Four Culture Fixes
Humanity has broken its superpower of cultural evolution, at least at the level of large cultural units, the units that set our game theoretic equilibria of key norms, values, and status markers. 300yrs ago these units had great variety, were under strong select pressures, and had slow rates of change of environment and internal drift. But since then, all four of these key control parameters have since gotten much worse.
Unless we achieve human level AI soon, our dominant world civ’s population seem likely to decline, to be replaced by fertile insular religious subcultures like the Amish and Haredim, who have been doubling every 20yrs for over a century. (Like how Christians took over Roman Empire.) Human extinction seems unlikely, if our declining civ continues to tolerate their norm deviance. But we do risk the end, at least for a while, of many novel treasured features of our current civ, such as democracy, pacifism, gender equality, sexual freedom, legal due process, open inquiry, and modern artistic genres.
I’ve been pondering our options, and want to report my current thinking. I see four.
Fertile Cults - We might plausibly try to create more fertile durable insular subcultures, ones that save more of our treasured cultural features. This is quite hard, however, as only a tiny fraction of cults ever achieve this package. As the strongest cultural divides in the world today are along religious lines, the few successes here are likely to be religious. And this only puts off the problem; replacement civs, including AIs, would still suffer cultural drift until they found deeper solutions. Very small groups can try this, though alas few seem interested in the key insularity feature.
Max Capitalism - For-profit firms still seem to be sustaining a healthy cultural evolution, with the set of all firms improving over time even as typical firms decay. The decaying dimensions of our behaviors seem to be those we don’t let for-profit firms control. So we might fix those dimensions by removing such limits. For example, allow large-scale for-profit governments, let capitalists pay parents to make profitable kids, let sacred capitalists invest in sacred ventures, and let foundations reinvest all returns to drive interest rates down to growth rates. This must be tried at the scales where laws now forbid such ventures. While many are passionately against this, some are passionately for, an energy one could build on.
Adaption Policy - If we could commit to measuring the actual adaptive influence (both via DNA and culture) of groups today in a century or two, we could make futures markets in such measures, and then use changes in current price estimates of group adaption as metrics to reward and punish group leaders. This requires such people to overcome the now widespread taboo against “Social Darwinism” to value adaptiveness greatly, and enough to use adaption as a main criterion when choosing group leaders and policies. (Futarchy might help here.) Modestly small groups can try this, though very few now have much passion for the adaption goal.
Sacred Policy - While few have much passion for the direct goal of adaption, many more can find passion for goals that cultural maladaption might block. For example, the goals of having a million people living in space, or achieving physical immortality for humans, might take centuries and also take longer if our civ falls due to maladaption. Many might treat such goals as sacred, being proud to sacrifice for them and ashamed to abandon them. A group big enough to have substantial influence on when the world achieves such goals might make futures markets estimating such dates, and use price changes to reward and punish group leaders. (Futarchy might help here.) Alas, this requires rather large groups, and requires them to, when they achieve sacred goals, keep setting new goals also in conflict with civ decline.
Added 9May: I paid $100 to @X to boost a poll on these, yet got only 20 responses:
Re. "(Like how Christians took over Roman Empire.)": There /is/ an argument that Christian families reproduced and survived at a higher rather than others, made by Rodney Stark in /The Rise of Christianity. But the math of survival and reproduction can't be made to account for the spread of Christianity. It would require saying that the non-Christian population of Rome suddenly became so bad at staying alive that they basically went extinct between 300 and 400 CE.
Nearly all of the growth of Christianity was from conversion, not higher birth or survival rate. The opposite of the Amish. But what drove this conversion?
In the 290s, IIRC, there were rebellions against the Empire by Christianized army units. This does testify that Christianity had great ideological power at the time. Perhaps partly for this reason, but for others as well, Diocletian, the eastern emperor, began his great purge of christians in 299 by trying to purge Christians from the roman army (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletianic_Persecution#Christians_in_the_army). Constantine soon after began protecting and favoring Christians, perhaps to gain a political advantage from Diocletian's purge. Constantine eventually became the sole emperor of the western and eastern empires.
After Constantine, being Christian or Pagan became a central political issue in choosing emperors. There was some back and forth, but Christianity won, and after that being Christian was a big advantage in the Roman bureaucracy.
So, though Christianity was initially known for being popular with slaves, its takeover of the Roman Empire was a top-down movement, in exactly the same way that the Social Justice movement is a top-down movement directed by Ivy League graduates and astroturfed by government grants, foundation money, and asset managers, all controlled by committees and boards made up of Ivy League graduates.
Possible these religious cults only keep multiplying quickly because they're still such a minority? Hard to keep isolation going the larger a group gets. Potential for cultural bleed from the more liberal outside culture as the isolated cults become more spread out?