This seems to be a fundamental human problem. We cannot organize ourselves into cultural units without feeling the need to oppose other cultural units or absorb them. There is simply no "let them be." Modern liberalism, by which I don't mean progressiveism, likes to see itself as tremendously open and, indeed, liberal in the original meaning of that word. Yes, we can value other societies and cultures. But only after we have vanquished them, as is the case with indigenous cultures that we pay verbal homage to, including literally offering land acknowledgments, but not actually ceding those people any authority over their land or their place in the broader culture. We simply cannot abide other people seeing the world differently than we do. We have to conclude that they are fools, or that they are motivated by an evil that must be suppressed.
Your original vision, that the world could unite once we reduced barriers of time and space, is paradoxically prevented by its exact opposite. We could live differently from one another when it was harder to communicate, when it was harder to reach out across distances and interact with each other, and we relied on specialists to manage the communications, trade, and other interactions between our relatively distant cultures. Only in this way could we actually call inhabit this planet as different cultures.
But once the ships and airplanes got fast enough the first thing people did with those ships and airplanes was to attempt subjugate other lands. Including those that previously would have been too difficult to subjugate and may have required cooperation and trade over vast distances, the way the Pacific was managed from the 1500s until the 1900s. I might have thought when I was in college four decades ago that we might have been able to coexist under an umbrella of relative prosperity, where as we saw that the Zero Sum game assumptions of the prior centuries no longer applied, and that it would be possible for countries that live under vastly different cultural schemas each to use modern tools to educate their populations and produce prosperity from within their own frameworks. And, indeed, the 1990s suggested such a thing might be possible, at least to my young mind. 9/11 changed some of that and then the global economic difficulty a decade later made that seem even more farfetched. Now, with the emergence of a global rlite that goes to Davos every year to decide what policies and preferences they should try to impose on the global economy, it is clear that even under tremendous prosperity we are simply not able to allow people to be truly different from one another. It is too threatening. We don't need to look across nations to see this, we see this in the United States. Every group wants to shut every other group down, whether left or right, because they find their thinking to be abominable and, indeed, genuinely object to some of their practices, which are not neutral in effect, I do not wish to pretend otherwise. All of this to say, that we are on the brink of being too able to communicate, too able to cross borders, and too able to attempt to control and dominate each other. And so therefore we will try to do this. Which will lead to exactly the balkanization that you describe, where we revert to slower communication, less international trade and collaboration, and less travel, ultimately. Everything that my generation got to benefit from, and see come to rich fruition, will now be taken from future generations, bit by bit, piece by piece, and this is very tragic. Though, not catastrophic. Eventually, the children deprived of the wonderful expansive life we live now, will rise up and try again. Perhaps they will have better tools or perhaps they will simply watch the cycle repeat itself.
"There is simply no "let them be." Modern liberalism, by which I don't mean progressiveism, likes to see itself as tremendously open and, indeed, liberal in the original meaning of that word. Yes, we can value other societies and cultures. But only after we have vanquished them, as is the case with indigenous cultures that we pay verbal homage to, including literally offering land acknowledgments, but not actually ceding those people any authority over their land or their place in the broader culture. We simply cannot abide other people seeing the world differently than we do. We have to conclude that they are fools, or that they are motivated by an evil that must be suppressed."
You're denying that the Treaty of Westphalia ever happened. There is "let them be"; it worked as recently as 2015, when same-sex couples gained the right to marry, not as a result of executive orders, smear campaigns, woke mobs, or the leftist seizure of institutions, but as a result of a long LGBT campaign to show that they were nice, regular people, and could be good neighbors.
It isn't "us" who can't let people be. It's the woke left, the Christian right, and the global elite. Don't get sucked into their vortex of hate, but don't be silenced, either.
What I find infinitely interesting about human beings is how malleable our concept of "in-group" is.
Traditionally this was based on factors like geopolitical boundaries, religion, race, and language. But these are made-up concepts that made sense in an era without good transportation or communication. Technology is reorganizing this very quickly. A kid in Milwaukee might have more of an affinity for a kid in Seoul that is into the same hobby he is, than he does for the kids down the street.
The traditional in-group factors like nationality and race are fading as the most useful ways to think about group-group interactions. This is especially so in the young generation. Countries are becoming diverse assemblages of micro-cultures that cut across the traditional dimensions, and will feel less cohesive as a result.
