here is my genetic analogy for Hanson's argument: Imagine an animal species inhabiting a very isolated small island of hills and swales, with considerable variation in vegetation and microclimate. Different places initially favor somewhat different adaptations. Then the species develops an extraordinary ability to reconstruct its own surroundings. It can regulate temperature, securely provide water, and create the food it prefers (e.g. to some degree: beavers). So more successful pops begin to expand. Gene exchange further erodes differences among local populations. The island’s topography remains, but its biological significance diminishes. Selection has not ended; it increasingly operates within a common environment created by the species itself. Air conditioning in Singapore and heating in Toronto are modest human equivalents. Now all directional change in the gene pool is mainly drift.
The danger appears when a prolonged drought, a novel predator, or some failure of the constructed environment exposes a vulnerability now shared across the island. That can drive an adaptive change (which will also eventually end in drift) or the shock causes extinction.
Over the last few centuries, the greatest extinction rates by far are with small island pops, well adapted locally, but without the variation needed to respond to eg the introduction of rats or a novel disease..
Ultimately the problem that both Fukuyama and Hanson identify is that once a set of traits is so successful that it has homogenized a finite area, then the selective process that drove its success will wither via subsequent drift.
Yes, that is the problem of too little variety. But we also face the problem of overly weak selection pressures, a very fast changing environment, and an eagerness to add extra changes to core design parameteres.
Nicely put. This is a general tradeoff between efficiency and resiliency. The problem is that while it's very easy to see the tangible benefits of efficiency, typically one only sees the benefits of resiliency when a disaster happens.
As our financial system is fond of reminding us, it's easy to set aside the lessons of that last black swan event when there is money to be made.
"At the dawn of “modernity”, the status jump that STEM (including business) fields had gained from innovating inspired non-STEM fields like art, religion, philosophy, politics, etc. to embrace innovation."
I don't agree with that narrative for art, and am skeptical about it in the other domains.
In politics, the great innovation of the US Constitution, which applied the Enlightenment idea of government as a machine made of many parts interacting to produce outputs via distributed decision-making (an analog of free markets), rather than the old notion of a government as strictly hierarchical, came before the advances in STEM that it enabled.
I'm skeptical of the idea that philosophy became innovative in response to STEM. The story of 19th and 20th century continental philosophy was mostly reactionary, fighting bitterly against STEM the whole way, in an attempt to undo the Enlightenment, with the exception of the logical philosophers, who were eliminated by the Nazis when they ruled continental Europe.
In art, the Italian Renaissance began pretty precisely in 1300, when Giotto began developing perspective, individual characters with emotions, and pretty much the whole gamut of Renaissance painting techniques. Dante wrote *Inferno* in 1321. The technological renaissance could be said to have begun in Italy in 1300, when the clock, eyeglasses, accurate maps, and a host of other inventions; but da Vinci and and Galilei came centuries later.
Art was much more innovative throughout the 19th century than the 20th. 20th century art looks like it was innovative because the artifacts look very different; but they are all alike in all adhering to the Platonic theory that art can't communicate meaning, and so all you can do is invent new styles in which to communicate nothing. 120 years of abstract art is the opposite of innovative. /We are still making squares and calling it great art./
It's even worse than that. Most famous 20th-century painters got famous for one particular painting, and so continued churning out copies of the same painting or concept for much of the rest of their lives, e.g., Mondrian, Malevich, Rothko, Pollock, Ryman, Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, On Kawara, Roman Opalka, Jasper Johns, Peter Halley, & Sean Scully. So it's absurd for modern art to claim to value innovation.
I gave an hour presentation last year showing and arguing that, from the time modern English existed until the early 19th century, "innovation" was considered a dirty word in English, usually preceded by the word "rash". To innovate is to make something new; and due to the prevalence of Platonic doctrine in Europe, making something new would require you to make a new Form, which is impossible, as Forms are eternal. So to create something new was considered equivalent to creating something *ex nihilo*. That was considered blasphemy by theologians.
I searched Google n-grams for uses of the word "innovate", "innovator", etc.; and before the 19th century, all the hits I checked condemned innovation.
So, yes, its prestige certainly increased. And this was partly driven by STEM.
The basic problem was that few people had any concept of "mechanism". That is, people, or at least philosophers and theologians, still hadn't internalized the idea that when someone invents, say, a clock, that clock behaves in ways that none of its constituent parts behaved.
