent because the big win is when others build on my insights, and integrate them into larger shared systems, as part of a long process of civilization accumulating insight. And myself having insights isn’t that valuable compared to communicating them in ways so let others see and build on them.

At my funeral, please do ask yourselves how well I did at this.

So CEOs block the application of futarchy to firms. You might think that investors could just force CEOs to use futarchy, if that would max investor gains. But investors also can’t seem to prevent the adoption of poison pills, which also cut investor gains. It seems we must accept that top managers have power sufficient to induce firm outcomes that don’t max profits. Investors do not in fact fully control firms.

Okay, then what if we flip this script, and set decision markets to the task of directly achieving the selfish managerial ends that likely drive managerial power politics? Create a metric of the total success of an individual manager over their future career, and then make advisory power-futarchy markets that estimate this personal success given key choices under that manager’s power. And to discourage sabotage, give everyone who that might be able to act to greatly hurt this success a positive stake in that success, a stake they aren’t allowed to trade to below zero.

Would this supercharge power politics, via better informing political strategies? Plausibly this would improve both offensive and defense political choices, and also make political info more symmetric. Managers could less often win via strategies that rely on rivals not noticing their plans until too late. So might power-futarchy actually cut harms from firm politics? Maybe, relative to the alternative of no markets at all, helping managers have successful careers also on average helps firms to max profits.

Of course such markets may advise top managers to not create power-futarchy markets to aid their subordinates several levels below them. Such markets might even say to instead give such subordinates futarchy markets tied to key firm or division outcomes. If so, that might usefully limit the scope of power-futarchy. Yes, this might over time undermine support for power-futarchy, but maybe not before current managers achieved great success from it.

Some kinds of power politics strategies may be hindered by open markets estimating their power effectiveness. But we needn’t have such markets regarding all possible managerial choices. Though, yes, the choice to not create such a market on some key choice might be taken as a bad sign about the politics behind that choice. No doubt there would be many new tricks to be found when playing power-futarchy.

Our dominant world culture hates tribes, but loves factions, especially factions who we see as “down”. We hate groups who disagree with world elite consensus on school, medicine, democracy, gender equality, sexual freedom, legal due process, rules of just war, and norms of good parenting. And we hate tribe supporters for their self-favoritism and habitual hostility toward outsiders. About these things we see our dominant world tribe as just right, and the others evil.

But we love factions within this main tribe who embrace distinct symbols, and who fight for tribe norm reforms. We call this love “tolerance”. At least we love factions who we can plausibly see as “down” relative to “up” rivals. (We presume “up” illicitly hurts “down”.) We hate “up” faction members who promote their factions, and accuse them of actually representing hated tribes. We moderns tend to channel our instinctive human tendencies to be tribal into our factional conflicts. Not noticing how we need tribes far more than factions.

The big problem is that in history our moral norms and status markers came mostly from cultural group selection acting on tribes, not factions. By crushing all but one dominant tribe, we now mostly block such evolution from preventing the decay of shared norms, or their adaption to changing context. We now see this most clearly in the decay of norms supporting fertility, but such decay is plausibly also happening across all our key norms. Selection acting instead on factions can’t do this remotely as well. If such decay continues long, our civilization will fall, to be replaced by others.

Unfortunately, we find it hard to see this problem, as our moral norms and status markers seem to us as just obviously true, and thus good bases for any analysis. In contrast, we can see and appreciate fights among factions, as we can frame these in terms of our “obvious” shared norms. But that doesn’t help much to ensure that the winners of faction fights are more adaptive.

Instead of trying to repress competing tribes, as we usually do, we might try to instead promote them. But even that seems quite insufficient, as the main underlying reason that the world has over centuries been merging toward one big tribe is the increasing ease of distant trade, travel, and talk. Such merging has achieved great scale economies of production and innovation, and a great reduction in conflict harms, such as via war, due to increasingly shared norms. Most people really like having a world community with shared norms..

There are a few today, like the Amish and Haredim, who care enough to treat themselves as distinct tribes, and are willing to forgo many gains of world cultural integration to achieve this. Such folks insulate themselves culturally from the large world, and so are the folks today whose descendants are mostly likely to replace our dominant world culture. But few groups today are this devoted to becoming tribes. Most of the folks today interested in cultural variety, like “network state” folks, are not remotely this devoted, and so have little chance of creating new tribes.

I can see only three ways for our main world civ, which I treasure in many ways, to avoid being replaced like this. The first solution is to somehow greatly raise the status of tribes, relative to factions. Convince the world to fragment into far more tribes, not just factions. Tolerate and even encourage groups having quite deviant views on democracy, gender equality, etc. to favor themselves and isolate from outsiders.

The second solution is to leave the world mostly integrated into one big tribe, but to find new ways to control and govern how key moral norms and status markers are changed to become more adaptive. Such as via competent governments held strongly accountable to increase adaption futures estimates, or via using a competent futarchy to pursue sacred adaption-achieving goals like when a million people live in space.

The third solution is to vastly increase the role of for-profit orgs in setting our moral norms and status markers. The evolution of firm cultures has long been quite healthy, as firms form quite distinct groups facing strong capitalists selection pressures. And for-profit orgs competing to give customers key numbers and observable outcomes have quite consistently improved on such outcomes. Each area they came to control, such as buying and running governments, or paying parents to make kids they could in effect sell, would likely become more adaptive.

