This is a pretty reasonable suggestion for a persistent tendency in cultural evolution. I might quibble about whether to call it drift because it does seem directional. Another natural way to see it is as multilevel selection, where in each case the lower level entity is acting contrary to the higher level interest, so classic selfish behaviour.
The multilevel perspective is useful also because it naturally suggests the classic ways that selfish behaviour at a lower level can be curtailed: higher level policing, same-level enforcement, or harsher competition between groups.
"Drift" is movement not guided by the intent of the thing moved. "Genetic drift" is random genetic change without selection. If a man is a drifter, he wanders aimlessly from place to place. We can drift downstream, but the stream chooses the direction, not us. Snow likewise drifts wherever the wind carries it.
Since you're proposing a mechanism which society doesn't choose consciously, I think your use of "drift" is correct.
The way I understand drift and selection is that selective processes are those to which there is an underlying directional bias. Saying there is ‘drift’ suggests a process with no inherent directionality. Of course, drift will exhibit a direction in the short run, but in the long run drift has no direction.
Now, there is a sense in which drift has a direction that is just ‘away from the adaptive’ since a random walk that starts from an adaptive peak will tend to move away from the peak.
But your discussion doesn’t really sound like a drift process in that sense: like I said, it sounds more like a competition between selection acting at two different levels. Not that the concepts are incompatible: there could be a movement away from the adaptive peak for the group both because of drift and because of selection at lower levels.
terminology difference. "drift terms" in stochastic processes have a directional bias. "evolutionary drift" does not. depends whether you're more used to math/stats or evo-bio jargon.
Decadance is often explained by evolutionary biologists as a common result of runaway sexual selection. Genes (or memes) are selected according to their reproductive success with reduced concern for survivalist traits. This leaves the "decadant" population more vulnerable if the environment changes and new predators or parasite or competitors are introduced. The population has become fragile. Extinction can follow - e.g. see the Irish Elk.
I would normally expect those proposing rival explanations to compare and contrast their explanation with existing ones, to see which theory explains which observations better. However, here I don't see much in the way of references. It isn't even clear whether a literature search took place.
As you get richer, it’s reasonable to spend more time on pleasure and save less for the future, and it may be reasonable for cultural norms to change correspondingly. When you invent contraception, it’s reasonable to worry less about chastity. One way to think about this is that we reacted to the cultural norms of the mid Victorian era, which had become inappropriately tight. But we might have overcorrected.
“We are going to hell in a handbasket” (say grumpy old conservatives, always). But we are richer, healthier, more knowledgeable, more sympathetic with the oppressed; we are doing something right.
But if culture has drifted away from the one that created this happy situation to something new and unsuited for maintaining it, the grumpy conservative may have a point.
Maybe anything. Broadly, many things are better than previously. Those living while enslaving others might have said that as well, historically. Only the enslaved would object, until decadence got so bad the country couldn't defend itself any longer.
If we are to do better, we should notice that things like decadence and low fertility are unsustainable, and correct for these without destroying adaptations that made our lives better. This does mean less comfort now to reduce extreme discomfort later.
History suggests I not be optimistic about this happening. Society seems to prefer civil war and other crises, which we're closer to than I'd prefer.
Humanity will likely survive, but we've seen some "hells". World wars, stalinism, maoism, khmer rouge, yellow turban rebellion, 30 years war, Paraguay's situation after their war of triple alliance, US civil war, Rome splitting etc.
Conservative messages are not always right. But the threat of enduring a hellish experience due to bad policy is real and observed many times over. None of those were unpreventable, in principle.
I've been following this substack for a while and would welcome sources and references for some of these opinions. Are these widely held beliefs in a particular field of studyc or the author's personal beliefs? I need a yardstick by which to measure them. Many thanks.
The cult I want to join/start is the Caplan cult which proposes that the cost of children does not need to be high and adult outcomes seem to be largely independent of parenting except for the somewhat controllable outcome of the parent-child relationship which can be bountiful if nurtured in a low pressure environment, and therefore, children can be seen as low cost and high ROI and therefore should be maximized. It seems at least plausible that this cult can be an offramp for the current mainstream culture because it allows for more indulgence by the parents (since they can use much more time/money on non-child things) and therefore can meet 20s-30s mindsets where they are now of wanting leisure/entertainment while still pumping out a lot of kids. Maybe simply seeding (pun intended) such an explicit culture and having many documented cases of outcomes of high children + high leisure can then be seen as a blueprint when people start to see the effects of collapsing fertility. So a practical conclusion might be to have a digital Caplanistan whose main purpose is to document such experiences. If anyone is interested, I could create some sort of online forum.
Some years ago, my office floor was being remodeled, so everyone on my floor had to office for a couple of days in a conference room.
I didn't like it.
For one thing, I couldn't goof off, or even switch tasks for a couple of minutes so I could look at my work again with fresher eyes, at least not without everyone knowing. If I made a non-work related phone call, it was everyone's business. I felt like I was going to work in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon or something equally dystopian.
I thought about the secretaries. When they go back to their remodeled cubicles, nothing changes. It's like this every day for them, constant supervision, no real solitude or privacy. That must suck mightily. I don't know how they can stand it.
