It's notable how little consensus there is on the "what are our biggest problems?" question, even among highly informed people. The future is fundamentally unknowable and any strong opinions are bound to reflect assumptions and biases as much as any rational argument. But it's probably good that people aren't fully rational, since only with some degree of unjustified certainty is one is motivated to take action. I purely rational actor might just shrug and do nothing about any problem that wasn't imminent and obvious.
Why? Because they're not taught or conditioned to even think of that, whenever they go to "do something". This is why so many government/organizational programs fail; the people running the damn things don't have clue one about how they really work.
Most of our "elite" functions in a cognitive haze; they think that what they think creates reality. You solve problems by writing memos/legislation/regulations. You're never, ever taught to go out and examine the "why" of those problems existing in the first place. Because of that, improper analysis is performed, and no feedback is ever sought. Something doesn't fix the problem? Why, the solution must be to double-down on the paperwork...
You can step back from the issues and begin to gain wisdom, once you consider each and every interaction with the environment as a momentary Skinner Box; conditioning behavior of the subject. Does the subject get what it wants from the interaction? Why, then that behavior becomes ingrained, permanent. If the subject doesn't get what it wants, then it tries something else. Behavior is the result of a conversation between the subject and the environment; if you want to modify behavior, you have to first consider what the signals are actually telling the subject. You may think your memo modifies those signals, but the sad fact is, they usually don't.
The "elites" of today do not understand the world they run, and they do not know how to make things happen. They're chimps, pulling away at levers and pushing buttons that they don't understand. If a reward pops out, then they're happy and continue on flailing away at things. No reward? Then they'll grow increasingly disturbed and start breaking things. That's the point we're at, right now.
Maybe, but it's also possible your readers skew more toward those thinking govt is a more likely source of problems because it's feedback mechanisms are so problematic. And those readers may not be wrong.
Interesting consideration but as a MD and a university researcher, it seems several significant factors are absent in your model :
1. Life extension (by epigenetic modification for instance) that will lead to an increase in life expectancy, slow down aging and at some point stop it. I am starting to see healthy patient asking me for specific drugs to increase their life expectancy.
2. The role of AI in research and innovation, new neurosymbolic model may very well help us to accelerate research and exploit results for innovation.
Consequently, it seems plausible to take into account these factors for a more accurate predictive model, don't you think ?
Fellow MD here (not a researcher nor an expert on aging). As far as I know, we are very far from slowing down aging or stopping disease from inevitably killing people (not counting cryopreservation or similar measures here). Much further than AGI or even ems, I'd wager.
Valuable as they may be, I don't believe such efforts are likely to have much impact on cultural drift / population for the next 50 years or so, during which the peak will likely be determined.
Re: AI; Robin used to begin several of these posts with "assuming no AGI / ems by then... ... innovation will decline". Lately he hasn't used such phrases, but the premise likely still is there.
I assume Robin thinks transformative AGI is much further away than the shortest timelines (he has repeatedly pushed back at Yudkowsky on this over the last decade or so). Also, he might think this issue is worth tackling simply in case of the possibility that "near-future AGI" fails, even if he thought it likely.
People assume that if this or that aspect of culture goes wrong, people will see this and take corrective action; they will respond rationally. You seem to doubt the power of reason: you think that instead a sort of natural selection, in which successful cultural innovations persist and unsuccessful ones die out, is needed for the correction of cultural defects.
The problem with "rationalism fixing the problem" is that all too large a part of the problem is precisely that "rationalism" itself.
Just like IQ, the concept relies on the presupposition that we've gotten it right, in terms of what the ratiocination is ratiocinating about.
Which ain't exactly a given, in that what you're thinking of as "rationalism" isn't usually at all, y'know... Rational. It is, instead, more rationalizing that's actually going on, not actual rational thought.
People reach conclusions, in other words, and then do great work in discovering justifications and "reasons" without any recourse to the reality of things. Then, they say that they've thought deeply on an issue, and found "solutions", without bothering to either arrive at those solutions via reproducible experiment or any actual evidence, and then they studiously ignore the work-product generated by said "solution", moving on to bigger and better mistakes. Usually with a promotion or two along the way...
