I’ve been reading, thinking, and talking, trying to get clearer on what exactly are the culture problems I’m worried about, and how best to describe them.
This was very helpful and explained a great deal that was unclear in your last posts on the subject. Here you identify a particular mechanism you think explains why our current norms/culture is likely to be superior to that in the future -- namely that our current culture is the result of competition amoung a diverse range of cultural choices while you suggest globalization of culture reduces this selective pressure.
And while I certainly see the worries there it seems particularly weird for your worry here to be driven by concerns over fertility.
First, changes in fertility seem relatively unique in being driven by economic changes primarily rather than cultural ones. Sure, some groups adopt culture that attempts to resist those economic incentives but it seems to primarily be a combination of women becoming equally valuable workers and a lack of similar increase in the value of domestic workers, the reduced economic value of children and decreased child mortality. Hence why, even with quite alot of cultural variation still left (Japan didn't reduce their birth rate just to copy western values or vice versa) we see such general reductions in reproduction.
Second, it's odd because this is probably the one area where cultural forces have the weakest long term power -- the more such norms work the greater fraction of the next generation are the children of norm breakers. In the very long term (say 1000 years) biological evolution will operate strongly to select for people who are particularly inclined to reproduce whatever the culture might think.
Random drift in a large space leads to bad outcomes when the good places are a small fraction of the phase space, and you started somewhere good a while ago.
Yes, I agree but I thought your model was that we would eventually adopt global cultural norms that prevent further change.
Indeed, that kinda has to be true in some sense. If we just drift through this large space and there are some states that lock us into smaller subspaces well either we eventually do take them and get locked in our we get locked out of ever doing so.
I still agree with the concern since we might have a great deal of drift before that so it's basically locking us into a random change resistant part of the space but it does suggest that maybe we want to hurry up on locking in.
For most of those who study culture, economic changes *are* cultural changes. Money doesn't grow on trees: it is a cultural artifact. Wealth doesn't fall from the sky, it is partly the result of cultural practices such as trading, innovation and law.
Sure, but the point is that it's not something you can control independently. You want the benefits of high productivity it's going to be hard to get it without this effect on reproduction.
You would think more resources would result in more offspring. That is how it works for most animals. More resources resulting in fewer offspring requires explanation.
An alternative hypothesis to blaming the demographic transition on economics is that non-economic cultural factors are significant. So, for example, a childless influencer has more time to spend influencing than someone raising multiple children - and so they are more likely to influence the next generation to follow their lifestyle and not have kids. Use of birth control is thought to be another relevant factor which is largely non-economic.
I think you can "control independently" economic factors - experiments where one group is given money illuminate the topic. There are likely existing natural experiments that bear on the issue.
The Amish and Ultra-orthodox Jews are the exception that prove your theory false. I guess the Amish choose not to use technology so they give up a lot of economic wealth because of that. But the Jews participate in the economy normally and they have the same high fertility rates.
I talked about them in the original post and notice those are groups which don't take full advantage of those economic factors.
Yes, obviously culture is strong and there will always be cultures that can overcome any economic incentives but the point is that it's not evidence of harmful cultural drift because we would have expected that regardless.
I guess I didn’t read this original post? Is it in your page? How do the ultra-orthodox Jews of NYC not take full advantage of the economy?
Low fertility rates are, in and of themselves, maladaptive. Low fertility societies are evolutionarily diminishing. I’m not looking at it as evidence of something else.
In replying to you I realized I was still a bit hazy on your model. I mean, I presume you are making an argument that there is something special about this point in history (so, eg, the ancient Babylonians shouldn't have found the same argument convincing) so then is your model this:
1) Inside any given culture isolated from external effects cultural change is more likely to be harmful than helpful.
2) Up till now this tendency of mutations to be harmful has been counterbalanced by global cultural selection (cultures with bad mutations were outcompeted and disappeared).
3) Globalization of culture eliminates this selective pressure so we should expect things to get worse in the future.
--
I see the appeal but the argument does seem to make a relatively strong appeal to group selection mechanisms that aren't always super strong.
Or am I wrong and even ancient cultures should have guessed cultural change would on net harm the world?
There is, theoretically, an independent fifth dimension of cultural maladaptivity which would be particularly exacerbating This dimension is "Motivated Elite Anti-Adaptive Counter-Culturalism"
That is, the elites - who have disproportionate power over institutions and influence capable of shifting the culture - do not make these efforts in a random way such that the drift is like that of a neutral molecule in Brownian motion.
Instead, the personal incentives they face generate a strong bias in the direction of pushing and advocating for maladaptive changes in particular, so more like a current of charged particles in a strong electric field.
There are two types of incentive which feed into mechanism behind this phenomenon, but they aren't cleanly separable because dynamic, co-evolving, and mutually reinforcing.