So why do I have a corner office? Why do I get anything done, ever, without anyone to watch over me? Because I am so well trained, I don't need to be supervised. I am the little hall monitor, the little prison super inside my own head, telling myself to get back to work. I won't leave the prison, even though there are no walls and I can come and go as I please, I can walk out the door any time I like.
This post sounds to me like the Marxist argument against capitalism: "We all find it easy and natural to choose selfishly and myopically; our culture and institutions must work to get us to do otherwise." Then you wrap it up with an ultraconservative agenda: we need less pleasure, more kids, more school, more patriotism, and more religion.
(Marxism and evangelical Christianity are actually very similar. Not by coincidence; Hegel was trying to create a secular Christianity. Also, Christianity was communist before it was Romanized.)
In both respects, you're advocating the leftist/rightist retreat to feudalism to solve the "ills" of capitalism, when in fact it is precisely those "Ills" -- individualism and the legitimization of self-directed action--which solved the ills of feudalism. You're calling for more community spirit and making-people-good to solve our problems, which was the favored approach to economics in the Middle Ages. We entered the modern age after the US Constitution was designed to produce a government which did not rely on the goodness of the people, but on their self-interest. Capitalism revolutionized production in the same way that the US Constitution revolutionized government.
I have myself seen many cases of workers and managers acting selfishly rather than in the interest of the company. I've seen far fewer cases of laziness, but I have seen at least two. I've seen far more cases of coders spending nearly all of their time "playing", adding the features or the middleware they think are cool rather than the ones that are good for the code or that the customer wants. You wrote, "Bosses and incentives are needed to push them to be productive," and this isn't wrong, but it is worded in a way that emphasizes "bosses" and "pushing" over incentives.
In my experience, there are 5 main things that incentivize workers:
- Personal incentives. Specifically, when an individual worker will get a bonus, a raise, or a promotion if she does her work exceptionally well. This works very well, but is hardly ever used, because everyone forgets to make sure that the /boss/ is incentivized to give her workers these incentives. I even had a supervisor at the Patent Office who explicitly refused to supervise me in any way that didn't count towards her quota.
- Group incentives. Workers as a group will get more money, or get to keep their jobs, if the clients are happy with the product. This is never the case in government contracting; the way contracts are budgeted in advance makes it illegal to pay anyone more or less based on the project outcome. This is the main reason government contracting is so wasteful.
- Competition, whether with another company or another division. It is not clear to me that competition between companies is good for the economy, but competition between divisions is bad for the economy. Logically, either both are good, or both are bad. It is possible that competition between divisions is good for the economy but bad for the company; but why should we care that it's bad for the company? We're taking the viewpoint of society here.
- Fun. Lots of people enjoy their work, no matter how much we deny it. Nerds love to program. Artists love to draw. Musicians love to compose. Scientists love to solve problems. I've spent most of my work life with nerds and creative people, so I guess I have a warped view. But attempts to "prevent laziness" from above destroy the fun and cause people to work less and worse. For instance, all programmers write too few comments in their code. The US government has responded to this in a variety of ways, including creating several long, hyper-specific sets of rules on how computer code is to be documented, which create /too many/ comments, and are too time-consuming to do (because you're required to put the documentation in a separate document, so you'd have to keep switching back and forth between documents with every line of code you write). The more rules they make on how documentation should be done, the less likely it is that anyone will keep the documentation up-to-date with the code. Also, they stop writing comments in the code at all. The intervention from above accomplished the opposite of what it was supposed to, /and/ made coding not fun.
(The same caveats apply to attempts to be rigorous about all patches to the code: if you have to fill out a 2-page form for every minor tweak you make to the code, you'll let a lot of things slide.)
- Caring about the mission. I've found this only in non-profits and in the Department of Defense (in my case, the Army, NASA, and the NSA).
In my experience, none of the cultural values you listed as fighting decadence have any impact on worker productivity, except in the case of the Department of Defense.
I know you wouldn't consciously advocate feudalism, but neither do Marxists or Christians consciously advocate feudalism. Perhaps instead of "feudalism" I should say "communitarianism", or (for the archaeologists among us) "the Neolithic package".
This entire post is about the advantages of a hegemonic ideology, traditional cultural values, and direction from above, as a cure for selfishness. That was the mainstream medieval view of what our problems are, and how we should solve them; and it's the view of Marxists, Christians, Romantics, Nazis, and the Social Justice movement; and it doesn't work. We tried it for over a thousand years. The modern solution, which is like the ancient Greek solution, is that it's more-effective to minimize authority and to incentivize people using their selfish desires, provided that people are given enough choices and opportunity that they can effectively gratify some of those desires.
I know you already know that. So, what's up with this post? How do you reconcile your libertarian views, and your understanding of free-market economics, with this post, which as far as I can tell sounds like pro-feudalism not coincidentally, but because it makes the same economics-based argument for a return to (or increase in) communitarian values as all these other people whom you believe are completely wrong about economics?
