Monthly Archives: October 2010

Why Impress Friends?

By Robin Hanson · October 9, 2010 3:00 pm · Comments (13)

For both foragers and farmers, social connections and status relations established as a teen and young adult lasted for a lifetime.  So it made great sense to invest in such things.

In the high-mobility upper-class US today, however, people move from high school to go to college, and then move somewhere else for a job; their investments in earlier friends gain them much less.  And it seems like behavior hasn’t updated fully to this new situation – it seems young adults invest too much in developing friendships and local status that they will soon lose.

Bryan Caplan argues that parents today make a similar mistake in trying too hard to impress friends and family via their parenting style.  Bryan argues persuasively that we vastly over-parent today, relative to long term effects on kid outcomes; kids of slacker parents will do just fine, he says.

When a year ago I worried aloud that slacker parents might look bad to associates, Bryan said that while you should worry about sending good signals to schools and employers, no one who matters cares much about your parenting:

Almost nothing is at stake … Even if you make a great impression, the rewards are trivial.

This week I discussed social conformity pressures within “smaller networks of neighbors or coworkers”:

This is small enough for rumors to tell most everyone about big norm violations, but too big for everyone to know everyone well.

Bryan commented:

Modern parents’ depend primarily on the market, not other parents – to meet their needs – and parent-on-parent sanctions are small and sporadic in any case.

How far Bryan will take this argument?  What other common social norms do people worry too much about, because in fact school or work will never know, friends and family hardly notice or care, and neighbors don’t matter?  For example, do people worry too much about clothes they wear, or swear words they utter, at home, while shopping, or at the park?  Or if someone felt inclined to torture small animals (legally), would informal social sanctions among friends and family really offer little barrier to openly pursuing this hobby?  And if animal-torture would go too far, where exactly is the line?

Added 11aOct10: Bryan responds:

  1. Clothes.  If you’re single or on-the-job, keep worrying.  If you’re married and off-the-job, suit yourself – and your spouse.
  2. Swearing. If swearing bothers you or the person you’re with, don’t do it.  Otherwise, you’ve got almost nothing to worry about.
  3. Animal-torture. Imprudent in front of almost anyone.  It’s so extreme, word will spread and there will be blowback.

… As long as you keep your personal and work life separate, you can almost always ignore career consequences.  And if you’re married, “keep your spouse happy” is 95% of what you need to know.

You should still worry about how you look to other potential employers, even if  your current employer seems happy with your work.  Similarly, you should still worry about how you look to potential mates, even if you are married. And people quite often find new jobs and mates via their network of friends (and mates and jobs).  I agree with Bryan that you should worry less about mild than extreme violations, but I can’t buy his advise to worry only about your spouse and co-workers except in extreme circumstances.  Being known as a slacker parent will hurt you socially. It might not hurt enough to stop, but it will hurt.

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Forage vs Farm Future

By Robin Hanson · October 7, 2010 12:00 pm · Comments (26)

The two biggest events of last million years, by far, are the transition from foraging to farming and then from farming to industry. Since industry began, humans have changed in many ways, some of which are puzzling, since there hasn’t been time for much genetic selection, and only limited time for cultural selection. Especially puzzling are big changes in our basic attitudes, and big variations in such attitudes between people and nations.

The ten thousand years since the farming transition, however, offers more time for genetic and cultural adaptation. Yet ten thousand years is also short enough that we should expect much less than full adaptation. Some people and places should retain vestiges of forager ways, and variations in these vestiges should be important.

So it seems natural to try to explain key variations and changes in attitudes today as vestiges of the transition from foragers to farmers colliding with the vast increase in individual wealth that is the main effect of industry. On Monday I described how foragers vs. farmers seems to do a decent job of capturing the rich-poor axis in the World Values Survey, which is related to today’s liberal/modern vs. conservative/traditional political axis. I suggested that the social pressures which encouraged farming behaviors were naturally stronger for the poor, predicting that people retreat to forager ways with increasing industry wealth. The rest of the week I explored two theories of why such social pressures reduce with wealth.