One incentive is trying to win at what could be called the "Ideological Fashion Class Distinguishing Game". Elites will adopt sartorial fashions that help to signal their elite status, but the problem is that, near-elites will soon adopt and imitate those fashions if they can afford them, thus undermining the signal. If near-elites can't afford them, the fashions are effective "costly signals". But if convincing and cheap copies are readily available to near-elites, then the signal of showing off a new fashion only works for a limited time, and elites must keep shifting to new fashions, the most important feature of which is to *not* look anything like what the near-elites or middle tiers are wearing.
If near-elites already wear a wide-variety of clothes but with a common thread, so to speak, that they are attractive and well-fitting clothes well-adapted to particular functions, then it is not easy to come up with new fashions with those qualities. It is, however, always possible and easy to come up with clothes that are ugly and poorly-adapted to the function for which they are worn. That is, the easiest and quickest way for elites to win at the game of status-markers distinguishing them from near-elites in a well-adapted state is to intentionally move in the direction away from adaptation.
With regards to ideological fashions, promulgation and imitation is now nearly instantaneous and 'costless' to signal hypocritically (though not costless if one doesn't get the joke and also implements the advice in one's own life.) So the incentive to use "maladaptive distinction" is particularly strong.
The second incentive is "Redistributive Clientalism" (RC) as a "High and Low against the Middle" winning political formula when power is contested and thus for democratic states in particular. This is more or less "the left" in most places since the French Revolution. In any society there are always going to be ways to categorize sub-groups of the politically empowered population in ways that have a good amount of salience and where members of those groups feel more commonality, social insularity, cohesion, and solidarity for each other than they do for the population at large. It could be class, race, sex, religious denomination, or any number of other things.
In the nature of things there will be disparities between groups in the average levels of factors that play large roles in the way social status is perceived by most people in all groups throughout the society. There are always going to those in the lower half and those in the upper half, but the distribution of wealth and status tends to be much more lopsided, so low-status groups will tend to outnumber high-status groups in the aggregate.
The clientalist political formula of RC is simply to say to those with less, "Help us get power, and we'll use it to grab from and hinder those with more, and hand out money, jobs, status, and other favors to you instead, and this is 'justice', if you really think about it, because of the following rationalization scheme ... "
The maladaptive trouble occurs when the high-status groups are not merely lucky (though good fortune plays a role) but high-status because high-performing and highly productive, and highly productive in part because practicing a cultural suite of well-adapted behavior rules.
Likewise, many of those in low-status groups and not just low-status because of oppression or bad luck or whatever, but because they tend to make a lot of bad choices, and engage in a lot of bad behavior, both personally counterproductive or destructive, and often anti-social involving harm to others. That is, the kind of things that states tend to denigrate and discourage.
And in order for the political and ideological elites on the side of RC to make things work and favor and reward their client groups despite these bad behaviors, they will eventually be put in the awkward position of making every sort of excuse, and this leads right away to neutralizing any state efforts to disparage and penalize the people engaging in these bad behaviors, because the excuses from culpability mean that penalty and pressure cannot be justified, and thus a form of "injustice" per se.
So here again we will see political-ideological elites specifically choose to make cultural shifts in the maladaptive direction lowering the status of things like "bourgeois values", raising the status of those who engage in bad behaviors, and corroding the power of institutions that were dedicated to minimizing those behaviors or for which the suppression of those behaviors was seen as essential toward achieving some higher goal, for example, social order and safety.
And as with the first incentive, advocating for these counter-cultural positions is so upside-down from the views that tend to be most widely shared by successful near-elites that it provides a great way not just win elections but to signal that you are really in the true elite.
All of us over the age of 40 remember things that used to be acceptable topics of discussion or debate, which are now taboo and excluded from conversation.
We are rapidly approaching a global monoculture, and this prospect frightens me far more than low fertility.
What do you mean that reason would "find it hardest to judge" changes to unconditional norms? That reason's answers to this type of question are maladaptive, or that it's hard to get reason to produce any answer to this type of question at all, or something else?
Usually people have a kind of black-or-white intuition about what is adaptive or maladaptive. I think psychiatry is the worst offender here but you see this from science-y / rational-y / intellectual-y types all the time.
What they seem not to understand is they don't get that what *seems* just plainly harmful, is actually a strategy that creates selection pressure. So for example, psychopathy may seem maladaptive, but it's nothing more than a kind of fine tuning of covert dominance. It may seem, at first glance, that being a callous sadomasochist and pathological liar is disadvantageous in a social world, but these are not disadvantages if you don't get caught. These are just tools. And many other things deemed "pathological" function just like this. Even things like schizophrenia, and depression and other things dubbed "disorders".
