I'm not sure decay is best modeled as modal. I think of every system as a dynamic equilibrium, simultaneously changing, decaying, accreting, and growing. This dynamic nature does include shifts so severe that it fully collapses and no longer qualifies as a system, but it's not a mode switch that can be delayed or prevented, it's an equilibrium shift in that some forces change strength by enough that it stops working.
I do agree that there is reasoned human resistance to many types of change, including those that reduce systemic viability. But I think it also often resists positive and strengthening changes, and it's VERY hard from inside to know which is which.
I suspect that your hope in Amish and other insular communities is misplaced - they are resisting change, but I really doubt they're strong enough to resist it if some of the competitive pressures (for productivity, lifestyle, resistance to invasion/theft, etc.) from larger/denser groups start encroaching on their existence.
You mention Amish and Haaredim subcultures as "resisting" the monoculture, but in point of fact the differences between the Amish of the USA and their neighbors is relatively trivial in the grand scheme of things. They don't employ certain household devices, they are somewhat more traditional in family arrangements than modern celebrities and tech entrepreneurs, and they dress distinctively. But they support democracy, they participate in the market economy, they obey the laws. I don't see them as resisting the monoculture any more than Star Wars cosplayers or vegans. It's only because their differences are not commodified that they seem odd.
But your main concern is that the "context societies" will fade away due to failure to reproduce, and once the context goes away, what then is the difference between the Taliban and the Amish and Haredim?
Which is why the fate of the universe (sounds melodramatic but I mean it literally) may depend on establishment of independent colonies on other planets, and eventually stars.
Our worldwide monoculture is the result of cheap transport and effectively free communications.
Evolution is driven by variation and competition. Without much variation little adaptation occurs.
As you've been saying for a while, monocultures are maladaptive because, being monocultures, they attempt very few unique experiments, and and so are unlikely to stumble upon adaptive solutions to the problems raised by a changing environment.
Just hanging out on Earth and expecting variation to recur when civilizations periodically fall ensures eventual extinction by catastrophe (meteor strikes, nuclear/bio war, AI, etc.).
This post about systematic decay is missing a conception of the arc of progress. Evolution proceeds by identifying innovations and then preserving them so that they accumulate. In a sufficiently stable and benign environment this results in gradual, accumulating technological progress - which we have seen taking place over the last few thousand years.
Human infertility is not a sign that the arc of progress is coming to an end. Instead it is the result of innovations in storage, sensors, actuators and computation that render many capabilities of humans obsolete. The arc of progress is continuing smoothly, but most of the engineers at the cutting edge are not biotech engineers, but software engineers - and their medium is not flesh, but machines.
What these engineers see is not stagnation. It is not a monoculture. It is an explosion of diversity - not biodiversity, but mechadiversity. There is no evolutionary rule that says that humans have to remain the dominant species.
There are two levels of culture, stuff that can vary easily locally, and stuff that can't. We have great variety and selection pressures at that first level, but not at the other level.
This reply seems unresponsive to my main claim. Evolutionary progress exists. We understand broadly when and why it happens. It trumps decay in the long term. It is reasonable to warn about system decay, but the underlying trend still seems to be upward. Evolution is still finding new ways to degrade sources of negentropy and it is still preserving that knowledge. Maybe one day that will stop - but so far there is little sign of that - and modern human fertility decline is not relevant evidence.
Natural selection is a statistical concept that only makes sense in the presence of large number of organisms. If you only have a single monoculture, or a handful of different cultures, there is no cultural evolution, no expectation of progress.
That seems close to tautological: if you can't change it, then it remains the same. There's also some "foundational" DNA like that: hox genes, for example.
Throughout my too-many years of grad school, I read several grand histories by great historians. I came to believe that they were lovers of empire. They did not merely describe the collapse of an empire, they lamented it. Empires centralize record keeping, and this is great for historians. A world of scattered villages and competing city-states is much more difficult to study, the more so after millennia have ground them to dust and ashes.
One of my professors, an Assyriologist, remarked during a seminar that across the four millennia of the pre-Christian historical period, the Ancient Near East was ruled by unitary governments for only about 150 years combined. Yet civilization marched on.
I personally fear empire more than local control. I think the development of a monoculture is not adaptive. So I wonder what is the point about ruminating on what we must do to alter the monoculture to make it more adaptive. This would require empire-level central planning, which has been the least adaptive of innovations, resulting in the intentional or unintentional slaughtering of hundreds of millions of people. I think the better route is to let people at the micro level figure out what works, and let them do it. In other words, subvert the monoculture altogether. Let the marketplace of ideas and of economies work it out.
