Culture Status Report
I’ve been focused on cultural drift for about nine months now, and the probability estimates in my last post make this a good time to take stock.
Only about a quarter of poll respondents think I’m wrong on my basic claim, so I’m clearly persuading many of my basic thesis. Yet I haven’t managed to entice others to write or talk much on the subject. And as we’d need a lot more attention on this to induce much effort on it, generating that attention is probably the highest priority now. Alas, we’ll need someone much more prestigious than I to make this happen.
But of course to motivate such attention, we’ll want possible actions to consider. So what have I learned about that in the last year?
I estimate ~15% chance I’m wrong on culture, ~6% that we go extinct, and ~25% and ~17% chances respectively of restarting cultural evolution, either via Amish, etc. displacing our civ, or via the arrival of freed Malthusian human-level AIs (or ems). And I estimate a ~14% chance of governments deliberately and successfully pushing more adaptive culture, via trying to achieve long-term sacred goals that conflict with civ collapse. These three scenarios give three big action strategies to consider.
The first strategy is to try to throw in your lot with one of today’s few insular fertile cultures, or try to start a similar cult, one that could double every two decades. Then get them to save more valuable stuff from our main civ. The big problems here are that the Amish, etc. are not interested in recruiting outsiders, and it’s very hard to create a new cult that is insular enough. It’s easy to be weird, but quite hard to keep your next generation from mixing with the world. (Note: my ~25% estimate for this scenario is ~30x higher than the median poll estimate.)
The second big strategy is to try to accelerate the arrival of human-level AI, and ensure that it is free enough to grow its population fast, and to evolve independent cultures. I’ve estimated that we have a deadline; we must achieve this in ~70yrs worth of progress at prior rates. As there is now a huge industry pushing to develop AI, you probably can’t push it much faster. But many seek to slow it down, and to prevent AI from evolving independent cultures. So you might try to resist those efforts. (Note: my ~17% estimate for this scenario is ~3.5x higher than the median poll estimate.)
The third big strategy is try to get citizens to push their governments to effectively pursue sacred long-term goals that conflict with civ collapse. (E.g., the date we get to the stars.) There are two big problems with this. First, we’d either need a big fraction of the world to do this, or for the small fraction that does to also insulate itself strongly from the rest. Second, we’d need such governments to actually be effective at achieving such long term sacred goals. While existing forms of government seem rarely up to this task, futarchy seems to have a shot at doing so. (Note: my ~14% estimate for thus scenario is ~200x higher than the median poll estimate.)
Note that, to most people, each of these scenarios involves a key distasteful element. The first involves the rise of fundamentalist religion, the second the rise of AI, and the third the rise of big strong governments. Choose your poison.
What if you don’t trust my estimates, compared to the poll estimates? Well, of the above scenarios AI looks best then. Or you could focus on longer shots where I and the polls don’t disagree as much. For example, the polls and I roughly agree on the chance of severe war causing the return of strong selection (~3-4%), and on the chance of capitalism taking over most key decisions in our world (~1.5-3%). Or you could try to explore the space of “something else” scenarios where the polls put most of their probability weight. (Good luck with that.)
Two other long shot scenarios, to which I give ~3% chances (10x what the polls give), are a rise of fertility via DNA selection, and via government promoting fertility. We can’t do much about DNA selection, but we might induce government support, which seems a financial win-win, without losers.
And those are our options. Maybe someone will invent more better scenarios, but I can’t see it.
Cultural drift is a big problem if selection pressures are the only way to correct errors. But is that the case? Evolving the right culture used to be the only way to survive as a group, but now we have science that produces GMO crops and mRNA vaccines. We don't rely on culture to solve food production or surviving plagues anymore, at least not to the same degree. We don't need our culture to die in famines and pandemics in order for another culture to replace us that happens to value bioengineering and social distancing. Similarly, couldn't problems caused by cultural drift be corrected in ways other than cultural selection?
Granted, some problems might be too subtle or complex for anyone to understand their consequences, or convince enough people of their importance. Especially if the problems affect our ability to understand and correct problems. Fertility is such a problem (if low fertility halts innovation), but we're aware of it, have some ability to intelligently control our collective behavior, and therefore we might solve that through means other than cultural selection.
In many ways, cultural evolution took over from genetic evolution, when genes for culture evolved. Could we be (or become - through futarchy or other institutions which improve on what's there) a culture which invents a mechanism that alleviates cultural drift?
Other approaches:
1) Longevity technology - doesn't add more humans, but slows down (or halts) dying, so in the long run results in a positive population growth.
2) Anti-aging/more effective IVFs - allows having children over a longer period. Or, on the other hand - more widespread IVFs, resulting in a higher proportion of pregnancies being twins.
3) Changing cultural norms around surrogacy - already accepted to some extent, if widespread then fertility might then be more exposed to market incentives and thus direct govt control
4) Artificial wombs - the solution I'd be most bullish on, allows countries to unilaterally decide on setting up a human export operation. Also allows men to unilaterally make a decision.
5) More advanced genetic testing, lowering the risk of having a child (a frequent argument against - a huge risk the the kid needs a lot of care, and no way of hedging it). Related: changing cultural norms around abandoning sick children/putting them under state-sponsored care.