As you can plainly see, these are all big long-shots. Our situation is quite desperate. And not likely to get better until a lot more people start to think about it.

You may have heard that such *group selection* never happens, but that’s wrong. Not only do most cultural evolution scholars see group selection as a key force, group selection also seems to important in DNA evolution, where species are groups. The fact that more species today descended from fragmented habits like rivers, coral reefs, and rainforests, where habitats were smaller, suggests that group selection of species has actually mattered more for DNA than individual selection within species.

I’ve said previously that healthy cultural evolution for stuff like norms status markers depends on four key parameters: enough cultural variety, strong enough selection pressures on cultures, slow enough internal cultural drift, and slow enough rates of environmental change. But I have to admit that this first “variety” parameter is a sloppy way to talk about it. Counting the number of cultures would make sense if, as with species for DNA, there was only one clear scale at which people are joined into cultural groups. But in fact cultural behaviors cluster together at many different scales.

However, I’ve been doing some reading, and have found that for decades cultural evolution scholars have had a less-sloppy substitute concept: “network structure”. If you look at the details of who people interact with, and who they are likely to copy their behaviors from, the shape of the network of such ties matters a lot for cultural group selection.

For example, the network feature that most promotes group selection seems to be “modularity”, roughly how many more ties there are within clusters, compared to between clusters. It also matters how similar are people within clusters, how much overlap there is between interaction and emulation networks, how well prestige tracks adaptiveness, how much conformity pressure there is for a behavior, and how much that behavior effects visible outcomes that people care about.

Each different type of behavior can have its own different network, and its own different coordination scale, requiring group selection at that cluster scale or above in order to select adaptive versions of that behavior. But it seems clear that relevant scales for many kinds of behaviors have greatly increased over the last few centuries, greatly reducing the effective “variety” for the purposes of cultural evolution. And this is plausibly cutting the effect strength of group selection, likely enough to cause net maladaptive change to our norms and status markers.

Power Fights - Most stories are about conflict, and so most big stories are about fights. And long ago, most big stories (e.g., Illiad) focused on powers and alliances fighting within worlds that were relatively stable, especially re tech, and within a context of stable morals. As those didn’t change much, stories didn’t care much about them.

The simplest stories of this type focused on one particular fight, with a start, middle and end. More complex stories, on longer timescales, might depict a sequence of fights with relative peace in between. Even more complex versions might have old powers leave, new powers enter, and changing alliances between powers.

Moral Fights - Starting with religious stories, but then spreading to most centuries ago, the sides in fights acquired stronger moral colors. These fights were not just about power (i.e., dominance) but also moral persuasion (i.e, prestige). The simplest versions had good heroes fight bad villains (e.g., Lord of the Rings). More complex versions had many fighting sides, or all sides seeing themselves as good.

Some moral fight stories have a small group of activists trying to spread their new moral view to a wider world. A common feature here is that the world at story end likely has more or less good morality, depending on who wins the fights.

Unstable Tech - Our modern world often has tech and business changing fast on the timescales of big fights. Tech changes often favor particular sides of fights, and can call into question common assumptions in prior moral positions. Many science fiction stories highlight how tech changes can influence who wins, and how they can force one to reconsider basic moral commitments.

The simplest such stories present a world with quite different tech to ours, but where that tech doesn’t change much during the story (e.g., Dune). This helps readers see how tech differences might translate to fight and moral differences. More complex stories focus on one particular big tech change (e.g., Frankenstein), and show that one change affects who wins in fights, and key moral categories. The most complex stories show long fights in the context of a long history of many big tech changes.

Unstable Morals - I’ve lately become unhappy with science fiction, as I came to understand the basics of cultural evolution. Science fiction’s big or fast changing tech, even with shifting powers and alliances over centuries, are usually set in the context of quite stable morals. Yet in fact over the last century or so key values, norms, and morals have changed about as fast as tech, and due to pretty random and plausibly out-of-control cultural evolution. A similar failure happens when historical fiction sets characters with modern values as heroes against villains with old-style values.

So I’d like to see authors try to write big stories, of whole civilizations over long timescales, that more realistically depict cultural instability. Yes it can be comforting to see key characters long continuing to fight for the same shared moral causes, even as their powers, alliances, and tech change greatly. And it can be disturbing to see key morals changing as fast as tech, and nearly as arbitrarily. But the switch to Unstable Tech type stories similarly resulted from the disturbing realization that fast changing tech often upended our conflicts. And we seem to have managed that switch okay.

Traditional societies have discouraged, regulated, and banned many kinds of pleasures. Such as sleep, idleness, fancy or plentiful food, fancy clothes, travel, humor, music and dancing, gossip and small talk, drugs and intoxication, fiction, gaming, gambling, bragging, gossip, fighting, spanking, and many forms of sex including prostitution. They feared such pleasures distracting from work and piety.

Our world still bans many things, but pleasure isn’t usually a central consideration; we are far more indulgent and approving of pleasure. Yet we still do ban a few pleasures, including recreational drugs, dogfighting, corporal punishment, loan sharks, dwarf-tossing, gambling, and sex that is paid or with minors. Drugs, dogfighting, dwarf-tossing, corporal punishment, and loan sharks seem to be about physical harms, and also shame and empathy. Sex has long evoked deep complex opaque feelings.