/At the moment/, this seems to be a great existential risk. But if you study the history that led to the ideal of a world government, you'll find that this elite monoculture has one root to it, which has dominated Western culture since the 4th century AD: rationalist Platonism, under which I include Christianity (especially the Orthodox, Catholic, Calvinist, and Unitarian churches), Islam, Rousseau, the French Revolutionaries, Hegel, Marx, progressivism, modern art, Italian fascism, Nazism, Heidegger, post-modernism, and the Social Justice Movement. (Platonism has some roots in Pythagoreanism, Hinduism, and Egyptian beliefs; but Plato made the first great rationalist synthesis.)
Opposed to it is the empirical liberal tradition of the British Enlightenment, which includes the US Revolution, New Amsterdam, the Rhode Island colony, the Netherlands, early Venice, etc., back at least to Athens, and arguably to Old Babylon. Liberalism and empirical epistemology have always been under attack from Platonist reactionaries, back to the days when Socrates' students betrayed Athens to Sparta, and Plato said he'd like to burn every word Democritus wrote.
(This dichotomy doesn't generalize in an obvious way to non-Western nations.)
It's essential to understand that "left" and "right" are both Platonist. See them as opposites, and you've already lost.
We already know the solution: Liberal democracy combined with a written legal code and an independent judiciary, balance-of-power government, free speech, free trade, good-faith debate, compromise, empirical (not just rational) science, and consequentialist ethics. It is no coincidence that every one of these essential ingredients has been under intense attack since the 1930s. Read Plato, then Augustine, then Rousseau, then Hegel, then Marx, then Hitler, then Heidegger, then post-modernists, then contemporary progressive theory; and see the shared assumptions, the recurring arguments, and the common objectives. There's been a gradual accumulation of more and more subtle philosophical tools and tactics, but otherwise little has changed since Plato said we just need to get rid of everybody over the age of 10 and start over.
The greatest weakness of Platonism is that its ideology requires believing that the Good is universal, and therefore all good people want the same things, and therefore rational people always agree, compromise is inherently evil, and the only possible solution to disagreements is to impoverish, exile, or kill the people who are wrong. (Plato and Rousseau both use this reasoning.) Platonists believe that conflict resolution mechanisms are immoral. So they'll split into factions and kill each other whenever they don't need to unite against liberals. It happened to Rome in the 4th-6th centuries, culminating in the obliteration of the Arian West by the Nicene East; it happened to the French Revolutionaries, to the Russian Revolutionaries immediately after the revolution, and in the 1910s & 1920s, when communism and labor movements split into left-wing (internationalist and revolutionary), right-wing (national and seeking incremental change within the system), and fascist.
This in-fighting seems to me to have happened in the US after the 2024 election. The Democrats are torn between people who say they lost for being too extreme, and people who say they lost for not being extreme enough. They might not be able to agree on a candidate in 2028. The Republicans are likewise torn between MAGA Trumpers and conservatives. If Vance remains loyal to Trump for 4 years, the Republicans will also be at great risk of splitting in two. If both parties split, that would be great. If one splits and the other doesn't, that would be worse than before.
A new advantage we have this time is that AI can expose the true meaning of, and failings of, Platonist philosophy. I'm working with some people who are testing the latest chatbots to see if they can point out fallacious reasoning and hidden assumptions in propaganda. At present, they're too gullible to pick up on flawed reasoning themselves, and too unemotional to notice that questions like "does this speaker advocate murdering millions of innocent people?" are more important than questions like "is this speaker's cultural background being adequately respected?"
Re: "So far, our superpower is cultural evolution. But that only works when we are split into different enough competing cultures." Well, there's sill competition between memes - even in a giant monoculture. Cultural evolution doesn't just stop if we ever get to a "Star Wars"-like galactic empire dominated by a giant monoculture changing via self-directed evolution.
That's like saying: "Without multiple competing ecosystems, evolution is dominated by drift rather than selection." There's more to evolution than competition between entire ecosystems. The term "evolution" doesn't just refer to macro-evolution. It also includes micro-evolution. Basically, evolution is a multi-level process with different conceptions of "fitness" and "adaptation" applying at the different levels.
I don't know what it would even mean for ecosystems to "compete" with each other. Is the arctic trying to take over more temperate areas?
I usually only hear micro-evolution distinguished from macro-evolution in disputes about creationism.
It's well known that selection requires variation to select from (the continued existence of variation was a puzzle for Darwin, eventually solved by integrated Mendelian genetics). In culture (vs genetics), we find less variation within groups and more between groups (which is why group selection works better for culture than genes).