I realize I'm making the standard mistake of equating "we should do more of X" with "we should do nothing but X". But I can't tell from this post where you stand on that continuum. It sounds like you're saying we've gone too far in individualism, but I don't think that diagnoses our current problems. The celebration of anti-work and pro-crime values is IMHO not due to random drift, but to deliberate scheming to foment revolution, guided by a selfish elite which hopes to have much more power after the revolution.
Its hard for me to read Hanson and take this as a call to "communitarian values", esp in the context of his posts/work Em's, Prediction markets and Futarchy.
For me I think things are already going great in the Futarchy direction (i.e. rise of decentralized prediction markets, autonomous agents, etc) and for people working in related industries...
I do think Hanson's worries about fertility are a bit over done esp in the context of innovation... as long as bytes/per second continues to grow (and compared to pre-printing press, 100 years post printing press, and now its seems like it will continue to). Though human fertility does seem to matter less in this paradigm, esp if most humans are now engaged in supporting the Futarchy direction our societies is moving in at the margins.
Humanists will probably be very alarmed, but they too will still be addicted to the tech and inadvertently continue to finance the growing Futarchy.
The first half of the post blames corporate dysfunction on selfishness and a lack of authoritarian supervision. As I already argued, this is the typical Marxist argument against capitalism, and it has little to do with the actual reasons for corporate dysfunction, which I have seen over and over again, which is mostly due to too much authoritarian supervision and to government grants screwing up the market. I think Robin would not have written it if he had more experience with the corporate world. It's based on folklore about how corporations operated in the 1950s and 1960s, rather than on experience with how they operate today in a business environment which is controlled more by the government than by the market. Back when divisional competition was a major concern, corporations functioned much better!
I'm also triggered by the post's last paragraph, which points to things like having more sex, more entertainment, and fewer children as causes of decadence. That sounds very Puritan, and again these "causes" aren't connected empirically to the effects they're blamed for.
If you do not look at this post alone and in the context everything else Hanson's has written about as potential solutions to corporate dysfunction (and organizational dysfunction in general), arriving at something like "lack of authoritarian supervision" seems ridiculous.
Again, i think most humans play an increasingly rather marginal role (regardless of your own proclivities that are causing you to get triggered and ignore the context of work this should be considered with), so whether or not we are reproducing enough to continue innovation matters very little at this point.
What do you think is advancing in the absence of humans? You comments seem to reference some unknown. What is it? Aliens? I cannot figure out what you are alluding to. I thought at first it was technology, but that makes no sense without humans. So what is it?
I know that, given the many other things he's written, it seems ridiculous to conclude that Robin Hanson thinks we have a big problem with not enough top-down control. That's why I'm so puzzled by this post.
Parents and bosses are just as "selfish" as children and subordinates. The difference is in status - influence over other people's behavior and thus control over long-term outcomes, which changes the goals worth pursuing. The culture created material abundance, making long-term material goals relatively less valuable and short-term status games more attractive. It is not a drift, it is a selection.
I feel have been covering this from a better framework, this one seems framed by hand-wringing & pathologising. But i guess that is because of traditional terms like drift and 'decadent' in scare quotes. Anyway, I hope to bring some new healthier terms to the table on this). Avoiding health or life-cycle related metaphor due to their disparaging labelling at times -- 'degenerate' and exhaustion are others (they betray a preference to romanticise the past as in golden ages) Worse, they can remove agency from the individual, if one removes agency one removes responsibility. Removing responsibility,as you point out, does not lead to good outcomes (in worlding).
With increasing complexity that our economies and geographies and 'metaverse's allow, the number of available pathways across the solution space that is life, increase, sometimes dramatically. We have an urge, an instinct, to world our way across this space as best as we can. Whatever cultural evolution is, its aim is to help us make mistakes, learn and adapt as _best_ we can.
In Freudian individualistic psychology this function is overloaded or is called the superego, as if it were in our heads but really its the village-that-raises-the-children thang. It's negotiated and a lot of cultural artifacts are an outcome of this process (art/performance/rites/mass/religion/polity/morality).
With an increasing number of pathways our preferred good worlding pathways may shrink in number, absolute & relative, this can cause in those aware of it existential dread and thus the preference to use trad terms like 'decadence'. A better term would be something related to entropy (Julian Barbour reckons complexity and entropy are a ratio, the pathways analogy is taken from Stephen Wolfram).
This is not a criticism of the accuracy of the description (as far as it goes) in the blog post, but it would be wise to not harp on the selfishness of peeps as the (only) cause, because each of us (who has empathy at least - gone through the tantrum times and gone through the reality principle with or without a transitional object ) also has the ability to world (as I call it) around it with others.
Worlding is a type of selfing without the ego in the foreground. Its the landscape or umwelt to the body, ours is a world because ti is social.
This ability to world is how isolated group of humans with a tiny population can survived 10K years despite technological drift and decreasing complexity. e.g. Tasmania. Remember our origin story is a number of bottlenecks, not creation stories per se.
See comment left at J.N Nielsen's Biologism, Cultural Evolutionism, and Cyclical History post
"betray a preference to romanticise the past as in golden ages) Worse, they can remove agency from the individual"
My goal is to tell the truth, regardless of what foul tendencies might have also produced those same beliefs, and regardless of their influences on motives.
