"[W]e have been accumulating a cultural debt, as our behaviors in these non-industry spheres have been getting increasingly maladaptive."
There seems to be a deeper issue here, but perhaps it is being driven by the institutional distortions you describe. Our culture is abandoning old notions of virtue and normative standards and discipline, in favor of a self-indulgent and increasingly destructive fixation on individual comfort and pleasure and convenience. This makes producers a LOT of money, but it leads to a shallower and emptier life for individuals and it drives the dissolution of communities (which used to enforce norms and help socialize children). Food, entertainment, education, spending, mental health, etc. - in each of these areas and more we have collectively abandoned the recognition that discipline and moderation and modesty are important. We have removed judgment, shame, and expectations as dominant cultural forces... and I suspect that we have one this so that peddlers of distraction and addiction can more easily profit from our cultural decay and our individual unhappiness.
The problems are so vast and confusingly interlinked that I struggle to describe them all (status-seeking among the elite, cowardice among professionals and bureaucratic employees, enshittifcation, feminization, etc.) but they all seem to revolve around this drive to elevate the fickle and pathological desires of the individual above the long-term benefit of the group.
I think there was a different post where Robin advocated things like giving parents, a share of the income of their children and the right to sell this right to their portion of the income. He explicitly contrasted his approach of trying to replicate the profit motive and financial metrics for optimisation from industry to an approach which only tried to copy freedom from the marketplace without these other elements to encourage what he sees as the right kind of optimisation.
Did you write "The biggest change humanity has seen in ten thousand years" specifically because you think (as I do) that the neolithic package was bigger? Just curious.
I rank the Enlightenment as more-important than the Industrial Revo, which was just a (probably inevitable) result of the Enlightenment. But I use the term to encompass multiple Enlightenments, including (to a lesser or greater extent) those of Phoenicia, classical and Hellenistic Athens, medieval Venice, Viking Iceland's Althing, the Haudenosaunee, the transition of Sephardic Jewish finances from Ma'arufiah (a medieval clientage system in which high-status rabbis protected the monopolies of their clients) to the Letra de Cambio ("bill of exchange"; rabbis adjudicated standardized financial contracts), the Dutch Republic, and the British Enlightenment (but not the French).
(Yes, the left and the right both hate the Jews today because the Jews were key in starting the post-dark-age European Enlightenment.)
All unenlightened civilizations attribute all agency to some analog of a "soul": an atomic essence which cannot be analyzed reductively. Agency includes the movement of animals; the magical power of words to mean something, or to cause something to happen ("Let there be light!", "Abracadabra!"); the operation of machines; legal systems; the invisible hand of a free market, and the checks and balances in the Constitution.
So unenlightened cultures see the solution to every systemic problem not as fixing the system--because they don't grok what a "system" is, or believe it has any agency beyond the will of the people who built it--but as either to put the right people in charge, or to tear the system down in the presumption that the state of nature is always better than being ruled by a "mere machine" (which in their imaginations becomes the malicious daemon Moloch). Leftist complaints today about "the system" and "systemic racism", based on Foucault's understanding of all governmental systems as nothing but the reified will of the ruling class, are a perfect example. (Foucault, like all post-modernists, always misunderstood the Enlightenment and science because he assumed they must be Aristotelian.)
Aristotle, providing what he thought was an exhaustive list of the different kinds of government, differentiated them only by what sort of people were in charge, not by mechanisms such as trial by jury, appointment to office by lot or election, etc. Enlightenment cultures see the government as the set of mechanisms which order it, which determine collectively how power is allocated. Aristotle saw it the other way around: a city's soul or essence was the group of people in charge, or the "politeia". (Isocrates much earlier called the politeia the "soul of the city" (psyche poleos).)
To Aristotle, the soul of a city came first, and mechanisms of government emerged to serve that soul. So even though he studied the laws of different cities intensively, he didn't see the nature (essence) of a city as emerging from its laws, but the laws as emerging from the city's essence, which was simply the set of people in charge. This is a classical soul-based understanding of government.
(We see the same backwards view of causation in the classical understanding of word meaning, which was that you must begin by defining your terms, as contrasted with the scientific understanding that you must begin with observations, and make up words as labels for your observations as you go. The classical view sees a word's meaning as inherent in its pre-existing eternal soul; the scientific view sees the word's meaning as emerging from the actions of the system being observed.)