You are OK with "multiple competing cultures", but don't understand what "multiple competing ecosystems" means? It's a bit of an odd combination of opinions, IMO.
Your link says macroevolution is defined as applying to the species level and above. But with cultural evolution we haven't been taking about the species level.
How does the arctic ecosystem compete with temperate or tropical ecosystems?
Well, you just selected an example of ecosystems not in close competition. I think the most common case where there is competition is where a land bridge forms between a previously-isolated island and the mainland - or another island.
It's been known that evolution is dominated by drift since the neutral revolution in the 1960s. Drift also being an important factor in cultural evolution would not be particularly suprising, IMO.
The theory that evolution is dominated by drift was ridiculous from the start. Most mutations are neutral mutations; but counting neutral mutations as "evolution" is just dumb. They're neutral! If you say drift dominates, you've removed selection from evolution--which means you no longer have a theory of evolution!
Anybody who fell for the drift hypothesis, must have had some Hegelian progressivist narrative in the back of their head telling them that progress is inevitable and drift is the hand of the World Spirit. Drift could only lead to adaptation through group selection, which the 1960s evobios hated even more than selection.
Neutral mutations count as evolution - according to most popular definitions of the term "evolution". Not all mutations are neutral - so there's still plenty of scope for selection.
Well, it's a matter of convention rather than of fact. To me, the term "evolution" refers to the process by which life adapts and develops complexity; and neutral drift isn't adaptive and doesn't develop complexity. That's because I think of it as a more-general abstract process, which can for instance be observed in cultures. Neutral mutations are unique to DNA; including them in the concept "evolution" would result in a concept of "evolution" that (A) obscured the important process that the theory of evolution explains, and (B) doesn't generalize to other kinds of systems.
I thought the 60s neutralists were supposed to be old hat now. My understanding is that for genetics, drift is important with small population sizes. For large populations, selection is dominant.
So: 90% of the human genome is junk DNA. So: most mutations there are neutral - and count as genetic drift. This argument makes no mention of the population size.
Selection can't apply to genuinely neutral genes (I guess it can save space by deleting them). Robin has been talking about cultural drift, where the end "phenotype" really is changing, and in a way that has reduced fertility.
Why is it important to collectively choose our future? Why isn’t it more important for different groups to have freedom, as Scott Alexander argues? Put another way, what are the externalities between groups that make collective choice so much better than the possible outcomes from decentralised choices?
I wonder if the monoculture feeling is something real or a typical westerner belief. Even on global risks such as global warming, that concerns everybody and where there is a scientific consensus since decades, policies hardly converge. On more controversial subjects, divergence is the rule. I hope the author is right, but I dont see that much convergence in russian or chinese policies, for instance.
In the past, cultures "competed" and "evolved" through war and conquest. Clearly, that seems undesirable. So how are cultures supposed to compete and evolve, exactly?
An idealized view of the post-WW2 era is that nations send representatives to the UN. Representatives at the UN have discussions about what international law should be. And international law determines the rules by which nations compete. This seems a lot better than war. But this model also seems to risk global monoculture. Insofar as discussions at the UN actually matter, they pull people into a global monoculture so they can better influence what happens at the UN.
What's the best way to square this circle? How do you answer the meta-level question of the "rules of the game" by which various cultures should compete?
That's what I was asking you! It seems like that's the big question which is implied by your worldview.
Maybe we can get some sort of in-between approach. E.g. every 100 years, have a global convention which lays out the rules for the following 100 years.
One thing the UN and the International Court of Justice have done is to largely prevent conquests of UN members by other UN members. There is space for alternative cultures to develop. Within many countries there is also a lot of diversity and space for cultural development.
You see a world mono-culture, but is that mostly because the culture you are part of has many adherents and doesn't regard other cultures highly enough to see them as eventual alternatives or competitors.
To choose a future, you need to choose a religion. Jonathan Rauch has become the unexpected messenger for the idea that liberalism cannot exist on its own without Christianity as a “substrate.” Christianity provides the essential cultural values, to which pure liberalism can only be agnostic.
Yes, the idea is as old as liberalism, though we are sort of re-discovering it in our day. Debatable, as is anything in history or the social sciences.