Observers going back to Plato at least have been overly pessimistic about our future. Fundamentally this is because of the asymmetry between the current things in our world (firms, traditions, cultures) and the future things that will replace them. The former weigh more heavily on our minds because they are more concrete, and because we are more personally invested in them. And those large current things (firms, systems) are often peaking or declining – hence pessimism.
However if you take a long view of history, it seems highly likely that something will replace whatever is decaying, and in many ways improve upon it. We can't say with certainty what that is and so the optimists are more vague than the pessimists. And yet historically the optimists have usually been right.
So if you say "beware macro decay modes," I would say, "beware discounting future innovation."
I'm not predicting human extinction, just a civ collapse, and with that the loss of many things we treasure about our current global monoculture. Like open inquiry.
Are there other culture trends, apart from population decline, that point toward broad civilizational collapse?
"Monoculture" I struggle with. Over my lifetime I would say that free communication and global economic integration have led countries to become more similar in many ways, but have also led the societies within those countries to become less internally cohesive. The points of friction have shifted around but I don't see us on a path to a true monoculture in the sense of Brave New World or 1984.
I think sometimes a fast decay, like a fire, can be better than a slow decay, because it allows a replacement to rise from the ashes and perform better.
We joke that without our iPhones or Google Maps we’d be fucked (not just depressed), but in all reality, virtually everyone will be truely fucked simply by disappearing flour, clean water, and rice from store shelves - gasoline, GPS systems, USB connectors, and credit card payment gateways, be damned.
How many people do you know who would have shriveled up and died years ago in Darwin’s universe had their parents or modern support systems not bailed them out of ever taking any of life’s great tests?
I'm not sure decay is best modeled as modal. I think of every system as a dynamic equilibrium, simultaneously changing, decaying, accreting, and growing. This dynamic nature does include shifts so severe that it fully collapses and no longer qualifies as a system, but it's not a mode switch that can be delayed or prevented, it's an equilibrium shift in that some forces change strength by enough that it stops working.
I do agree that there is reasoned human resistance to many types of change, including those that reduce systemic viability. But I think it also often resists positive and strengthening changes, and it's VERY hard from inside to know which is which.
I suspect that your hope in Amish and other insular communities is misplaced - they are resisting change, but I really doubt they're strong enough to resist it if some of the competitive pressures (for productivity, lifestyle, resistance to invasion/theft, etc.) from larger/denser groups start encroaching on their existence.
An equilibrium is a mode.
You mention Amish and Haaredim subcultures as "resisting" the monoculture, but in point of fact the differences between the Amish of the USA and their neighbors is relatively trivial in the grand scheme of things. They don't employ certain household devices, they are somewhat more traditional in family arrangements than modern celebrities and tech entrepreneurs, and they dress distinctively. But they support democracy, they participate in the market economy, they obey the laws. I don't see them as resisting the monoculture any more than Star Wars cosplayers or vegans. It's only because their differences are not commodified that they seem odd.
They have lots of kids. That is the "resistance" Robin is talking about.
The Talban also does similar, but Robin never admits them in the same group as the Amish or Haredim for some reason.
The achievement is to maintain high fertility in a rich modern context.
But your main concern is that the "context societies" will fade away due to failure to reproduce, and once the context goes away, what then is the difference between the Taliban and the Amish and Haredim?
Which is why the fate of the universe (sounds melodramatic but I mean it literally) may depend on establishment of independent colonies on other planets, and eventually stars.
Our worldwide monoculture is the result of cheap transport and effectively free communications.
Evolution is driven by variation and competition. Without much variation little adaptation occurs.
As you've been saying for a while, monocultures are maladaptive because, being monocultures, they attempt very few unique experiments, and and so are unlikely to stumble upon adaptive solutions to the problems raised by a changing environment.
Just hanging out on Earth and expecting variation to recur when civilizations periodically fall ensures eventual extinction by catastrophe (meteor strikes, nuclear/bio war, AI, etc.).
Other planets doesn't block monoculture, only maybe other stars.
Not completely, but distance helps. And there's no way to get to other stars without getting to other planets first.
This post about systematic decay is missing a conception of the arc of progress. Evolution proceeds by identifying innovations and then preserving them so that they accumulate. In a sufficiently stable and benign environment this results in gradual, accumulating technological progress - which we have seen taking place over the last few thousand years.