Today I want to consider what this theory implies about our future. First, it implies that if we continue to get richer, we should continue to see attitude changes in roughly the same directions. We should expect continued movement toward accepting school and workplace domination and ranking, and whatever other attitudes greatly enable industry to create wealth. And regarding how we spend our increased wealth, we should expect a continued shift from farmer to forager style attitudes for a while. For example, we should expect less war and physical cruelty to humans and animals, and more forager-like sexual promiscuity and respect for the environment. This should make us feel more happy, relaxed, and natural. In the extreme, we might even end up (for a time) as foragers in bands wandering virtual robot-supported forests, absent predators, famines, or pandemics.

Yet in the long run, if our interactions remain competitive, we shouldn’t expect forager behavior to be anything like the most adaptive for our descendants’ future worlds. Neither should farming of course, but one might still wonder which offers the best basis for generating adaptation to those future worlds. And on that criteria, the farming style seem more promising. Its not so much that farming ways adapted to a larger social world, more like the large social worlds we expect for our descendants. Its more that farming adapted at all – farming found ways to push foragers, whose ways had been changing very slowly by farming standards, rather quickly into doing quite unnatural things. So farming meta-innovations, like religion, honor, politeness, etc., might well be usefully repurposed to get our descendants to adapt to even stranger future environments.

For example, ems, or whole brain emulations, are my best guess for the next big transition on the order of the farming and industry transitions. Farmer-style stoicism, self-sacrifice, and self-control, detached as needed from farmer specifics like love of land or sexual monogamy, might well be more effective at creating acceptance of em-efficient lifestyles. Religious ems might, for example, better accept being deleted when new more efficient versions of themselves are introduced. “Onward Christian robots” might be the new sensibility. And em’s low incomes might help farmer-style fear-based norm-enforcement to gain traction.

Perhaps you hope that an industry-refashioned forager style might adapt just as well to these new requirements.  But wishing won’t make it so.

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Why Towns Conform

By Robin Hanson · October 6, 2010 5:00 pm · Comments (15)

Imagine a group with a social norm against spitting on the sidewalk. If this group is very small, then everyone should know everyone well, and any one act of spitting will have only a small influence on how people think about the spitting person. A consistent habit of spitting might cost you, but any one spit would not.  If the group is very large, there is also little risk that any one spitting will result in an informal social sanction. You’ll probably never meet the strangers who see it again, and they probably don’t know each other, so why should anyone make a fuss? At an intermediate scale, however, spitters should fear that any one act of spitting will produce a widespread rumor about this act, making folks who know them only moderately avoid them after hearing this rumor.  Why deal with someone if you have other options and the main thing you know about him or her is negative?

In general, social norms are enforced via two key informal mechanisms:

  1. When norms are usually followed, rare violators are often undesirable in objective ways. They may lack intelligence or self-control, for example. So people avoid violating such norms to avoid sending bad signals about themselves.
  2. Meta-norms often require observers of norm violations to punish violators, such as by refusing to associate with them. This includes observers of a failure to punish a failure to punish, and so on.

These two mechanisms play out differently on three different social scales:

  • Foragers only interacted with a hundred or so others, all of whom they know in great detail.
  • Farmers lived in larger social networks of roughly thousands of folks near enough by to matter. This is small enough for rumors to tell most everyone about big norm violations, but too big for everyone to know everyone well.
  • Today we live in communities so big that, outside of smaller networks of neighbors or coworkers, rumors only reliably tell everyone about extreme norm violations.  Informal rumors will not tell most people you deal with about your norm violations.

These two norm enforcers seem to work best at intermediate social scales. Signaling discourages norm violations best when people that matter tend to hear about norm violations, but know little else about violators. At a smaller scale one norm violation will add only a small amount to what observers know about that person, and at a larger scale observers will probably not have heard about the norm violation. But inbetween, observers will prefer to avoid someone when they know little else besides one bad sign.

