Some things are said to be good servants but bad masters. Consider applying this warning to culture. Culture is humanity’s superpower; it is what makes humans so much more capable than other animals. When we know what outcomes we want, but not how to get them, culture helps us find and copy associates better at getting those outcomes, and then collectively improve our abilities.
I don't understand the justification for opposing cultural drift. I mean, our values right now are the result of cultural influences as well and so too would any values we tried to implicitly or explicitly embed in some machinery of futurarchy.
Ultimately, you just can't avoid the fact that culture affects values so why assume the way it's affected yours at the moment is superior?
I wonder if the problem doesn't stem from the fact that life is cruel and unfair. Culture compounds this problem, but I don't think is the cause of it.
I've never heard of this famous warning from Thomas Carlyle, and can't find it in Google. :-/ The closest I can find is "Fire is the best of servants; but what a master!" or various similar quotes from other authors.
Your model doesn't take into account momentum of the drift. In the short term, cultural drift has some sort of momentum, but in the longer term, it's largely mean reverting.
That's mostly fine for human flourishing. Most cultural "choices" involve some kind of trade-off, which means that it's never in humanity's interest for it to be permanently set one way or another. Since humanity doesn't to keep to a "happy medium", it will just keep swinging from one generation to the next.
In the short term though, most of the social misery comes from over-emphasis on cultural "wars" (where the participants expect to win some sort of "eternal" victory), or cultural "enforcement" (where the guardians expect to perserve some sort of "eternal" status quo). The less "force" and "attention" that is invested in these sorts of activities the happier the people. Live and let live!
I actually find this concern rather odd because I find the solution to be so obvious.
The way I see it is that "culture" especially as used here is a multifaceted term and that these facets should be considered individually. Fundamentally culture can be seen as a set of norms, and I would distinguish firstly between those that are optimal and those that are arbitrary, and among those that are arbitrary I would distinguish between those that are non-irrational and those that are irrational. Norms that are optimal are norms that yield superior outcomes to their alternatives, and as examples at least typically heeding science is such a norm, as is respecting laws against violence and theft, and this is the aspect of culture that is particularly beneficial to society and the individuals that compose it. Norms that are arbitrary but not irrational include what language to use and what side of the road to drive on; these are norms that society needs to function smoothly and while the norm itself is arbitrary, once the norm is established, respecting the norm is not arbitrary but clearly preferable. But what first comes to mind when we think of the concept of culture tends to be its irrational norms; mildly irrational norms include artistic preferences such as what kind of music and architecture and cuisine and clothing is favored, and what's irrational about this is not actually producing this particular kind of art but rather only producing this kind and not the others, which leads to an impovershiment in experience; strongly irrational norms include religions and non-consequentialist norms on appropriate behavior, and this is the main self-generated cause of oppression and suffering in societies. Now of course these strongly irrational norms often have been adaptive for societies, enabling them to prevail over other societies which lacked them, which is largely why they have persisted, meaning that despite being irrational at the object level there is a sort of meta-rationality to holding them, but that does not make them necessary for the success of a socitey, and I am convinced that societies can do well without them, at which point stamping these norms out becomes the obvious thing to do.
And so then what we should aim for is to retain the non-irrational norms and discard the irrational ones. What is needed is not to entrench any particular culture, what's needed is to entrench rational policies and customs and beliefs, as opposed to irrational ones. To me this seems so obvious that it doesn't even need saying. Regarding adaptive norms that are irrational at object-level, if they happen to appear to be still adaptive, they should be replaced with norms that yield the same outcome but that are rational at object-level, eg don't tell people to not eat undercooked pork because God doesn't want you to but because it can get you sick, and if that doesn't suffice then introduce some amount of social shaming or mild government punishment for not caring about one's health and in this case about others' too since worms can be spread to others. And regarding art the obvious solution is to just be open to all different versions of it, such that eg sushi is no longer Japanese and pizza no longer Italian but both simply belong to everywhere as has already been becoming more and more the case, and that more generally no music or clothes or any other art styles are more in or out of vogue than they would be based on innate preferences. Obviously this implies that there is such a thing as moral and factual objectiveness, which I believe to be the case, and which anyone must believe to be the case if they hold any beliefs whatsoever. The people who believe in irrational cultural elements are simply wrong and they simply need to be completely overridden.
