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.
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
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.
'done well over the past century' is a weird criteria for the time scales of success we're talking about.
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
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.
How to assimilate pre-conquering? The Amish are very insular so it's hard to even learn what their cultural practices are. Reading books about them?