But sports bets don’t involve shame, physical harm, or deep opaque feelings. We mostly approve of sports, and of people putting lots of time and energy into playing and watching sports. And sports bets complements those activities, making them more interesting, engaging, and better informed.

Yes, we dislike money all else equal, but we let money touch many adjacent areas. Yes, sports bets can waste time and money, but so do a great many allowed pleasures. Yes, they involve risk, but we let people take big risks in deciding who to date, and in longshot careers like acting, music, or athletics. Yes, sports bets resolve faster, but you can bet just as fast and big in ordinary financial markets. Yes, bookies once charged high fees, but new markets have far lower fees.

I guess I lean toward explaining banned sports bets as just a random exception to our usual historical trend, which seems a weak but good sign re how long we’ll let these new sports betting markets continue to be legal. Not my thing, but I usually don’t mind others having fun via their things.

Added 14Apr: Many point to the possibility of commitment problems, where people are tempted in the moment to do stuff they would want to commit ahead of time not to do. But it isn’t that hard to set up commitment mechanisms, and when we do few actually avail themselves of such options.

“The science in Project Hail Mary is all pretty firmly grounded. There’s some BS all the way down at the quantum level, where Astrophage cell membranes can keep neutrinos in… But outside of that, everything else just follows established physics and science.” - Andy Weir, author of Project Hail Mary

Unrealistic science fiction can be great, but folks should sometimes point out the the unrealism of particular stories, especially stories that are very popular, and widely said to be realistic, including by their authors.

Other have pointed to implausible physics and politics, but after reading two dozen reviews, I don’t find anyone else mentioning my three comments on Project Hail Mary:

Rare Event: In the story, a big dimming of our Sun and a dozen nearby stars happens over decades. This must be a very rare sort of event, or we’d have noticed this scenario before out there among the stars. It also can’t last that long or spread that far each time, before reverting to the usual star appearance.

Close Alien: Our hero meets an alien from a star roughly 20 lightyears from Earth, who is at a very similar level of tech development to us. For example, they haven’t yet discovered radiation or relativity. Say no more than a century different. In a 14Gyr old universe that level of time correlation seems crazy unlikely. Also, to have aliens that spatially close be typical, our universe must be chock full of civilizations. Which then must quite reliably die fast to produce our empty looking universe.

Similar Alien: They have different bodies and sensors, but once they manage to talk, our hero and alien get along better than would two random humans from human history. The alien’s culture is much like our hero’s culture, which is quite different from most other human cultures in history. This is worse than most historical fiction, which puts modern hero characters in old worlds.

Since 2023, it has been widely reported that LLMs seem quite good at coding, and that this seems their most promising application area. Global spending on software is ~$1-2T/yr, so potential big saving there soon might plausibly justify last year’s ~$0.5T/yr AI investment.

For many decades the demand for software has been large and elastic. Most firms have many software projects they’d like to do, which they don’t do mainly due to cost. And market leaders tend to be firms whose software investments went well. So if the total cost of software fell by a factor of two, total spending on software should more than double. That’s supply and demand. And AI getting a big cut of that increased spending soon might justify its investment.

Of course fielding useful software involves many tasks, including identifying opportunities, securing funding, overseeing projects, defining requirements, marketing, user support, and writing, testing, and maintaining code. Just making code writing much cheaper doesn’t obviously make total software cost much cheaper. Much depends on just how many of these other tasks can be made cheaper as well.

If AI is going to have a big impact, when should we expect to see it? Software projects typically take ~6-9 months from conception to delivery, though orgs can take 1-3 years to reorganize workflows, incentives, etc. to accommodate new techs. Legacy software may not be replaced for up to 3-10 years.

So it seems that one should expect to see substantial AI-driven changes to the scale of the software industry within roughly 3 years of a widespread consensus that AI makes it much cheaper. Which is about now if that consensus happened 3 years ago. Or in about 3 years if that happened one year ago.

The number of U.S. software workers increased by ~50% in the last decade, probably mostly due to falling costs. So we should expect an even faster growth in software spending if AI is in fact causing a big increase in the rate at which its costs fall.

And if we don’t see such a big increase in the next few years, that will suggests that AI does not actually cut software costs nearly as much as advocates hope. Which is of course the usual scenario for hyped new techs. And should lead to a crash.

Of course that’s the short run; we might still plausibly see a “general purpose tech” impact that takes several decades to play out, as we’ve seen previously for techs like steam, electricity, personal computers, and the internet.

Added 13Apr: After a long convo with Bram Cohen, here is my revised estimate. About as likely as not, AI will help the software industry grow in spending by a factor of 2-3 over the next decade, and gain 10-20% of software revenue, for $0.4-0.6T/yr revenue. AI will also gain as much revenue from all other industries combined, so total: ~$1T/yr.

But watching a documentary on early activist H.D. Thoreau brought home to me just how huge an ask this seems. Our modern world has come to deeply adore and revere changing its morals fast via youth movements, and a great many features of our modern world support this new pattern.

For example, youths are generally more risk-taking, emotionally expressive, eager to impress potential mates, less invested in prior arrangements, and better able to bond together into groups. Which attracts youths to the chance to skip the usual dues to rise fast in status as leaders of new tightly-bonded emotional youth movements.

Helping further, we legitimized fashions, seeing those who first adopt new popular changes as more virtuous. And we put kids together in high school and college, where they have more time for activism, bond into their own youth cultures, and are taught to see the world more abstractly and thus morality more simply and universally. Also, better communication tech has let them coordinate faster across wider distances.