I suspect her greatest difference with you may be the existence of "truth" itself. I feel like today we are senselessly arguing positions when we should be arguing the assumptions underlying them.
"With an increasing number of pathways our preferred good worlding pathways may shrink in number,"
This seems very unlikely to me, regardless of what "good worlding" means. More pathways available means more X pathways available, for most any X. Also, can you clarify what you mean by "worlding"?
yes, worlding has become very idiosyncratic to my blog (I wasn't using it when I started so much). It just means that part of the living we do and to which we direct our efforts but the outcomes are not our physical body so much as the 'extended phenotype' {Richard Dawkins} and/or umwelt {Jakob von Uexküll} (cocoon & life sphere), which for humans is our social reality we call 'the world'. I use it to reframe questions which might ask: where does morality come from? where does art come from, what is the gene for fashion (these are all outcomes of the urge/instinct/bias to should the world into shape (to suit ourselves among others as we are social) (Currently reading Robert Ardrey's 1967 book on The Territorial Imperative and he ends up in a similar place, even ends up talking about the Roman god Janus. Weirdly this book comes from my grandparents house... I was born before the book came out.) (in a previous life in my late 20s I re-invented the Mondragon co-operative created in the 50s, in Spain..)
""With an increasing number of pathways our preferred good worlding pathways may shrink in number,"" the emphasis here should be put on _preferred_ I am not arguing variety decrease per se (variety can be read as decadence you see)
thanks for asking, it helps me work out what I am saying (or what i am worlding (loosely)with others).
I also feel bias is constitutive, i.e. con-founds us. But as always strengths are also weaknesses. Everything is a trade-off. We have a urge/instinct to world, i.e. move, misstep and adapt, and within that we each have a style of movement, where it may help to overcome bias when we world together to work out what reality is. E.G. science.
The world, as in worlding, does not exist, much like the self does not exist, but we carry on regardless.
One could also argue that the world expands at the expense of reality, given technological progress.
what is the measure of time for cultural processes? Our population or GDP are far larger than ever. To some extent an acceleration of History is almost mechanically inevitable with more people, that being richer are more active cultural agents.
If instead of measuring cultural time in clock years, you use man-hours devoted to cultural activities, probably the puzzle is that cultural change is surprisingly slow (the life expectancy increase probably slows cultural change). Some discussion on the baseline expected cultural change in a growing society is necessary to measure cultural drift.
Agree with most of the analysis but I think you missed the salient point of why cultures drift.
Not technologies, nor expanding media, or coice or the myriad other factors rapidly changing.
For whatever reason, enabling parents or pandering politicians have removed the guard rails that control drift....there is no downside to lazyness, incompetence, bad choices, or failure. Society must relearn that there should be a penalty for all of the above. We allow misplaced compassion to remove the downside so we enable drift, but if we allowed or forced people to experience the consequences of their actions, then drift would be minimal and probably beneficial.
Traditional peasant societies were reluctant to change their culture, but we have instead become eager to change it, raising our cultural activists to our highest heroes. And many activists have urged removing guardrails.
I do not believe that is a long-term sustainable change. Those most impacted are the least likely to reproduce. We have little to fear from lonely, weak over-grown children hiding in their parents' homes. That problem solves itself within a decade.
The real issue would be if populations fall too far, too fast where outsiders could overrun wealthy societies in order to loot them. It sounds crazy until you look at demographic projections. If I were in the Middle East, I would be especially afraid. Get rid of the current American-designed system with pro-small country social norms (which China and Russia are doing right now), and why wouldn't Pakistan invade Iran and Iraq? China could then sweep in and "rescue" Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. China wants such a world desperately, and they would love to replicate the British Empire, only they will do it better with boots and families on the ground so the future will be Chinese everywhere they can sustainably remain (doing to Africa, Latin America and the Middle East what the British did in Australia and North America).
People are so obsessed with Russia, but that is a side show. The real issue is China and their desire for territorial expansion. The best way for them to win would be an America self-absorbed in debates about how many genders can float around the head of a pin.
"When rapidly changing social conditions make prior cultural norms less relevant for current conditions, old norms do less well at promoting cooperation and investments in the future. "
When you say that it predicts modernism, which seems to be a one-off event, you seem to say that it is unique. But decadence is not historically unique. Were earlier periods of decadence also caused by cultural drift? If not, what caused that decadence and could it be happening today? But if earlier decadence was caused by drift, why didn't they have modernism?
Hellenistic Greece and the Renaissance were periods of artistic innovation and celebrity artists, but they are not usually seen as decadent.
This is a pretty reasonable suggestion for a persistent tendency in cultural evolution. I might quibble about whether to call it drift because it does seem directional. Another natural way to see it is as multilevel selection, where in each case the lower level entity is acting contrary to the higher level interest, so classic selfish behaviour.
The multilevel perspective is useful also because it naturally suggests the classic ways that selfish behaviour at a lower level can be curtailed: higher level policing, same-level enforcement, or harsher competition between groups.
"drift" includes directional movement:
drift: a continuous slow movement from one place to another.