The biggest problem I see with the world around me today is that there is rather too much "rationalism" and entirely too little empirical observation and pragmatic use of said observations. If you have a brilliant idea, like "Defund the police", you try it, and discover that, gee, the crime rate has gone up... What should you do?
If you're the typical social theorist of today, you double-down on things and take even more money and resources from the cops, and expect that to work even better.
There is insufficient clarity of thought, and entirely too little carefully coldblooded observation in today's world. Nobody wants to actually upset those cloud-castles that all the abstract "rationalists" have come up with, mostly because those same dolts have done such a good job convincing us of both their probity and their wisdom.
And, wisdom is precisely that which they lack. At some point, you have to acknowledge that if something seems "smart" and does not work... Then, it ain't actually all that smart. Likewise, if something seems stupid, yet works...? That might actually be fairly "smart" in reality. The trick is being capable of recognizing the facts, and acknowledging them, two things we've become notably deficient in being able to do as a society or as individuals.
Cultural innovations are not random, like genetic mutations; they are (at least somewhat) prompted by reason, which is always a factor (among others) in human behavior.
I think that you're more than a little off-base with that "...prompted by reason..." thing.
Here's why: Ain't nobody actually thinking about the "why" of any social custom or norm. Nobody sat down one day and said "Here's how we're organizing things... And why we're doing it that way..." You cannot, in other words, discover any such thing as a foundational document or owner's manual for a society. They don't exist, because they were never, ever "reasoned" into being. They just <i>are</i>.
We design at the major macro level, with things like the Constitution. We do not design at the micro level, at all, because at that point on the spectrum? It's all received wisdom we picked up along the way. Nobody ever thought about it, nobody is even aware it exists; we just do it, because "that's how it works".
Would we be better off if things were better defined, and written down? Probably, but the root of the issue is that the vast majority of us are entirely unaware of the social infrastructure represented. It's the water we swim in, the air we breathe; we don't recognize it because it goes on in the liminal spaces of our society, the ones nobody ever really considers or notices.
I will contend to my dying day that nobody in this world with me really understands how it all works. I've made a life-long study of it, and I'm convinced that the average person of any intellectual level doesn't pay attention or even recognize the things that make the world work. This is why the purblind idjits we put in charge of things don't actually ever manage to get anything really done; they've no idea what they're doing when they flail away at the levers and gears of the machinery inside the organizations they think they're running. They have models for how it works, but those models are based on delusional fantasies like "the organization chart is the organization". Anyone who's spent any time at all actually getting things done in a hierarchical organization understands that the wireframe org chart best serves as an outline and a phone book; to get anything accomplished, you have to move into that liminal space where you know that Shirley, the vice president's admin assistant, actually makes the decisions about whose decisions and requests get approved. The VP is virtually a non-entity, because they have no idea at all what comes across Shirley's desk, nor that Shirley is making decisions for them by carefully managing what they see of the company's activities.
Every organization is like that; regardless of how closely it might follow the org chart, the reality is that there's a collective organism there, one that exists separately from the individual participants. Every such entity is functional or dysfunctional in unique ways, and you have to learn the ins and outs before you can really be a productive manager within them.
Ain't nobody going to ever tell you that, though.
All of this is tangible evidence that we, as a society and individuals, really do not know how things work inside our social structures. Mostly because we're utterly blind to all of it. We don't believe this sort of thing exists, therefore we don't look for it, nor do we study it; yet, it does exist, and it does rule our lives, all these little rules and reflexes of social life.
Abstraction is fine. Simulation is fine... So long as they maintain fidelity with reality.
The problem we have throughout society is viewable in many things; one of which is the incessant drive towards what could be termed "gamification" of everything, wherein the simulation somehow becomes far more important than reality itself. When you've turned something into a game, and then warp the game so as to make it easier for you to win at it... You've lost sight of the entire point.
Examples abound: Once upon a time, we had the old-school Olympic Pentathlon... Which was a military event made sport: A short foot race, a javelin throw, a discus throw, a long jump, and wrestling. It was meant to serve as a proxy for assessing the participants military skills; these five events were deemed key and essential to it all, and were conducted with the same gear that that athlete might use on the battlefield.
Have a look at what the thing has evolved into, today: It's pure game, with denatured javelins that bear little or no resemblance to weapons. We don't even use the discus in battle, any more... The wrestling is stylized beyond recognition or actual combat utility.