The belief that things can't be invented is still the foundation of the counter-enlightenment. This is why counter-enlightenment warriors demand governments that are either authoritarian, true democracies which constantly produce unanimous consensus, or anarchies. A government, they think, can only act by the agency of some soul, or collection of souls, within it. The US government is a machine, with its own agency, but no soul; and thus an ontological horror.
You think we make progress only by relying on natural selection—lots of different social arrangements get tried and only the best survive. But you also are trying to generate a planned rational response to what you perceive as a new social problem—cultural globalization, or monoculture. I see a contradiction: if rational planning can work, we need not, after all, rely just on natural selection, and monoculture is not so worrisome.
A monoculture that was actually organized to and expert at managing adaption would in fact be less worrisome. But that is not the monoculture we have now.
Rational planning has a long history of missing what's in front of its nose (Mises' economic calculation problem, Hayek's info problem). I'm not sure a rational monoculture would solve the problem. Maybe it would be a partial improvement.
Then you are fated to Cassandra-eque status. The monoculture cannot be improved, since it is not subject to natural selection, which is the only effective force for improvement. Political action must be unavailing; slogans are useless. The only hope is that you have exaggerated the present uniformity of culture, that dissident groups—the Amish, the Haredim, etc.—persist as sub-societies that will enable natural selection to work.
Trump PAC founding guidelines, whatever they're called, were written so that any single donation over a specific amount -can't recall how much exactly, somewhere over $6k and below $8k- had to be spent on political campaigns and similar. Any single donation below that amount he could spend however he wanted, hookers, Mel's clothes, hair, make-up, plastic surgery, Diet Coke, abortions, whatever. Since most of his donations came in as $20 or less, he was sitting pretty and still is. There was a story from his first campaign about him attending a charity fundraising event. Even though he had donated nothing, he sat himself on the stage with the donors, taking the spot belonging to one of the donors who ended up sitting in the audience. Remember his refusing to attend the one debate in 2016, preferring to feature himself on stage and supposedly using that I love Me time as a fundraiser for military organizations? Haven't seen anything on a final outcome, but last I'd read, most of the money had never made it to the military organizations.
here is my genetic analogy for Hanson's argument: Imagine an animal species inhabiting a very isolated small island of hills and swales, with considerable variation in vegetation and microclimate. Different places initially favor somewhat different adaptations. Then the species develops an extraordinary ability to reconstruct its own surroundings. It can regulate temperature, securely provide water, and create the food it prefers (e.g. to some degree: beavers). So more successful pops begin to expand. Gene exchange further erodes differences among local populations. The island’s topography remains, but its biological significance diminishes. Selection has not ended; it increasingly operates within a common environment created by the species itself. Air conditioning in Singapore and heating in Toronto are modest human equivalents. Now all directional change in the gene pool is mainly drift.
The danger appears when a prolonged drought, a novel predator, or some failure of the constructed environment exposes a vulnerability now shared across the island. That can drive an adaptive change (which will also eventually end in drift) or the shock causes extinction.
Over the last few centuries, the greatest extinction rates by far are with small island pops, well adapted locally, but without the variation needed to respond to eg the introduction of rats or a novel disease..
Ultimately the problem that both Fukuyama and Hanson identify is that once a set of traits is so successful that it has homogenized a finite area, then the selective process that drove its success will wither via subsequent drift.
Yes, that is the problem of too little variety. But we also face the problem of overly weak selection pressures, a very fast changing environment, and an eagerness to add extra changes to core design parameteres.
Nicely put. This is a general tradeoff between efficiency and resiliency. The problem is that while it's very easy to see the tangible benefits of efficiency, typically one only sees the benefits of resiliency when a disaster happens.
As our financial system is fond of reminding us, it's easy to set aside the lessons of that last black swan event when there is money to be made.
"At the dawn of “modernity”, the status jump that STEM (including business) fields had gained from innovating inspired non-STEM fields like art, religion, philosophy, politics, etc. to embrace innovation."
I don't agree with that narrative for art, and am skeptical about it in the other domains.
In politics, the great innovation of the US Constitution, which applied the Enlightenment idea of government as a machine made of many parts interacting to produce outputs via distributed decision-making (an analog of free markets), rather than the old notion of a government as strictly hierarchical, came before the advances in STEM that it enabled.
I'm skeptical of the idea that philosophy became innovative in response to STEM. The story of 19th and 20th century continental philosophy was mostly reactionary, fighting bitterly against STEM the whole way, in an attempt to undo the Enlightenment, with the exception of the logical philosophers, who were eliminated by the Nazis when they ruled continental Europe.