It's interesting that you posted this today. I'm reading 'The Dawn of Everything' (an anthropological survey that emphasizes the forethought and agency and intentional cultural choices of our distant ancestors), and I have been contemplating this very question. People certainly FEEL more powerless and disconnected-as if they're being swept along by a tide over which they have no control. Some of the reasons involve our isolated lifestyles and the strange and perverse nature of social media but this is far from the entire story.
I think we can find (partial) solutions, but first we need to develop our understanding and build a new vocabulary.
I was raised on Star Trek and Isaac Asimov and The High Frontier and the rest of it. I want to believe the answer to your titular question is "yes".
But I have concluded the answer is "no", short of narrowly-defined problems like banning CFCs. For two reasons: (1) we have no idea what the impact of general purpose technologies will be in advance, and (2) the herd is moved by economic forces that make it increasingly challenging to depart from the herd.
Here's an example of (2). Thirty-five years ago it would have been possible for you to be an academic at a university and decide that you didn't want to use computers. You may have been seen as quirky – but you could have functioned. Today it would be entirely impossible to not use a computer as a university professor. Even the guy at Costco who changes car tires has to use a computer. What was optional in the past - a personal choice - is no longer *really* an option if you want to stay plugged into the economy.
In an earlier era technologies like "money" and "literacy" went from optional to mandatory. In theory you can detach from the economy and go live in the wilds of Alaska, but there are big reasons people don't do that. You as an individual have no practical choice – you have to follow the herd.
The "monoculture" you're talking about is the integrated worldwide economy. True diversity would only come from breaking apart that integrated economy – or at least weakening its bonds – because that integration is what drives herd behavior and loss of diversity. But again, even at a global level there are strong forces that make it hard to break from the herd.
If there's a monoculture, what is this other culture that will replace the monoculture when it fails? We may be risking extinction by adopting such monoculture now.
This seems to be a fundamental human problem. We cannot organize ourselves into cultural units without feeling the need to oppose other cultural units or absorb them. There is simply no "let them be." Modern liberalism, by which I don't mean progressiveism, likes to see itself as tremendously open and, indeed, liberal in the original meaning of that word. Yes, we can value other societies and cultures. But only after we have vanquished them, as is the case with indigenous cultures that we pay verbal homage to, including literally offering land acknowledgments, but not actually ceding those people any authority over their land or their place in the broader culture. We simply cannot abide other people seeing the world differently than we do. We have to conclude that they are fools, or that they are motivated by an evil that must be suppressed.
Your original vision, that the world could unite once we reduced barriers of time and space, is paradoxically prevented by its exact opposite. We could live differently from one another when it was harder to communicate, when it was harder to reach out across distances and interact with each other, and we relied on specialists to manage the communications, trade, and other interactions between our relatively distant cultures. Only in this way could we actually call inhabit this planet as different cultures.
But once the ships and airplanes got fast enough the first thing people did with those ships and airplanes was to attempt subjugate other lands. Including those that previously would have been too difficult to subjugate and may have required cooperation and trade over vast distances, the way the Pacific was managed from the 1500s until the 1900s. I might have thought when I was in college four decades ago that we might have been able to coexist under an umbrella of relative prosperity, where as we saw that the Zero Sum game assumptions of the prior centuries no longer applied, and that it would be possible for countries that live under vastly different cultural schemas each to use modern tools to educate their populations and produce prosperity from within their own frameworks. And, indeed, the 1990s suggested such a thing might be possible, at least to my young mind. 9/11 changed some of that and then the global economic difficulty a decade later made that seem even more farfetched. Now, with the emergence of a global rlite that goes to Davos every year to decide what policies and preferences they should try to impose on the global economy, it is clear that even under tremendous prosperity we are simply not able to allow people to be truly different from one another. It is too threatening. We don't need to look across nations to see this, we see this in the United States. Every group wants to shut every other group down, whether left or right, because they find their thinking to be abominable and, indeed, genuinely object to some of their practices, which are not neutral in effect, I do not wish to pretend otherwise. All of this to say, that we are on the brink of being too able to communicate, too able to cross borders, and too able to attempt to control and dominate each other. And so therefore we will try to do this. Which will lead to exactly the balkanization that you describe, where we revert to slower communication, less international trade and collaboration, and less travel, ultimately. Everything that my generation got to benefit from, and see come to rich fruition, will now be taken from future generations, bit by bit, piece by piece, and this is very tragic. Though, not catastrophic. Eventually, the children deprived of the wonderful expansive life we live now, will rise up and try again. Perhaps they will have better tools or perhaps they will simply watch the cycle repeat itself.
