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.
Pitching you on orthodox Catholicism again. By orthodox Catholicism I mean "Catholicism, and you believe everything that the Church teaches."
This group is rarely studied as a distinct sociological category, but in practice it really is a distinct culture/group. It's high-fertility. And both the orthodox Catholicism and the high-fertility appear to be pretty heritable.
Some reasons you might like it:
1) It's less insular than the groups in question — but still has a way to be high-fertility and high-heritability.
Basically, plenty of Catholics assimilated to the surrounding cultural norms but some didn't—and the ones who didn't have generally figured out a way to raise their kids in contact with the broader culture while inoculating them against its values. (If you want to see this in action I can put you in touch with folks in your area.)
2) The arguments for it are quite compelling, and I think you'd like the intellectual tradition. Happy to get more into this, if it's of interest, or to recommend some texts eg "Can We Trust the Gospels?" or watching the "Aquinas 101 videos". But some arguments would be:
—You already have lots of Judeo-Christian values, and these don't actually make that much sense as free-floating beliefs. Much more parsimonious to believe in (real) things like "human rights" in a context where they actually make sense
—There's incredibly strong historical evidence that Jesus lived and was crucified and also very strong evidence that the earliest leaders of the church he founded—men who knew him personally—sincerely believed that he rose rom the dead. (The evidence is that basically all of them allowed themselves to be executed rather than deny this.) It's very difficult to account for the early spread of Christianity apart from sincere belief, because the persecutions were severe.
—fine tuning, near-death experiences, squaring justice & love, etc etc.
3) It's a stronger fit than the Amish etc on things you value. Eg tech, science, and political and religious freedom. (I know plenty of folks in this group who are software developers, scientists, doctors, academics, etc.)
> ...It's very difficult to account for the early spread of Christianity...., because the persecutions were severe.
and the Orthadox Catholic church's role in that... ? :P
But beyond that, i think early christian breath of gospels including those beyond what was allowed by the catholic church, seems more convincing to me as a "cultural anchor" than the Amish...
"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."
The Amish and the Haredim haven't been in a harsh competition with the mainstream cultures they are embedded in, a luxury that isn't afforded to most firms.
They've won the actual competition so far, and I don't see strong reasons to expect the nature of the competition to change a lot over the next two centuries.
Under a "nothing ever happens" assumption - sure. That does seem to be the single most likely scenario, but I doubt that it carries the majority of probability mass overall. Of course, having a contingency plan is warranted in any case, and to that effect I wish your program success.
Interesting discussion Robin, though not sure if I agree.
Per my understanding, the Amish do not work with or own technology, but most will use it in the medical context if it will save their lives or the lives of their children.
It is for this reason, for example, that it is thought that the Amish were also swept up in the 1930s-1950s “Baby Boom” along with the rest of the world (I recently explored this at Risk & Progress).
This is not a criticism, but could we not argue that the Amish’s success and cultural persistence are only possible because most of us are not Amish?
Somebody needed to invent the MRI, someone needs to build the ambulance, someone needs to write the X-ray machine’s software, etc.
Excellent analysis but there are a few things missing that are quite relevant.
1. Its not just Ultra Orthodox Jews. ALL Jews who are observant by Jewish standards (including "secular" Israelis who are observant simply by living in Israel) have vastly higher fertility than others in 1st & 2nd world nations.
2. Observant Jews (as defined above) are able to have high fertility along with high prosperity and high technology. This is a trifecta no other civilisation is currently able to achieve.
3. Being Amish requires foreswearing technology. This is both a very hard call for most people AND, if Amish were to become a majority, would severely undermine the military capabilities necessary for a civilisation's survival.
4. While religious Christians do have higher fertility than others in Western societies, their fertility is still sub-replacement and dropping.
So given your analysis and the above, the ONLY way to maintain prosperity, technology AND fertility is to be observantly Jewish. But this need not involve becoming Ultra Orthodox. It simply requires becoming a Jewish Israeli.
When we say a culture will “win,” we usually mean “stay dominant in today’s ladder” — status, institutional control, media reach, elite signaling. But selection doesn’t care about our current ladder. It cares about which packages keep producing retained descendants.