Meta-norms to punish non-punishers also work best at an intermediate social scale. At a very small scale, when few observers see each violation, observers can coordinate to avoid the meta-norm of punishment; “let’s not and say we did.” Punishment can be expensive, after all.  At a very large scale, you many care little about the opinions of those who happen to see you fail to punish a non-punisher.  But at intermediate scales, a single bad signal can induce a strong shunning reaction. Why take a risk on a near stranger with a big negative strike against them?

The fact that norms are enforced best at an intermediate social density helps explain why higher-density farmers had stronger social norms than lower-density foragers, and yet even higher-density modern folk have reverted back to a weaker forager-like level of norm enforcement.

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Fear Made Farmers

By Robin Hanson · October 6, 2010 8:40 am · Comments (22)

Farming required huge behavior changes, mostly unnatural to foragers. A key enabler seems to have been increased self-control to follow social norms. But what allowed this increased self-control?

One source was moving from vague spirituality to religions with powerful and morally-outraged gods who punish norm violators. In addition (as I’ll explain tomorrow), high densities and larger social networks made stronger credible threats to ostracize folks for specific deviant acts.  Yes both these mechanisms require the fear that norm violations could lead to great harm, even death. But for poor farmers living on edge, such threats were easy to come by.

Interestingly, this death-threat pressure could work even without farmers being conscious of the relevant threats or fears. In fact, farming society probably worked better with homo hypocritus farmers, consciously denying that strong social pressures pushed them to do what would otherwise feel unnatural.

A large robust literature makes it clear that inducing people to unconsciously think about death pushes them to more strongly obey and defend cultural norms, especially norms framed as disgust at animal-like behavior.  Today, fear of death encourages folks to obey authorities, and be more loyal to their communities and spouses, all strong farmer norms:

Empirical support for [Terror management theory] has originated from more than 175 published experiments which have been conducted cross-culturally both nationally and internationally. … People, when reminded of their own inevitable death, will cling more strongly to their cultural worldviews. …. Nations or persons who have experienced traumas are more attracted to strong leaders who express traditional, pro-establishment, authoritarian viewpoints. … Many terror management studies have examined elicited affect as a covariate to mortality salience, and only one reviewed study has found elicited affect (fear) in the terror management process. Why? Terror management is a non-conscious process. …

Research corroborates the link between love and the fear of death. Studies reveal an association between close relationship seeking and mortality salience. Moreover, further studies demonstrate that the desire for close relationships under conditions of mortality salience trumps other needs including self-esteem and maintenance (pride) or avoidance (shame/guilt) … [Researchers] find the rejection of animality or creatureliness to function as the central tendency driving disgust … Studies demonstrate that mortality salience is associated with the rejection of animal traits. (more)

Subtle reminders of death on a subconscious level motivates a statistically significant number of subjects to exhibit biased and xenophobic type behaviors, such as gravitating toward those who they perceive as culturally similar to themselves and holding higher negative feelings and judgments toward those they perceive as culturally dissimilar to themselves. (more)

Note that fear-of-death based norm-enforcement mechanisms should work better on poor folk for whom death is a more immediate threat. Farming culture took advantage of a prior natural fear of death to push farming ways, but as farmers got richer, such pressures weakened, inclining folks to revert to more natural-feeling forager ways.

I suspect that social scientists, even those favoring “behavioral” explanations, consistently neglect fear of (thinking about) death as an explanation of social phenomena. Social scientists also don’t like to think about death, and thinking about explanations involving fear of death makes social scientists think too much about death.

Added: tijmz points out an ’08 Science study showing more fear-sensitive folks are more conservative:

Individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism,and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

Bryan reminded he that he pointed out this essay arguing that “authoritarian personalities” looks more like “old-fashioned personalities”, a fact which emphasizes just how much opinion has moved in a less conservative direction over time.

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Hole In My Hypothesis

By Robin Hanson · October 5, 2010 9:00 am · Comments (23)

What is politics about? A single “ideology” dimension explains most within-society political variation, and two dimensions, roughly “east-west” and “rich-poor” seem to explain most between-society variations. But what are these dimensions, and why do they exist?