"There is simply no "let them be." Modern liberalism, by which I don't mean progressiveism, likes to see itself as tremendously open and, indeed, liberal in the original meaning of that word. Yes, we can value other societies and cultures. But only after we have vanquished them, as is the case with indigenous cultures that we pay verbal homage to, including literally offering land acknowledgments, but not actually ceding those people any authority over their land or their place in the broader culture. We simply cannot abide other people seeing the world differently than we do. We have to conclude that they are fools, or that they are motivated by an evil that must be suppressed."
You're denying that the Treaty of Westphalia ever happened. There is "let them be"; it worked as recently as 2015, when same-sex couples gained the right to marry, not as a result of executive orders, smear campaigns, woke mobs, or the leftist seizure of institutions, but as a result of a long LGBT campaign to show that they were nice, regular people, and could be good neighbors.
It isn't "us" who can't let people be. It's the woke left, the Christian right, and the global elite. Don't get sucked into their vortex of hate, but don't be silenced, either.
What I find infinitely interesting about human beings is how malleable our concept of "in-group" is.
Traditionally this was based on factors like geopolitical boundaries, religion, race, and language. But these are made-up concepts that made sense in an era without good transportation or communication. Technology is reorganizing this very quickly. A kid in Milwaukee might have more of an affinity for a kid in Seoul that is into the same hobby he is, than he does for the kids down the street.
The traditional in-group factors like nationality and race are fading as the most useful ways to think about group-group interactions. This is especially so in the young generation. Countries are becoming diverse assemblages of micro-cultures that cut across the traditional dimensions, and will feel less cohesive as a result.
/At the moment/, this seems to be a great existential risk. But if you study the history that led to the ideal of a world government, you'll find that this elite monoculture has one root to it, which has dominated Western culture since the 4th century AD: rationalist Platonism, under which I include Christianity (especially the Orthodox, Catholic, Calvinist, and Unitarian churches), Islam, Rousseau, the French Revolutionaries, Hegel, Marx, progressivism, modern art, Italian fascism, Nazism, Heidegger, post-modernism, and the Social Justice Movement. (Platonism has some roots in Pythagoreanism, Hinduism, and Egyptian beliefs; but Plato made the first great rationalist synthesis.)
Opposed to it is the empirical liberal tradition of the British Enlightenment, which includes the US Revolution, New Amsterdam, the Rhode Island colony, the Netherlands, early Venice, etc., back at least to Athens, and arguably to Old Babylon. Liberalism and empirical epistemology have always been under attack from Platonist reactionaries, back to the days when Socrates' students betrayed Athens to Sparta, and Plato said he'd like to burn every word Democritus wrote.
(This dichotomy doesn't generalize in an obvious way to non-Western nations.)
It's essential to understand that "left" and "right" are both Platonist. See them as opposites, and you've already lost.
We already know the solution: Liberal democracy combined with a written legal code and an independent judiciary, balance-of-power government, free speech, free trade, good-faith debate, compromise, empirical (not just rational) science, and consequentialist ethics. It is no coincidence that every one of these essential ingredients has been under intense attack since the 1930s. Read Plato, then Augustine, then Rousseau, then Hegel, then Marx, then Hitler, then Heidegger, then post-modernists, then contemporary progressive theory; and see the shared assumptions, the recurring arguments, and the common objectives. There's been a gradual accumulation of more and more subtle philosophical tools and tactics, but otherwise little has changed since Plato said we just need to get rid of everybody over the age of 10 and start over.
The greatest weakness of Platonism is that its ideology requires believing that the Good is universal, and therefore all good people want the same things, and therefore rational people always agree, compromise is inherently evil, and the only possible solution to disagreements is to impoverish, exile, or kill the people who are wrong. (Plato and Rousseau both use this reasoning.) Platonists believe that conflict resolution mechanisms are immoral. So they'll split into factions and kill each other whenever they don't need to unite against liberals. It happened to Rome in the 4th-6th centuries, culminating in the obliteration of the Arian West by the Nicene East; it happened to the French Revolutionaries, to the Russian Revolutionaries immediately after the revolution, and in the 1910s & 1920s, when communism and labor movements split into left-wing (internationalist and revolutionary), right-wing (national and seeking incremental change within the system), and fascist.
