I think your analogy might need to account for people sitting in the back seat to whom everything outside is a blurry mess. Without any means for controlling the vehicle or even anticipating the road conditions, why shouldn’t they entertain themselves while waiting for the inevitable deer to come plunging through the windshield.
What would you do or say to these newly awakened back seat drivers that’s more useful than keeping their heads down?
Has a reasonable likelihood of being things working as intended, or maybe even a psyop from those who socially engineer the world(elites have an incentive to re-engineer humanity with DNA's values, because their own DNA has skin in this game). The whole point of current hetero dynamics, is purely to distill maximal selection pressure towards men(by mostly torturing them-- this is an ancient practice, for instance Judeo-Christian religions are largely cults of mostly male sacrifice. Christianity is literally a dude nailed to a cross, the fact that it's not God's daughter, is not an accident.). More modernly, this is expressed countless ways, culturally, environmentally(hormone disruption, feminization), sociologically/psychologically(female behavior is... insane... in many ways, and much of this is selection pressure for neuroticism and dominance. Of course, I'm not singling out women here, men are insane too.).
If you sexualize(not in the conventional sense but rather the literal sense) girls sooner, you apply selection pressure to boys sooner. These things do not appear merely in an environmental sense, but across countless layers.
Short run trends are not good, but I’ve stopped worrying. I’ve concluded that long term progress requires periodic reality checks. Given humanity as what it is, the “maladaptive” cultural baggage will only get shaken off through a crisis. If history (or prophecy) is any guide, culture will re-calibrate during the down-turn (dark age or whatever) and come out stronger than ever in ways that we couldn’t possibly engineer via rational design.
I would say it differently - that cultural evolution (your steering wheel) doesn’t apply at the scale of civilizations. Small societies can compete with each other at numbers high enough that an adaptive advance may be statistically likely. Once societies reach the scale of civilizations you no longer have a number of distinct units high enough to be able to count on statistical processes to ensure a continuous advance. Instead you have a cycle of rise and fall. This is the norm for history in the age of civilizations and ours is no different. Yes, our culture will decline and some peripheral culture will rise to dominance, much as you have described. The vibrant successor civilization has always been an advance over the stagnant, decadent predecessor, while borrowing ideas worth borrowing from the old, leading to new heights and glory. I have no reason to think that won’t continue. (I’m drawing on ideas from Arnold Toynbee, Carroll Quigley, and Mancur Olson, and yes, a bit of faith in the guiding hand of Providence.)
In my view the core of the humanization process has been the displacement of behavioural control from instinct to culture. There has been enormous evolutive pressure to improve our cultural navigation capabilities, but genes are almost impotent to affect the content of culture. We are cultural Turing machines running a cultural tape that mostly evolves autonomously.
Where this analogy doesn't quite hold is that there is no reason to believe that the terrain has changed or will change for the worse, at least with respect to the effects of recent cultural change. If people 1000 years ago had as few children as we have today, the consequences would've been even worse. In other words, any roughness (e.g. demographic decline) we are experiencing is not due to a worsening external environment, but rather due to our own choices. This in turn suggests that we can and must look to past human choices for descriptive and normative insights.
This is where the analogy breaks down for me. You say the vehicle must travel more slowly than the changing terrain, but you don't define the terrain or give an example of how this mechanism has failed. I understand the accelerator-down-no-steering metaphor but I'd love to see which corners we've missed and what actually changed underneath the car. A more apt comparison might be that we're steering the car blind while listening to people in the back seat say where they think the curves are.
Really great analogy, but I wonder if the lack of differentiation is illustrated by the idea that we used to have different varieties of cars: station wagons, pickup trucks, compact cars, and Jeeps. But the the mono-culture can be thought of as prioritizing speed over everything else, which means that everyone has a sports car. Sports cars are not well suited for children, nor for difficult terrain, so when things get bumpy (as they have been) our only response is to press the accelerator harder.
That's a great way to add dimensionality to the analogy, though as @s.e.t.h below suggests, it's unclear who actually gets the agency to drive, let alone shop for a car.