Finally, the modern world has widely adopted the views (a) that morality is a whole separate realm where the usual adult knowledge and experience are less relevant, (b) that moral opinions should from come authentically from within, and (c) that youthful opinions on morals tend to be less corrupted by habit and self-interest.

All of this has created a perfect storm encouraging youth to repeatedly make and join new internal-feelings-driven moral crusades, movements maximally suspicious of opposing older adults with ties of interest and habits to the existing order.

Could we apply industry to more strongly to manage this process? For example, by paying big orgs to create, suppress, and influence such movements to achieve key metrics. Yes, big orgs do substantially influence youth movements today, but mostly from behind the scenes. And these are mostly not for-profit orgs, and our world is pretty hostile to for-profit orgs operating outside their usual scopes, especially in sacred areas like moral activism. Social media feed algorithms seem to be the main form of this now, but I doubt they could do that much more than they do now.

We should do our best to try, but damn does this look hard.

Hayek, however, seems fine with using reason to choose within big firms, and he admits that cultural evolution (a) has often induced simpler societies to prevent such capitalism, (b) has often induced governments to greatly hinder capitalism in their later civilization periods, and (c) seems a proximate cause of the recent rise of interest in socialism. So why not estimate that the levels of capitalism and reason use that we seem to be drifting toward are in fact the most adaptive? Why see all that as a mistake?

Hayek seems to actually rely here not on cultural evolution, but instead on his theoretical economic analysis, together with empirical correlations between capitalism and places and periods that have had especially large wealth and growth. Which allows him to conclude that allowing cultural evolution to push us far enough away from capitalism now would plausibly result in the fall of our civilization, causing many deaths and much suffering. Which would be bad more because suffering is bad, and less because cultural evolution would go awry.

Behind Hayek’s argument there, however, seems to be a judgment that our modern world looks especially vulnerable to appeals to deeply embedded ancient moral instincts, and to flattery about our abilities to reason. However, as he never says this explicitly, Hayek never offers arguments for why we should expect to be more vulnerable to such things now.

This is where I offer cultural drift analysis as a complement to Hayek’s story. At the level of cultural features that we can only vary effectively in large groups, over the last few centuries our civilization has drifted toward less variety, weaker selection pressures, and faster rates of change of culture and environments. All of which does plausibly make us more vulnerable to flattery and simplistic moral appeals undermining our commitments to morals supporting capitalism.

However, such analysis also predicts that these same forces make us vulnerable to many more fatal conceits, i.e., to decay in many other key features of our shared culture. Does Hayek also fear and warn against excess trust in reason and moral instincts there? Is it feasible for us to reason well enough to usefully overturn other non-capitalist morals that we have inherited from cultural evolution? Hayek said:

Rebellion against private property and the family was, in short, not restricted to socialists. … Limits of space as well as insufficient competence forbid me to deal in this book with the second of the traditional objects of atavistic reaction that I have just mentioned: the family. I ought however at least to mention that I believe that new factual knowledge has in some measure deprived traditional rules of sexual morality of some of their foundation, and that it seems likely that in this area substantial changes are bound to occur. (p.51) …

Nor do I dispute that reason may, although with caution and in humility, and in a piecemeal way, be directed to the examination, criticism and rejection of traditional institutions and moral principles. … I wish neither to deny reason the power to improve norms and institutions nor even to insist that it is incapable of recasting the whole of our moral system in the direction now commonly conceived as `social justice’. We can do so, however, only by probing every part of a system of morals. (p.8)

So Hayek is relatively open to rationality overturning traditional morals in one big area of life, and is in principle open in many other areas. So let me say this clearly: our usual styles of rational analysis deployed over the last few centuries seem to have been quite inadequate to the task of changing morals while preserving or enhancing their cultural adaptability. Maybe we could up our game, but that does look quite hard.

Nations seem similar. Yes, nations value some activities more, and engage in those more as a result. But nations often double-down on stuff after seeing themselves as win at it in ways that they personally respect, and expect others to respect. Nations continue to do that stuff lots in part to remind the world of how grateful it should be for their contribution.

For example, the US has seen itself as pioneering and greatly advancing democracy, free speech, medicine, higher education, basic research, legal due process, mass production, mass media, space exploration, entrepreneurship, the internet, and global military suppression of nazism, communism, and terrorism. This helps explain continued record US spending on medicine, education, military, and legal process.

Other nations act similarly. For example, Britain doubles down on law, parliaments, and anti-racism. France doubles down on liberties and fancy food. India doubles down on yoga and spirituality, Russia on war, sacrifice, and anti-decadence, and China on development.

If you want a nation to do more of X, maybe praise what they’ve already done on X.

Authenticity having your behaviors driven from within you, instead of letting others influence them. Follow your heart, you do you, go with your gut, that sort of thing. It is such a widely accepted norm that the authors who write books on it don’t actually argue for it much; they instead use it to argue for other stuff. My reading was a waste.

But, why exactly is authenticity such a good thing? Yes, there’s this quote about me, “Robin Hanson is more like himself than anybody else I know.” And, yes, my webpage has long said: “I’m not a joiner; I rebel against groups with ‘our beliefs’.” So as a matter of practice I seem to be authentic. Yet I still don’t see why it’s good, per se.