Cultural behaviors fall into this as well. Being a tribe that hates its enemies, looks insane, looks bad, causes harm to themselves and those around them-- surely this is bad, right? Except evolution doesn't think this way. Evolution is not rational in the moral sense, evolution is a kind of meat grinder that grinds up beings(really, has beings grind *themselves* up, because the DNA expresses traits that cause the being to often harm itself, through some form of moral stupidity, actively or passively).
In short: Evolution *really* loves(If it could love) to select a form of very broad sadomasochism and camouflage(because overt monstrosity gets killed by more covert monsters who create a good guy vs. monster narrative as an adaptive function).
If psychopathic aliens who were identically as technologically advanced than us descended upon Earth, and provoked an otherwise completely fair fight with an otherwise 50/50 chance of winning, except for the fact that they absolutely couldn't care less about ethics(and we sort of cared or pretended or were divided), they would utterly destroy us. This would be adaptive behavior, from both their perspective, and evolution's. It would also be insane behavior, and not behavior any decent species would engage in. If humanity knew it was on a certain course to become such a species with no solution in sight, it would become a moral emergency to eradicate all life on Earth immediately(I don't mean this purely hypothetically because I believe the odds of humanity becoming something much like this species, are realistic).
Each market that has made contraceptives available to a large population has then experienced a fertility crisis. There are no exceptions to this rule except for markets that had initial regulations against it. Such markets later succumb to the same problem.
The problem we are seeing is a failure of the proxy. Sexual pleasure is currently the driver of procreation in humans, in contrast to procreation instincts in many animals. Sexual pleasure, being a proxy for procreation, worked well so far: it allowed for diversification of gene mixtures and kept populations growing despite other factors. However, the introduction of contraceptives made sexual pleasure inconsequential and shifted procreation into the decision-making area. Since having children is not a well-programmed instinct for humans, fertility fails across all markets where there is freedom of production and transactions.
The problem of the proxy has no solution when the proxy is built-in; for example, humans are biologically programmed to seek sex but not children. Even in the case of a catastrophe leading to the loss of knowledge about contraceptives, it is only a matter of time before contraceptives are reinvented. Markets are an innate ability of humans and are built into any human society.
Perhaps you cover this, but what strikes me immediately is the idea of "deviant trials" were, historically, self-limiting. Now they aren't.
Now, with global communications networks enabling niche ideas to gain an outsized following due to the delocalization of ideas (i.e., no longer being limited to the self-limiting cap of local followship), these deviant trials can gain far more purchase than socially designed for, and trip into mass-market awareness thanks to the legacy broadcast media looking for juicy deviant stories to report on.
These observations are clever and empirically makes a lot of sense. But it is not clear what is the normative basis for being worried about this tendency toward global monoculturalism. Why worry? What is the normative observation point that makes this tendency worrying?
It seems like the implicit outside-observation-point here, is some kind of vitalism. Good cultures are those that result in on average above-reproduction fertility. Bad cultures are those that don’t. If so, there is something that needs further work here.
First, it seems doubtful that vitalism (operationalized as resulting in on average above reproduction fertility) is the only normative value that counts. If a very vital culture is at the same time vehemently anti-science (these two seem often to go together) it will, if it is successful, lead humanity into a dead-end street where we sit around on this planet till sooner or later something happens that wipes us out. Re: The fate of the reindeer population on St Matthews island.
Second, no culture is internally homogenous. All have internal contradictions and strange dynamics. There are likely to be sub-groups within a broader (mono)culture that more-than-reproduce. We’ll have to wait till the dust settles in the emerging global monoculture to see which sub-cultures or new hybrid-cultures that increase their dominance. Notice that it may take a very, very long time before the dust settles sufficiently to see which hybrid/subcultures that is – most likely several generations from now.
Third, vitalism, like any normative viewpoint, is itself a cultural “product”. It is not some firm point beyond culture that can be used to evaluate culture. So one may run into some sort of self-referring consistency problem when having normative opinions (worries) about “culture” (One needs an outside-of-cultures observation point to make a normative assessment of a culture – but “outside views” do not exist…. )
Re: "As these changes are only moderately predictable, I find it hard to see them as adaptive. And the world’s long fertility fall suggests to me that they are in fact maladaptive." - it is fairly easy to see them as adaptive: take the meme's eye view. Much culture doesn't benefit human host DNA. However it does benefit the culture itself to get copied and spread. Evangelical priests are not helping their DNA reproduce. They are helping their evangelical memes reproduce. It's a new kind of adaptation.
Well, we didn't reach "peak human" yet - so that hasn't been much of an issue so far. By the time we do, meme propagation will increasingly be in the hands of intelligent machines.
