How Fix Cultural Drift?

Many are optimists or pessimists by temperament; they tend to look for the bright side, or the dark, in most everything. (Except for us/them stuff, of course, where us seems bright and them dark no matter what.) In these terms, I’ve long leaned bright, especially re reforms and the future. 

So it is painful for me to focus now on a big way our future looks dark. I spent five recent months thinking about fertility fall, but at least there I could see plausible concrete fixes. Then I came to see that problem as caused by a deeper one, cultural drift, which seems much harder to fix. 

In my main essay on the subject to date, I had a very brief outline of possible fixes. In this post, I want to face my pain, and go through our options more carefully. 

The key problem is that cultures today change quite rapidly. This isn’t a problem for changes driven by good outcome metrics. For example, when people copy the fishing practices of the most productive fishers, they all get better at fishing. But it is a problem when we copy the values, norms, and status markers of the high status folks around us. Since compared to centuries ago, we now have far less cultural diversity, and far weaker (really, slower) cultural selection, such changes are likely to be more maladaptive than adaptive, causing our cultures to drift “off the rails”.

If nothing is done, this drift will cause many dysfunctions, including fertility fall. And that alone should lead to a several centuries long decline in population, innovation, and civility. Plausibly ending when the descendants of today’s insular fertile subcultures, like Amish or Haredim, who double every two decades, come to dominate world population. Much like the once Christians grew to take over the Roman Empire.

Regarding fertility fall, the obvious fix here is to try to move the vast ship of world culture toward higher fertility. But accept that you will probably fail, and our civ will decline. To the extent that you care about what happens next, look for contributions you could make that might survive such a fall, and which might be accepted by successor civs. 

The bit-less-obvious fix here is to jump ship for lifeboats. That is, join one of those insular fertile subcultures, or start a new one. Except existing ones aren’t at all looking for new members, and it looks crazy hard to start a new one. Out of many thousands of cults over centuries, only a handful have succeeded longterm. But if you feel inclined to try, I support you; the world could use more cults. 

But both of these solutions fail to address the underlying problem of cultural drift. So even if a civ fall produces sufficient cultural variety and selection to temporarily fix prior cultural problems, a new rising civ would likely reintroduce the key problem. Furthermore, two other solutions I mentioned, cheap human level AI and colonizing the stars, also need not fix this key problem. After all, AIs modeled after humans may also suffer cultural drift, and the civ at each star would suffer relative to other stars if it does not manage to fix its local cultural drift problem. 

Obviously, one option is to “turn back the clock.” If we somehow bombed our world back to very low tech, with bad travel and comm tech, and much poverty, disease, and war, that would probably soon ensure sufficient cultural diversity and selection. But only until tech rose again to our level.

An ideal would be to somehow achieve great cultural diversity and selection in a one-planet hi-tech civ with great wealth, health, and peace. Get people to somehow be inclined to create, sustain, and accept great diversity in deep values among those who they can easily travel and talk to, and with who they share business relations and governance structures. This is the “deep multiculturalism” option to which I gave the most space in my essay. 

A complement to this option would be to slow down the rate of cultural drift, via widespread embrace of traditional “conservative” wariness of cultural change. We’d need to look more down on, instead of up to, cultural change activists. For any given level of cultural diversity, slower rates of change allow cultures to be better disciplined by any given level of cultural selection pressures. 

Alas, in our world, we mainly see people, when possible, use shared business or governance relations as a lever to try to force their favored deep values on those who disagree. For example, the US started out allowing a pretty wide divergence of local law, but over time repeated moral crusades induced national law to force shared national morals on locals. I wish I knew how to promote deep multiculturalism, and wariness of cultural change, but at the moment I’m all out of ideas.

However, if we can’t ensure that the world encompasses sufficient cultural variety and selection pressures for cultural evolution to function effectively, then the only other option I can see is to find a way to selectively restrain and control cultural evolution. To somehow distinguish adaptive from maladaptive cultural changes, and organize to sufficiently encourage the former while discouraging the latter.

One approach would be strong culture-wide agreement on an explicit clear expression of our deepest cultural values. We usually express our values vaguely, and in relative shallow context-dependent terms, so that we need to revise such value descriptions as our contexts change. This creates opportunities to in effect actually change our values as we switch to new vague shallow value descriptions.

If we could instead agree on a clear and general statement of what it is we want, a statement that should still remain understandable and valid in most all contexts that we may encounter, then we might never need to change that statement with changing social context. And thus we wouldn’t need to let cultural change our values. Of course it seems quite hard to agree on explicit expressions of our deep values, and our future might go badly if we choose such expressions badly. Or if we hypocritically espouse one set of clear stable values, while actually following other values that we allow to drift in familiar ways. 

A related option is to instead change our status markers, tying them better to what cultural evolution is selecting for, and then better limit changes to such markers. For example, we might reduce the weight we put on personal wealth and professional success, and put more weight on number of children and grandchildren. Maybe include more robust measure of fertility, like number of grandkids averaged over one’s grandparents. Though again, what if we hypocritically pretend to use such improved status markers, but actually use other less adaptive ones?

One way to ensure that we actually use particular expressed values is via a governance mechanism tied directly to formalized expressions. I speak of course of futarchy, my proposed governance mechanism in which traders approve policies that they expect to increase some ex-post-measurable value. A large region might authorize a futarchy government based on some particular value that is in conflict with allowing great culture drift and dysfunction, and then resist making changes to this officially declared value. In which case we have good reason to expect that such a region would in fact avoid drift, dysfunction, and collapse. (At least if we can evolve futarchy into a version that passes many tests, showing that it functions effectively.)

Using a declared value that is a time-integral over future aggregate population, economic activity, or energy usage seems sufficiently in conflict with cultural collapse. However, such simple materialistic values may fail to inspire sufficient respect and allegiance to get people to resist changing them in response to disliked policy choices or outcomes. Taking a cue from my work on the sacred, we might want to choose a value that people can more easily treat as sacred, but which also seems incompatible with great culture drift and decline. After all, people are willing and even eager to sacrifice quite a lot for values they see as sacred.

For example, the ex-post-measurable value might be as early as possible a date for our descendants to *reach the stars. For concreteness, it might be the date when there are colonies around at least ten other stars, where the local capital of each colony is at least one hundred times larger than the capital initially deposited by its founding colony ship. Preventing cultural drift and collapse seems instrumental in achieving this goal sooner, and so a futarchy governance tied to this goal would do what it took to prevent such collapse. Yes, our descendants would have to choose some new goals once they achieved this one, but that doesn’t seem crazy hard. 

Of course there are many other possibilities here, such as a time integral over future knowledge, the date of learning some particular thing, or an integral over respect of us by the alien civilizations we expect to eventually meet. I’m not trying to solve all these problems in this post, but just to move this ball down a bit further down the field.