(Fun fact: The phrase "right wing socialist" was more common than "right-wing conservative" until 1975. See this Google n-grams chart for proof: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=right+wing+socialist%2Cright+wing+conservative&year_start=1910&year_end=2009&corpus=en-2009&smoothing=1)
This in-fighting seems to me to have happened in the US after the 2024 election. The Democrats are torn between people who say they lost for being too extreme, and people who say they lost for not being extreme enough. They might not be able to agree on a candidate in 2028. The Republicans are likewise torn between MAGA Trumpers and conservatives. If Vance remains loyal to Trump for 4 years, the Republicans will also be at great risk of splitting in two. If both parties split, that would be great. If one splits and the other doesn't, that would be worse than before.
A new advantage we have this time is that AI can expose the true meaning of, and failings of, Platonist philosophy. I'm working with some people who are testing the latest chatbots to see if they can point out fallacious reasoning and hidden assumptions in propaganda. At present, they're too gullible to pick up on flawed reasoning themselves, and too unemotional to notice that questions like "does this speaker advocate murdering millions of innocent people?" are more important than questions like "is this speaker's cultural background being adequately respected?"
Re: "So far, our superpower is cultural evolution. But that only works when we are split into different enough competing cultures." Well, there's sill competition between memes - even in a giant monoculture. Cultural evolution doesn't just stop if we ever get to a "Star Wars"-like galactic empire dominated by a giant monoculture changing via self-directed evolution.
Distinguish elements of culture than can easily vary individually from those shared by large "cultures" as groups.
Without multiple competing cultures, evolution is dominated by drift rather than selection.
That's like saying: "Without multiple competing ecosystems, evolution is dominated by drift rather than selection." There's more to evolution than competition between entire ecosystems. The term "evolution" doesn't just refer to macro-evolution. It also includes micro-evolution. Basically, evolution is a multi-level process with different conceptions of "fitness" and "adaptation" applying at the different levels.
I don't know what it would even mean for ecosystems to "compete" with each other. Is the arctic trying to take over more temperate areas?
I usually only hear micro-evolution distinguished from macro-evolution in disputes about creationism.
It's well known that selection requires variation to select from (the continued existence of variation was a puzzle for Darwin, eventually solved by integrated Mendelian genetics). In culture (vs genetics), we find less variation within groups and more between groups (which is why group selection works better for culture than genes).
Perhaps see:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroevolution
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microevolution
You are OK with "multiple competing cultures", but don't understand what "multiple competing ecosystems" means? It's a bit of an odd combination of opinions, IMO.
Your link says macroevolution is defined as applying to the species level and above. But with cultural evolution we haven't been taking about the species level.
How does the arctic ecosystem compete with temperate or tropical ecosystems?
Well, you just selected an example of ecosystems not in close competition. I think the most common case where there is competition is where a land bridge forms between a previously-isolated island and the mainland - or another island.
It's been known that evolution is dominated by drift since the neutral revolution in the 1960s. Drift also being an important factor in cultural evolution would not be particularly suprising, IMO.
The theory that evolution is dominated by drift was ridiculous from the start. Most mutations are neutral mutations; but counting neutral mutations as "evolution" is just dumb. They're neutral! If you say drift dominates, you've removed selection from evolution--which means you no longer have a theory of evolution!
Anybody who fell for the drift hypothesis, must have had some Hegelian progressivist narrative in the back of their head telling them that progress is inevitable and drift is the hand of the World Spirit. Drift could only lead to adaptation through group selection, which the 1960s evobios hated even more than selection.
Neutral mutations count as evolution - according to most popular definitions of the term "evolution". Not all mutations are neutral - so there's still plenty of scope for selection.
Well, it's a matter of convention rather than of fact. To me, the term "evolution" refers to the process by which life adapts and develops complexity; and neutral drift isn't adaptive and doesn't develop complexity. That's because I think of it as a more-general abstract process, which can for instance be observed in cultures. Neutral mutations are unique to DNA; including them in the concept "evolution" would result in a concept of "evolution" that (A) obscured the important process that the theory of evolution explains, and (B) doesn't generalize to other kinds of systems.
Neutral mutations are not unique to DNA-based systems, though. Nor do they "obscure" anything - they are just part of the evolutionary process.
I thought the 60s neutralists were supposed to be old hat now. My understanding is that for genetics, drift is important with small population sizes. For large populations, selection is dominant.
https://x.com/gcochran99/status/1080654279201804289
So: 90% of the human genome is junk DNA. So: most mutations there are neutral - and count as genetic drift. This argument makes no mention of the population size.
