Have you read Michael Magoon on Substack or his book series, From Poverty to Progress. He proposes the creation of smaller states out of the larger city populations (greater than 2 million) into city-states to be governed more like autonomous city-states to foster innovation and competition.
I thought you’d say that. So small groups (libertarians, communitarians, etc. ) need to buy up land (sort of like Zionists in the 1880s) and settle down with their community members and fight legal battles in court against various federal, state and local tax claims, which is how the Amish prevailed against Social Security and Medicare taxes.
Religion seems to be the only mechanism we have for maintaining deeper cultural differences in a durable way. Maybe we should be encouraging new religions.
The US is more supportive of experimental religions ("cults") than most places, owing to the circumstances of its founding and a general acceptance of differences. We don't ban religions in the way Scientology is banned in much of Europe, and Falun Gong in China.
So how to encourage more religious innovation? Through tax incentives? Public funding for religious charter schools? Like any blind evolutionary process most of these experiments will be neutral or harmful (Heaven's Gate, Peoples Temple, Branch Davidians), but occasionally we could get lucky.
>Religion seems to be the only mechanism we have for maintaining deeper cultural differences in a durable way.
Indeed, and we invented liberalism in order to limit the damage that full-strength religions caused. Of course, these days liberalism is declining, and quasi-religions are on the rise, so we may yet get to sample this prescription...
I think the hidden dimension in this is the technology and the downstream economics it enables. If Ethereum (or other chains, but most likely Ethereum) lives up to it's plans, the cultural variance should follow at least in theory, without the need for prompts. And from what I can tell the technology has better odds of doing so than most people are giving it.
If the tech does in fact live up to the dream scenario and somehow culture manages to stay homogenous, then imitation/mimesis effects are even stronger than I suspect.
This perspective seems overly pessimistic. Consider the possibility that humans are intelligent, intensely interested in culture, and extremely capable at dissecting, analyzing, adapting, and disseminating cultural innovations. For example, you love to harp on fertility. Fertility is being tracked in cultures across the globe. Social scientists carefully dissect reasons for falling fertility and the effectiveness of various pro-fertility policies. If a modern society found something which increased fertility, it would become apparent in the data, and other societies which want to raise fertility would rapidly adopt it. It wouldn't take generations for this process to play out.
I don't see many societies today as willing to pay a lot to induce high fertility. The limit isn't a lack of knowledge of what to do, but a willingness to do it.
Seems like an oversimplification. Most high-fertility societies haven't paid women to have kids. E.g. the Amish do not pay, nor did the US pay in the 1700s when our fertility was quite high. So it's not unreasonable to search for cheap ways to induce fertility. Furthermore, if paying a lot for kids actually worked, and a nation was able to prove this to the world, I'll bet other nations would consider adopting this practice. The best incentive would be to give married new parents a temporary holiday or steep discount on their taxes, so high earners would be incentivized to have kids they are financially positioned to support and nurture.
Some time ago you used to have disclaimers on these "cultural drift" posts - saying that they relied on the premise that machines would not become superintelligent for a long time - and so would not be able to take over innovation or production in time to take up the slack exposed by the dysgenics and devolution of other human cultural practices. These days, it seems as though these disclaimers have become less frequent. I miss the days when the argument's premises were more regularly laid out.
Re: "It is thus far easier to promote innovation in say software or governance, compared to culture." I think most scientists in the area would classify software and governance as largely aspects of culture. Which in not to day that genes don't influence them at all - but rather than cultural variation is more significant. You seem to be using the term "culture" in a different way - without pointing out that your usage is different from most scientists studing the subject - or even offering a definition. I think this could lead to confusion.
Prior to planning a culture, one needs to understand what it is. VB cites Wikipedia: The arts, customs, lifestyles, background ....beliefs, values, behaviour and material objects ....conventional conducts and ideologies of a community.
Wrong. But, alas, even cross-cultural psychology textbooks have the above 'definition.' But what is culture actually? Culture is the set of norms, beliefs, etc., that solve the problem of group living. The problem of group living is how to triangulate between individual needs, group needs (such as, coordination challenges) and the specific ecosystem (meaning, what methods of subsistence are available), and the history of how the culture arrived at those solutions.
This is why Hanson differentiated between shallow and deep culture. Deep aspects of culture are those practices that have emerged via cultural evolution over decades, centuries or millennia to solve recurring problems of staying alive (and reproducing) in a specific environment. Shallow aspects of culture primarily serve signalling purposes for specific individuals or subgroups. Shallow aspects are usually only of interest if they provide insight into the deeper values and norms.
What's happened in global culture is that status and virtue signalling have become so important that "deep" values, norms and practices that used to solve adaptive problems have now been recruited for signalling. This is part of the reason for the fertility crisis. Having children interferes with status attainment. So, one solution is that having big families can be understood as signalling status.
VB does eventually cite Thomas, who espouses an adaptationist view of culture. A drawback is even the major scholars who take the adaptationist view sometimes do not spell out what I have here: that the purpose and existence of culture is to solve problems.