Your post (and I think it’s right) nails the core mechanism: for big decisions we don’t just “reason from priors” as isolated agents; we inherit priors and preferences as bundled packages, and we keep updating them by exposure to families, firms, cities, elites, conquerors. Where I’d push back is the leap from that descriptive story to a prescriptive one: “pre-assimilate to the likely future winners.”
That move smuggles in a metric. “Winning” has to be specified: winning where, under which selection pressures, and by what descendant rule (more kids, more retention, more converts, more institutional copies, more imitators)? Without that, “winning” collapses into vibes — or into “dominance in the present regime.”
Also: beliefs don’t have to be true to drive persistence. Many religious systems are exceptionally good persistence machines: high-fidelity transmission, thick boundaries, costly signals, lifecycle hooks, and strong retention. That can outperform “decaying monoculture” even if the metaphysical claims aren’t truth-tracking in any strong sense.
So I’m sympathetic to “copy packages when causality is unclear.” I’m less convinced by “treat forecasted long-run dominance as evidence of truth.” The cleaner claim is narrower: pay attention to which cultural packages are demonstrably good at persistence — and don’t confuse that with either truth or virtue.
If one wants to maximize the chance of influencing culture into the far future, religion is a good bet.
Which leads to a cause of culture drift today: The decline of religion in much of the world. I don't believe it's a coincidence that (a) our legacy religions are all patriarchal, and (b) the economic power and agency of women has grown throughout the period that religion has faded in much of the world. Perhaps women have concluded, consciously or not: We have power now and the patriarchal religions don't appeal to us, so we're opting out.
So we're in an awkward phase right now where most of our institutions have changed to become more inclusive of women – except religion, which has too much inertia to change quickly. There's an imbalance.
Perhaps a religion will emerge that is more appealing to women. If so it would have a strong chance of dominating world culture over the next millennium.
First, although God may look at the inside, people can only look at the outside. If you expect a future world with Christian-dominant culture, it likely pays to "behave as if God really exists", whether you "believe" that he does or not. You don't actually need to personally meet the King or President of a foreign nation that conquered yours to rationally understand that you then live under a culture where that individual is commonly understood to exist and have legitimate authority over you and so the model of the world that you use in your decision-making should presume that he does, in effect, exist.
Secondly, assimilation may not be the only option. A symbiotic relationship may be similarly or at least sufficiently beneficial to enable preservation alongside another highly successful culture. I'm unsure what this might look like in practice, but I would assume that a complement to a stable culture should have significant internal and external pressure to sustain that complement.
Encourage the future increasingly hegemonic Amish to allow free cultural zones such as cities which maintain a particularly high interest in science and capability of innovation. It seems like North America may have a good time with this, with hopefully centuries of continued tolerance of them to provide good will towards returning the favour
This is an obvious point but: isn’t the solution Western culture + high fertility (however that is achieved - not easy but not impossible)?
And doesn’t Western culture have high retention, and many wannabe converts to it?
Yes there is some drift, but isn’t the ultimate guardrail that Western values create wealth; people once wealthy want to stay wealthy; and wealth provides power, eg protection (via superior military/technology) against eg military attack by non-Western cultures.
I’m not convinced the Amish can continue to grow so as to outstrip the West while continuing to forswear the comforts of wealth provided by capitalism. Won’t more and more leave as the wealth gap increases? And which westerners would choose to become Amish, and lose all their comforts? Not many.
Admittedly China is a complication - non-Western but quite rich and powerful, though probably aspiring to be more Western - other than Chinese leaders
“How could the adaptive success of a culture count as evidence that its religion is true?” Honestly wasn’t expecting this post to go there. But in physics, if your insight “works” in the sense of enabling new and better technology, you can say it’s improving the model toward greater truth. Why not apply that to metaphysics? By their fruits ye shall know them.
My scepticism about Amish, Hareidi etc cultures supplanting current ones simply due to their higher fertility - isn't there considerable free-riding involved? After all, neither group is known for producing microchips at scale, nor in serving in the military?
In these fields, they differ very considerably from the 17-19th top dog, the Calvinists/Puritans.
You've stated a criticism of your own theory pretty well here "There’s no particular evidence that the Judeo-Christian religions of those societies is what would make them win". There simply isn't any evidence to suggest that religions of this type have anything to do with the success of a particular culture. In fact, if anything the prevalence of the Christian right in the US may result in the decline of scientific funding and government funding in this country. Religion is not a guarantee of cultural longevity.