Selection can't apply to genuinely neutral genes (I guess it can save space by deleting them). Robin has been talking about cultural drift, where the end "phenotype" really is changing, and in a way that has reduced fertility.
Right. The more usual evo-bio term for that would be "deleterious muations". Their accumulation is usually referred to as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muller%27s_ratchet If it goes on for too long, there's a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutational_meltdown
Why is it important to collectively choose our future? Why isn’t it more important for different groups to have freedom, as Scott Alexander argues? Put another way, what are the externalities between groups that make collective choice so much better than the possible outcomes from decentralised choices?
I wonder if the monoculture feeling is something real or a typical westerner belief. Even on global risks such as global warming, that concerns everybody and where there is a scientific consensus since decades, policies hardly converge. On more controversial subjects, divergence is the rule. I hope the author is right, but I dont see that much convergence in russian or chinese policies, for instance.
In the past, cultures "competed" and "evolved" through war and conquest. Clearly, that seems undesirable. So how are cultures supposed to compete and evolve, exactly?
An idealized view of the post-WW2 era is that nations send representatives to the UN. Representatives at the UN have discussions about what international law should be. And international law determines the rules by which nations compete. This seems a lot better than war. But this model also seems to risk global monoculture. Insofar as discussions at the UN actually matter, they pull people into a global monoculture so they can better influence what happens at the UN.
What's the best way to square this circle? How do you answer the meta-level question of the "rules of the game" by which various cultures should compete?
Physics was the rules of the game. Can we agree on other rules without sharing a monoculture?
That's what I was asking you! It seems like that's the big question which is implied by your worldview.
Maybe we can get some sort of in-between approach. E.g. every 100 years, have a global convention which lays out the rules for the following 100 years.
One thing the UN and the International Court of Justice have done is to largely prevent conquests of UN members by other UN members. There is space for alternative cultures to develop. Within many countries there is also a lot of diversity and space for cultural development.
You see a world mono-culture, but is that mostly because the culture you are part of has many adherents and doesn't regard other cultures highly enough to see them as eventual alternatives or competitors.
To choose a future, you need to choose a religion. Jonathan Rauch has become the unexpected messenger for the idea that liberalism cannot exist on its own without Christianity as a “substrate.” Christianity provides the essential cultural values, to which pure liberalism can only be agnostic.
That's a very old idea, and is just a hypothesis, not a fact.
Yes, the idea is as old as liberalism, though we are sort of re-discovering it in our day. Debatable, as is anything in history or the social sciences.
It's interesting that you posted this today. I'm reading 'The Dawn of Everything' (an anthropological survey that emphasizes the forethought and agency and intentional cultural choices of our distant ancestors), and I have been contemplating this very question. People certainly FEEL more powerless and disconnected-as if they're being swept along by a tide over which they have no control. Some of the reasons involve our isolated lifestyles and the strange and perverse nature of social media but this is far from the entire story.
I think we can find (partial) solutions, but first we need to develop our understanding and build a new vocabulary.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-maelstrom
I was raised on Star Trek and Isaac Asimov and The High Frontier and the rest of it. I want to believe the answer to your titular question is "yes".
But I have concluded the answer is "no", short of narrowly-defined problems like banning CFCs. For two reasons: (1) we have no idea what the impact of general purpose technologies will be in advance, and (2) the herd is moved by economic forces that make it increasingly challenging to depart from the herd.
Here's an example of (2). Thirty-five years ago it would have been possible for you to be an academic at a university and decide that you didn't want to use computers. You may have been seen as quirky – but you could have functioned. Today it would be entirely impossible to not use a computer as a university professor. Even the guy at Costco who changes car tires has to use a computer. What was optional in the past - a personal choice - is no longer *really* an option if you want to stay plugged into the economy.
In an earlier era technologies like "money" and "literacy" went from optional to mandatory. In theory you can detach from the economy and go live in the wilds of Alaska, but there are big reasons people don't do that. You as an individual have no practical choice – you have to follow the herd.
The "monoculture" you're talking about is the integrated worldwide economy. True diversity would only come from breaking apart that integrated economy – or at least weakening its bonds – because that integration is what drives herd behavior and loss of diversity. But again, even at a global level there are strong forces that make it hard to break from the herd.
If there's a monoculture, what is this other culture that will replace the monoculture when it fails? We may be risking extinction by adopting such monoculture now.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/bow-to-our-future-overlords