A Governance Innovation Crisis
Consider two possible ways culture could be kept adaptive:
Dumb evolution requires adequate levels of cultural variety, selection pressures, and rates of change in the environment and within cultures. Our world is now far from adequate levels of these.
Managed evolution requires that each culture coordinate enough to use reason to deliberately pursue a goal that is sufficiently aligned with adaption. This requires that such cultures have access to competent and effective governance mechanisms. We do not now have proven competent mechanisms.
Within dumb evolution, we can distinguish cultures that
suppress all questioning of tradition, and just do what traditions say.
allow and even encourage “questioning”, except they also encourage deference to elites, and give elites strong incentives and abilities to rationalize traditions. So traditions persist, don’t actually change much in response to rational questioning.
Within managed evolution, we can distinguish cultures that
coordinate to directly pursue the goal of staying adaptive. This might require making adaption sufficiently measurable, which seems hard.
directly pursue a goal that happens to be correlated with long term adaption, but which is easier for people to see as sacred, and so be proud to sacrifice for, and ashamed to abandon. Such as, for us now, maybe, achieving medical immortality, or having a million people live in space.
We thus have four options:
Tradition - Dumb evolution, discourage questioning of tradition
Rationalize - Dumb evolution, allow elite pseudo-questioning that is actually rationalization
Aligned Goal - Managed evolution, pursuing sacred goal correlated with adaption
Adaption Direct - Managed evolution, directly pursuing adaption
I asked a poll, and 8 LLMs, to rank how promising are these options. They all agreed that Aligned Goal seems most promising. (~1/2 of poll respondents picked it.) And the poll agreed with median of LLMs choices that the next most promising is Adaption Direct, then Rationalize, then Tradition.
Given this strong preference for managed evolution, and as it seems relatively easy to find sacred goals that should work, the limiting factor becomes clear: find and prove competent governance mechanisms. And as this may well take a while to achieve, and as success or failure here will set how much the future inherits from what we now cherish about our civ, the stakes here are very high. The word “crisis” seems apt.
Humanity is now at a crisis point. We should invest vastly more effort into finding and proving more competent forms of governance. And of course more competent governance could go a lot way to helping to solve all our other problems as well.