And just to finish with the example I consider most salient of an irrational norm that is strong enough to be entrenched in law and the removal of which would initially cause quite strong widespread pyschological distress due to social conditioning but is obviously warranted: the ban on public nudity (except over the perineum when seated which is in fact rational).
Edit to add: Most of the current phenomenon that you (Robin) perceive as a maladaptive cultural drift I would consider a shift from irrational norms to rational ones as a result of a combination of the irrational norms being less needed for societal success and increase in education and rationality. I quite strongly disagree that this shift is particularly maladaptive, and rather it seems that our current situation of prosperity is more permissive enabling a wider range of norms to be adaptive, including the ones that are correct at object-level, and this allows them to progressively gain in popularity, which I presume is just a spontaneous process arising from our instinct to attain the truth. I also suspect that the object-level irrational norms would never have been adaptive if most people had been considerably more rational, and even that they simply never could have prevailed because people would never have even considered to hold such ridiculous beliefs. The drop in fertility is indeed superficially maladaptive inasmuch as it leads the society/culture in question to be numerically outweighed by other socieites, however this is hardly a major maladaptive trait in the current case given that all societies are swiftly declining in fertility, and given that as you yourself have said societies are merging into a single global society which if this were to be completed would mean there would be no more concern at all about being overrun by other societies due to low fertility, and it's not like the current level of low fertility poses a credible risk of total human extinction.
Isn’t the mal-adaptive cultural drift really just our culture moving away from the principles of Christianity (setting aside the flaws in execution within the various churches)? For Paul, the bulwark against cultural drift was faith in Christ. He encouraged faith to the end “that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine.”
"Culture" has always struck me as a very appropriate word, describing a meta-organism growing in the petri dish of our minds. We happened to be the first species with the cognitive, social, linguistic, and physical tools that allowed culture to flourish (along with its latest incarnation, technology).
But to be clear, we are the substrate. As individuals we can't understand what culture is, or what its trajectory is likely to be – it's far too big to fit in our minds. The skin cell on your arm would just as soon understand your hopes and dreams.
Dr. Scott Alexander seems to think you made everything up in a post you made two years ago, and now his supporters are all diagnosing people who disagree with Dr. Alexander as mentally ill while impressively back-patting each other at the same time.
> Thomas Carlyle famously warned against stuff that is “a good tool to have as a slave, but a bad master to be ruled by."
So basically any move in any competitive game theoretical space where players are fundamentally similar in a broad sense(for instance, no one wants to truly suffer beyond metaphorical language, no one wants to "Lose", and so on)
Hmm. Yeah. I guess. Is that a deep insight? Scoring a touchdown a great. But be careful-- the enemy team/player wants to do that too.
Sure. Everything is like that, or, everything leads up *to* that(in actuality and/or potentially). That's our world. It either leads up to it, or it is it. Wouldn't it be funny if scoring touchdowns and winning a football game was actually not winning, but in fact losing the most cosmic football game of all football games? Not funny haha. Life is full of paradoxes, so would it even be a surprise? I'd be stunned if basically all common, popular, and elite intuitions weren't actually backwards. And I'm talking about the kinds of seemingly more sophisticated intuitions people have in "rationalist" spaces, by the way. Not the obviously backwards ones you find in the most obviously ignorant spaces on Earth.
> A standard depiction of a cruel boss or master is one who assigns impossible tasks, or gives vague and contradictory descriptions of desired outcomes or constraints. All so that this master can berate and punish subordinates no matter what they do.
They can also give perfectly clear and sensible orders, and then forget them and act like they told you something else. What are you going to do? Argue with them? They’ll just interrupt you before you get three words out, make you look like an idiot, and punish you for talking back.