Multipe host species decreases the dependency of parasites on any one particular host species. Parasites can and do sometimes drive host species extinct - but a requirement for that is usually multiple host species, so that the loss of any one of them is less significant.
Regarding Robin's concerns: it seems reasonable to me to be concerned that rapid cultural change has a chance of being maladaptive change - and so there are benefits to be had by going slow. Of course, there are also benefits associated with going fast - for example, the founder effect. Aside from the issue of how fast we should go, there's also the issue of whether we can do much to influence this. If not, attempts to control the speed might be effort wasted.
It could also makes sense to be concerned about monocultures, memetic drift and devolution. Those seem more like domain-specific concerns, though - rather than something global. We are far from having a global culture. There are large scale battles over languages, currencies, religions, operating systems, chatbots - and so on. In most cases there's no monoculture. There are "antitrust" institutions to help prevent monocultures. Concerns about problems caused by drift and devolution seem rather remote here. Some do worry about a woke monoculture spread by the members of the WEF, but a world government monoculture seems like a fairly distant fear to me.
Personally, I'm more interested in the immediate effects of machine superintelligence. By comparison, humans getting sterilized by being sucked into cyberspace is a slow problem that takes multiple human generations to manifest.
The "maladaptive culture" framing seems like an improvement to me. Cultures are huge, though. I think most of those in the field tend to "atomize" culture - with cultural variants, memes, memeplexes, norms - or similar.
It then becomes easier to assign values and you can then talk about "maladaptive cultural variants" - or simply "bad memes". This atomizing has its critics - who invoke holism - but ISTM that you gain a lot more than you lose.
Once bad memes are identified as a problem, it raises the issue of what can be done about them. There is a lot that can be done. Bad memes can be displaced by good memes - much as probiotic bacteria can flush out bad bacteria. There's a mememtic immune system which can be strengthened by tools like scepticism and caution. Memes can be dissected in a protective environment - to show how they work. Once someone gets scammed once, they might take more care the next time - and the protective scam can be administered inside a game. It's a bit like administering a weakened form of a virus to protect against the real thing. Of course, this whole topic is an enormous subject.
Your next-to-last paragraph, where you dismiss the possibility that people will use reason to correct social practices that seem to be leading towards disaster, is quite unconvincing.
Whether a thing is convincing or not is in the eye of the beholder. Many would find his statements not merely convincing but obvious, a kind of vaticinium ex eventu.
Another idea to incorporate in your framework is an idea like the Half Life of a Cultural Practice (analogous to Half Life of Knowledge). People might blindly copy the culture that they're exposed to, but their loyalty to each cultural practice is not the same.
A lot of the newer cultural changes that you don't like probably has a shorter half life than you fear. While those you want to save have been around for a long time and has a much longer half life (more resilient than you think).
It's the Lindy effect applied to cultural changes. That's a way you can have reversal to the mean rather than a random walk of culture in a cultural change model.
I think this is a much better framework for discussing cultural change. I think we're currently in a period of great "mal-adaptation" but that's because of last 30 years of globalization + emphasis on scaling fast + low-interest rate regime / general economic prosperity + belief in mimesis over reason (in your lingo, "DreamTime"). That's happened to culture, to politics, to business, to technology. Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how much you profit from DreamTime), these driving factors aren't always going to be the case, so we might be entering a period of more normal selection soon.
My main critique is I don't see even periodic mal-adaptation as necessarily a problem. Every optimization regime needs to have periods of not always going along the path of greatest descent, otherwise you'll be stuck in local minima. I've relented to the notion that the world has to go crazy periodically -- the craziness regime is oscillatory -- and keeps humanity sane over a longer period of time. Otherwise you run into the dinosaur's problem of over-fitting to being extremely large in physical size (which has repeatedly happened to different species, from aquatic species to dinosaurs to mammals). You then either reboot en-masse (an asteroid strike leaving tiny creatures), or you need to have oscillatory trends along the way.
Given that mal-adaptation has to happen sometime, I expect cultural ones to be lumpy in time -- the best time to try to socially deviate and non-conform is when everyone is also -- rather than evenly spread in time.
I also have a lot more faith in "reason" across/over generations than within a generation. As they say, science progresses one funeral at a time. Lots of people don't like to change their minds when faced with evidence or facts, but for another person watching or copying them, they don't have necessarily have that same personal emotional stake to defend if they have to re-assess the approach later. Skin-in-the-game is great for decision making some of the time, but no-skin-in-the-game is also great some of the time (ie assessment by independent observers).
So I feel like cultural mal-adaptation is only stuck when future generations are unable to act as independent observers to assess the cultural preference settings of the past generations.