"there was a drift to the towns"
"Drift" is movement not guided by the intent of the thing moved. "Genetic drift" is random genetic change without selection. If a man is a drifter, he wanders aimlessly from place to place. We can drift downstream, but the stream chooses the direction, not us. Snow likewise drifts wherever the wind carries it.
Since you're proposing a mechanism which society doesn't choose consciously, I think your use of "drift" is correct.
The way I understand drift and selection is that selective processes are those to which there is an underlying directional bias. Saying there is ‘drift’ suggests a process with no inherent directionality. Of course, drift will exhibit a direction in the short run, but in the long run drift has no direction.
Now, there is a sense in which drift has a direction that is just ‘away from the adaptive’ since a random walk that starts from an adaptive peak will tend to move away from the peak.
But your discussion doesn’t really sound like a drift process in that sense: like I said, it sounds more like a competition between selection acting at two different levels. Not that the concepts are incompatible: there could be a movement away from the adaptive peak for the group both because of drift and because of selection at lower levels.
If selection was holding a position against other tendencies, the absence of selection will result in those tendencies being realized.
terminology difference. "drift terms" in stochastic processes have a directional bias. "evolutionary drift" does not. depends whether you're more used to math/stats or evo-bio jargon.
Decadance is often explained by evolutionary biologists as a common result of runaway sexual selection. Genes (or memes) are selected according to their reproductive success with reduced concern for survivalist traits. This leaves the "decadant" population more vulnerable if the environment changes and new predators or parasite or competitors are introduced. The population has become fragile. Extinction can follow - e.g. see the Irish Elk.
I would normally expect those proposing rival explanations to compare and contrast their explanation with existing ones, to see which theory explains which observations better. However, here I don't see much in the way of references. It isn't even clear whether a literature search took place.
As you get richer, it’s reasonable to spend more time on pleasure and save less for the future, and it may be reasonable for cultural norms to change correspondingly. When you invent contraception, it’s reasonable to worry less about chastity. One way to think about this is that we reacted to the cultural norms of the mid Victorian era, which had become inappropriately tight. But we might have overcorrected.
It FEELs reasonable, which is why I say it is natural. But is that adaptive?
Well, it’s what a homo economicus who values both present and future consumption would do.
“We are going to hell in a handbasket” (say grumpy old conservatives, always). But we are richer, healthier, more knowledgeable, more sympathetic with the oppressed; we are doing something right.
But if culture has drifted away from the one that created this happy situation to something new and unsuited for maintaining it, the grumpy conservative may have a point.
Maybe we are going to hell. Maybe we are not.
Maybe anything. Broadly, many things are better than previously. Those living while enslaving others might have said that as well, historically. Only the enslaved would object, until decadence got so bad the country couldn't defend itself any longer.
If we are to do better, we should notice that things like decadence and low fertility are unsustainable, and correct for these without destroying adaptations that made our lives better. This does mean less comfort now to reduce extreme discomfort later.
History suggests I not be optimistic about this happening. Society seems to prefer civil war and other crises, which we're closer to than I'd prefer.
Humanity will likely survive, but we've seen some "hells". World wars, stalinism, maoism, khmer rouge, yellow turban rebellion, 30 years war, Paraguay's situation after their war of triple alliance, US civil war, Rome splitting etc.
Conservative messages are not always right. But the threat of enduring a hellish experience due to bad policy is real and observed many times over. None of those were unpreventable, in principle.
I've been following this substack for a while and would welcome sources and references for some of these opinions. Are these widely held beliefs in a particular field of studyc or the author's personal beliefs? I need a yardstick by which to measure them. Many thanks.
The cult I want to join/start is the Caplan cult which proposes that the cost of children does not need to be high and adult outcomes seem to be largely independent of parenting except for the somewhat controllable outcome of the parent-child relationship which can be bountiful if nurtured in a low pressure environment, and therefore, children can be seen as low cost and high ROI and therefore should be maximized. It seems at least plausible that this cult can be an offramp for the current mainstream culture because it allows for more indulgence by the parents (since they can use much more time/money on non-child things) and therefore can meet 20s-30s mindsets where they are now of wanting leisure/entertainment while still pumping out a lot of kids. Maybe simply seeding (pun intended) such an explicit culture and having many documented cases of outcomes of high children + high leisure can then be seen as a blueprint when people start to see the effects of collapsing fertility. So a practical conclusion might be to have a digital Caplanistan whose main purpose is to document such experiences. If anyone is interested, I could create some sort of online forum.
Some years ago, my office floor was being remodeled, so everyone on my floor had to office for a couple of days in a conference room.
I didn't like it.
For one thing, I couldn't goof off, or even switch tasks for a couple of minutes so I could look at my work again with fresher eyes, at least not without everyone knowing. If I made a non-work related phone call, it was everyone's business. I felt like I was going to work in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon or something equally dystopian.
I thought about the secretaries. When they go back to their remodeled cubicles, nothing changes. It's like this every day for them, constant supervision, no real solitude or privacy. That must suck mightily. I don't know how they can stand it.
