Cultural Rationality

In our standard model of natural selection, organisms encode stable behavioral strategies, and pass those encodings on to their kids, only some of whom manage to make more kids, causing a drift over time toward strategies that tend to promote successful reproduction. In our standard model of decision theory, agents have fixed preferences, start with “prior” beliefs, update those beliefs based on info observed, and then pick the actions that max expected preferences.

Culture is humanity’s superpower, and in our best models of culture, humans combine these two approaches. DNA encodes brains that act much like standard decision theory agents for decisions of small to modest scale and scope. Larger decisions are handled by agent preferences and priors, which are encoded in culture. That culture is given in childhood by parents and teachers, but such transfer also continues through our lives. For example, we continue to assimilate to the culture of our elites as they change, to cultures of those who conqueror our places, and to cultures of cities, firms, clubs, and families to which we choose to expose ourselves. For example, over the last few centuries much of the world copied a great many features of successful rich West cultures, including their Christian religion.

I’ve continued to ponder how best to combine deliberate decision strategies with cultural inheritance. And in this post I want to prod such thoughts by focusing on an especially dramatic case:

Consider someone who, like me, now expects descendants of today’s Amish, Haredim, and other insular fertile fundamentalist religious cultures to, in a few centuries, “win” by becoming much more culturally influential than descendants of today’s dominant world monoculture. Such a person might today plausibly try to respect those future winning cultures similar to how they’d respect a culture that had recently conquered their place. So they might try to make themselves open to assimilating into that future winning culture, such as by believing in the Judeo-Christian God. The reasoning is similar; in both cases a “winning” culture has shown substantial evidence of its adaptive superiority.

The general idea is that if natural selection is going to continue, and if you want to influence the longer-term future, you will have to find a way to combine the features you love with other adaptive features, to create a package with a better chance of success, to give your loved features their best chance to survive and thrive.

The reason I expect the Amish, etc. to win is that they have grown fast and maintained insularity for over a century, and survived many big change challenges in that time, while the leaders of our decaying world monoculture have far less incentive, knowledge, and power to change that culture, compared to CEOs re firm cultures, yet such CEOs consistently fail to stop firm cultures from decaying and killing firms.

Nine counter arguments:

1) What if I don’t care about influencing our long term future?

Then you are excused. But do expect people with your attitude here, and those with correlated features, to decline over time in the future.

2) Natural selection should not encourage a culture to have members promote the death of that culture, compared to others.

Cultural assimilation usually isn’t all or nothing; you retain something of your origin. Sometimes the best way to promote your culture is to merge a part of it into another more adaptive culture. While you can’t save all of your culture this way, this might still be your best shot.

3) We often try to resist, not assimilate into, a conquering culture.

Yes, when we think there’s a decent chance such resistance could succeed, getting our entire culture back seems better than having a modest influence over an invading culture. But when the chance of successful resistance falls too low, abject submission seems a better strategy.

4) Our current habits are largely of copying cultures that have recently been clearly successful, not ones that seem likely to succeed in the far future.

But the logic of copying success doesn’t care when exactly the success will be achieved, only when such success becomes sufficiently clear.

5) We can’t actually choose to believe something just because we think it would be good to believe it.

Yes, beliefs aren’t simple dials to turn in our head. But we can deliberately change many influential aspects of the contexts of our belief changes. Otherwise there would be little point to the vast literature on the rationality of beliefs.

6) But don’t we need culture to evaluate which cultures “win”?

Sure, cultures tell you which virtues to count how much in estimating cultural success, and that may influence your estimate of a culture’s adaptive success. But in most cases, including this case, that doesn’t change the answer much.

7) There’s no particular evidence that the Judeo-Christian religions of those societies is what would make them win.

We usually don’t know that much about which particular cultural features are more responsible for a culture’s success. Which is why we evolved the habit of copying culture packages wholesale.

8) How could the adaptive success of a culture count as evidence that its religion is true?

It seems that on average, all else equal, cultures that believe more true things are more likely to succeed. To bet otherwise, you’d need particular evidence that this particular claim is an exception to this general trend.

9) But if the correlation between a cultural feature and cultural success is low, success is only weak evidence re that feature.

Yes, but as we typically have great uncertainty over the future adaptiveness of cultural features, usually most of our evidence is weak. Nevertheless, if we care enough about adaptiveness, then even weak evidence will be enough to tip our actions in the direction of our best clues so far, even if those clues remain weak.