Is your second sentence of point 1 correct? I'm no expert but I'm thinking of the Roman emperors Constantine (the Great) and Julian (the Apostate) who took the empire to and away from Christianity (the latter unsuccessfully). To them, and their subjects, their military victories and defeats were evidence of the support or lack of support of divine powers. This sort of thing has been a common assumption (understandably) in many times and places (Chinese mandate of Heaven for example).
However, as I understand it, when the (Christian) Roman empire was falling, St Augustine argued, in City of God, that this in fact was not something people should focus on, that they should not focus on earthly success in this way. And, I think he was making this argument because people very much were focusing on that (perhaps everything has gone to sh*t because we've turned away from the old religion). If that argument had not been strongly made and adopted, it seems likely that Christianity would have crumbled with the empire.
So is it necessarily true that being concerned with the long term survival of your culture is actually good for the long term survival of your culture? If you do believe in the Christian God, you might answer that these things are in His hands, and not yours. So it looks like a bit of a catch 22.
It is maybe similar to the question 'is doing a decision analysis the best decision?' You might come away from reading Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahnemann or Iain McGilchrist and answer 'no' on that one, right? Or 'not necessarily'.
Ems are going to outnumber every insular culture 100000000000000:1, and they're most likely to continue evolving the monoculture. Also, it's not obvious that the success of a culture should be measured by the number of its adherents.
I like this thinking. (Whether ems or whatever aspect of a better future.) If our civ decays, a new one will rise that has memory of what made ours successful, plus some new successful attributes, minus the sclerotic baggage that any civ pics up over time that eventually holds it back. It’s rise and decline, but on an overall upward long-term trajectory.
'done well over the past century' is a weird criteria for the time scales of success we're talking about.
Seems to me success over one past century is substantial evidence re success over the next two centuries.
Pitching you on orthodox Catholicism again. By orthodox Catholicism I mean "Catholicism, and you believe everything that the Church teaches."
This group is rarely studied as a distinct sociological category, but in practice it really is a distinct culture/group. It's high-fertility. And both the orthodox Catholicism and the high-fertility appear to be pretty heritable.
Some reasons you might like it:
1) It's less insular than the groups in question — but still has a way to be high-fertility and high-heritability.
Basically, plenty of Catholics assimilated to the surrounding cultural norms but some didn't—and the ones who didn't have generally figured out a way to raise their kids in contact with the broader culture while inoculating them against its values. (If you want to see this in action I can put you in touch with folks in your area.)
2) The arguments for it are quite compelling, and I think you'd like the intellectual tradition. Happy to get more into this, if it's of interest, or to recommend some texts eg "Can We Trust the Gospels?" or watching the "Aquinas 101 videos". But some arguments would be:
—You already have lots of Judeo-Christian values, and these don't actually make that much sense as free-floating beliefs. Much more parsimonious to believe in (real) things like "human rights" in a context where they actually make sense
—There's incredibly strong historical evidence that Jesus lived and was crucified and also very strong evidence that the earliest leaders of the church he founded—men who knew him personally—sincerely believed that he rose rom the dead. (The evidence is that basically all of them allowed themselves to be executed rather than deny this.) It's very difficult to account for the early spread of Christianity apart from sincere belief, because the persecutions were severe.
—fine tuning, near-death experiences, squaring justice & love, etc etc.
3) It's a stronger fit than the Amish etc on things you value. Eg tech, science, and political and religious freedom. (I know plenty of folks in this group who are software developers, scientists, doctors, academics, etc.)
> ...It's very difficult to account for the early spread of Christianity...., because the persecutions were severe.
and the Orthadox Catholic church's role in that... ? :P
But beyond that, i think early christian breath of gospels including those beyond what was allowed by the catholic church, seems more convincing to me as a "cultural anchor" than the Amish...
"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."
The Amish and the Haredim haven't been in a harsh competition with the mainstream cultures they are embedded in, a luxury that isn't afforded to most firms.
They've won the actual competition so far, and I don't see strong reasons to expect the nature of the competition to change a lot over the next two centuries.
Under a "nothing ever happens" assumption - sure. That does seem to be the single most likely scenario, but I doubt that it carries the majority of probability mass overall. Of course, having a contingency plan is warranted in any case, and to that effect I wish your program success.
