Cultural Variety Is Crazy Hard To Fix

Vitalik Buterin (VB) on culture:

Zuzalu in 2023 was an experiment: bring ~200 people, from multiple communities -Ethereum, longevity, rationalism, AI - together in one place for two months, and see what happens. … fall away over time: novel governance designs, and a search for legal autonomy. … Over time, popups would get shorter in duration, smaller in scope, and more generic in substance, … I have started advocating for Zuzalu-inspired communities to start having permanent nodes. … I always fear the “regression to the mean” that they will turn into glorified coworkingspaces, and lose all of their cultural or experimental interestingness. …

We have too much of a two-level structure: individuals, very powerful large-scale actors like states, and nothing else. … a successful “intermediate institution” … needs to be some kind of neo-tribe … that focuses, and meaningfully innovates, on the thing that humans do that isn’t generic: culture. … people make the mistake of thinking culture is something that can be explicitly laid down by mission statements and top-down edicts. …

Mistake of over-identifying culture with the purely aesthetic, subjective and group-identity-oriented parts of culture: food, music, dance, dress, architecture styles, and ignore the parts that are functional, whose success or failure drives the success and failure of civilizations. …

Many things … require “immersion” to succeed: lifestyle habits, local public goods such as air quality, work habits, lifetime learning habits, limitations on use of technology, etc. Doing anything truly interesting and unique requires “depth”, and substantial collective investment and effort to create an entire environment oriented around better serving those needs. These things cannot easily be done by an individual …

Culture is a big complicated blob where actions, consequences, statements by leaders and theories by intellectuals all influence each other in every direction. …

What we want is a better “world game” for cultural evolution: an environment where cultures improve and compete, but not on the basis of violent force, and also not exclusively on low-level forms of memetic fitness (eg. virality of individual posts on social media, moment-by-moment enjoyment and convenience), but rather on some kind of fair playing field that creates sufficient space to showcase the longer-term benefits that a thriving culture provides. …

Cultural innovation works better when it arises out of a collection of habits, attitudes and goals that are shared by a particular group, and adapted to the group’s needs. …

So far, I have told two disjoint stories. One is about smaller-scale community-driven projects, and experimentation in culture. Another is about larger-scale politics and business-driven projects, and experimentation in rules.

… I predict that in general the “market structure” will split [these] tribes and zones into distinct categories, because these are different things that require different specialties that are complementary …

People just have to get off their butts and actually create these alternative cultures and environments, and doing it is hard. Startups are also hard. But startups have had a multi-billion-dollar capitalist optimization machine figuring out all the most optimized ways of doing them and rapidly growing them to scale, and turned them into cookie-cutter standardized playbooks. Culture does not have the same profit motive, and culture is inherently not easy to scale. …

I do not literally expect we are going to see a world where most people live in tribes, or even zones. … But I do expect a world that is somewhat more dynamic in both economic and political rules and in cultural dimensions, and that gives people more options. Such a world would be a world where (i) people have more meaningful freedom, both to escape persecution and to choose the kinds of environments that they truly enjoy living in, (ii) we get better innovation both in economic and political rules and in culture, and (iii) instead of the innovation and creativity of the world being concentrated in a few super-centers of global economic and political power, it is globally distributed everywhere across the world. This is a world that I want to live in.

It seems that VB has learned much about culture. But I fear that he, and most of you, still don’t quite get just how severe is our culture problem.

Some aspects of culture, like clothes and food, let people feel enjoy a distinct cultural identity, but are shallow, and don’t much influence biological adaptiveness. Other aspects are deep, like those that set our attitudes and behaviors to family, fertility, death, war, community, and democracy.

Each aspect of culture has a (context-dependent) scale above which it can easily vary, and below which it cannot. Aspects with low scales allow for much variety and experimentation, and thus effective selection, but aspects with high scales allow for far less, and this is where we have a big problem. Deep aspects tend to have higher scales.

When aspects vary one at a time, then to win, innovations must be attractive given the usual distribution over all the other aspects. But when aspects can be varied as packages, parts can win that would not seem attractive by themselves. This is like the evolution of species compared to organisms, or of firm cultures compared to within-firm innovations. These species- and firm- level innovation processes actually matter more than do within-species and within-firm level innovation processes, as we have seen more innovation in fragmented habits and industries.

When we try to innovate in language, tech, business practice, law, and governance, we can often A) see which factors were held fixed while others changed, B) distinguish cause from effect among related factors, and C) see which particular factor changes most contributed to which particular local outcomes of interest. These abilities greatly aid us in identifying promising changes and adapting them to new contexts.

But doing these is just far harder with culture. Which is why culture has far less structured experimentation, or learning of useful lessons from the variations we see. And this is why cultural evolution has long been much more of a simple Darwinian process of natural selection: variations happen, and then some win out over others.

It is thus far easier to promote innovation in say software or governance, compared to culture. To innovate in culture, we can mainly just induce many new cults, cults that try out whole packages of deep high-scale cultural features, that try to last for generations, and that build up sufficient insularity against outside influences to have a shot at actually retaining kids and preserving distinctiveness for generations.

Most of the cultural experiments that VB celebrates have far too little insularity to plausibly serve in this role. More important, due to several centuries of easier talk, travel, and trade, the world now has many orders of magnitude a) too little variety, at cultures level, and also b) too few attempts to start and grow new cults. So I’m afraid that the amount of added variety that VB could plausibly induce in these parameters, even if he induced 100x more from others, is just vastly insufficient to the need.

But VB, or people like him, could plausibly single-handedly induce far more experimentation and thus innovation in governance. And there is a decent chance that we could find far more competent forms of governance, which we might then assign to the task of fixing and improving our processes of cultural evolution, including its variety. Yes, even this seems a long shot, and so my best prediction is that we will fail, and our civilization will decline, to be replaced by descendants of the Amish, Haredim, etc. But its the best shot I can see.