Drift Poll Winner: Rational Culture

Over the last day, I did two sets of polls comparing 16 cultural drift scenarios (detailed here) re their likelihood and desirability. (I later added influence.) Here are best fit priorities (relative to 100 max), sorted by priority sum:

While the 529 responses to likely fit well (as do the ~200 to influence), the 943 responses to desirable fit much worse, with 12x the squared error, and that by estimating 18% of responses to be random. (Best fit for likely (and influence) had 0% random.) Thus we can roughly trust the likely estimates, which show a max range of variation of x7.5, but for desirable can’t really trust much beyond the ranking of the top few, i.e., that rational culture is top, generalized return is 2nd, and maybe pay parents is 3rd.

On likelihood, to me uber capitalism seems way overrated, as most people hate that. And paying parents seems a bit overrated, though I hope not. For the rest, it seems respondents had relatively weak aggregate opinions on their relative likelihood.

The big surprise of these polls, to me, is rational culture being mid likely and max desirable, with the rather similar option of generalized return as 2nd place desirable. (They only differ in how much one takes a specific past example as a model to generalize from.)

I agree they seem desirable, but they also seem a pretty big ask: 

A rational cultural agent would … look at their entire historical dataset of known cultures, their values, and their adaptive successes, combine that with their best theories of natural selection and the world, to estimate the culture priorities most likely to be adaptive in relevant contexts. … If such rational culture agents could coordinate with others, … they might do better to conduct a much more detailed analysis together, and then simultaneously explore many possible cultural values, in order to more quickly discover which were more adaptive. (More more)

Our book The Elephant in the Brain, and my more recent work on the sacred, detail how deeply embedded in us are habits of not being honest and practical about our motives. Seems really hard to change that fast. Though I have to admit that these habits are probably encoded in culture, not DNA, suggesting fast changes might be possible. I’ll take these polls as a prod to think more about rational culture.

Pay parents, the third most desirable and 2nd most likely, is an obvious win even if it doesn’t solve culture drift. Not sure what else I can do to promote or explore this though.

Added 27Oct: I’ve added a column of responses re influence, e.g., “for which scenario Is it easiest to change its chance by say 0.01%.”