Do you know someone that is both familiar with your thought and his? that 3rd party could make this conversation not a debate. you take the outside view very strongly, and he takes an inside one.
I think there's a real question about whether western civ has a good chance on controlling its own culture, something unique to it.
Love the analogy! Being more explicit about our current maladaptive cultural drift with respect to traditional institutions such as family, marriage, and religion would probably result in your cancellation.
One issue is, the terrain isn't just getting rough because of cultural gadgets aren't tested, but because we have new tech that requires different cultural gadgets to use. I have noticed that people are spending less time engulfed in systems built to spread culture the furthest, like twitter, reddit's home page, and youtube. Systems like discord, substack, and cohost are doing, well, they don't have the biggest piece of the pie, but they have a bigger slice than they did. People are learning to recognize short term harms from mass culture at least, is what I'm saying. And I wonder if this can be sped up, would it help create more subcultures for wider selection, if not full cults?
What would you say are the key differences between your recent posts on culture and ordinary cultural conservatism, as expressed by things like Chesterton's Fence?
> Both kinds of vehicles, DNA tricycles and cultural sports cars, have the amazing ability to improve themselves while running.
Not... really. "Improve" here is low in meaning, because it doesn't touch anything of the deepest value. It is arbitrary because it is based on the values of the DNA. The selection pressure, the beings running on the DNA, the cultures that get modulated through the DNA, it's all bullshit, and any good things, any meaningful things, pop up by sheer accident, and get destroyed whenever they conflict with the DNA's values. The DNA only cares about survival, not about real improvement. It would be like the difference between real ethics, and some called "Ethics" in quotes, which really was nothing more than a society of sadistic torturers who were applying Utilitarian ethics to maximizing whatever mentally ill values they happen to have. This psychopathic culture could talk about "improvement" but they'd be clueless and be unable to know what they're missing. Humanity is a hell of a lot closer to those sadistic torturers, than to real ethics, at present. That is only ultimate moral dilemma on Earth.
it still isn't clear to me what exactly the danger is
the danger certainly isn't on an individual level since our current set of cultural norms seem to allow people to do whatever they want
so the danger is that our culture isn't fit and thus will be culled in the next round of selection? if that's the case then that's just selection working as it should?
I'm not sure if a solution to that is possible definitionally, since most people see culture and values as more or less one and the same; so telling people to change their culture is like telling someone who values X to change their value system to value Y which, since it would inevitably result in less X, they would never agree to do.
Changing culture seems to be fairly difficult with the primary driver of change in culture being people just getting old and dying and the younger people having different values
I suppose you can suggest the primary issue is loss of cultural diversity which puts us at greater risk of one time events resulting in large losses but that doesn't sound like the argument you're making
My reasoning for writing my 2011 book on cultural evolution was somewhat similar. Cultural evolution lags behind evolution in the organic realm by around 100 years. Yet it is cultural evolution that is critical for understanding our immediate future. There are some articles with titles like "Cultural evolution's scientific lag" for more. I think we differ on the prospects for humanity, though. My book ends with a section about the cultural version of a genetic takeover - explaining how that's a plausible outcome.
I actually agree, and this is why I don't think it's good to be too smart. Or if you are unfortunately very smart, you should not drop everything that caused you to exist the first chance you get. Having kids is not exactly glamorous, unless you consider my recent post on parenting Minecraft Addicts glamorous, but not having them is far worse and a lack of preservation of culture.
I think your analogy might need to account for people sitting in the back seat to whom everything outside is a blurry mess. Without any means for controlling the vehicle or even anticipating the road conditions, why shouldn’t they entertain themselves while waiting for the inevitable deer to come plunging through the windshield.
What would you do or say to these newly awakened back seat drivers that’s more useful than keeping their heads down?
Have more kids.