The modern world changes faster, and gives us more options, which puts a premium on agency; we can’t just ride along with our slowly changing peasant village anymore. But that means you need make choices, not that they need to come from within.

We’ve long taken controlling more as a sign of status, so others controlling you lowers your status. But what would this effect be stronger in the modern world?

Maybe in the modern world imitation and social pressures have become easier to see. In the old stable peasant village you acted like everyone else, but so did everyone, and you were not noticeably following any particular other visible models. However, in the modern world choices are more varied and contested, and so we can more easily see who in particular is pressuring or influencing who else in particular.

That wouldn’t necessarily be bad, except that looking too obviously “try hard”, like you are trying to choose actions to impress and please others, shows an unimpressive lack of confidence. Just as the most impressive dancers make their dancing look “effortless”, maybe the most impressive social displays are those that seem to come naturally, with little noticeable effort.

Cultural evolution says that most everything that comes from inside of you was stuff that went there before, from your prior cultural exposures. But seeing you trying to please and conform looks quite different to observers than your seeming to just do stuff from within, even though all of that stuff inside resulted from your prior efforts to please and conform, perhaps as a child. It is like the difference between a dancer who is visibly struggles to do her dance routine, and one for who the routine looks effortless, enjoyable, and even invented on the spot.

The Bible tells of how, freed from slavery in Egypt (~1270BC), the Israelites reached the promised land in a bit over a year, but then turned away out of fear, and wandered 40 more years before entering. Humanity is now doing something similar. A few centuries ago, we saw great promise but also threats in industry, so we put only one foot there, leaving the other in our ancient system of tradition and cultural evolution.

Alas this won’t work. We could stay standing either with both feet in culture, or with both in industry, but with our feet split civilization will soon fall. Most likely to be replaced by insular religious groups the Amish or Haredim, who will then discard most historically-unusual features of today’s world mono-culture. So to save such features, we must try to move our other foot into industry. Or bust. Let me explain.

The biggest change humanity has seen in at least 10Kyrs was the “industrial revolution” in the last few centuries. Its core cause was our finding better ways to organize and optimize effort. These included (a) math in accounting, engineering, and science, (b) new ways to structure hierarchical and professional organizations, and (c) capitalist societies. The peak in industrial optimization has been big competing for-profit orgs seeking to max key numbers that drive customer choices, in areas where professionals found powerful formal abstractions. Numbers like the cost of cloth, the strength of steel, or the speed of cars.

We have allowed many modern choices to be set by such powerfully-optimizing industrial orgs. Which is why we are rich and powerful. But even in the rich most industrialized West we retain two other spheres of life which are each just as large as this industrial sphere.

One non-industry sphere is where we LARP industrial styles of specialization, procedure, and formality, but don’t actually release much of the power of industrial optimization. For example, in academia and medicine we let prestigious professionals judge quality, which results in great inefficiently and rising spending. And in much of law and government we mistakenly trust prestige, specialization, and process to work without capitalist incentives, and even to well-regulate the capitalists. We have numbers to use to let industry optimize such areas, but don’t let them.

The other non-industry sphere of life is where we pointedly resist industry-style optimization. A century or two ago we saw huge productivity gains in shipyards, plantations, and factories. But saw also how they cut individuality, variety, and enchantment, and fostered inequality, regimentation, and instrumentality. So we have worked to limit the scope of what we’ve called “totalitarian” “dehumanizing” industry.

Socialist and communist regimes tried to cut out only the capitalism part, and most other regimes have limited industry via redistribution and regulation. The arts, humanities, and culture adopted strong norms against overly-overt industry-style practices, even as modernism LARPed industry levels of change as “innovation”. And “little boxes” ridicule, and laws, have pushed ordinary folks into spending their increased wealth on variety, instead of cost-effective industrial dorm-like lifestyles.

Alas, we have been accumulating a cultural deft, and our behaviors in these non-industry spheres become more maladaptive. Before industry, the main way humans kept their behaviors adaptive was via cultural evolution, which required high cultural variety and selection pressures, and low rates of environmental change and internal cultural drift. But modern industry (a) increased rates of social environment change, (b) increased travel, talk, and trade, which has cut cultural variety, and (c) caused far higher levels of wealth, health, and security, which has cut selection pressures. In addition, the modernism cultural turn induced far higher rates of cultural drift.

So we face a stark choice. We can let our civ fall, to be replaced by the Amish, Haredim, etc. For a while the world loses industry, and when that maybe later returns it is without most of what we cherish about our current world culture. And then it likely falls as well later. Like the Israelites staying away from the promised land.

Or we can try to enter that promised land, by applying industry more to the life areas which we have so far blocked, accepting that will also change and sometimes destroy things we now like about our lives in those areas. Such as by freeing capitalism more to run academia, education, medicine, law, governance, and fertility.

Or you might change your mind about my first questions above, and decide that you don’t actually much care about the distant future. I don’t have good news here; you can either use this info to better choose carefully, or stick your head in the sand.

Oh, and if you think AI will save us, ask yourself: why would an AI culture modeled after human culture better avoid the problem of a broken cultural evolution process?

• Elite Youth Culture - Rise of high school and college, youth culture and movements; changes had to appeal to elite youths.

• Lazy/Myopic/Selfish/Pleas - Revert to be more lazy, myopic, selfish, pleasure-oriented.

• Forager Reversion - Revert to forager styles: more art, leisure, democracy, and equality, and less religion, fertility, and domination.