We are in a post-traumatic addiction feedback loop. I've noticed it much the same the last couple of years - be it large or small - in order to survive we were taught to stop planning ahead and rely on authority - or not rely on anyone at all. The perceived lack of time for thorough understanding of any topic forces us to accept shortcuts, but intuition is short-circuited. So we resort to mask our own lack of authority (and good riddance really, the concept was being abused way too much) - so when we see something that seemingly works, we copy it. And it works. And other copy it as well. And it works for them also. Hardly any energy will be invested into error correction until the error is too late and far too transmittable. Humans excel at this, and so do bananas which we cultivate.
Knowing this, let's still try to not go bananas completely. If you already spot errors that others don't see - call attention to them. Most will not listen - that's fine. Keep speaking.
I think that at this point it will be in the best interest for literally anyone to start treating honesty - first of all with ourselves - as a necessity for survival. Reward it and punish resistance to it when you encounter it in others, like the good ol' game theory. Because I think the global prisoner's dilemma might have reached its critical mass and is now in the stage of potential system collapse (so let's try to catch it mid-air, alright?).
I did not expect that you'd also veer towards an animist view of culture! I reinterpreted Durkheim through this lens, and I think we can know what cultures want: like any creature of evolution, these psychic megafauna desire to survive and grow. Some of them grow at the expense of humans: these are your slavemasters
I think you’d enjoy this conversation between Derek Thompson and Sean Illing about how the fragmentation of mass media culture is leading to more cultish behavior. Here are two quotes:
“You have this interesting popularity of new influencers or new media makers adapting as their core personality the idea that the mainstream is broken, that news is broken, that mass institutions are broken, that the elite are in some way broken. The fragmentation of media that we're seeing, and the rise of this sort of anti-institutional, somewhat paranoid style of understanding reality, I see these things as rising together in a way that I find very interesting.”
“We’ve gotten so damn good at making products with good physical attributes, at making good enough stuff, that the commerce of the future won't be about value or quality, it'll be about identity. Are you the kind of person who buys this product, rather than is this a product that does more for you?”
>However, not only does culture help us get more stuff we want, culture also tells us what we want. We are built to eagerly copy not only the means, but also the ends, of our prestigious associates. So culture is our master, and not just our slave.
This is too strongly worded, imo. Culture does inform our appraisal of "the ends", but I strongly disagree that culture *dictates* those ends.
Some issues. First, there is no within species and between species biological evolution. Biological evolution occurs at the individual level and proceeds at about the same pace for all. Consider turtles. There were turtles hundreds of millions of years ago that look very much like modern ones. But modern turtles are completely different species than those ancient turtles. Modern turtles are just as *evolved* as humans whose reptilian ancestors contemporary to the ancient turtles were very different in appearance and function to us. Appearance/functional changes are the result of the selectivity of the environment in which evolution takes place, not the evolutionary process itself.
Industrial microbiologists have taken advantage of this by subjecting populations of microbes to artificially enhanced selection pressures and speeding up mutation rates by blasting them with radiation or exposing them to mutagens in order to evolve cultures that are superior at producing commercially valuable stuff.
Culture evolution sometimes leading us in unproductive paths is always an issue. But in addition to frequency bias and prestige bias, there is also direct bias and guided variation.
These involve an evaluative function. So we can have a situation in which culture runs off the tracks (e.g. men who menstruate) as happens during creedal passion periods like the one we are in now.
And then see these periods of radical ideation end as a result of the application of individual learning and direct bias. Some people see through the radical ideas and propose counter arguments, The most successful gain prestige and start spreading their counter-narratives by prestige bias. We are seeing the process unfold in real time right here on Substack.
Now the theory I used to model this is based on a social contagion mechanism, which is a memetics approach (memetics is similar to cultural evolution) but what is going on can be represented as a cultural evolutionary process, but I don't have the chops to develop such a model, so I just use Turchin's model since it seems to work.