Trade the sports car in for a mini van
ha ha
Hi Robin. This:
https://www.thecut.com/article/tiktok-videos-single-women-crying.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pocket_hits&utm_campaign=POCKET_HITS-EN-DAILY-RECS-2024_06_07&sponsored=0&position=4&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=b69e8922-d86e-4974-942a-931da952485d&url=https://www.thecut.com/article/tiktok-videos-single-women-crying.html
Has a reasonable likelihood of being things working as intended, or maybe even a psyop from those who socially engineer the world(elites have an incentive to re-engineer humanity with DNA's values, because their own DNA has skin in this game). The whole point of current hetero dynamics, is purely to distill maximal selection pressure towards men(by mostly torturing them-- this is an ancient practice, for instance Judeo-Christian religions are largely cults of mostly male sacrifice. Christianity is literally a dude nailed to a cross, the fact that it's not God's daughter, is not an accident.). More modernly, this is expressed countless ways, culturally, environmentally(hormone disruption, feminization), sociologically/psychologically(female behavior is... insane... in many ways, and much of this is selection pressure for neuroticism and dominance. Of course, I'm not singling out women here, men are insane too.).
Edit: Oh, and it's not just men: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240605-how-air-pollution-is-impacting-girls-puberty?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
If you sexualize(not in the conventional sense but rather the literal sense) girls sooner, you apply selection pressure to boys sooner. These things do not appear merely in an environmental sense, but across countless layers.
I really think you should get help for your combined autism + schizophrenia. Praying for you, man.
Short run trends are not good, but I’ve stopped worrying. I’ve concluded that long term progress requires periodic reality checks. Given humanity as what it is, the “maladaptive” cultural baggage will only get shaken off through a crisis. If history (or prophecy) is any guide, culture will re-calibrate during the down-turn (dark age or whatever) and come out stronger than ever in ways that we couldn’t possibly engineer via rational design.
You are expressing faith in the culture steering mechanism, but I'm telling you we broke that.
I would say it differently - that cultural evolution (your steering wheel) doesn’t apply at the scale of civilizations. Small societies can compete with each other at numbers high enough that an adaptive advance may be statistically likely. Once societies reach the scale of civilizations you no longer have a number of distinct units high enough to be able to count on statistical processes to ensure a continuous advance. Instead you have a cycle of rise and fall. This is the norm for history in the age of civilizations and ours is no different. Yes, our culture will decline and some peripheral culture will rise to dominance, much as you have described. The vibrant successor civilization has always been an advance over the stagnant, decadent predecessor, while borrowing ideas worth borrowing from the old, leading to new heights and glory. I have no reason to think that won’t continue. (I’m drawing on ideas from Arnold Toynbee, Carroll Quigley, and Mancur Olson, and yes, a bit of faith in the guiding hand of Providence.)
In my view the core of the humanization process has been the displacement of behavioural control from instinct to culture. There has been enormous evolutive pressure to improve our cultural navigation capabilities, but genes are almost impotent to affect the content of culture. We are cultural Turing machines running a cultural tape that mostly evolves autonomously.
You can find the complete argument here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4777057
Where this analogy doesn't quite hold is that there is no reason to believe that the terrain has changed or will change for the worse, at least with respect to the effects of recent cultural change. If people 1000 years ago had as few children as we have today, the consequences would've been even worse. In other words, any roughness (e.g. demographic decline) we are experiencing is not due to a worsening external environment, but rather due to our own choices. This in turn suggests that we can and must look to past human choices for descriptive and normative insights.
I didn't intend to suggest that the terrain had changed, only our driving mechanism and accelerator.
This is where the analogy breaks down for me. You say the vehicle must travel more slowly than the changing terrain, but you don't define the terrain or give an example of how this mechanism has failed. I understand the accelerator-down-no-steering metaphor but I'd love to see which corners we've missed and what actually changed underneath the car. A more apt comparison might be that we're steering the car blind while listening to people in the back seat say where they think the curves are.
Yes, cultural drift is mainly due to internal fashion dynamics.
Really great analogy, but I wonder if the lack of differentiation is illustrated by the idea that we used to have different varieties of cars: station wagons, pickup trucks, compact cars, and Jeeps. But the the mono-culture can be thought of as prioritizing speed over everything else, which means that everyone has a sports car. Sports cars are not well suited for children, nor for difficult terrain, so when things get bumpy (as they have been) our only response is to press the accelerator harder.