So why do I have a corner office? Why do I get anything done, ever, without anyone to watch over me? Because I am so well trained, I don't need to be supervised. I am the little hall monitor, the little prison super inside my own head, telling myself to get back to work. I won't leave the prison, even though there are no walls and I can come and go as I please, I can walk out the door any time I like.
How messed up is that?!?
This post sounds to me like the Marxist argument against capitalism: "We all find it easy and natural to choose selfishly and myopically; our culture and institutions must work to get us to do otherwise." Then you wrap it up with an ultraconservative agenda: we need less pleasure, more kids, more school, more patriotism, and more religion.
(Marxism and evangelical Christianity are actually very similar. Not by coincidence; Hegel was trying to create a secular Christianity. Also, Christianity was communist before it was Romanized.)
In both respects, you're advocating the leftist/rightist retreat to feudalism to solve the "ills" of capitalism, when in fact it is precisely those "Ills" -- individualism and the legitimization of self-directed action--which solved the ills of feudalism. You're calling for more community spirit and making-people-good to solve our problems, which was the favored approach to economics in the Middle Ages. We entered the modern age after the US Constitution was designed to produce a government which did not rely on the goodness of the people, but on their self-interest. Capitalism revolutionized production in the same way that the US Constitution revolutionized government.
I have myself seen many cases of workers and managers acting selfishly rather than in the interest of the company. I've seen far fewer cases of laziness, but I have seen at least two. I've seen far more cases of coders spending nearly all of their time "playing", adding the features or the middleware they think are cool rather than the ones that are good for the code or that the customer wants. You wrote, "Bosses and incentives are needed to push them to be productive," and this isn't wrong, but it is worded in a way that emphasizes "bosses" and "pushing" over incentives.
In my experience, there are 5 main things that incentivize workers:
- Personal incentives. Specifically, when an individual worker will get a bonus, a raise, or a promotion if she does her work exceptionally well. This works very well, but is hardly ever used, because everyone forgets to make sure that the /boss/ is incentivized to give her workers these incentives. I even had a supervisor at the Patent Office who explicitly refused to supervise me in any way that didn't count towards her quota.
- Group incentives. Workers as a group will get more money, or get to keep their jobs, if the clients are happy with the product. This is never the case in government contracting; the way contracts are budgeted in advance makes it illegal to pay anyone more or less based on the project outcome. This is the main reason government contracting is so wasteful.
- Competition, whether with another company or another division. It is not clear to me that competition between companies is good for the economy, but competition between divisions is bad for the economy. Logically, either both are good, or both are bad. It is possible that competition between divisions is good for the economy but bad for the company; but why should we care that it's bad for the company? We're taking the viewpoint of society here.
- Fun. Lots of people enjoy their work, no matter how much we deny it. Nerds love to program. Artists love to draw. Musicians love to compose. Scientists love to solve problems. I've spent most of my work life with nerds and creative people, so I guess I have a warped view. But attempts to "prevent laziness" from above destroy the fun and cause people to work less and worse. For instance, all programmers write too few comments in their code. The US government has responded to this in a variety of ways, including creating several long, hyper-specific sets of rules on how computer code is to be documented, which create /too many/ comments, and are too time-consuming to do (because you're required to put the documentation in a separate document, so you'd have to keep switching back and forth between documents with every line of code you write). The more rules they make on how documentation should be done, the less likely it is that anyone will keep the documentation up-to-date with the code. Also, they stop writing comments in the code at all. The intervention from above accomplished the opposite of what it was supposed to, /and/ made coding not fun.
(The same caveats apply to attempts to be rigorous about all patches to the code: if you have to fill out a 2-page form for every minor tweak you make to the code, you'll let a lot of things slide.)
- Caring about the mission. I've found this only in non-profits and in the Department of Defense (in my case, the Army, NASA, and the NSA).
In my experience, none of the cultural values you listed as fighting decadence have any impact on worker productivity, except in the case of the Department of Defense.
I am not at all advocating feudalism.
I know you wouldn't consciously advocate feudalism, but neither do Marxists or Christians consciously advocate feudalism. Perhaps instead of "feudalism" I should say "communitarianism", or (for the archaeologists among us) "the Neolithic package".
This entire post is about the advantages of a hegemonic ideology, traditional cultural values, and direction from above, as a cure for selfishness. That was the mainstream medieval view of what our problems are, and how we should solve them; and it's the view of Marxists, Christians, Romantics, Nazis, and the Social Justice movement; and it doesn't work. We tried it for over a thousand years. The modern solution, which is like the ancient Greek solution, is that it's more-effective to minimize authority and to incentivize people using their selfish desires, provided that people are given enough choices and opportunity that they can effectively gratify some of those desires.
I know you already know that. So, what's up with this post? How do you reconcile your libertarian views, and your understanding of free-market economics, with this post, which as far as I can tell sounds like pro-feudalism not coincidentally, but because it makes the same economics-based argument for a return to (or increase in) communitarian values as all these other people whom you believe are completely wrong about economics?
I realize I'm making the standard mistake of equating "we should do more of X" with "we should do nothing but X". But I can't tell from this post where you stand on that continuum. It sounds like you're saying we've gone too far in individualism, but I don't think that diagnoses our current problems. The celebration of anti-work and pro-crime values is IMHO not due to random drift, but to deliberate scheming to foment revolution, guided by a selfish elite which hopes to have much more power after the revolution.