It would make a lot of sense if political conflict derived from natural conflicts between obvious categories of individuals: old vs. young, men vs. women, rich vs. poor, married vs. single, parents vs. kidless, owners vs. renters, natives vs. immigrants, rural vs. urban, smart vs. dumb, extroverts vs. introverts, etc. For example, it would make sense if the young were to struggle with the old over tax-funded benefits for the old. But remarkably, such factors correlate only weakly with the sides in key policy disputes.

Yes, we’d expect lots of random behavior if politics were mainly about signaling, rather than policy. But signaling doesn’t by itself get us very far in explaining the two main political dimensions. What could be the two key features being signaled?

An important clue is that political positions have long drifted steadily toward the “rich”, and to a lesser extent “west”, directions.  This steady drift is hard to reconcile with people learning to deal with a discrete change, as changes due to such learning should instead look more like a random walk.

A better explanation is that this political drift results from common context-dependent strategies applied to a steadily drifting environment. That is, individuals and societies might have evolved to express different values and attitudes in different sorts of situations. In particular, folks might have evolved different priorities when rich vs. poor. So as societies get smoothly rich, their politics might smoothly change toward rich-appropriate strategies. And individuals who grow up richer, or who inherited stronger context-dependency, would favor more rich-end politics.

The problem is, it is hard to see why most “rich” policies make more sense for rich folk. Why exactly would folks have evolved to, when rich, more prefer abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and leisure, and less kids religion, patriotism, and authority? It seems hard to find satisfying direct functional explanations for most of these patterns. Could these patters instead be no-longer-functional vestiges of a prior disruption?

The biggest disruption in the last million years was the transition from foraging to farming (= digging + herding), roughly ten thousand years ago. This transition required huge changes in attitudes and behaviors, supported by modest still-slowly-continuing genetic changes and huge cultural changes. I hypothesize that the cultural pressures which long ago pushed folks from more natural forager ways into then-more-functional farming ways work better on poor people, so that rich folk less feel their pressure. If so, as folks get rich they would tend to revert back to the natural-feeling forager ways.

While this hypothesis may seem natural, I must point out that it has a gaping hole: it is far from obvious why the cultural pressures that made foragers act like farmers should weaken when folks get rich.  Yes poor farmers may have few other options, while rich folks have the luxury of acting more like foragers. But rich farmers could have instead used their wealth to act like hyper-farmers, moving even further from forager styles. Why exactly did rich farmers act more like foragers?

More tomorrow on how farming pressures might depend on wealth.

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Two Types of People

By Robin Hanson · October 4, 2010 8:30 am · Comments (69)

I’m about to describe two types of people, A vs. B.  While reading their descriptions I want you to think about which people around you are more like type A or B. Also ask yourself: which type do you respect more? Which would you rather be?

TYPE *A* folks eat a healthier more varied diet, and get better exercise. They more love nature, travel, and exploration, and they move more often to new communities. They work fewer hours, and have more complex mentally-challenging jobs. They talk more openly about sex, are more sexually promiscuous, and more accepting of divorce, abortion, homosexuality, and pre-marital and extra-marital sex. They have fewer kids, who they are more reluctant to discipline or constrain. They more emphasize their love for kids, and teach kids to more value generosity, trust, and honesty.

Type A folks care less for land or material posessions, relative to people.  They spend more time on leisure, music, dance, story-telling and the arts. They are less comfortable with war, domination, bragging, or money and material inequalities, and they push more for sharing and redistribution. They more want lots of discussion of group decisions, with everyone having an equal voice and free to speak their mind. They deal with conflicts more personally and informally, and more prefer unhappy folk to be free to leave. Their leaders lead more by consensus.

TYPE *B* folks travel less, and move less often from where they grew up. They are more polite and care more for cleanliness and order. They have more self-sacrifice and self-control, which makes them more stressed and suicidal. They work harder and longer at more tedious and less healthy jobs, and are more faithful to their spouses and their communities. They make better warriors, and expect and prepare more for disasters like war, famine, and disease. They have a stronger sense of honor and shame, and enforce more social rules, which let them depend more on folks they know less. When considering rule violators, they look more at specific rules, and less at the entire person and what feels right. Fewer topics are open for discussion or negotiation.