Modern pentathlon has followed the same path; the events are games, not actual militarily relevant tasks and skills. Biathlon? Once a test of ski patrolling ability on Nordic military skis, the event is now a game played with .22LR purpose-built toys, not actual center-fire military weapons that would see actual combat use. It has all been gamified beyond recognition or real-world utility.
This would be just fine, but the problem is that we do it with everything: It all becomes some rarefied game, and every time someone tries to inject a note of reality, along come the rule-lawyers to render it "game" again with gadgets and "refinements". It's the difference between the sport version of Judo and the real-world ju-jitsu combative art; one teaches you to do your forms and "play fair", the other teaches you to win by killing expeditiously.
You have to have fidelity between the real world and the simulation. Wonder why the kids do so badly, in school? Look at the gulf of separation between the two: We do not simulate the reality of adulthood in our schools at all, let alone well. The simulation inevitably becomes what the student comes to expect from reality, and then they don't find that when they hit the real world of adulthood? You wonder why they are so confused, and so jaded? They've had one thing modeled for them, and encounter another entirely when they hit post-education reality.
You see this syndrome all too often with the military academy graduates; every fall, they show up in their first units, earnest young men who think that they have an idea how the Army works. Come the following spring, most of them have lost their innocence, discovering that the world of West Point is nothing at all like the Regular Army. The shock is disillusioning, and that's the real reason so few make careers of the military.
If you don't maintain fidelity between reality and the training simulation, the whole thing will eventually crash under the weight of the contradictions inherent to the whole thing.
Abstraction and simulation are not necessarily bad things; it'd be damned stupid to train men for things like war by actually killing them, not to mention wasteful. But, the rub therein is that you have to ensure that you are constantly vigilant to keep the training simulation updated and current, by way of taking clear-eyed and unbiased views of the reality of things under the current conditions.
Chess was once a wargame, meant to teach strategy and so forth; what is it today? A game, one with little or no bearing on how we actually fight wars. It's become so abstract and gamified that it's virtually useless to teach "war" as it is fought under modern conditions, although some value can be had from it yet...
I'm against none of that; what I'm against is the excess, the abuse, and the delusional belief that the map is indeed the territory. It is not: The map is the map, and the territory is the territory. They only have value in relation to how much fidelity the one has with the other. Losing sight of that is to destroy any utility that the map might have.
So, you mean 'gamified' as in, the training doesn't match the actions. OK. In USAF BMT we learned that it wasn't the true military life, but a shared trauma and bonding experience. I guess they don't bother warning Privates the same thing...
There are sharp-shooter competitions, and the fitness test (don't get me started on the AF abuse of BMI though). As well as all the times people are judged for doing their job. I've known many a Sgt who doesn't want the brass messing with their troops, and a couple of troops who burnt out after getting a reputation that caused the brass to call on them to no end.
Now I'm in the civilian world, and I see people very thorough to CYA. Which mostly incentivizes something like productivity. There is little risk, if the higher ups find out about you being good, that you will be pulled in 20 directions and burnt out. Therefore there is less incentive for front line supervisors to hide the way things truly work from those on top. Well, except for that big chain of CYA.
I'm not even arguing with you just commiserating after I got clarification ha
Just in case you weren't aware of it already - one of Robin's key predictions re: cultural drift and fertility is that insular, fertile subcultures such as the Amish will likely dominate the population after some centuries.
Some elites are trying to harden against changing the system that works so well for them. Right after Putin declared war, many semiconductor businesses opened sites in new areas to make sure their supply chains wouldn't be broken by a single war. Certainly an industry aware of how delicate a long supply chain is, things are always breaking a little to remind them.
As things gradually get worse, I imagine gradually more an more robust industries will do the same. This will drive greater innovation in other parts of the globe, if people are educated to match the jobs. It's hard for me to judge if your scenario is more likely.
Have you read Ishmael? I find it interesting that you used the exact same analogy for the exact same idea, cultural change leading to negative consequences. Even more interesting, in his conception the cultural system causing our downfall is everything since the agricultural revolution
"But cultural variety is #24, and status norms is #28, and activism is #30, even those these three are core to the cultural evolution process. So we don’t have much generic fear of cultural systems going awry. "
I don't buy those are measures of culture or cultural drift, whatever the latter would be.