Interesting discussion Robin, though not sure if I agree.
Per my understanding, the Amish do not work with or own technology, but most will use it in the medical context if it will save their lives or the lives of their children.
It is for this reason, for example, that it is thought that the Amish were also swept up in the 1930s-1950s “Baby Boom” along with the rest of the world (I recently explored this at Risk & Progress).
This is not a criticism, but could we not argue that the Amish’s success and cultural persistence are only possible because most of us are not Amish?
Somebody needed to invent the MRI, someone needs to build the ambulance, someone needs to write the X-ray machine’s software, etc.
If there are few people left to do complex tech work, most of it won't get done.
Excellent analysis but there are a few things missing that are quite relevant.
1. Its not just Ultra Orthodox Jews. ALL Jews who are observant by Jewish standards (including "secular" Israelis who are observant simply by living in Israel) have vastly higher fertility than others in 1st & 2nd world nations.
2. Observant Jews (as defined above) are able to have high fertility along with high prosperity and high technology. This is a trifecta no other civilisation is currently able to achieve.
3. Being Amish requires foreswearing technology. This is both a very hard call for most people AND, if Amish were to become a majority, would severely undermine the military capabilities necessary for a civilisation's survival.
4. While religious Christians do have higher fertility than others in Western societies, their fertility is still sub-replacement and dropping.
So given your analysis and the above, the ONLY way to maintain prosperity, technology AND fertility is to be observantly Jewish. But this need not involve becoming Ultra Orthodox. It simply requires becoming a Jewish Israeli.
I agree that is a candidate option to consider for some. But many of us are simply not Jewish in any way, and so don't have this as an option.
I am somewhat confused and perhaps missed a synthesis in your writing. Presumably you don't think the Amish will make or be EMs?
Not for a while.
When we say a culture will “win,” we usually mean “stay dominant in today’s ladder” — status, institutional control, media reach, elite signaling. But selection doesn’t care about our current ladder. It cares about which packages keep producing retained descendants.
Your post (and I think it’s right) nails the core mechanism: for big decisions we don’t just “reason from priors” as isolated agents; we inherit priors and preferences as bundled packages, and we keep updating them by exposure to families, firms, cities, elites, conquerors. Where I’d push back is the leap from that descriptive story to a prescriptive one: “pre-assimilate to the likely future winners.”
That move smuggles in a metric. “Winning” has to be specified: winning where, under which selection pressures, and by what descendant rule (more kids, more retention, more converts, more institutional copies, more imitators)? Without that, “winning” collapses into vibes — or into “dominance in the present regime.”
Also: beliefs don’t have to be true to drive persistence. Many religious systems are exceptionally good persistence machines: high-fidelity transmission, thick boundaries, costly signals, lifecycle hooks, and strong retention. That can outperform “decaying monoculture” even if the metaphysical claims aren’t truth-tracking in any strong sense.
So I’m sympathetic to “copy packages when causality is unclear.” I’m less convinced by “treat forecasted long-run dominance as evidence of truth.” The cleaner claim is narrower: pay attention to which cultural packages are demonstrably good at persistence — and don’t confuse that with either truth or virtue.
Mike with help
As I said in the post, it seems to me the Amish, etc. will win for a wide range of how you might weight different dimensions of winning.
If one wants to maximize the chance of influencing culture into the far future, religion is a good bet.
Which leads to a cause of culture drift today: The decline of religion in much of the world. I don't believe it's a coincidence that (a) our legacy religions are all patriarchal, and (b) the economic power and agency of women has grown throughout the period that religion has faded in much of the world. Perhaps women have concluded, consciously or not: We have power now and the patriarchal religions don't appeal to us, so we're opting out.
So we're in an awkward phase right now where most of our institutions have changed to become more inclusive of women – except religion, which has too much inertia to change quickly. There's an imbalance.
Perhaps a religion will emerge that is more appealing to women. If so it would have a strong chance of dominating world culture over the next millennium.
This suggests a few things to me.
First, although God may look at the inside, people can only look at the outside. If you expect a future world with Christian-dominant culture, it likely pays to "behave as if God really exists", whether you "believe" that he does or not. You don't actually need to personally meet the King or President of a foreign nation that conquered yours to rationally understand that you then live under a culture where that individual is commonly understood to exist and have legitimate authority over you and so the model of the world that you use in your decision-making should presume that he does, in effect, exist.
