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.
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.
Robin, please be more specific about which claims you want citations for. It seems I'm not going to have time to go thru the whole thing; that would be more than one citation per sentence.
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?
The future of humanity is a numbers game…in other words, the group with the most numbers overpowers the declining groups…and the winner is? Muslims. It can’t be any other way…birth control is illegal in many Islamic countries and Muslim women marry young and give birth to lots of children; meanwhile, non-Muslim women in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China are having fewer and fewer children. So, as the old saying goes, “God is on the side of the big battalions.”
Re: "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."
It's bigger than that. DNA has been the main unit of inheritance in biology for millions of years. Now cultural evolution has produced a wide range of new inheritance media capable to supporting high fidelity copying. The near-monopoly is over. Once we get more advanced molecular nanotechnology the days of the DNA-based biosphere are surely numbered. It seems likely to be the first genetic takeover for billions of years. A memetic takeover, in fact. A one-size fits all medium like DNA will only get a small slice of the action - at best. More likely it will become obsolete. Not the rise of the Amish, but the end of the Amish - along with all other human tribes.
As a summary, machine intelligence seems set to transform the world on a much shorter timescale - rendering this problem largely irrelevant. Peak human is still likely to be decades away. The evolution of human DNA is just too slow. Hardly any engineers are trying to build on it. The baton has been passed on.
There are less than 3M Amish and haredim in the entire world. If they continue doubling every 20 years, they will number about 100M in a century, which would be about 1% to 1.5% of world population. That's not replacement.
|replaced by fertile insular religious subcultures
seems to be less about being replaced, and more about regime/relative dominance switching. One of the interesting things of course about higher fertility - is more outliers, variance, and inevitable cultural budding. The monoculture decline period will likely overlap with artificial wombs being created, even if only in some small tech enclave...and things will continue to get interesting from there.
| Sacred Policy
...+ Adaptation Policy is my 'vote'. So part of my 'grand vision':
1. Establish life-years (LYs) as our pragmatic *ethical unit* - physically grounded with just [count] x [time]. This same quantity appears in demographics (area under curve) and evo theory. (the generalization to include objects that you don't consider alive is 'tocts' - 'total object class time', building on observer-invariant proper time from relativity)
2. 'Install' HOLYs (see below), providing pan-cultural BIOS and minimal cross-cultural comms protocol, both respecting high pluralism. HOLYs can both be a wrapper around traditional cultures, and I believe make current ones who are willing to 'adapt' have higher mean time to failure (MTTF)
As 'currency' is to utils, 'holys' are to LYs...but *unlike* them, there is no expected market. One polity or culture does not generally 'just trade' ones community's LYs for another's. In other words, one's holys are sacred.
Fertile Cults - watch out for meme-space egregores. If you want to simplify things enough to make them intellectually tractable you need to add egregores to your ontology to lump a lot of intricate detail into something you can talk about. An egregore isn't just an organisation or a philosophy; it is interesting because it gets through the gaps in the human memetic immune system to manipulate people into making sacrifices for the egregore. Think Catholic priests being celibate.
This creates two level selection. Does the egregore go viral and reproduce (in the minds of its substrate humans) with r>1? Call that the egregore's Darwinian fitness. But it may also be barren or fertile depending on whether it discourages or encourages humans susceptible to it to have children. Think again of the Catholic Church. Lay Catholics are encouraged to have children and bring them up in the faith. So the egregore is fertile. Alternatively Catholics priests aren't fathering children so the egregore is barren. We might think it is fertile on net because there are many lay Catholics for each priest. Or we might think it barren on net because it is the humans that are most susceptible to the belief system that are being bred out.
Meanwhile Mother Nature has two instincts for continuing the species: lust and broodiness. The combination of contraception, sexual freedom, and gender equality have rendered lust ineffective. In the past people with strong feelings of lust would end up with more children than those with weak feelings of lust. Now that lust doesn't lead to children, natural selection will not favour and preserve it. We can guess that in 10000 years humans will be noticeably less interested in sex. Meanwhile the future is inhabited by the descendants of the broody: those who came off contraception because they actively wanted children.
Now that lust has been neutered, natural selection is trying out two responses. First, select for broodiness. Second, select for memetic immune systems that defend well against barren egregores and poorly against fertile egregores.
You are asking about fertile durable insular subcultures, ones that save more of our treasured cultural features. I think we will see a race between the evolution of broodiness and the evolution of memetic immune systems that are differentially susceptible to fertile egregores. Either outcome trashes your list of treasured cultural features. I'm not seeing where we get to exercise any cultural control.
These “more AI” and “max capitalism” ideas sound promising. Also seems like a good fit for Robin Hanson Thought, maybe something along these lines could rhyme with prediction markets.
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.
Citations for your claims?
Robin, please be more specific about which claims you want citations for. It seems I'm not going to have time to go thru the whole thing; that would be more than one citation per sentence.
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?
Actually isolation is a surface area to volume issue, which gets easier for larger groups.