"So we do have a big problem with people not seeing cultural drift in the abstract as a problem."
I feel like you never defined cultural drift or connected these ideas.
The two sets -- government & variety+status+activism -- don't have to be mutually exclusive explanations. Government could be a main driver of cultural drift and people could be intuiting that. That's what the Soviet citizens thought and they were right.
This is not to deny that minarchy/anarcho-capitalism might have equal or larger cultural drift, though I'm biased against that hypothesis because I think bad power dynamics are a main driver of cultural drift and, in general (though not always), less government means more competition which means less bad power dynamics.
I think the reason governmental worries are so high is because the government keeps sticking it's nose into everything. At this point we can all see that most of the camel is already inside the tent, and we're hoping it's bactrian, not dromedary, and might still have a chance at pushing it back out with enough effort. Otherwise, someone is going to have to shoot it and drag its carcass out, which is going to involve a huge mess and more effort. And if it's not done quick enough the wolves will be inside as well, ripping apart not just the carcass but us as well.
An airplane is a device, built to spec, with a well-defined function and precise, objective, agreed-on criteria for success and failure. Culture is a nebulous process whose goals are ambiguous and uncertain. And necessarily so, because it is the process by which the criteria itself evolves. Culture is the ongoing, open-ended process in which we not only drive towards goals, but suggest, critique, and come to consensus about what those goals are. Culture is not a device, it is the turbulent froth out of which devices emerge.
In my view, for your argument to be persuasive, you need to do much more work to convince people that you have a compelling meta-level view of this process, from which you can make strong normative claims about how it should and shouldn't work. Yes, there are some obvious failure states, where the whole process halts, but these look like the global catastrophes people are already worried about - global war, global economic meltdown, other existential threats, a global political regime that locks us into a static equilibrium, etc. You don't need a complex theory of cultural drift to get people to care about avoiding those things, they are rocks in the rapids directly ahead of us that we should obviously steer away from.
Is the main value of your theory that it gives us a useful way to identify and avoid those kinds of hazards? If so, that could be made more clear. Otherwise, it feels like you are assuming a perspective outside of culture, this vast, sublime thing that combines all the slippery complexity of Navier-Stokes and all the recursive puzzles of Godelian incompleteness, and making vague normative claims about how it *should* work in a general sense. It's hard to even know how one should go about evaluating claims like that - what kind of evidence or arguments to invoke.
(I know you've been a bit frustrated with the lack of traction this theory is getting. I'm trying to articulate why it's not landing for me. I hope this is helpful.)
> If the jet engines turn off midair, they don’t realize that they are in trouble. The plane still feels fine, and it is now less noisy. To see a problem, they’d have to see themselves as part of a flying system sustained by particular supports, and see how those supports might fail. Someone who tried to tell them about their problem would need to have sufficient status or a clear and compelling enough argument to distract them from their seat, bathroom, and food fights.
_(Looks out of the window)_ We seem to be losing altitude. I knew this plane was too crowded! Time to fight over whom we throw out to reduce the load! Without parachutes, of course—the winners of the fight might need ’em later.
So people care non-negligibly about epistemic norms? That looks like a very privileged sample of people to me. I can think of a lot of people who would reply more or less like this:
A – What do you think about epistemic norms?
B – Epi—what? *SMACK!* You think you’re better than me just because you know a useless big word, don’t you? *WHACK!*
I'm not sure Robin has tackled this comprehensively, but he has repeatedly mentioned fertility as an example of a proxy measure of adaptive values. I suppose there are several more, and it'd be interesting to see this analyzed more thoroughly.
I wrote something (much less nuanced) earlier and when writing it, found myself wanting to digress into examples of complex systems and the inability of a natural majority of the population to grasp such issues, let alone care about them. You did this in a better way and it was a lot more fun to read than my own. Thanks for helping me through this.
It's notable how little consensus there is on the "what are our biggest problems?" question, even among highly informed people. The future is fundamentally unknowable and any strong opinions are bound to reflect assumptions and biases as much as any rational argument. But it's probably good that people aren't fully rational, since only with some degree of unjustified certainty is one is motivated to take action. I purely rational actor might just shrug and do nothing about any problem that wasn't imminent and obvious.