This was very helpful and explained a great deal that was unclear in your last posts on the subject. Here you identify a particular mechanism you think explains why our current norms/culture is likely to be superior to that in the future -- namely that our current culture is the result of competition amoung a diverse range of cultural choices while you suggest globalization of culture reduces this selective pressure.
And while I certainly see the worries there it seems particularly weird for your worry here to be driven by concerns over fertility.
First, changes in fertility seem relatively unique in being driven by economic changes primarily rather than cultural ones. Sure, some groups adopt culture that attempts to resist those economic incentives but it seems to primarily be a combination of women becoming equally valuable workers and a lack of similar increase in the value of domestic workers, the reduced economic value of children and decreased child mortality. Hence why, even with quite alot of cultural variation still left (Japan didn't reduce their birth rate just to copy western values or vice versa) we see such general reductions in reproduction.
Second, it's odd because this is probably the one area where cultural forces have the weakest long term power -- the more such norms work the greater fraction of the next generation are the children of norm breakers. In the very long term (say 1000 years) biological evolution will operate strongly to select for people who are particularly inclined to reproduce whatever the culture might think.
Random drift in a large space leads to bad outcomes when the good places are a small fraction of the phase space, and you started somewhere good a while ago.
Yes, I agree but I thought your model was that we would eventually adopt global cultural norms that prevent further change.
Indeed, that kinda has to be true in some sense. If we just drift through this large space and there are some states that lock us into smaller subspaces well either we eventually do take them and get locked in our we get locked out of ever doing so.
I still agree with the concern since we might have a great deal of drift before that so it's basically locking us into a random change resistant part of the space but it does suggest that maybe we want to hurry up on locking in.
I don't see the halting of global cultural norm change in the foreseeable future.
For most of those who study culture, economic changes *are* cultural changes. Money doesn't grow on trees: it is a cultural artifact. Wealth doesn't fall from the sky, it is partly the result of cultural practices such as trading, innovation and law.
Sure, but the point is that it's not something you can control independently. You want the benefits of high productivity it's going to be hard to get it without this effect on reproduction.
You would think more resources would result in more offspring. That is how it works for most animals. More resources resulting in fewer offspring requires explanation.
An alternative hypothesis to blaming the demographic transition on economics is that non-economic cultural factors are significant. So, for example, a childless influencer has more time to spend influencing than someone raising multiple children - and so they are more likely to influence the next generation to follow their lifestyle and not have kids. Use of birth control is thought to be another relevant factor which is largely non-economic.
I think you can "control independently" economic factors - experiments where one group is given money illuminate the topic. There are likely existing natural experiments that bear on the issue.
The Amish and Ultra-orthodox Jews are the exception that prove your theory false. I guess the Amish choose not to use technology so they give up a lot of economic wealth because of that. But the Jews participate in the economy normally and they have the same high fertility rates.
I talked about them in the original post and notice those are groups which don't take full advantage of those economic factors.
Yes, obviously culture is strong and there will always be cultures that can overcome any economic incentives but the point is that it's not evidence of harmful cultural drift because we would have expected that regardless.
I guess I didn’t read this original post? Is it in your page? How do the ultra-orthodox Jews of NYC not take full advantage of the economy?
Low fertility rates are, in and of themselves, maladaptive. Low fertility societies are evolutionarily diminishing. I’m not looking at it as evidence of something else.
In replying to you I realized I was still a bit hazy on your model. I mean, I presume you are making an argument that there is something special about this point in history (so, eg, the ancient Babylonians shouldn't have found the same argument convincing) so then is your model this:
1) Inside any given culture isolated from external effects cultural change is more likely to be harmful than helpful.
2) Up till now this tendency of mutations to be harmful has been counterbalanced by global cultural selection (cultures with bad mutations were outcompeted and disappeared).
3) Globalization of culture eliminates this selective pressure so we should expect things to get worse in the future.
--
I see the appeal but the argument does seem to make a relatively strong appeal to group selection mechanisms that aren't always super strong.
Or am I wrong and even ancient cultures should have guessed cultural change would on net harm the world?
Yes, Greek and Roman empires likely fell due to cultural drift, in part via fertility fall.
There is, theoretically, an independent fifth dimension of cultural maladaptivity which would be particularly exacerbating This dimension is "Motivated Elite Anti-Adaptive Counter-Culturalism"
That is, the elites - who have disproportionate power over institutions and influence capable of shifting the culture - do not make these efforts in a random way such that the drift is like that of a neutral molecule in Brownian motion.
Instead, the personal incentives they face generate a strong bias in the direction of pushing and advocating for maladaptive changes in particular, so more like a current of charged particles in a strong electric field.
There are two types of incentive which feed into mechanism behind this phenomenon, but they aren't cleanly separable because dynamic, co-evolving, and mutually reinforcing.