I don't understand the justification for opposing cultural drift. I mean, our values right now are the result of cultural influences as well and so too would any values we tried to implicitly or explicitly embed in some machinery of futurarchy.
Ultimately, you just can't avoid the fact that culture affects values so why assume the way it's affected yours at the moment is superior?
I wonder if the problem doesn't stem from the fact that life is cruel and unfair. Culture compounds this problem, but I don't think is the cause of it.
I've never heard of this famous warning from Thomas Carlyle, and can't find it in Google. :-/ The closest I can find is "Fire is the best of servants; but what a master!" or various similar quotes from other authors.
Your model doesn't take into account momentum of the drift. In the short term, cultural drift has some sort of momentum, but in the longer term, it's largely mean reverting.
That's mostly fine for human flourishing. Most cultural "choices" involve some kind of trade-off, which means that it's never in humanity's interest for it to be permanently set one way or another. Since humanity doesn't to keep to a "happy medium", it will just keep swinging from one generation to the next.
In the short term though, most of the social misery comes from over-emphasis on cultural "wars" (where the participants expect to win some sort of "eternal" victory), or cultural "enforcement" (where the guardians expect to perserve some sort of "eternal" status quo). The less "force" and "attention" that is invested in these sorts of activities the happier the people. Live and let live!
I actually find this concern rather odd because I find the solution to be so obvious.
The way I see it is that "culture" especially as used here is a multifaceted term and that these facets should be considered individually. Fundamentally culture can be seen as a set of norms, and I would distinguish firstly between those that are optimal and those that are arbitrary, and among those that are arbitrary I would distinguish between those that are non-irrational and those that are irrational. Norms that are optimal are norms that yield superior outcomes to their alternatives, and as examples at least typically heeding science is such a norm, as is respecting laws against violence and theft, and this is the aspect of culture that is particularly beneficial to society and the individuals that compose it. Norms that are arbitrary but not irrational include what language to use and what side of the road to drive on; these are norms that society needs to function smoothly and while the norm itself is arbitrary, once the norm is established, respecting the norm is not arbitrary but clearly preferable. But what first comes to mind when we think of the concept of culture tends to be its irrational norms; mildly irrational norms include artistic preferences such as what kind of music and architecture and cuisine and clothing is favored, and what's irrational about this is not actually producing this particular kind of art but rather only producing this kind and not the others, which leads to an impovershiment in experience; strongly irrational norms include religions and non-consequentialist norms on appropriate behavior, and this is the main self-generated cause of oppression and suffering in societies. Now of course these strongly irrational norms often have been adaptive for societies, enabling them to prevail over other societies which lacked them, which is largely why they have persisted, meaning that despite being irrational at the object level there is a sort of meta-rationality to holding them, but that does not make them necessary for the success of a socitey, and I am convinced that societies can do well without them, at which point stamping these norms out becomes the obvious thing to do.
And so then what we should aim for is to retain the non-irrational norms and discard the irrational ones. What is needed is not to entrench any particular culture, what's needed is to entrench rational policies and customs and beliefs, as opposed to irrational ones. To me this seems so obvious that it doesn't even need saying. Regarding adaptive norms that are irrational at object-level, if they happen to appear to be still adaptive, they should be replaced with norms that yield the same outcome but that are rational at object-level, eg don't tell people to not eat undercooked pork because God doesn't want you to but because it can get you sick, and if that doesn't suffice then introduce some amount of social shaming or mild government punishment for not caring about one's health and in this case about others' too since worms can be spread to others. And regarding art the obvious solution is to just be open to all different versions of it, such that eg sushi is no longer Japanese and pizza no longer Italian but both simply belong to everywhere as has already been becoming more and more the case, and that more generally no music or clothes or any other art styles are more in or out of vogue than they would be based on innate preferences. Obviously this implies that there is such a thing as moral and factual objectiveness, which I believe to be the case, and which anyone must believe to be the case if they hold any beliefs whatsoever. The people who believe in irrational cultural elements are simply wrong and they simply need to be completely overridden.