Nobody pays attention to "how it all works".
Why? Because they're not taught or conditioned to even think of that, whenever they go to "do something". This is why so many government/organizational programs fail; the people running the damn things don't have clue one about how they really work.
Most of our "elite" functions in a cognitive haze; they think that what they think creates reality. You solve problems by writing memos/legislation/regulations. You're never, ever taught to go out and examine the "why" of those problems existing in the first place. Because of that, improper analysis is performed, and no feedback is ever sought. Something doesn't fix the problem? Why, the solution must be to double-down on the paperwork...
You can step back from the issues and begin to gain wisdom, once you consider each and every interaction with the environment as a momentary Skinner Box; conditioning behavior of the subject. Does the subject get what it wants from the interaction? Why, then that behavior becomes ingrained, permanent. If the subject doesn't get what it wants, then it tries something else. Behavior is the result of a conversation between the subject and the environment; if you want to modify behavior, you have to first consider what the signals are actually telling the subject. You may think your memo modifies those signals, but the sad fact is, they usually don't.
The "elites" of today do not understand the world they run, and they do not know how to make things happen. They're chimps, pulling away at levers and pushing buttons that they don't understand. If a reward pops out, then they're happy and continue on flailing away at things. No reward? Then they'll grow increasingly disturbed and start breaking things. That's the point we're at, right now.
Maybe, but it's also possible your readers skew more toward those thinking govt is a more likely source of problems because it's feedback mechanisms are so problematic. And those readers may not be wrong.
Interesting consideration but as a MD and a university researcher, it seems several significant factors are absent in your model :
1. Life extension (by epigenetic modification for instance) that will lead to an increase in life expectancy, slow down aging and at some point stop it. I am starting to see healthy patient asking me for specific drugs to increase their life expectancy.
2. The role of AI in research and innovation, new neurosymbolic model may very well help us to accelerate research and exploit results for innovation.
Consequently, it seems plausible to take into account these factors for a more accurate predictive model, don't you think ?
Fellow MD here (not a researcher nor an expert on aging). As far as I know, we are very far from slowing down aging or stopping disease from inevitably killing people (not counting cryopreservation or similar measures here). Much further than AGI or even ems, I'd wager.
For example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWAmkSqLE4YMQRuhj/a-primer-on-the-current-state-of-longevity-research
Valuable as they may be, I don't believe such efforts are likely to have much impact on cultural drift / population for the next 50 years or so, during which the peak will likely be determined.
Re: AI; Robin used to begin several of these posts with "assuming no AGI / ems by then... ... innovation will decline". Lately he hasn't used such phrases, but the premise likely still is there.
I assume Robin thinks transformative AGI is much further away than the shortest timelines (he has repeatedly pushed back at Yudkowsky on this over the last decade or so). Also, he might think this issue is worth tackling simply in case of the possibility that "near-future AGI" fails, even if he thought it likely.
Yes, the implicit "assuming no ems or human level AI" is still there.
People assume that if this or that aspect of culture goes wrong, people will see this and take corrective action; they will respond rationally. You seem to doubt the power of reason: you think that instead a sort of natural selection, in which successful cultural innovations persist and unsuccessful ones die out, is needed for the correction of cultural defects.
I'd love for rationalism to fix the problem. But that has never happened before to my knowledge.
The problem with "rationalism fixing the problem" is that all too large a part of the problem is precisely that "rationalism" itself.
Just like IQ, the concept relies on the presupposition that we've gotten it right, in terms of what the ratiocination is ratiocinating about.
Which ain't exactly a given, in that what you're thinking of as "rationalism" isn't usually at all, y'know... Rational. It is, instead, more rationalizing that's actually going on, not actual rational thought.
People reach conclusions, in other words, and then do great work in discovering justifications and "reasons" without any recourse to the reality of things. Then, they say that they've thought deeply on an issue, and found "solutions", without bothering to either arrive at those solutions via reproducible experiment or any actual evidence, and then they studiously ignore the work-product generated by said "solution", moving on to bigger and better mistakes. Usually with a promotion or two along the way...
The biggest problem I see with the world around me today is that there is rather too much "rationalism" and entirely too little empirical observation and pragmatic use of said observations. If you have a brilliant idea, like "Defund the police", you try it, and discover that, gee, the crime rate has gone up... What should you do?