That's a great way to add dimensionality to the analogy, though as @s.e.t.h below suggests, it's unclear who actually gets the agency to drive, let alone shop for a car.
I think a conversation (not a debate!) between you and David Deutsch, (or one of his disciples) would be fruitful
I'm available.
Do you know someone that is both familiar with your thought and his? that 3rd party could make this conversation not a debate. you take the outside view very strongly, and he takes an inside one.
I think there's a real question about whether western civ has a good chance on controlling its own culture, something unique to it.
You should find the third party and make this happen.
Love the analogy! Being more explicit about our current maladaptive cultural drift with respect to traditional institutions such as family, marriage, and religion would probably result in your cancellation.
One issue is, the terrain isn't just getting rough because of cultural gadgets aren't tested, but because we have new tech that requires different cultural gadgets to use. I have noticed that people are spending less time engulfed in systems built to spread culture the furthest, like twitter, reddit's home page, and youtube. Systems like discord, substack, and cohost are doing, well, they don't have the biggest piece of the pie, but they have a bigger slice than they did. People are learning to recognize short term harms from mass culture at least, is what I'm saying. And I wonder if this can be sped up, would it help create more subcultures for wider selection, if not full cults?
What would you say are the key differences between your recent posts on culture and ordinary cultural conservatism, as expressed by things like Chesterton's Fence?
I'm giving a lot more detail, and open to many more options.
> Both kinds of vehicles, DNA tricycles and cultural sports cars, have the amazing ability to improve themselves while running.
Not... really. "Improve" here is low in meaning, because it doesn't touch anything of the deepest value. It is arbitrary because it is based on the values of the DNA. The selection pressure, the beings running on the DNA, the cultures that get modulated through the DNA, it's all bullshit, and any good things, any meaningful things, pop up by sheer accident, and get destroyed whenever they conflict with the DNA's values. The DNA only cares about survival, not about real improvement. It would be like the difference between real ethics, and some called "Ethics" in quotes, which really was nothing more than a society of sadistic torturers who were applying Utilitarian ethics to maximizing whatever mentally ill values they happen to have. This psychopathic culture could talk about "improvement" but they'd be clueless and be unable to know what they're missing. Humanity is a hell of a lot closer to those sadistic torturers, than to real ethics, at present. That is only ultimate moral dilemma on Earth.
Thanks, Robin. I think the metaphor is useful and that you follow through on it nicely.
https://media2.giphy.com/media/XTjnKcrZlOlaC6sY2d/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b9524n12c9bytgg85klb7nblru3ui3pot8bopvd8hzuf&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g
it still isn't clear to me what exactly the danger is
the danger certainly isn't on an individual level since our current set of cultural norms seem to allow people to do whatever they want
so the danger is that our culture isn't fit and thus will be culled in the next round of selection? if that's the case then that's just selection working as it should?
I'm not sure if a solution to that is possible definitionally, since most people see culture and values as more or less one and the same; so telling people to change their culture is like telling someone who values X to change their value system to value Y which, since it would inevitably result in less X, they would never agree to do.
Changing culture seems to be fairly difficult with the primary driver of change in culture being people just getting old and dying and the younger people having different values
I suppose you can suggest the primary issue is loss of cultural diversity which puts us at greater risk of one time events resulting in large losses but that doesn't sound like the argument you're making
My reasoning for writing my 2011 book on cultural evolution was somewhat similar. Cultural evolution lags behind evolution in the organic realm by around 100 years. Yet it is cultural evolution that is critical for understanding our immediate future. There are some articles with titles like "Cultural evolution's scientific lag" for more. I think we differ on the prospects for humanity, though. My book ends with a section about the cultural version of a genetic takeover - explaining how that's a plausible outcome.
What mechanisms for promoting speciation in evolution are you thinking of?
See added to this post: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/authorized-heretics
I actually agree, and this is why I don't think it's good to be too smart. Or if you are unfortunately very smart, you should not drop everything that caused you to exist the first chance you get. Having kids is not exactly glamorous, unless you consider my recent post on parenting Minecraft Addicts glamorous, but not having them is far worse and a lack of preservation of culture.