And just to finish with the example I consider most salient of an irrational norm that is strong enough to be entrenched in law and the removal of which would initially cause quite strong widespread pyschological distress due to social conditioning but is obviously warranted: the ban on public nudity (except over the perineum when seated which is in fact rational).
Edit to add: Most of the current phenomenon that you (Robin) perceive as a maladaptive cultural drift I would consider a shift from irrational norms to rational ones as a result of a combination of the irrational norms being less needed for societal success and increase in education and rationality. I quite strongly disagree that this shift is particularly maladaptive, and rather it seems that our current situation of prosperity is more permissive enabling a wider range of norms to be adaptive, including the ones that are correct at object-level, and this allows them to progressively gain in popularity, which I presume is just a spontaneous process arising from our instinct to attain the truth. I also suspect that the object-level irrational norms would never have been adaptive if most people had been considerably more rational, and even that they simply never could have prevailed because people would never have even considered to hold such ridiculous beliefs. The drop in fertility is indeed superficially maladaptive inasmuch as it leads the society/culture in question to be numerically outweighed by other socieites, however this is hardly a major maladaptive trait in the current case given that all societies are swiftly declining in fertility, and given that as you yourself have said societies are merging into a single global society which if this were to be completed would mean there would be no more concern at all about being overrun by other societies due to low fertility, and it's not like the current level of low fertility poses a credible risk of total human extinction.
Isn’t the mal-adaptive cultural drift really just our culture moving away from the principles of Christianity (setting aside the flaws in execution within the various churches)? For Paul, the bulwark against cultural drift was faith in Christ. He encouraged faith to the end “that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine.”
"Culture" has always struck me as a very appropriate word, describing a meta-organism growing in the petri dish of our minds. We happened to be the first species with the cognitive, social, linguistic, and physical tools that allowed culture to flourish (along with its latest incarnation, technology).
But to be clear, we are the substrate. As individuals we can't understand what culture is, or what its trajectory is likely to be – it's far too big to fit in our minds. The skin cell on your arm would just as soon understand your hopes and dreams.
Dr. Scott Alexander seems to think you made everything up in a post you made two years ago, and now his supporters are all diagnosing people who disagree with Dr. Alexander as mentally ill while impressively back-patting each other at the same time.
> Thomas Carlyle famously warned against stuff that is “a good tool to have as a slave, but a bad master to be ruled by."
So basically any move in any competitive game theoretical space where players are fundamentally similar in a broad sense(for instance, no one wants to truly suffer beyond metaphorical language, no one wants to "Lose", and so on)
Hmm. Yeah. I guess. Is that a deep insight? Scoring a touchdown a great. But be careful-- the enemy team/player wants to do that too.
Sure. Everything is like that, or, everything leads up *to* that(in actuality and/or potentially). That's our world. It either leads up to it, or it is it. Wouldn't it be funny if scoring touchdowns and winning a football game was actually not winning, but in fact losing the most cosmic football game of all football games? Not funny haha. Life is full of paradoxes, so would it even be a surprise? I'd be stunned if basically all common, popular, and elite intuitions weren't actually backwards. And I'm talking about the kinds of seemingly more sophisticated intuitions people have in "rationalist" spaces, by the way. Not the obviously backwards ones you find in the most obviously ignorant spaces on Earth.
Sorry, I misread it then!
> A standard depiction of a cruel boss or master is one who assigns impossible tasks, or gives vague and contradictory descriptions of desired outcomes or constraints. All so that this master can berate and punish subordinates no matter what they do.
They can also give perfectly clear and sensible orders, and then forget them and act like they told you something else. What are you going to do? Argue with them? They’ll just interrupt you before you get three words out, make you look like an idiot, and punish you for talking back.
