Beware Value Dashboards

Vehicles like cars, planes, and boats generally need a) an engine to push them forward, b) steering to direct their motions, and c) a driver to manage both. 

Vehicle steering systems vary in effectiveness along many dimensions. For example, when a driver adjusts their steering, the wheels, flaps, or rudders which do that steering can vary in their dimensionality, noise, delays, strength, and frequency of breakdowns. And the info given to the driver to help them steer can also vary in its dimensionality, noise, delays, and frequency of breakdown. 

For a vehicle with an adequate engine and steering system, a competent driver can direct its path toward desired destinations. But in many situations, such systems can also be inadequate to this task. When going too fast in a harsh environment, the vehicle info and controls might be insufficient to let the driver direct it toward desired destinations, or to keep it away from dangers and obstacles. For example, a boat may capsize, or crash into and break on rocks. 

Our civilization is a system that moves, like a boat, through a vast space of possible civilizations. Within a boat, individuals can move around, and change their within-boat spaces and strategies. But as a boat must also move in some ways as a unit, communities must also make collective choices about key shared features like norms and status markers. 

Okay, yes, maybe humanity is more like an armada of boats; in principle different parts can go different directions. And if two boats in an armada were far enough away from each other, and out of contact, they might have to go in independent directions. But for the last few centuries, humanity has had close enough contact to mostly be one big armada moving together.

Each boat in our armada is led by a captain (really a close-knit community of elites) who steers it. And when steering, those captains refer often to a key navigation dashboard sporting a big sign that reads “This Boat’s Values”. Each dashboard tells its boat’s captain the priorities to use when steering. And our captains feel strongly obligated to obey these dashboards. After all, what it means to be a “boat value” is to be the priorities that boat’s captain uses when making choices. The label just couldn’t be wrong, as there it is on the boat.

These dashboards are central to humanity’s boat steering processes. Our captains could have instead held stable abstract priorities in their heads, like avoid storms, rocks, and predators, and find lush fertile fishing grounds and islands. Or the ship’s residents might have held such stable priorities, which they delegated to accountable captains who they kept under control. But in fact our ship residents accept the priorities given them by their captains, who accept the priorities given them by their dashboards. 

And we all do this even after we have heard from experts who have examined these dashboards, and tell us how they work. They say that our boat dashboards were designed to align with neighboring boat dashboards, but to otherwise mostly change without much regard for the details of our boats or the waters ahead. So in fact our captains aren’t really steering our boats much, as they are mostly following the directions of dashboard instructions which ignore most relevant steering info. 

In the past, most everyone lived on small fragile ships, and when their dashboards directed them into storms or rocks, those boats just sank, leaving the remaining boats with dashboards more aligned to survival. Which resulted in an armada of boats with dashboards roughly aligned with survival and growth. Which might give one hope that one’s armada would continue to survive and grow.

However, our best experts can see that our boats and waters have changed a lot lately, Our boats now have much bigger faster engines, and are more easily capsized. In our current waters we can’t see as far ahead, and have less reliable maps and compasses. Yet our current waters are unusally calm and full of fish, so few boats are at risk of starving or sinking soon. Thus while times are good now, we should expect to face usually high risks, and lose many boats, later when we again enter stormy rock-filled waters. Which is sure to happen eventually.  

But rather than think through how to adapt our steering systems to better handle such challenges, such experts are mainly content to ponder these changes as abstract curiosities. They don’t much seek to tell boat captains about these issues, and when they do captains aren’t much interested. In fact, many captains say that if their value dashboards say to stay the course, when doing so risks sinking most boats later, that must mean that value dashboards declare a low value of the future. Who cares if we crash later? Which must be the correct value, as “values” are in their names, after all. 

The above has of course been an allegory of cultural drift. Each boat is a distinct culture. The elites of each culture steer its key norms and status markers according to the “dashboard” they see of its prestigious culture, such as elite art, stories, and journalism. A dashboard that in fact changes fast in ways that have little to do with the adaptive threats or pressures faced by that culture. 

We have high variety and strong selection pressures re habits and practices that can easily vary within each culture, which ensures healthy innovation in such things. But we are in deep trouble re the norms and status markers that we must share in our elite world monoculture; these are plausibly drifting into maladaption. Meaning there will be hell to pay when we again enter difficult waters. Or we may just be replaced by insular fertile cultures like the Amish, Haredim, etc.

We each really do face a choice of values. Yes, elite culture dashboards do tell us what to value, and yes we are inclined to unthinkingly obey them. But we really can think instead, and ask if we really want to follow such dashboards to be smashed against the rocks. We can instead choose to survive and grow, by studying our boats and the waters ahead, and thinking out a navigation strategy, instead of blindly trusting blind but prestigious navigation dashboards.