Its hard for me to read Hanson and take this as a call to "communitarian values", esp in the context of his posts/work Em's, Prediction markets and Futarchy.
For me I think things are already going great in the Futarchy direction (i.e. rise of decentralized prediction markets, autonomous agents, etc) and for people working in related industries...
I do think Hanson's worries about fertility are a bit over done esp in the context of innovation... as long as bytes/per second continues to grow (and compared to pre-printing press, 100 years post printing press, and now its seems like it will continue to). Though human fertility does seem to matter less in this paradigm, esp if most humans are now engaged in supporting the Futarchy direction our societies is moving in at the margins.
Humanists will probably be very alarmed, but they too will still be addicted to the tech and inadvertently continue to finance the growing Futarchy.
The first half of the post blames corporate dysfunction on selfishness and a lack of authoritarian supervision. As I already argued, this is the typical Marxist argument against capitalism, and it has little to do with the actual reasons for corporate dysfunction, which I have seen over and over again, which is mostly due to too much authoritarian supervision and to government grants screwing up the market. I think Robin would not have written it if he had more experience with the corporate world. It's based on folklore about how corporations operated in the 1950s and 1960s, rather than on experience with how they operate today in a business environment which is controlled more by the government than by the market. Back when divisional competition was a major concern, corporations functioned much better!
I'm also triggered by the post's last paragraph, which points to things like having more sex, more entertainment, and fewer children as causes of decadence. That sounds very Puritan, and again these "causes" aren't connected empirically to the effects they're blamed for.
If you do not look at this post alone and in the context everything else Hanson's has written about as potential solutions to corporate dysfunction (and organizational dysfunction in general), arriving at something like "lack of authoritarian supervision" seems ridiculous.
Again, i think most humans play an increasingly rather marginal role (regardless of your own proclivities that are causing you to get triggered and ignore the context of work this should be considered with), so whether or not we are reproducing enough to continue innovation matters very little at this point.
What do you think is advancing in the absence of humans? You comments seem to reference some unknown. What is it? Aliens? I cannot figure out what you are alluding to. I thought at first it was technology, but that makes no sense without humans. So what is it?
I know that, given the many other things he's written, it seems ridiculous to conclude that Robin Hanson thinks we have a big problem with not enough top-down control. That's why I'm so puzzled by this post.
typo: one place says film instead of firm
fixed
Parents and bosses are just as "selfish" as children and subordinates. The difference is in status - influence over other people's behavior and thus control over long-term outcomes, which changes the goals worth pursuing. The culture created material abundance, making long-term material goals relatively less valuable and short-term status games more attractive. It is not a drift, it is a selection.
I feel have been covering this from a better framework, this one seems framed by hand-wringing & pathologising. But i guess that is because of traditional terms like drift and 'decadent' in scare quotes. Anyway, I hope to bring some new healthier terms to the table on this). Avoiding health or life-cycle related metaphor due to their disparaging labelling at times -- 'degenerate' and exhaustion are others (they betray a preference to romanticise the past as in golden ages) Worse, they can remove agency from the individual, if one removes agency one removes responsibility. Removing responsibility,as you point out, does not lead to good outcomes (in worlding).
With increasing complexity that our economies and geographies and 'metaverse's allow, the number of available pathways across the solution space that is life, increase, sometimes dramatically. We have an urge, an instinct, to world our way across this space as best as we can. Whatever cultural evolution is, its aim is to help us make mistakes, learn and adapt as _best_ we can.
In Freudian individualistic psychology this function is overloaded or is called the superego, as if it were in our heads but really its the village-that-raises-the-children thang. It's negotiated and a lot of cultural artifacts are an outcome of this process (art/performance/rites/mass/religion/polity/morality).
With an increasing number of pathways our preferred good worlding pathways may shrink in number, absolute & relative, this can cause in those aware of it existential dread and thus the preference to use trad terms like 'decadence'. A better term would be something related to entropy (Julian Barbour reckons complexity and entropy are a ratio, the pathways analogy is taken from Stephen Wolfram).
This is not a criticism of the accuracy of the description (as far as it goes) in the blog post, but it would be wise to not harp on the selfishness of peeps as the (only) cause, because each of us (who has empathy at least - gone through the tantrum times and gone through the reality principle with or without a transitional object ) also has the ability to world (as I call it) around it with others.
Worlding is a type of selfing without the ego in the foreground. Its the landscape or umwelt to the body, ours is a world because ti is social.
This ability to world is how isolated group of humans with a tiny population can survived 10K years despite technological drift and decreasing complexity. e.g. Tasmania. Remember our origin story is a number of bottlenecks, not creation stories per se.
See comment left at J.N Nielsen's Biologism, Cultural Evolutionism, and Cyclical History post
https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/biologism-cultural-evolutionism-and/comment/71081267
and my substack generally,
based on the notice at
https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
"betray a preference to romanticise the past as in golden ages) Worse, they can remove agency from the individual"
My goal is to tell the truth, regardless of what foul tendencies might have also produced those same beliefs, and regardless of their influences on motives.