• Individualism, Authentic - Rise in status of individualism, authenticity: think for yourself, follow your heart, be true to yourself.

• Innovate, Explore, Create - Rise in status of innovation, exploration, creativity.

• Abstract Concept, Reason - Rise in status of more abstract concepts and reasoning.

• Rich, Safe, Trade/Talk - Stuff that appeals more to people who are richer and safer, with more/wider talk/travel/trade.

• Merging Culture Appeal - Stuff accessible to and can appeal to the wide range of cultures merging in this period.

• Fashion/Elite Displace - Rise in fashion as change process; changes must appeal to elites seeking to displace other elites.

• Media/Word Legibile - Legibility of change symbols to spread via words and mass media.

• Big Org/Inst. Codify - New stuff can be seen and codified by our new large orgs and institutions.

• Sounds Good, Short-Run - Prefer stuff that sounds good and shows visible short-run gains.

• Visible Sacrifice - Visible sacrifices show allegiance; we figure we value what we’ve seen recent big visible sacrifices for.

• Lose Religion/Fragment - Loss of religion and traditions as core cultural glues induce fragmentation, divergence.

• Low War/Internal Polarize - Less war and outside threats make more wealth inequality, stronger internal conflict, polarization.

• Adapt Tech/Demography - Sensible adaptation to other behavior changes, not of culture type, eg, tech, demographic, and business practices.

Here are priority out of 100 poll scores, and median of the 3 LLM sum scores:

Scores don’t vary that much, correlations between sources are weak, and I overall disagree a lot with them. From which I conclude that either this is quite hard to figure out, and/or there really were quite a few strong causes.

But we are quite reluctant to admit that social values are our main positive values. So our cultures give us other varied “sacred” positive values to focus on and aspire to. While these sacred values seem to function in practice mainly to help us achieve our social values, it is important to us that we not see them this way. So each culture gives its members distinctive high positive values. Like their versions of freedom, purity, honor, justice, equality, art, exploration, and inquiry.

However, when our culture shows us several different such grand values, or we are exposed to different subcultures, how do we rank such values? Yes, we have a norm that sacred values don’t conflict. But we are at times forced to see that two values do in fact conflict, which we then resolve this by deciding that the lower one can’t really be sacred. To do this, we need a way to pick which value is higher.

George Simmel, “founding figure of sociology”, in 1900 published The Philosophy of Money, wherein he argued (quotes below) that a common human heuristic is that we judge our highest values to be those that we, or people like us, have recently sacrificed the most to achieve, via suffering those negatives that we usually try to avoid.

For example, Christians see the great value of God’s love in the sacrifice of his son Christ, and the value of Christianity in the sacrifices of martyrs, monks, and soldiers in religions wars. Citizens see the great value of their nation in the many harsh wars to promote that nation. Professionals see the value of their profession in the sacrifice of potential, years of practice, and hours per day of devoted work. Activists see the value of their causes in the suffering of advocates at the hands of opponents. We have record levels of spending on education, medicine, and legal process, and record levels of confidence in the high value of such spending.

You see, we humans aren’t satisfied to just enjoy tasty nutritious easily-prepared food. But foodies can hope that expensive ingredients, difficult preparation methods, and exceptional skilled cooks may deliver sensory nuance, harmony of composition, craft appreciation, place authenticity, novelty, and narrative. Enough of that and they hope to rise above the mundane to touch the sacred.

And we can’t just be entertained by engaging stories amid pleasing views in movies. But cinéphiles can hope that movie-makers’ artistic excellence and deep insight into human nature, obtained at great personal cost, can be combined with viewers’ careful attention, multiple viewings, literacy, and tolerance for ambiguity to let them see deeply, access serious emotions, encounter other minds and worlds, and join the community of those who “get it”. Which rises above the mundane to touch the sacred.

Now if we had some independent and strong grip on our greatest values, then we might only sacrifice for them when and to the degree that such sacrifice actually best achieved those values. But when we don’t have much of a way to tell which are our greatest values, but instead infer our values to be whatever we most sacrifice for, this can create self-reinforcing cycles that create great suffering.

For example, if we see that our greatest sacrifices lately have been for religion, we try harder to push more of us to be more strictly religious, via more personal sacrifice, and to convert outsiders, which cases suffering via conflict. If our greatest sacrifices have been wars to promote our nations, religions, or ideologies, then we get more eager to promote such things via new wars.

If our greatest sacrifices recently have been in culture wars, we get more eager to push for faster bigger cultural change, especially along the dimensions where we have faced opposition. For example, high levels of social conflict and sacrifice induced by recent “defund the police” initiatives on one side, and by anti-immigrant efforts on the other side, was probably part of the appeal of both approaches.

This makes me better appreciate ancient societies that spent huge fractions of their available labor on monumental architecture, and also that did lots of human sacrifice.

The longer the period where we have not seen great sacrifices lately, the more we fear that we have become decadent, selfish, profane, and have lost touch with higher values and deeper meanings. And the more eager we become to induce and join big sacrifice activities. For example, WWI ended an unusually long period of European peace and prosperity, and saw an unusually great enthusiasm for war on all sides.

Today we have also seen an unusually long period of peace and prosperity. I predict this will not last. We will come more see ourselves as out of touch with our grand values, and become more open and even eager for actions that induce new regimes of great sacrifice. Periodic high rates of sacrifice will probably continue for as long as we humans (or our AI descendants) use sacrifice as our key indicator of our top grand values. We really need to find a better way to find and affirm our highest values.