Human infertility is not a sign that the arc of progress is coming to an end. Instead it is the result of innovations in storage, sensors, actuators and computation that render many capabilities of humans obsolete. The arc of progress is continuing smoothly, but most of the engineers at the cutting edge are not biotech engineers, but software engineers - and their medium is not flesh, but machines.
What these engineers see is not stagnation. It is not a monoculture. It is an explosion of diversity - not biodiversity, but mechadiversity. There is no evolutionary rule that says that humans have to remain the dominant species.
There are two levels of culture, stuff that can vary easily locally, and stuff that can't. We have great variety and selection pressures at that first level, but not at the other level.
This reply seems unresponsive to my main claim. Evolutionary progress exists. We understand broadly when and why it happens. It trumps decay in the long term. It is reasonable to warn about system decay, but the underlying trend still seems to be upward. Evolution is still finding new ways to degrade sources of negentropy and it is still preserving that knowledge. Maybe one day that will stop - but so far there is little sign of that - and modern human fertility decline is not relevant evidence.
Natural selection is a statistical concept that only makes sense in the presence of large number of organisms. If you only have a single monoculture, or a handful of different cultures, there is no cultural evolution, no expectation of progress.
That seems close to tautological: if you can't change it, then it remains the same. There's also some "foundational" DNA like that: hox genes, for example.
Throughout my too-many years of grad school, I read several grand histories by great historians. I came to believe that they were lovers of empire. They did not merely describe the collapse of an empire, they lamented it. Empires centralize record keeping, and this is great for historians. A world of scattered villages and competing city-states is much more difficult to study, the more so after millennia have ground them to dust and ashes.
One of my professors, an Assyriologist, remarked during a seminar that across the four millennia of the pre-Christian historical period, the Ancient Near East was ruled by unitary governments for only about 150 years combined. Yet civilization marched on.
I personally fear empire more than local control. I think the development of a monoculture is not adaptive. So I wonder what is the point about ruminating on what we must do to alter the monoculture to make it more adaptive. This would require empire-level central planning, which has been the least adaptive of innovations, resulting in the intentional or unintentional slaughtering of hundreds of millions of people. I think the better route is to let people at the micro level figure out what works, and let them do it. In other words, subvert the monoculture altogether. Let the marketplace of ideas and of economies work it out.
The question is HOW to get far more cultural variety in the world.
Observers going back to Plato at least have been overly pessimistic about our future. Fundamentally this is because of the asymmetry between the current things in our world (firms, traditions, cultures) and the future things that will replace them. The former weigh more heavily on our minds because they are more concrete, and because we are more personally invested in them. And those large current things (firms, systems) are often peaking or declining – hence pessimism.
However if you take a long view of history, it seems highly likely that something will replace whatever is decaying, and in many ways improve upon it. We can't say with certainty what that is and so the optimists are more vague than the pessimists. And yet historically the optimists have usually been right.
So if you say "beware macro decay modes," I would say, "beware discounting future innovation."
I'm not predicting human extinction, just a civ collapse, and with that the loss of many things we treasure about our current global monoculture. Like open inquiry.
Are there other culture trends, apart from population decline, that point toward broad civilizational collapse?
"Monoculture" I struggle with. Over my lifetime I would say that free communication and global economic integration have led countries to become more similar in many ways, but have also led the societies within those countries to become less internally cohesive. The points of friction have shifted around but I don't see us on a path to a true monoculture in the sense of Brave New World or 1984.
I thought referring to it as "rot" made more sense than the new phrase "decay mode" https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/what-makes-stuff-rothtml
I think of "rot" as a more particular type of "decay".
What distinguishes "rot" from other forms of decay?
In software, rot comes from lower modularity due to many incremental changes.
Didn't you apply the term to many areas other than software?
I think sometimes a fast decay, like a fire, can be better than a slow decay, because it allows a replacement to rise from the ashes and perform better.
What is the word "mostly" doing in this observation?: "even when not sick, our bodies are mostly in a slow overall decay mode of aging."
Progress or Failure Mode?
We joke that without our iPhones or Google Maps we’d be fucked (not just depressed), but in all reality, virtually everyone will be truely fucked simply by disappearing flour, clean water, and rice from store shelves - gasoline, GPS systems, USB connectors, and credit card payment gateways, be damned.
How many people do you know who would have shriveled up and died years ago in Darwin’s universe had their parents or modern support systems not bailed them out of ever taking any of life’s great tests?