I suspect her greatest difference with you may be the existence of "truth" itself. I feel like today we are senselessly arguing positions when we should be arguing the assumptions underlying them.
"With an increasing number of pathways our preferred good worlding pathways may shrink in number,"
This seems very unlikely to me, regardless of what "good worlding" means. More pathways available means more X pathways available, for most any X. Also, can you clarify what you mean by "worlding"?
yes, worlding has become very idiosyncratic to my blog (I wasn't using it when I started so much). It just means that part of the living we do and to which we direct our efforts but the outcomes are not our physical body so much as the 'extended phenotype' {Richard Dawkins} and/or umwelt {Jakob von Uexküll} (cocoon & life sphere), which for humans is our social reality we call 'the world'. I use it to reframe questions which might ask: where does morality come from? where does art come from, what is the gene for fashion (these are all outcomes of the urge/instinct/bias to should the world into shape (to suit ourselves among others as we are social) (Currently reading Robert Ardrey's 1967 book on The Territorial Imperative and he ends up in a similar place, even ends up talking about the Roman god Janus. Weirdly this book comes from my grandparents house... I was born before the book came out.) (in a previous life in my late 20s I re-invented the Mondragon co-operative created in the 50s, in Spain..)
""With an increasing number of pathways our preferred good worlding pathways may shrink in number,"" the emphasis here should be put on _preferred_ I am not arguing variety decrease per se (variety can be read as decadence you see)
thanks for asking, it helps me work out what I am saying (or what i am worlding (loosely)with others).
I also feel bias is constitutive, i.e. con-founds us. But as always strengths are also weaknesses. Everything is a trade-off. We have a urge/instinct to world, i.e. move, misstep and adapt, and within that we each have a style of movement, where it may help to overcome bias when we world together to work out what reality is. E.G. science.
The world, as in worlding, does not exist, much like the self does not exist, but we carry on regardless.
One could also argue that the world expands at the expense of reality, given technological progress.
what is the measure of time for cultural processes? Our population or GDP are far larger than ever. To some extent an acceleration of History is almost mechanically inevitable with more people, that being richer are more active cultural agents.
If instead of measuring cultural time in clock years, you use man-hours devoted to cultural activities, probably the puzzle is that cultural change is surprisingly slow (the life expectancy increase probably slows cultural change). Some discussion on the baseline expected cultural change in a growing society is necessary to measure cultural drift.
Agree with most of the analysis but I think you missed the salient point of why cultures drift.
Not technologies, nor expanding media, or coice or the myriad other factors rapidly changing.
For whatever reason, enabling parents or pandering politicians have removed the guard rails that control drift....there is no downside to lazyness, incompetence, bad choices, or failure. Society must relearn that there should be a penalty for all of the above. We allow misplaced compassion to remove the downside so we enable drift, but if we allowed or forced people to experience the consequences of their actions, then drift would be minimal and probably beneficial.
Dick Minnis removingthecataract.substack.com
Traditional peasant societies were reluctant to change their culture, but we have instead become eager to change it, raising our cultural activists to our highest heroes. And many activists have urged removing guardrails.
I do not believe that is a long-term sustainable change. Those most impacted are the least likely to reproduce. We have little to fear from lonely, weak over-grown children hiding in their parents' homes. That problem solves itself within a decade.
The real issue would be if populations fall too far, too fast where outsiders could overrun wealthy societies in order to loot them. It sounds crazy until you look at demographic projections. If I were in the Middle East, I would be especially afraid. Get rid of the current American-designed system with pro-small country social norms (which China and Russia are doing right now), and why wouldn't Pakistan invade Iran and Iraq? China could then sweep in and "rescue" Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. China wants such a world desperately, and they would love to replicate the British Empire, only they will do it better with boots and families on the ground so the future will be Chinese everywhere they can sustainably remain (doing to Africa, Latin America and the Middle East what the British did in Australia and North America).
People are so obsessed with Russia, but that is a side show. The real issue is China and their desire for territorial expansion. The best way for them to win would be an America self-absorbed in debates about how many genders can float around the head of a pin.
Robin has repeatedly brought up the lack of selection pressures as a key factor in inducing cultural drift.
A fascinating reflection of history s cycles when culture reaches its peak it often drifts toward excess and beauty intertwined with decline 🎨✨
Art reminds us how fragile balance truly is
"When rapidly changing social conditions make prior cultural norms less relevant for current conditions, old norms do less well at promoting cooperation and investments in the future. "
Rapidly changing social conditions are also making some of our evolved dispositions less relevant. This is what I called "The Age of Mismatch" in one of my pieces: https://triangulation.substack.com/p/what-do-women-really-want
Is cultural drift unique today?
When you say that it predicts modernism, which seems to be a one-off event, you seem to say that it is unique. But decadence is not historically unique. Were earlier periods of decadence also caused by cultural drift? If not, what caused that decadence and could it be happening today? But if earlier decadence was caused by drift, why didn't they have modernism?
Hellenistic Greece and the Renaissance were periods of artistic innovation and celebrity artists, but they are not usually seen as decadent.