If you're the typical social theorist of today, you double-down on things and take even more money and resources from the cops, and expect that to work even better.
There is insufficient clarity of thought, and entirely too little carefully coldblooded observation in today's world. Nobody wants to actually upset those cloud-castles that all the abstract "rationalists" have come up with, mostly because those same dolts have done such a good job convincing us of both their probity and their wisdom.
And, wisdom is precisely that which they lack. At some point, you have to acknowledge that if something seems "smart" and does not work... Then, it ain't actually all that smart. Likewise, if something seems stupid, yet works...? That might actually be fairly "smart" in reality. The trick is being capable of recognizing the facts, and acknowledging them, two things we've become notably deficient in being able to do as a society or as individuals.
Cultural innovations are not random, like genetic mutations; they are (at least somewhat) prompted by reason, which is always a factor (among others) in human behavior.
I think that you're more than a little off-base with that "...prompted by reason..." thing.
Here's why: Ain't nobody actually thinking about the "why" of any social custom or norm. Nobody sat down one day and said "Here's how we're organizing things... And why we're doing it that way..." You cannot, in other words, discover any such thing as a foundational document or owner's manual for a society. They don't exist, because they were never, ever "reasoned" into being. They just <i>are</i>.
We design at the major macro level, with things like the Constitution. We do not design at the micro level, at all, because at that point on the spectrum? It's all received wisdom we picked up along the way. Nobody ever thought about it, nobody is even aware it exists; we just do it, because "that's how it works".
Would we be better off if things were better defined, and written down? Probably, but the root of the issue is that the vast majority of us are entirely unaware of the social infrastructure represented. It's the water we swim in, the air we breathe; we don't recognize it because it goes on in the liminal spaces of our society, the ones nobody ever really considers or notices.
I will contend to my dying day that nobody in this world with me really understands how it all works. I've made a life-long study of it, and I'm convinced that the average person of any intellectual level doesn't pay attention or even recognize the things that make the world work. This is why the purblind idjits we put in charge of things don't actually ever manage to get anything really done; they've no idea what they're doing when they flail away at the levers and gears of the machinery inside the organizations they think they're running. They have models for how it works, but those models are based on delusional fantasies like "the organization chart is the organization". Anyone who's spent any time at all actually getting things done in a hierarchical organization understands that the wireframe org chart best serves as an outline and a phone book; to get anything accomplished, you have to move into that liminal space where you know that Shirley, the vice president's admin assistant, actually makes the decisions about whose decisions and requests get approved. The VP is virtually a non-entity, because they have no idea at all what comes across Shirley's desk, nor that Shirley is making decisions for them by carefully managing what they see of the company's activities.
Every organization is like that; regardless of how closely it might follow the org chart, the reality is that there's a collective organism there, one that exists separately from the individual participants. Every such entity is functional or dysfunctional in unique ways, and you have to learn the ins and outs before you can really be a productive manager within them.
Ain't nobody going to ever tell you that, though.
All of this is tangible evidence that we, as a society and individuals, really do not know how things work inside our social structures. Mostly because we're utterly blind to all of it. We don't believe this sort of thing exists, therefore we don't look for it, nor do we study it; yet, it does exist, and it does rule our lives, all these little rules and reflexes of social life.
Man, you really dislike abstraction, huh. Maybe find an anthropologist to theory craft with
Abstraction is fine. Simulation is fine... So long as they maintain fidelity with reality.
The problem we have throughout society is viewable in many things; one of which is the incessant drive towards what could be termed "gamification" of everything, wherein the simulation somehow becomes far more important than reality itself. When you've turned something into a game, and then warp the game so as to make it easier for you to win at it... You've lost sight of the entire point.
Examples abound: Once upon a time, we had the old-school Olympic Pentathlon... Which was a military event made sport: A short foot race, a javelin throw, a discus throw, a long jump, and wrestling. It was meant to serve as a proxy for assessing the participants military skills; these five events were deemed key and essential to it all, and were conducted with the same gear that that athlete might use on the battlefield.
Have a look at what the thing has evolved into, today: It's pure game, with denatured javelins that bear little or no resemblance to weapons. We don't even use the discus in battle, any more... The wrestling is stylized beyond recognition or actual combat utility.