Typo nitpicking:
> such ass immigrants
We are in a post-traumatic addiction feedback loop. I've noticed it much the same the last couple of years - be it large or small - in order to survive we were taught to stop planning ahead and rely on authority - or not rely on anyone at all. The perceived lack of time for thorough understanding of any topic forces us to accept shortcuts, but intuition is short-circuited. So we resort to mask our own lack of authority (and good riddance really, the concept was being abused way too much) - so when we see something that seemingly works, we copy it. And it works. And other copy it as well. And it works for them also. Hardly any energy will be invested into error correction until the error is too late and far too transmittable. Humans excel at this, and so do bananas which we cultivate.
Knowing this, let's still try to not go bananas completely. If you already spot errors that others don't see - call attention to them. Most will not listen - that's fine. Keep speaking.
I think that at this point it will be in the best interest for literally anyone to start treating honesty - first of all with ourselves - as a necessity for survival. Reward it and punish resistance to it when you encounter it in others, like the good ol' game theory. Because I think the global prisoner's dilemma might have reached its critical mass and is now in the stage of potential system collapse (so let's try to catch it mid-air, alright?).
I did not expect that you'd also veer towards an animist view of culture! I reinterpreted Durkheim through this lens, and I think we can know what cultures want: like any creature of evolution, these psychic megafauna desire to survive and grow. Some of them grow at the expense of humans: these are your slavemasters
https://www.explorations.ph/p/durkheim-on-the-nature-of-psychic
I think you’d enjoy this conversation between Derek Thompson and Sean Illing about how the fragmentation of mass media culture is leading to more cultish behavior. Here are two quotes:
“You have this interesting popularity of new influencers or new media makers adapting as their core personality the idea that the mainstream is broken, that news is broken, that mass institutions are broken, that the elite are in some way broken. The fragmentation of media that we're seeing, and the rise of this sort of anti-institutional, somewhat paranoid style of understanding reality, I see these things as rising together in a way that I find very interesting.”
“We’ve gotten so damn good at making products with good physical attributes, at making good enough stuff, that the commerce of the future won't be about value or quality, it'll be about identity. Are you the kind of person who buys this product, rather than is this a product that does more for you?”
https://castro.fm/episode/ujW3zj
>However, not only does culture help us get more stuff we want, culture also tells us what we want. We are built to eagerly copy not only the means, but also the ends, of our prestigious associates. So culture is our master, and not just our slave.
This is too strongly worded, imo. Culture does inform our appraisal of "the ends", but I strongly disagree that culture *dictates* those ends.
Some issues. First, there is no within species and between species biological evolution. Biological evolution occurs at the individual level and proceeds at about the same pace for all. Consider turtles. There were turtles hundreds of millions of years ago that look very much like modern ones. But modern turtles are completely different species than those ancient turtles. Modern turtles are just as *evolved* as humans whose reptilian ancestors contemporary to the ancient turtles were very different in appearance and function to us. Appearance/functional changes are the result of the selectivity of the environment in which evolution takes place, not the evolutionary process itself.
Industrial microbiologists have taken advantage of this by subjecting populations of microbes to artificially enhanced selection pressures and speeding up mutation rates by blasting them with radiation or exposing them to mutagens in order to evolve cultures that are superior at producing commercially valuable stuff.
Culture evolution sometimes leading us in unproductive paths is always an issue. But in addition to frequency bias and prestige bias, there is also direct bias and guided variation.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-cultural-evolution-works
These involve an evaluative function. So we can have a situation in which culture runs off the tracks (e.g. men who menstruate) as happens during creedal passion periods like the one we are in now.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
And then see these periods of radical ideation end as a result of the application of individual learning and direct bias. Some people see through the radical ideas and propose counter arguments, The most successful gain prestige and start spreading their counter-narratives by prestige bias. We are seeing the process unfold in real time right here on Substack.
Now the theory I used to model this is based on a social contagion mechanism, which is a memetics approach (memetics is similar to cultural evolution) but what is going on can be represented as a cultural evolutionary process, but I don't have the chops to develop such a model, so I just use Turchin's model since it seems to work.