I'm so fed up with too few people explicitly saying this that I'm currently writing a book chapter that says it. Agree, eminent scholars like Henrich, Boyd, Richerson, Dunbar, Marvin Harris do say this, but their books and works are apparently insufficiently well-known enough to have beaten out the tiresome banality that culture is simply the set of beliefs, values, and norms of a community. This is important because spelling out "to solve the problems of group living" is what lets us see the *reason* for the existence of these norms, values etc.
Now I come full circle to getting more on Hanson's side that current global culture is in crisis. Because the key goal of solving the problems of group living is survival. Physical survival and reproduction of individual group members and of the cultural group. Survival of the cultural group requires replacement levels fertility.
Yes adaptive culture "solves problems". And yes big families as high status would help. But the current context plausibly may not actually work to move cultures to be more adaptive.
When I read his post I didn't get much of a sense of why "Cultural individualism (and incrementalism generally)" was insufficient. "[E]veryone drinking Coca Cola" doesn't actually sound like much of a problem, and "getting addicted to outrage-driven social media" seems like a relatively trivial issue (compared to classic coordination problems like the Tragedy of the Commons). Similarly, when he made his tripartite division of "schools of thought" he was lacking in specific examples for one of the three, "Social technologists" (a tweet from Marko Jukic was the closest thing, and my prior exposure to his tweets has not led me to take him seriously), and the subsequent "political compass" was lacking examples near that vertex compared to the other two.
I was interested in the social engineering aspect of Mormonism, but it is clear that the Mormons have largely adopted the general aspects of the mass culture. At least my reading of the Book of Mormon would support a far more separate path, more like Amish separatism. It is a path not taken - but clearly envisioned.
In genetics, a single outbreeding event per generation is sufficient to prevent two populations from genetically diverging. Culture isn't the same as genetics, but there are lessons we can take from it, and Jones' "spaghetti assimilation" is one.
That is an oft-cited statistic - but there are also "ring species" - which show that even continuous gene flow is not sufficient to prevent speciation - under some circumstances.
Have you read Michael Magoon on Substack or his book series, From Poverty to Progress. He proposes the creation of smaller states out of the larger city populations (greater than 2 million) into city-states to be governed more like autonomous city-states to foster innovation and competition.
Haven't read that, but wouldn't help much unless those new city-states would become FAR more insular than they are now.
Incremental progress helping a little is better than nothing.
I thought you’d say that. So small groups (libertarians, communitarians, etc. ) need to buy up land (sort of like Zionists in the 1880s) and settle down with their community members and fight legal battles in court against various federal, state and local tax claims, which is how the Amish prevailed against Social Security and Medicare taxes.
They first have to WANT to be insular. Few odd groups today do.
Well I’m moving to Knox county, Ohio, which has a growing Amish community. When I set up my small libertarian community I’ll let you know.
Religion seems to be the only mechanism we have for maintaining deeper cultural differences in a durable way. Maybe we should be encouraging new religions.
The US is more supportive of experimental religions ("cults") than most places, owing to the circumstances of its founding and a general acceptance of differences. We don't ban religions in the way Scientology is banned in much of Europe, and Falun Gong in China.
So how to encourage more religious innovation? Through tax incentives? Public funding for religious charter schools? Like any blind evolutionary process most of these experiments will be neutral or harmful (Heaven's Gate, Peoples Temple, Branch Davidians), but occasionally we could get lucky.
>Religion seems to be the only mechanism we have for maintaining deeper cultural differences in a durable way.
Indeed, and we invented liberalism in order to limit the damage that full-strength religions caused. Of course, these days liberalism is declining, and quasi-religions are on the rise, so we may yet get to sample this prescription...
What value is experimentation? Christianity, the West, was doing ok before the three bearded God-killers.
I think the hidden dimension in this is the technology and the downstream economics it enables. If Ethereum (or other chains, but most likely Ethereum) lives up to it's plans, the cultural variance should follow at least in theory, without the need for prompts. And from what I can tell the technology has better odds of doing so than most people are giving it.
If the tech does in fact live up to the dream scenario and somehow culture manages to stay homogenous, then imitation/mimesis effects are even stronger than I suspect.
This perspective seems overly pessimistic. Consider the possibility that humans are intelligent, intensely interested in culture, and extremely capable at dissecting, analyzing, adapting, and disseminating cultural innovations. For example, you love to harp on fertility. Fertility is being tracked in cultures across the globe. Social scientists carefully dissect reasons for falling fertility and the effectiveness of various pro-fertility policies. If a modern society found something which increased fertility, it would become apparent in the data, and other societies which want to raise fertility would rapidly adopt it. It wouldn't take generations for this process to play out.
I don't see many societies today as willing to pay a lot to induce high fertility. The limit isn't a lack of knowledge of what to do, but a willingness to do it.