Modern pentathlon has followed the same path; the events are games, not actual militarily relevant tasks and skills. Biathlon? Once a test of ski patrolling ability on Nordic military skis, the event is now a game played with .22LR purpose-built toys, not actual center-fire military weapons that would see actual combat use. It has all been gamified beyond recognition or real-world utility.
This would be just fine, but the problem is that we do it with everything: It all becomes some rarefied game, and every time someone tries to inject a note of reality, along come the rule-lawyers to render it "game" again with gadgets and "refinements". It's the difference between the sport version of Judo and the real-world ju-jitsu combative art; one teaches you to do your forms and "play fair", the other teaches you to win by killing expeditiously.
You have to have fidelity between the real world and the simulation. Wonder why the kids do so badly, in school? Look at the gulf of separation between the two: We do not simulate the reality of adulthood in our schools at all, let alone well. The simulation inevitably becomes what the student comes to expect from reality, and then they don't find that when they hit the real world of adulthood? You wonder why they are so confused, and so jaded? They've had one thing modeled for them, and encounter another entirely when they hit post-education reality.
You see this syndrome all too often with the military academy graduates; every fall, they show up in their first units, earnest young men who think that they have an idea how the Army works. Come the following spring, most of them have lost their innocence, discovering that the world of West Point is nothing at all like the Regular Army. The shock is disillusioning, and that's the real reason so few make careers of the military.
If you don't maintain fidelity between reality and the training simulation, the whole thing will eventually crash under the weight of the contradictions inherent to the whole thing.
Abstraction and simulation are not necessarily bad things; it'd be damned stupid to train men for things like war by actually killing them, not to mention wasteful. But, the rub therein is that you have to ensure that you are constantly vigilant to keep the training simulation updated and current, by way of taking clear-eyed and unbiased views of the reality of things under the current conditions.
Chess was once a wargame, meant to teach strategy and so forth; what is it today? A game, one with little or no bearing on how we actually fight wars. It's become so abstract and gamified that it's virtually useless to teach "war" as it is fought under modern conditions, although some value can be had from it yet...
I'm against none of that; what I'm against is the excess, the abuse, and the delusional belief that the map is indeed the territory. It is not: The map is the map, and the territory is the territory. They only have value in relation to how much fidelity the one has with the other. Losing sight of that is to destroy any utility that the map might have.
So, you mean 'gamified' as in, the training doesn't match the actions. OK. In USAF BMT we learned that it wasn't the true military life, but a shared trauma and bonding experience. I guess they don't bother warning Privates the same thing...
There are sharp-shooter competitions, and the fitness test (don't get me started on the AF abuse of BMI though). As well as all the times people are judged for doing their job. I've known many a Sgt who doesn't want the brass messing with their troops, and a couple of troops who burnt out after getting a reputation that caused the brass to call on them to no end.
Now I'm in the civilian world, and I see people very thorough to CYA. Which mostly incentivizes something like productivity. There is little risk, if the higher ups find out about you being good, that you will be pulled in 20 directions and burnt out. Therefore there is less incentive for front line supervisors to hide the way things truly work from those on top. Well, except for that big chain of CYA.
I'm not even arguing with you just commiserating after I got clarification ha
Cultural drift mitigation without mentioning cultural drift: https://brownstone.org/articles/the-amish-a-control-group-for-technofeudalism/
Just in case you weren't aware of it already - one of Robin's key predictions re: cultural drift and fertility is that insular, fertile subcultures such as the Amish will likely dominate the population after some centuries.
Some elites are trying to harden against changing the system that works so well for them. Right after Putin declared war, many semiconductor businesses opened sites in new areas to make sure their supply chains wouldn't be broken by a single war. Certainly an industry aware of how delicate a long supply chain is, things are always breaking a little to remind them.
As things gradually get worse, I imagine gradually more an more robust industries will do the same. This will drive greater innovation in other parts of the globe, if people are educated to match the jobs. It's hard for me to judge if your scenario is more likely.