One incentive is trying to win at what could be called the "Ideological Fashion Class Distinguishing Game". Elites will adopt sartorial fashions that help to signal their elite status, but the problem is that, near-elites will soon adopt and imitate those fashions if they can afford them, thus undermining the signal. If near-elites can't afford them, the fashions are effective "costly signals". But if convincing and cheap copies are readily available to near-elites, then the signal of showing off a new fashion only works for a limited time, and elites must keep shifting to new fashions, the most important feature of which is to *not* look anything like what the near-elites or middle tiers are wearing.
If near-elites already wear a wide-variety of clothes but with a common thread, so to speak, that they are attractive and well-fitting clothes well-adapted to particular functions, then it is not easy to come up with new fashions with those qualities. It is, however, always possible and easy to come up with clothes that are ugly and poorly-adapted to the function for which they are worn. That is, the easiest and quickest way for elites to win at the game of status-markers distinguishing them from near-elites in a well-adapted state is to intentionally move in the direction away from adaptation.
With regards to ideological fashions, promulgation and imitation is now nearly instantaneous and 'costless' to signal hypocritically (though not costless if one doesn't get the joke and also implements the advice in one's own life.) So the incentive to use "maladaptive distinction" is particularly strong.
The second incentive is "Redistributive Clientalism" (RC) as a "High and Low against the Middle" winning political formula when power is contested and thus for democratic states in particular. This is more or less "the left" in most places since the French Revolution. In any society there are always going to be ways to categorize sub-groups of the politically empowered population in ways that have a good amount of salience and where members of those groups feel more commonality, social insularity, cohesion, and solidarity for each other than they do for the population at large. It could be class, race, sex, religious denomination, or any number of other things.
In the nature of things there will be disparities between groups in the average levels of factors that play large roles in the way social status is perceived by most people in all groups throughout the society. There are always going to those in the lower half and those in the upper half, but the distribution of wealth and status tends to be much more lopsided, so low-status groups will tend to outnumber high-status groups in the aggregate.
The clientalist political formula of RC is simply to say to those with less, "Help us get power, and we'll use it to grab from and hinder those with more, and hand out money, jobs, status, and other favors to you instead, and this is 'justice', if you really think about it, because of the following rationalization scheme ... "
The maladaptive trouble occurs when the high-status groups are not merely lucky (though good fortune plays a role) but high-status because high-performing and highly productive, and highly productive in part because practicing a cultural suite of well-adapted behavior rules.
Likewise, many of those in low-status groups and not just low-status because of oppression or bad luck or whatever, but because they tend to make a lot of bad choices, and engage in a lot of bad behavior, both personally counterproductive or destructive, and often anti-social involving harm to others. That is, the kind of things that states tend to denigrate and discourage.
And in order for the political and ideological elites on the side of RC to make things work and favor and reward their client groups despite these bad behaviors, they will eventually be put in the awkward position of making every sort of excuse, and this leads right away to neutralizing any state efforts to disparage and penalize the people engaging in these bad behaviors, because the excuses from culpability mean that penalty and pressure cannot be justified, and thus a form of "injustice" per se.
So here again we will see political-ideological elites specifically choose to make cultural shifts in the maladaptive direction lowering the status of things like "bourgeois values", raising the status of those who engage in bad behaviors, and corroding the power of institutions that were dedicated to minimizing those behaviors or for which the suppression of those behaviors was seen as essential toward achieving some higher goal, for example, social order and safety.
And as with the first incentive, advocating for these counter-cultural positions is so upside-down from the views that tend to be most widely shared by successful near-elites that it provides a great way not just win elections but to signal that you are really in the true elite.
All of us over the age of 40 remember things that used to be acceptable topics of discussion or debate, which are now taboo and excluded from conversation.
We are rapidly approaching a global monoculture, and this prospect frightens me far more than low fertility.
Communal negative-perceived-action-tolerance gains testing.
What do you mean that reason would "find it hardest to judge" changes to unconditional norms? That reason's answers to this type of question are maladaptive, or that it's hard to get reason to produce any answer to this type of question at all, or something else?
Usually people have a kind of black-or-white intuition about what is adaptive or maladaptive. I think psychiatry is the worst offender here but you see this from science-y / rational-y / intellectual-y types all the time.
What they seem not to understand is they don't get that what *seems* just plainly harmful, is actually a strategy that creates selection pressure. So for example, psychopathy may seem maladaptive, but it's nothing more than a kind of fine tuning of covert dominance. It may seem, at first glance, that being a callous sadomasochist and pathological liar is disadvantageous in a social world, but these are not disadvantages if you don't get caught. These are just tools. And many other things deemed "pathological" function just like this. Even things like schizophrenia, and depression and other things dubbed "disorders".