> let sacred capitalists invest in sacred ventures
Eg https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoNLfX3ihXSZJwqK/church-planting-when-venture-capital-finds-jesus
The future of humanity is a numbers game…in other words, the group with the most numbers overpowers the declining groups…and the winner is? Muslims. It can’t be any other way…birth control is illegal in many Islamic countries and Muslim women marry young and give birth to lots of children; meanwhile, non-Muslim women in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China are having fewer and fewer children. So, as the old saying goes, “God is on the side of the big battalions.”
Re: "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."
It's bigger than that. DNA has been the main unit of inheritance in biology for millions of years. Now cultural evolution has produced a wide range of new inheritance media capable to supporting high fidelity copying. The near-monopoly is over. Once we get more advanced molecular nanotechnology the days of the DNA-based biosphere are surely numbered. It seems likely to be the first genetic takeover for billions of years. A memetic takeover, in fact. A one-size fits all medium like DNA will only get a small slice of the action - at best. More likely it will become obsolete. Not the rise of the Amish, but the end of the Amish - along with all other human tribes.
As a summary, machine intelligence seems set to transform the world on a much shorter timescale - rendering this problem largely irrelevant. Peak human is still likely to be decades away. The evolution of human DNA is just too slow. Hardly any engineers are trying to build on it. The baton has been passed on.
There are less than 3M Amish and haredim in the entire world. If they continue doubling every 20 years, they will number about 100M in a century, which would be about 1% to 1.5% of world population. That's not replacement.
|replaced by fertile insular religious subcultures
seems to be less about being replaced, and more about regime/relative dominance switching. One of the interesting things of course about higher fertility - is more outliers, variance, and inevitable cultural budding. The monoculture decline period will likely overlap with artificial wombs being created, even if only in some small tech enclave...and things will continue to get interesting from there.
| Sacred Policy
...+ Adaptation Policy is my 'vote'. So part of my 'grand vision':
1. Establish life-years (LYs) as our pragmatic *ethical unit* - physically grounded with just [count] x [time]. This same quantity appears in demographics (area under curve) and evo theory. (the generalization to include objects that you don't consider alive is 'tocts' - 'total object class time', building on observer-invariant proper time from relativity)
2. 'Install' HOLYs (see below), providing pan-cultural BIOS and minimal cross-cultural comms protocol, both respecting high pluralism. HOLYs can both be a wrapper around traditional cultures, and I believe make current ones who are willing to 'adapt' have higher mean time to failure (MTTF)
As 'currency' is to utils, 'holys' are to LYs...but *unlike* them, there is no expected market. One polity or culture does not generally 'just trade' ones community's LYs for another's. In other words, one's holys are sacred.
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/heirs-of-life-years-a-meta-ethics
I'm glad you are now taking Max Capitalism seriously.
Fertile Cults - watch out for meme-space egregores. If you want to simplify things enough to make them intellectually tractable you need to add egregores to your ontology to lump a lot of intricate detail into something you can talk about. An egregore isn't just an organisation or a philosophy; it is interesting because it gets through the gaps in the human memetic immune system to manipulate people into making sacrifices for the egregore. Think Catholic priests being celibate.
This creates two level selection. Does the egregore go viral and reproduce (in the minds of its substrate humans) with r>1? Call that the egregore's Darwinian fitness. But it may also be barren or fertile depending on whether it discourages or encourages humans susceptible to it to have children. Think again of the Catholic Church. Lay Catholics are encouraged to have children and bring them up in the faith. So the egregore is fertile. Alternatively Catholics priests aren't fathering children so the egregore is barren. We might think it is fertile on net because there are many lay Catholics for each priest. Or we might think it barren on net because it is the humans that are most susceptible to the belief system that are being bred out.
Meanwhile Mother Nature has two instincts for continuing the species: lust and broodiness. The combination of contraception, sexual freedom, and gender equality have rendered lust ineffective. In the past people with strong feelings of lust would end up with more children than those with weak feelings of lust. Now that lust doesn't lead to children, natural selection will not favour and preserve it. We can guess that in 10000 years humans will be noticeably less interested in sex. Meanwhile the future is inhabited by the descendants of the broody: those who came off contraception because they actively wanted children.
Now that lust has been neutered, natural selection is trying out two responses. First, select for broodiness. Second, select for memetic immune systems that defend well against barren egregores and poorly against fertile egregores.
You are asking about fertile durable insular subcultures, ones that save more of our treasured cultural features. I think we will see a race between the evolution of broodiness and the evolution of memetic immune systems that are differentially susceptible to fertile egregores. Either outcome trashes your list of treasured cultural features. I'm not seeing where we get to exercise any cultural control.
Secular Israelis have very high fertility (not just Haredim).
Arguably Elon Musk is pursuing the "Max Capitalism" plan re Mars.
I have the feeling recursively-self-improving AI is going to upend all our plans. Let us hope for the better.
Secular Israelis are hovering just below replacement TFR.
These “more AI” and “max capitalism” ideas sound promising. Also seems like a good fit for Robin Hanson Thought, maybe something along these lines could rhyme with prediction markets.