Those Simmel quotes:

Even superficial psychological observation discloses instances in which the sacrifice not only increases the value of the desired object but actually brings it about. This process reveals the desire to prove one’s strength, to overcome difficulties, or even simply to be contrary. The necessity of proceeding in a roundabout way in order to acquire certain things is often the occasion, and often also the reason, for considering them valuable. In human relations, and most frequently and clearly in erotic relations, it is apparent that reserve, indifference or rejection incite the most passionate desire to overcome these barriers, and are the cause of efforts and sacrifices that, in many cases, the goal would not have seemed to deserve were it not for such opposition. …

Moral merit always signifies that opposing impulses and desires had to be conquered and sacrificed in favour of the morally desirable act. If such an act is carried out without any difficulty as a result of natural impulse, it will not be considered to have a subjective moral value, no matter how desirable its objective content. Moral merit is attained only by the sacrifice of lower and yet very tempting goods, and it is the greater the more inviting the temptations and the more comprehensive and difficult the sacrifice. Of all human achievements the highest honour and appreciation is given to those that indicate, or at least seem to indicate, a maximum of commitment, energy and persistent concentration of the whole being, and along with this, renunciation, sacrifice of everything else, and devotion to the objective idea.

1. Africa Wars - African nations/tribes go to war against each other. Sometimes in part to grab slaves.

2. Enslave Losers - African war winners enslave losers instead of killing them. Other options more risked revenge.

3. Sell to Traders - African war winners sell slaves to African slave traders

4. Sell to Non-Africans - African slave traders move slaves to coast (~10-20% die on way), sell to Non-Africans

5. Move to US - European slave traders move ~4% of African slaves to US (~10-15% die on way), sell them there

6. US farmers buy - US farmers buy slaves, work them

7. Let slaves have kids - US farmers let slaves live long, and have kids. This was unusual in history of slavery.

8. Treat kids as slaves - US farmers treat kids of slaves as also slaves. If this were not allowed, they’d not have allowed step 7.

Polls with 4009 responses rated which of these were the worse moral mistakes, relative to a max of 100:

It seems that respondents put most blame here on people who choose to enslave over to kill or stop from existing. Even though when directly asked they say that slavery is not as bad an outcome as death or non-existence.

For example, around powerful people we typically more laugh and agree, interrupt less, and are more deferential, polite and flattering. We are ingratiating and conformist to bosses, and less likely to criticize them to other people. And famously:

Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. (More)

I’ve written many times before on the subject of blackmail. As the main effect of anti-blackmail laws is to allow rich celebrities to more easily evade norms and laws, my best explanation for such laws is a widespread desire to give them what they want. The most telling evidence is that we allow exactly the same transaction, as an NDA, if initiated by the rich celebrity, but criminalize it if initiated by a poor observer of their transgressions. Which seems to me pretty clear evidence of who the policy is intended to benefit.

Elite journalists have long pushed their lesser competitors to have more “citizen journalism”. And recently journalists have complained loudly about their newly risen competitor of prediction markets. They complain that such markets are in poor taste, sensational, unethical, induce manipulation and sabotage efforts, undermine respect for proper authorities, and tempt people to waste their time and energy. All of which are of course also issues with journalism.

But their loudest complaints, at least lately, have been about inequality. “Insider trading”, by people who know more than others, is said to be blatantly unfair, discourages participation by know-nothings, and tempts people to reveal secrets they have promised to keep. All of which are of course also problems with journalism. But with the usual hypocrisy, they propose forbidding government officials from trading in markets, but not from talking to journalists. And banning markets, but not journalist reports, on important world events.

Elites usually admire and celebrate elite journalists, who have elite insight, connections, and go to elite events. As they can get the story first, and understand it better. But elite traders who know more than others, that’s shameful!

We humans evolved to see ourselves as naturally egalitarian. This is shown by the highly egalitarian practices of modern foragers, who represent our best guess of typical ancestral practices until roughly 10,000 years ago. Modern non-egalitarian social practices are thus likely an affront to natural human morality and add to our modern alienation, stress, conflict, and unhappiness. We should thus move government policy toward more financial redistribution, to make more equality.

We have good reasons to doubt this narrative. Yes, there are many social processes common in human societies that often substantially cut particular kinds of inequality. Such as sharing, risk-pooling, reputation-building, status-leveling, consensus collective decisions, and mobility. However,

1. the main motives for participating in such processes was not to reduce inequality,

2. each such process only cuts a few types of inequality, not inequality in general, &

3. societies have varied greatly in which processes they supported, and in their details.

This suggests that humans do not in fact have a general moral norm of egalitarianism.

Yes, cultural evolution, our best theoretical account of the origin and shaping of such processes, does suggest that such processes were once often adaptive, and that part of their adaptive benefit was often to cut inequality. However, the fact that our more recent ancestors have tended to drop such processes suggests they are no longer as adaptive.

We thus have at best only rather weak reasons to expect modern alienation, stress, conflict, or unhappiness today to result from our using such processes less. And no concrete reason to expect that reviving such practices would be adaptive on net. Given our weak data on cross-cultural happiness or meaning, we also have little evidence to suggest that such policies would help much today with such outcomes.