Type B folks believe more in good and evil, and in powerful gods who enforce social norms. They envy less, and better accept human authorities and hierarchy, including hereditary elites at the top (who act more type A), women and kids lower down, and human and animal slaves at the bottom. They identify more with strangers who share their ethnicity or culture, and more fear others. They are less bothered by violence in war, and toward foreigners, kids, slaves, and animals. They more think people should learn their place and stay there. Nature’s place is to be ruled and changed by humans.

Types A and B map reasonably well onto today’s culture wars, with A the modern/liberal and B the traditional/conservative. It maps well to the rich-poor axis from the World Value Survey.  But in fact, type A vs. B are actually foragers vs. farmers. [The above summarizes many books and articles I've read over the last year.]  Which is my point: I think a lot of today’s political disputes come down to a conflict between farmer and forager ways, with forager ways slowly and steadily winning out since the industrial revolution. It seems we acted like farmers when farming required that, but when richer we feel we can afford to revert to more natural-feeling forager ways. The main exceptions, like school and workplace domination and ranking, are required to generate industry-level wealth. We live a farmer lifestyle when poor, but prefer to buy a forager lifestyle when rich. Why this should be will be the subject of my next few posts.

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Dissing Fear

By Robin Hanson · October 3, 2010 11:40 am · Comments (12)

Political pundits like to accuse opponents of a “politics of fear”, or of hate.  In contrast, folks go out of their way to emphasize that theirs is a politics of hope or compassion.  Yet when each of us notices that we are feeling fear or hate, this doesn’t usually make us reject the beliefs that lead to such feelings.  Why do we embrace and accept our own fears and hates, even as we suggest that others’ fears and hates are bad signs about them?

One obvious explanation: relative to low status folks, high status folks have less occassion to fear or hate.  Pretty pampered prestigious people encounter fewer dangers to fear, or powerful enemies to hate.  Therefore publicly showing fear or hate is a sign of low status.  Complaining that your opponents have a “politics of fear” or hate is really just complaining about their low status.  Politics isn’t about policy, after all.

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1860 View Of School

By Robin Hanson · October 2, 2010 12:02 pm · Comments (15)

The October 2010 Scientific American, p.102, quoting the October 1860 issue:

A child who has been boxed up six hours in school might spend the next four hours in study, but it is impossible to develop the child’s intellect in this way. The laws of nature are inexorable. By dint of great and painful labor, the child may succeed in repeating a lot of words, like a parrot, but, with the power of its brain all exhausted, it is out of the question for it to really master and comprehend its lessons. The effect of the system is to enfeeble the intellect even more than the body. We never see a little girl staggering home under a load of books, or knitting her brow over them at eight o’clock in the evening, without wondering that our citizens do not arm themselves at once with carving knives, pokers, clubs, paving stones or any weapons at hand, and chase out the managers of our common schools, as they would wild beasts that were devouring their children.

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Lava Killed Neanderthals

By Robin Hanson · October 1, 2010 2:20 pm · Comments (5)

We have identified evidence that the disappearance of Neanderthals in the Caucasus coincides with a volcanic eruption at about 40,000 BP. …  The coeval volcanic eruptions (from a large Campanian Ignimbrite eruption to a smaller eruption in the Central Caucasus) … forced the fast and extreme climate deterioration (“volcanic winter”) of the Northern Hemisphere. … The most significant advantage of early modern humans over contemporary Neanderthals was geographic localization in the more southern parts of western Eurasia and Africa. … Major technological and social innovations [appeared] shortly after 40,000 BP. (more)

More evidence that disasters matter, and evolution can be pretty random.

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Open Thread

By Robin Hanson · October 1, 2010 6:00 am · Comments (23)

This is our monthly place to discuss topics that have not appeared in recent posts.

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