Cultural behaviors fall into this as well. Being a tribe that hates its enemies, looks insane, looks bad, causes harm to themselves and those around them-- surely this is bad, right? Except evolution doesn't think this way. Evolution is not rational in the moral sense, evolution is a kind of meat grinder that grinds up beings(really, has beings grind *themselves* up, because the DNA expresses traits that cause the being to often harm itself, through some form of moral stupidity, actively or passively).
In short: Evolution *really* loves(If it could love) to select a form of very broad sadomasochism and camouflage(because overt monstrosity gets killed by more covert monsters who create a good guy vs. monster narrative as an adaptive function).
If psychopathic aliens who were identically as technologically advanced than us descended upon Earth, and provoked an otherwise completely fair fight with an otherwise 50/50 chance of winning, except for the fact that they absolutely couldn't care less about ethics(and we sort of cared or pretended or were divided), they would utterly destroy us. This would be adaptive behavior, from both their perspective, and evolution's. It would also be insane behavior, and not behavior any decent species would engage in. If humanity knew it was on a certain course to become such a species with no solution in sight, it would become a moral emergency to eradicate all life on Earth immediately(I don't mean this purely hypothetically because I believe the odds of humanity becoming something much like this species, are realistic).
Each market that has made contraceptives available to a large population has then experienced a fertility crisis. There are no exceptions to this rule except for markets that had initial regulations against it. Such markets later succumb to the same problem.
The problem we are seeing is a failure of the proxy. Sexual pleasure is currently the driver of procreation in humans, in contrast to procreation instincts in many animals. Sexual pleasure, being a proxy for procreation, worked well so far: it allowed for diversification of gene mixtures and kept populations growing despite other factors. However, the introduction of contraceptives made sexual pleasure inconsequential and shifted procreation into the decision-making area. Since having children is not a well-programmed instinct for humans, fertility fails across all markets where there is freedom of production and transactions.
The problem of the proxy has no solution when the proxy is built-in; for example, humans are biologically programmed to seek sex but not children. Even in the case of a catastrophe leading to the loss of knowledge about contraceptives, it is only a matter of time before contraceptives are reinvented. Markets are an innate ability of humans and are built into any human society.
Perhaps you cover this, but what strikes me immediately is the idea of "deviant trials" were, historically, self-limiting. Now they aren't.
Now, with global communications networks enabling niche ideas to gain an outsized following due to the delocalization of ideas (i.e., no longer being limited to the self-limiting cap of local followship), these deviant trials can gain far more purchase than socially designed for, and trip into mass-market awareness thanks to the legacy broadcast media looking for juicy deviant stories to report on.
Yikes!
These observations are clever and empirically makes a lot of sense. But it is not clear what is the normative basis for being worried about this tendency toward global monoculturalism. Why worry? What is the normative observation point that makes this tendency worrying?
It seems like the implicit outside-observation-point here, is some kind of vitalism. Good cultures are those that result in on average above-reproduction fertility. Bad cultures are those that don’t. If so, there is something that needs further work here.
First, it seems doubtful that vitalism (operationalized as resulting in on average above reproduction fertility) is the only normative value that counts. If a very vital culture is at the same time vehemently anti-science (these two seem often to go together) it will, if it is successful, lead humanity into a dead-end street where we sit around on this planet till sooner or later something happens that wipes us out. Re: The fate of the reindeer population on St Matthews island.
Second, no culture is internally homogenous. All have internal contradictions and strange dynamics. There are likely to be sub-groups within a broader (mono)culture that more-than-reproduce. We’ll have to wait till the dust settles in the emerging global monoculture to see which sub-cultures or new hybrid-cultures that increase their dominance. Notice that it may take a very, very long time before the dust settles sufficiently to see which hybrid/subcultures that is – most likely several generations from now.
Third, vitalism, like any normative viewpoint, is itself a cultural “product”. It is not some firm point beyond culture that can be used to evaluate culture. So one may run into some sort of self-referring consistency problem when having normative opinions (worries) about “culture” (One needs an outside-of-cultures observation point to make a normative assessment of a culture – but “outside views” do not exist…. )
Re: "As these changes are only moderately predictable, I find it hard to see them as adaptive. And the world’s long fertility fall suggests to me that they are in fact maladaptive." - it is fairly easy to see them as adaptive: take the meme's eye view. Much culture doesn't benefit human host DNA. However it does benefit the culture itself to get copied and spread. Evangelical priests are not helping their DNA reproduce. They are helping their evangelical memes reproduce. It's a new kind of adaptation.
If your poll of potential converts vastly declines, your meme prospects greatly decline.
Well, we didn't reach "peak human" yet - so that hasn't been much of an issue so far. By the time we do, meme propagation will increasingly be in the hands of intelligent machines.