(The transition from soul-based to mechanism-based thought is encoded in the use of the word "Constitution" to mean the laws describing a government's mechanism. Leonardo Bruni translated Aristotle's /politeia/ into Latin in the early 1400s as /constitutio/, which then meant the parts making up the human body, and corresponded to Aristotle's meaning. But by the time the US Constitution was written, a nation's "constitution" referred not to who ruled, but to the machinery of government, which is now seen as the phenomenon, not the epiphenomenon. The word's etymology means the soul of a nation, but we understand it as its legal machinery.)
Unenlightened cultures, who see a culture as having an essence witht the atomic and eternal nature of a soul, see cultures not as evolving, but as being founded, and then running downhill until they collapse, as in Greek myth, Christianity, Oswald Spengler, and Tolkien. Good government is the continual fight to impose order on chaos by an endless cycle of trying to give more power to more-virtuous people. The pre-Enlightenment meaning of "chaos" was the combination of "randomness" and "emptiness", and with few exceptions (such as Viking mythology), chaos was strictly bad.
(Yes, Loki is an interesting Marvel character because Iceland had a political system of checks and balances.)
The greatest discovery of the Enlightenment was how to harness the power of chaos, which now has the late-20th-century mathematical meaning of the thin border between order and randomness. This applies to building machines with many moving parts, to governments with checks and balances, and to the distributed decision-making of a free market. This harnesses for our own purposes the very same agentive power which caused life to evolve.
You argue that human cultural evolution is 'broken' because we’ve fundamentally altered the hyperparameters of our environment: we've drastically lowered the selection pressure through wealth and safety, collapsed our search space via a global internet monoculture, and increased the rate of environmental change far beyond what biological generations can adapt to. I completely agree with this diagnosis.
However, an AI culture modeled after human culture, also meaning it inherits our foundational mechanisms of cooperation, trade, specialization, and knowledge transfer, could theoretically bypass these biological bottlenecks and 'fix' the evolutionary process.
AI points toward a third path, like synthetic evolution. We can use AI to run the harsh evolutionary simulations we no longer can, helping us 'choose' our cultural adaptations much better. I believe AI will save us, obviously, but not as a magical 'Savior’, rather, as a powerful computational tool that allows us to offload our evolutionary iteration to silicon.
"[W]e have been accumulating a cultural debt, as our behaviors in these non-industry spheres have been getting increasingly maladaptive."
There seems to be a deeper issue here, but perhaps it is being driven by the institutional distortions you describe. Our culture is abandoning old notions of virtue and normative standards and discipline, in favor of a self-indulgent and increasingly destructive fixation on individual comfort and pleasure and convenience. This makes producers a LOT of money, but it leads to a shallower and emptier life for individuals and it drives the dissolution of communities (which used to enforce norms and help socialize children). Food, entertainment, education, spending, mental health, etc. - in each of these areas and more we have collectively abandoned the recognition that discipline and moderation and modesty are important. We have removed judgment, shame, and expectations as dominant cultural forces... and I suspect that we have one this so that peddlers of distraction and addiction can more easily profit from our cultural decay and our individual unhappiness.
The problems are so vast and confusingly interlinked that I struggle to describe them all (status-seeking among the elite, cowardice among professionals and bureaucratic employees, enshittifcation, feminization, etc.) but they all seem to revolve around this drive to elevate the fickle and pathological desires of the individual above the long-term benefit of the group.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-war-on-norms
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-primacy-of-subjectivity
“Such as by freeing capitalism more to run education, medicine, law, governance, and fertility.”
I’m fully in favor or more capitalism in these realms but why fertility? Secondly, what does even more capitalism in running fertility even mean?
Maybe being able to buy surrogates more easily, being able to pay for a baby to be made so it can work as a servant or something.
I think there was a different post where Robin advocated things like giving parents, a share of the income of their children and the right to sell this right to their portion of the income. He explicitly contrasted his approach of trying to replicate the profit motive and financial metrics for optimisation from industry to an approach which only tried to copy freedom from the marketplace without these other elements to encourage what he sees as the right kind of optimisation.
Did you write "The biggest change humanity has seen in ten thousand years" specifically because you think (as I do) that the neolithic package was bigger? Just curious.
I rank the Enlightenment as more-important than the Industrial Revo, which was just a (probably inevitable) result of the Enlightenment. But I use the term to encompass multiple Enlightenments, including (to a lesser or greater extent) those of Phoenicia, classical and Hellenistic Athens, medieval Venice, Viking Iceland's Althing, the Haudenosaunee, the transition of Sephardic Jewish finances from Ma'arufiah (a medieval clientage system in which high-status rabbis protected the monopolies of their clients) to the Letra de Cambio ("bill of exchange"; rabbis adjudicated standardized financial contracts), the Dutch Republic, and the British Enlightenment (but not the French).