Seems like an oversimplification. Most high-fertility societies haven't paid women to have kids. E.g. the Amish do not pay, nor did the US pay in the 1700s when our fertility was quite high. So it's not unreasonable to search for cheap ways to induce fertility. Furthermore, if paying a lot for kids actually worked, and a nation was able to prove this to the world, I'll bet other nations would consider adopting this practice. The best incentive would be to give married new parents a temporary holiday or steep discount on their taxes, so high earners would be incentivized to have kids they are financially positioned to support and nurture.
Some time ago you used to have disclaimers on these "cultural drift" posts - saying that they relied on the premise that machines would not become superintelligent for a long time - and so would not be able to take over innovation or production in time to take up the slack exposed by the dysgenics and devolution of other human cultural practices. These days, it seems as though these disclaimers have become less frequent. I miss the days when the argument's premises were more regularly laid out.
Superintelligence by itself doesn't solve the problem of cultural drift, though it changes its context.
Re: "It is thus far easier to promote innovation in say software or governance, compared to culture." I think most scientists in the area would classify software and governance as largely aspects of culture. Which in not to day that genes don't influence them at all - but rather than cultural variation is more significant. You seem to be using the term "culture" in a different way - without pointing out that your usage is different from most scientists studing the subject - or even offering a definition. I think this could lead to confusion.
Prior to planning a culture, one needs to understand what it is. VB cites Wikipedia: The arts, customs, lifestyles, background ....beliefs, values, behaviour and material objects ....conventional conducts and ideologies of a community.
Wrong. But, alas, even cross-cultural psychology textbooks have the above 'definition.' But what is culture actually? Culture is the set of norms, beliefs, etc., that solve the problem of group living. The problem of group living is how to triangulate between individual needs, group needs (such as, coordination challenges) and the specific ecosystem (meaning, what methods of subsistence are available), and the history of how the culture arrived at those solutions.
This is why Hanson differentiated between shallow and deep culture. Deep aspects of culture are those practices that have emerged via cultural evolution over decades, centuries or millennia to solve recurring problems of staying alive (and reproducing) in a specific environment. Shallow aspects of culture primarily serve signalling purposes for specific individuals or subgroups. Shallow aspects are usually only of interest if they provide insight into the deeper values and norms.
What's happened in global culture is that status and virtue signalling have become so important that "deep" values, norms and practices that used to solve adaptive problems have now been recruited for signalling. This is part of the reason for the fertility crisis. Having children interferes with status attainment. So, one solution is that having big families can be understood as signalling status.
VB does eventually cite Thomas, who espouses an adaptationist view of culture. A drawback is even the major scholars who take the adaptationist view sometimes do not spell out what I have here: that the purpose and existence of culture is to solve problems.
I'm so fed up with too few people explicitly saying this that I'm currently writing a book chapter that says it. Agree, eminent scholars like Henrich, Boyd, Richerson, Dunbar, Marvin Harris do say this, but their books and works are apparently insufficiently well-known enough to have beaten out the tiresome banality that culture is simply the set of beliefs, values, and norms of a community. This is important because spelling out "to solve the problems of group living" is what lets us see the *reason* for the existence of these norms, values etc.
Now I come full circle to getting more on Hanson's side that current global culture is in crisis. Because the key goal of solving the problems of group living is survival. Physical survival and reproduction of individual group members and of the cultural group. Survival of the cultural group requires replacement levels fertility.
Yes adaptive culture "solves problems". And yes big families as high status would help. But the current context plausibly may not actually work to move cultures to be more adaptive.
When I read his post I didn't get much of a sense of why "Cultural individualism (and incrementalism generally)" was insufficient. "[E]veryone drinking Coca Cola" doesn't actually sound like much of a problem, and "getting addicted to outrage-driven social media" seems like a relatively trivial issue (compared to classic coordination problems like the Tragedy of the Commons). Similarly, when he made his tripartite division of "schools of thought" he was lacking in specific examples for one of the three, "Social technologists" (a tweet from Marko Jukic was the closest thing, and my prior exposure to his tweets has not led me to take him seriously), and the subsequent "political compass" was lacking examples near that vertex compared to the other two.
Transmetropolitan?
I was interested in the social engineering aspect of Mormonism, but it is clear that the Mormons have largely adopted the general aspects of the mass culture. At least my reading of the Book of Mormon would support a far more separate path, more like Amish separatism. It is a path not taken - but clearly envisioned.
The Mormons were more like the Amish, but then central church leadership decided to integrate more w/ US culture.
What implications do you think this has for immigration? (a la, Garrett Jones?)
Immigration doesn't matter much re issues I'm talking about in this post.
In genetics, a single outbreeding event per generation is sufficient to prevent two populations from genetically diverging. Culture isn't the same as genetics, but there are lessons we can take from it, and Jones' "spaghetti assimilation" is one.
That is an oft-cited statistic - but there are also "ring species" - which show that even continuous gene flow is not sufficient to prevent speciation - under some circumstances.