Have you read Ishmael? I find it interesting that you used the exact same analogy for the exact same idea, cultural change leading to negative consequences. Even more interesting, in his conception the cultural system causing our downfall is everything since the agricultural revolution
"But cultural variety is #24, and status norms is #28, and activism is #30, even those these three are core to the cultural evolution process. So we don’t have much generic fear of cultural systems going awry. "
I don't buy those are measures of culture or cultural drift, whatever the latter would be.
"So we do have a big problem with people not seeing cultural drift in the abstract as a problem."
I feel like you never defined cultural drift or connected these ideas.
The two sets -- government & variety+status+activism -- don't have to be mutually exclusive explanations. Government could be a main driver of cultural drift and people could be intuiting that. That's what the Soviet citizens thought and they were right.
This is not to deny that minarchy/anarcho-capitalism might have equal or larger cultural drift, though I'm biased against that hypothesis because I think bad power dynamics are a main driver of cultural drift and, in general (though not always), less government means more competition which means less bad power dynamics.
I think the reason governmental worries are so high is because the government keeps sticking it's nose into everything. At this point we can all see that most of the camel is already inside the tent, and we're hoping it's bactrian, not dromedary, and might still have a chance at pushing it back out with enough effort. Otherwise, someone is going to have to shoot it and drag its carcass out, which is going to involve a huge mess and more effort. And if it's not done quick enough the wolves will be inside as well, ripping apart not just the carcass but us as well.
An airplane is a device, built to spec, with a well-defined function and precise, objective, agreed-on criteria for success and failure. Culture is a nebulous process whose goals are ambiguous and uncertain. And necessarily so, because it is the process by which the criteria itself evolves. Culture is the ongoing, open-ended process in which we not only drive towards goals, but suggest, critique, and come to consensus about what those goals are. Culture is not a device, it is the turbulent froth out of which devices emerge.
In my view, for your argument to be persuasive, you need to do much more work to convince people that you have a compelling meta-level view of this process, from which you can make strong normative claims about how it should and shouldn't work. Yes, there are some obvious failure states, where the whole process halts, but these look like the global catastrophes people are already worried about - global war, global economic meltdown, other existential threats, a global political regime that locks us into a static equilibrium, etc. You don't need a complex theory of cultural drift to get people to care about avoiding those things, they are rocks in the rapids directly ahead of us that we should obviously steer away from.
Is the main value of your theory that it gives us a useful way to identify and avoid those kinds of hazards? If so, that could be made more clear. Otherwise, it feels like you are assuming a perspective outside of culture, this vast, sublime thing that combines all the slippery complexity of Navier-Stokes and all the recursive puzzles of Godelian incompleteness, and making vague normative claims about how it *should* work in a general sense. It's hard to even know how one should go about evaluating claims like that - what kind of evidence or arguments to invoke.
(I know you've been a bit frustrated with the lack of traction this theory is getting. I'm trying to articulate why it's not landing for me. I hope this is helpful.)
> If the jet engines turn off midair, they don’t realize that they are in trouble. The plane still feels fine, and it is now less noisy. To see a problem, they’d have to see themselves as part of a flying system sustained by particular supports, and see how those supports might fail. Someone who tried to tell them about their problem would need to have sufficient status or a clear and compelling enough argument to distract them from their seat, bathroom, and food fights.
_(Looks out of the window)_ We seem to be losing altitude. I knew this plane was too crowded! Time to fight over whom we throw out to reduce the load! Without parachutes, of course—the winners of the fight might need ’em later.
So people care non-negligibly about epistemic norms? That looks like a very privileged sample of people to me. I can think of a lot of people who would reply more or less like this:
A – What do you think about epistemic norms?
B – Epi—what? *SMACK!* You think you’re better than me just because you know a useless big word, don’t you? *WHACK!*
How might we distinguish system evolution from system decay?
I'm not sure Robin has tackled this comprehensively, but he has repeatedly mentioned fertility as an example of a proxy measure of adaptive values. I suppose there are several more, and it'd be interesting to see this analyzed more thoroughly.
I wrote something (much less nuanced) earlier and when writing it, found myself wanting to digress into examples of complex systems and the inability of a natural majority of the population to grasp such issues, let alone care about them. You did this in a better way and it was a lot more fun to read than my own. Thanks for helping me through this.
https://substack.com/@cynicology/note/c-69513103
It's funny how one knows by the second paragraph that you our describing the state of our culture. Great metaphor.