Employers have little patience with candidates who didn’t pick the most prestigious possible college or job, but were swayed by other considerations. Such as topics of interest, limited money, or the needs of a spouse or family. A “serious” person always picks max prestige. Always.

Yet for extracurriculars, you are not supposed to connect those to your career plans, as “nerds” do. You must instead do something with no practical value, but that is prestigious. Like varsity athletes in lacrosse or crew, sports that are too expensive for ordinary folks to pursue. Excess interest in ideas marks you as a “boring” “tool”. (More)

We can see this as elites using norms to coordinate to prevent their lives being totally filled with career competition. Yes, they also compete in non-career activities, but at least they get a change of pace. Common norms among elites through history can be seen as similarly trying to limit how people could achieve high status. To limit which sorts of people could compete, which activities they would do, and how much of their time would be spent on those.

This is how I now think about this key modern change:

Early in the Industrial Revolution, many noted the great productivity that resulted from very regimented and organized workplaces like shipyards and factories. They then expected and feared that such regimentation would spread to all the rest of their lives, including their food, clothes, homes, friends, lovers, and parenting. Novels like Pictures of a Socialist Future and We warned of this coming totalitarianism.

But what happened instead is that we have spent most of our increased wealth on not regimenting our non-work lives. Instead of such things being arranged and regimented efficiently by big orgs, as in our work lives, we instead each make pretty autonomous and artisanal choices. For example, instead of wearing standard uniforms, living in dorms with shared bathrooms, and eating at cafeterias, we each vary and duplicate all this at great expense. (More)

Though we allowed big competitive orgs to achieve high levels of efficiency and innovation in many key areas, we have so far coordinated to discourage people from using such orgs to achieve max competitive advantage in their non-work lives.

How could this have worked? Imagine you sold a big fraction of your future income to a for-profit “style agent” org, to which you gave the power to substantially influence where you live, what car you drive, what clothes you wear, how you do your hair and face, and what are your hobbies. They would do this in consultation with you, to best complement your abilities and ambitions, but also to max your career income, so they can max their cut of it.

Such firms would plausibly produce max income people, except that such folks’ status would fall too far when others learned that their lives had been managed this way. As we made strong norms ridiculing such regimented and managed lives. So while modern rates of cultural evolution have greatly increased in areas where we’ve allowed strong selection, we’ve prevented such strong selection in other areas.

The modern world thus has a big split, variously described as STEM vs humanities, quantitative vs qualitative, competition vs cooperation, profane vs sacred, and work vs. leisure. I’ll call them “system” vs “soul”. In the system areas, people and orgs frequently choose according to a low dimensional set of concrete metrics, driving big competitive orgs that used modern systems of concepts, analysis, and organization to make those “numbers go up”. Like how phone companies compete to make their phones cheap, light, long-lasting, wide-ranged, big-screened, and high computing.

In the remaining soul areas, in contrast, choices are made mostly by individuals pressured to use vibes to express their individuality, creativity, and authenticity. Like in friendship, love, parenting, art, entertainment, prestige, community, and voting. Or by folks who defer to specialists who aren’t monitored well enough to drive them to complete strongly to produce or innovate in either the soul or system areas where they claim expertise. Like priests who claim to produce religious soul, or education and medicine experts who claim to produce income or health.

Long ago both system and soul areas changed slowly together, such change being driven mainly by simple adaptive cultural evolution. And there was enormous variety in such things around the world. But then a few centuries ago system areas developed much stronger ways to select for adaptive change. Which greatly increased our long distance interaction via more talk, travel, and trade. Which caused a global convergence in all areas of culture.

At first, soul areas of culture tried to make minimal adjustments to accommodate system changes, but then around 1900, at the “modernism” transition, soul area folk decided that the one thing they agreed on was that prior soul styles were no good. So they switched to eagerly seeking change, via exploring many possibilities and following cultural activists supported by youth movements.

A rationale for this was to help soul areas adapt to fast changing system areas. And some soul changes did do this. But most were not tracking adaptive pressures, and so overall this change has led to our soul culture drifting to into increasing maladaption. Which is the key problem that will cause our civ to fall, and future civs that replace us to also fall, until we either slow system evolution way down, or find ways to induce fast adaptive soul changes.

Financial debt is money you must repay, and technical debt is accumulated when insufficient maintenance costs are paid counter the usual tendencies of complex systems like software to rot. Let me now use the term “macro cultural debt” to describe the costs that cultures that must eventually repay when key parts of them decay into maladaption. Like the “org culture debt” from the org culture literature. For over a century now we have been accumulating big cultural debt in our soul areas.

Maybe we could invent new ways to drive strong cultural evolution in soul areas. I’ve been exploring how futarchy might help. But until we find new better methods, the obvious solution is to allow the proven metric-driven for-profit orgs that have done so well in system areas to take more control over soul areas, such as via for-profit orgs that manage governance, parenting, and style (as outlined above). Early visions expressed in novels like Pictures of a Socialist Future and We may well be have been surprisingly prescient.

I get that I’m not painting a pretty or inspiring picture here. But my first allegiance is to tell the truth. If you don’t want descendant cultures to be as different from us today as we are from most random past cultures, but instead want some precious parts of our present soul culture to last far into the future, then we will need to find a way to package such precious parts with an overall adaptive cultural package. So we will need to somehow induce sufficient adaptive cultural evolution in most parts of soul culture.