Multipe host species decreases the dependency of parasites on any one particular host species. Parasites can and do sometimes drive host species extinct - but a requirement for that is usually multiple host species, so that the loss of any one of them is less significant.
Regarding Robin's concerns: it seems reasonable to me to be concerned that rapid cultural change has a chance of being maladaptive change - and so there are benefits to be had by going slow. Of course, there are also benefits associated with going fast - for example, the founder effect. Aside from the issue of how fast we should go, there's also the issue of whether we can do much to influence this. If not, attempts to control the speed might be effort wasted.
It could also makes sense to be concerned about monocultures, memetic drift and devolution. Those seem more like domain-specific concerns, though - rather than something global. We are far from having a global culture. There are large scale battles over languages, currencies, religions, operating systems, chatbots - and so on. In most cases there's no monoculture. There are "antitrust" institutions to help prevent monocultures. Concerns about problems caused by drift and devolution seem rather remote here. Some do worry about a woke monoculture spread by the members of the WEF, but a world government monoculture seems like a fairly distant fear to me.
Personally, I'm more interested in the immediate effects of machine superintelligence. By comparison, humans getting sterilized by being sucked into cyberspace is a slow problem that takes multiple human generations to manifest.
The "maladaptive culture" framing seems like an improvement to me. Cultures are huge, though. I think most of those in the field tend to "atomize" culture - with cultural variants, memes, memeplexes, norms - or similar.
It then becomes easier to assign values and you can then talk about "maladaptive cultural variants" - or simply "bad memes". This atomizing has its critics - who invoke holism - but ISTM that you gain a lot more than you lose.
Once bad memes are identified as a problem, it raises the issue of what can be done about them. There is a lot that can be done. Bad memes can be displaced by good memes - much as probiotic bacteria can flush out bad bacteria. There's a mememtic immune system which can be strengthened by tools like scepticism and caution. Memes can be dissected in a protective environment - to show how they work. Once someone gets scammed once, they might take more care the next time - and the protective scam can be administered inside a game. It's a bit like administering a weakened form of a virus to protect against the real thing. Of course, this whole topic is an enormous subject.
Your next-to-last paragraph, where you dismiss the possibility that people will use reason to correct social practices that seem to be leading towards disaster, is quite unconvincing.
Whether a thing is convincing or not is in the eye of the beholder. Many would find his statements not merely convincing but obvious, a kind of vaticinium ex eventu.
Another idea to incorporate in your framework is an idea like the Half Life of a Cultural Practice (analogous to Half Life of Knowledge). People might blindly copy the culture that they're exposed to, but their loyalty to each cultural practice is not the same.
A lot of the newer cultural changes that you don't like probably has a shorter half life than you fear. While those you want to save have been around for a long time and has a much longer half life (more resilient than you think).
It's the Lindy effect applied to cultural changes. That's a way you can have reversal to the mean rather than a random walk of culture in a cultural change model.
I think this is a much better framework for discussing cultural change. I think we're currently in a period of great "mal-adaptation" but that's because of last 30 years of globalization + emphasis on scaling fast + low-interest rate regime / general economic prosperity + belief in mimesis over reason (in your lingo, "DreamTime"). That's happened to culture, to politics, to business, to technology. Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how much you profit from DreamTime), these driving factors aren't always going to be the case, so we might be entering a period of more normal selection soon.
My main critique is I don't see even periodic mal-adaptation as necessarily a problem. Every optimization regime needs to have periods of not always going along the path of greatest descent, otherwise you'll be stuck in local minima. I've relented to the notion that the world has to go crazy periodically -- the craziness regime is oscillatory -- and keeps humanity sane over a longer period of time. Otherwise you run into the dinosaur's problem of over-fitting to being extremely large in physical size (which has repeatedly happened to different species, from aquatic species to dinosaurs to mammals). You then either reboot en-masse (an asteroid strike leaving tiny creatures), or you need to have oscillatory trends along the way.
Given that mal-adaptation has to happen sometime, I expect cultural ones to be lumpy in time -- the best time to try to socially deviate and non-conform is when everyone is also -- rather than evenly spread in time.
I also have a lot more faith in "reason" across/over generations than within a generation. As they say, science progresses one funeral at a time. Lots of people don't like to change their minds when faced with evidence or facts, but for another person watching or copying them, they don't have necessarily have that same personal emotional stake to defend if they have to re-assess the approach later. Skin-in-the-game is great for decision making some of the time, but no-skin-in-the-game is also great some of the time (ie assessment by independent observers).
So I feel like cultural mal-adaptation is only stuck when future generations are unable to act as independent observers to assess the cultural preference settings of the past generations.