(Yes, the left and the right both hate the Jews today because the Jews were key in starting the post-dark-age European Enlightenment.)
All unenlightened civilizations attribute all agency to some analog of a "soul": an atomic essence which cannot be analyzed reductively. Agency includes the movement of animals; the magical power of words to mean something, or to cause something to happen ("Let there be light!", "Abracadabra!"); the operation of machines; legal systems; the invisible hand of a free market, and the checks and balances in the Constitution.
So unenlightened cultures see the solution to every systemic problem not as fixing the system--because they don't grok what a "system" is, or believe it has any agency beyond the will of the people who built it--but as either to put the right people in charge, or to tear the system down in the presumption that the state of nature is always better than being ruled by a "mere machine" (which in their imaginations becomes the malicious daemon Moloch). Leftist complaints today about "the system" and "systemic racism", based on Foucault's understanding of all governmental systems as nothing but the reified will of the ruling class, are a perfect example. (Foucault, like all post-modernists, always misunderstood the Enlightenment and science because he assumed they must be Aristotelian.)
Aristotle, providing what he thought was an exhaustive list of the different kinds of government, differentiated them only by what sort of people were in charge, not by mechanisms such as trial by jury, appointment to office by lot or election, etc. Enlightenment cultures see the government as the set of mechanisms which order it, which determine collectively how power is allocated. Aristotle saw it the other way around: a city's soul or essence was the group of people in charge, or the "politeia". (Isocrates much earlier called the politeia the "soul of the city" (psyche poleos).)
To Aristotle, the soul of a city came first, and mechanisms of government emerged to serve that soul. So even though he studied the laws of different cities intensively, he didn't see the nature (essence) of a city as emerging from its laws, but the laws as emerging from the city's essence, which was simply the set of people in charge. This is a classical soul-based understanding of government.
(We see the same backwards view of causation in the classical understanding of word meaning, which was that you must begin by defining your terms, as contrasted with the scientific understanding that you must begin with observations, and make up words as labels for your observations as you go. The classical view sees a word's meaning as inherent in its pre-existing eternal soul; the scientific view sees the word's meaning as emerging from the actions of the system being observed.)
(The transition from soul-based to mechanism-based thought is encoded in the use of the word "Constitution" to mean the laws describing a government's mechanism. Leonardo Bruni translated Aristotle's /politeia/ into Latin in the early 1400s as /constitutio/, which then meant the parts making up the human body, and corresponded to Aristotle's meaning. But by the time the US Constitution was written, a nation's "constitution" referred not to who ruled, but to the machinery of government, which is now seen as the phenomenon, not the epiphenomenon. The word's etymology means the soul of a nation, but we understand it as its legal machinery.)
Unenlightened cultures, who see a culture as having an essence witht the atomic and eternal nature of a soul, see cultures not as evolving, but as being founded, and then running downhill until they collapse, as in Greek myth, Christianity, Oswald Spengler, and Tolkien. Good government is the continual fight to impose order on chaos by an endless cycle of trying to give more power to more-virtuous people. The pre-Enlightenment meaning of "chaos" was the combination of "randomness" and "emptiness", and with few exceptions (such as Viking mythology), chaos was strictly bad.
(Yes, Loki is an interesting Marvel character because Iceland had a political system of checks and balances.)
The greatest discovery of the Enlightenment was how to harness the power of chaos, which now has the late-20th-century mathematical meaning of the thin border between order and randomness. This applies to building machines with many moving parts, to governments with checks and balances, and to the distributed decision-making of a free market. This harnesses for our own purposes the very same agentive power which caused life to evolve.
You argue that human cultural evolution is 'broken' because we’ve fundamentally altered the hyperparameters of our environment: we've drastically lowered the selection pressure through wealth and safety, collapsed our search space via a global internet monoculture, and increased the rate of environmental change far beyond what biological generations can adapt to. I completely agree with this diagnosis.
However, an AI culture modeled after human culture, also meaning it inherits our foundational mechanisms of cooperation, trade, specialization, and knowledge transfer, could theoretically bypass these biological bottlenecks and 'fix' the evolutionary process.
AI points toward a third path, like synthetic evolution. We can use AI to run the harsh evolutionary simulations we no longer can, helping us 'choose' our cultural adaptations much better. I believe AI will save us, obviously, but not as a magical 'Savior’, rather, as a powerful computational tool that allows us to offload our evolutionary iteration to silicon.
One of the hard to change aspects of culture is that it overrides rationality. Confirm or be ostracized.
We’d need a culture that prioritizes rationality to rise in popularity, if we ever expect to make some of your proposed changes.