Secondly, assimilation may not be the only option. A symbiotic relationship may be similarly or at least sufficiently beneficial to enable preservation alongside another highly successful culture. I'm unsure what this might look like in practice, but I would assume that a complement to a stable culture should have significant internal and external pressure to sustain that complement.
Encourage the future increasingly hegemonic Amish to allow free cultural zones such as cities which maintain a particularly high interest in science and capability of innovation. It seems like North America may have a good time with this, with hopefully centuries of continued tolerance of them to provide good will towards returning the favour
This is an obvious point but: isn’t the solution Western culture + high fertility (however that is achieved - not easy but not impossible)?
And doesn’t Western culture have high retention, and many wannabe converts to it?
Yes there is some drift, but isn’t the ultimate guardrail that Western values create wealth; people once wealthy want to stay wealthy; and wealth provides power, eg protection (via superior military/technology) against eg military attack by non-Western cultures.
I’m not convinced the Amish can continue to grow so as to outstrip the West while continuing to forswear the comforts of wealth provided by capitalism. Won’t more and more leave as the wealth gap increases? And which westerners would choose to become Amish, and lose all their comforts? Not many.
Admittedly China is a complication - non-Western but quite rich and powerful, though probably aspiring to be more Western - other than Chinese leaders
10) Machine intelligence. Sorry to bang on about this, but for some reason it seems to be needed.
Have some common sense. You are not going to accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour because the Amish have a lot of kids!
“How could the adaptive success of a culture count as evidence that its religion is true?” Honestly wasn’t expecting this post to go there. But in physics, if your insight “works” in the sense of enabling new and better technology, you can say it’s improving the model toward greater truth. Why not apply that to metaphysics? By their fruits ye shall know them.
My scepticism about Amish, Hareidi etc cultures supplanting current ones simply due to their higher fertility - isn't there considerable free-riding involved? After all, neither group is known for producing microchips at scale, nor in serving in the military?
In these fields, they differ very considerably from the 17-19th top dog, the Calvinists/Puritans.
You've stated a criticism of your own theory pretty well here "There’s no particular evidence that the Judeo-Christian religions of those societies is what would make them win". There simply isn't any evidence to suggest that religions of this type have anything to do with the success of a particular culture. In fact, if anything the prevalence of the Christian right in the US may result in the decline of scientific funding and government funding in this country. Religion is not a guarantee of cultural longevity.
Is your second sentence of point 1 correct? I'm no expert but I'm thinking of the Roman emperors Constantine (the Great) and Julian (the Apostate) who took the empire to and away from Christianity (the latter unsuccessfully). To them, and their subjects, their military victories and defeats were evidence of the support or lack of support of divine powers. This sort of thing has been a common assumption (understandably) in many times and places (Chinese mandate of Heaven for example).
However, as I understand it, when the (Christian) Roman empire was falling, St Augustine argued, in City of God, that this in fact was not something people should focus on, that they should not focus on earthly success in this way. And, I think he was making this argument because people very much were focusing on that (perhaps everything has gone to sh*t because we've turned away from the old religion). If that argument had not been strongly made and adopted, it seems likely that Christianity would have crumbled with the empire.
So is it necessarily true that being concerned with the long term survival of your culture is actually good for the long term survival of your culture? If you do believe in the Christian God, you might answer that these things are in His hands, and not yours. So it looks like a bit of a catch 22.
It is maybe similar to the question 'is doing a decision analysis the best decision?' You might come away from reading Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahnemann or Iain McGilchrist and answer 'no' on that one, right? Or 'not necessarily'.
Ems are going to outnumber every insular culture 100000000000000:1, and they're most likely to continue evolving the monoculture. Also, it's not obvious that the success of a culture should be measured by the number of its adherents.
But ems most likely won't appear until the next civ rises, after our civ falls.
I like this thinking. (Whether ems or whatever aspect of a better future.) If our civ decays, a new one will rise that has memory of what made ours successful, plus some new successful attributes, minus the sclerotic baggage that any civ pics up over time that eventually holds it back. It’s rise and decline, but on an overall upward long-term trajectory.
Why?