In art, the Italian Renaissance began pretty precisely in 1300, when Giotto began developing perspective, individual characters with emotions, and pretty much the whole gamut of Renaissance painting techniques. Dante wrote *Inferno* in 1321. The technological renaissance could be said to have begun in Italy in 1300, when the clock, eyeglasses, accurate maps, and a host of other inventions; but da Vinci and and Galilei came centuries later.
Art was much more innovative throughout the 19th century than the 20th. 20th century art looks like it was innovative because the artifacts look very different; but they are all alike in all adhering to the Platonic theory that art can't communicate meaning, and so all you can do is invent new styles in which to communicate nothing. 120 years of abstract art is the opposite of innovative. /We are still making squares and calling it great art./
It's even worse than that. Most famous 20th-century painters got famous for one particular painting, and so continued churning out copies of the same painting or concept for much of the rest of their lives, e.g., Mondrian, Malevich, Rothko, Pollock, Ryman, Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, On Kawara, Roman Opalka, Jasper Johns, Peter Halley, & Sean Scully. So it's absurd for modern art to claim to value innovation.
I agree innovation in other areas wasn't zero before modernity. But the prestige of its innovation greatly increase with modernity.
I gave an hour presentation last year showing and arguing that, from the time modern English existed until the early 19th century, "innovation" was considered a dirty word in English, usually preceded by the word "rash". To innovate is to make something new; and due to the prevalence of Platonic doctrine in Europe, making something new would require you to make a new Form, which is impossible, as Forms are eternal. So to create something new was considered equivalent to creating something *ex nihilo*. That was considered blasphemy by theologians.
I searched Google n-grams for uses of the word "innovate", "innovator", etc.; and before the 19th century, all the hits I checked condemned innovation.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nUCm-43Z_26qY23erdmHGfpT5tEWz0U7AYJEWadHlas/edit?slide=id.p1#slide=id.p1
So, yes, its prestige certainly increased. And this was partly driven by STEM.
The basic problem was that few people had any concept of "mechanism". That is, people, or at least philosophers and theologians, still hadn't internalized the idea that when someone invents, say, a clock, that clock behaves in ways that none of its constituent parts behaved.
The belief that things can't be invented is still the foundation of the counter-enlightenment. This is why counter-enlightenment warriors demand governments that are either authoritarian, true democracies which constantly produce unanimous consensus, or anarchies. A government, they think, can only act by the agency of some soul, or collection of souls, within it. The US government is a machine, with its own agency, but no soul; and thus an ontological horror.
You think we make progress only by relying on natural selection—lots of different social arrangements get tried and only the best survive. But you also are trying to generate a planned rational response to what you perceive as a new social problem—cultural globalization, or monoculture. I see a contradiction: if rational planning can work, we need not, after all, rely just on natural selection, and monoculture is not so worrisome.
A monoculture that was actually organized to and expert at managing adaption would in fact be less worrisome. But that is not the monoculture we have now.
Rational planning has a long history of missing what's in front of its nose (Mises' economic calculation problem, Hayek's info problem). I'm not sure a rational monoculture would solve the problem. Maybe it would be a partial improvement.
Then you are fated to Cassandra-eque status. The monoculture cannot be improved, since it is not subject to natural selection, which is the only effective force for improvement. Political action must be unavailing; slogans are useless. The only hope is that you have exaggerated the present uniformity of culture, that dissident groups—the Amish, the Haredim, etc.—persist as sub-societies that will enable natural selection to work.
One of my suggestions is to let capitalism run a lot more life areas, which unleashes its selection powers. Why do you see that as impossible?
Trump PAC founding guidelines, whatever they're called, were written so that any single donation over a specific amount -can't recall how much exactly, somewhere over $6k and below $8k- had to be spent on political campaigns and similar. Any single donation below that amount he could spend however he wanted, hookers, Mel's clothes, hair, make-up, plastic surgery, Diet Coke, abortions, whatever. Since most of his donations came in as $20 or less, he was sitting pretty and still is. There was a story from his first campaign about him attending a charity fundraising event. Even though he had donated nothing, he sat himself on the stage with the donors, taking the spot belonging to one of the donors who ended up sitting in the audience. Remember his refusing to attend the one debate in 2016, preferring to feature himself on stage and supposedly using that I love Me time as a fundraiser for military organizations? Haven't seen anything on a final outcome, but last I'd read, most of the money had never made it to the military organizations.