Innovation Without Feedback Is Drift

The ancient world respected tradition, and was wary of most kinds of change. In contrast, our modern world looks down on tradition, and celebrates most change as innovation. And this, alas, will be our downfall. Hopefully some civ after ours will learn this key lesson: you should only innovate as fast as you get feedback on the changes that you try.

With most technology and business practices, we can see most of their key consequences pretty locally and pretty fast. So we can get a lot of data fast, and can reject most of them as bad ideas, but accumulate the rare winners. In contrast, many changes in norms, morals, and other key parameters that distinguish our game-theoretic equilibria set the health of entire cultures, health that may not be revealed for decades or centuries. It thus makes far more sense to be accepting and even eager for innovations in the former areas, compared to the latter areas. Alas, our modern burst of enthusiasm for innovation has not made this key distinction.

For the last few years I’ve focused on a simple story of how key parameters for the evolution of (not in) cultures have changed from healthy to unhealthy over the last few centuries. We’ve seen a great fall in variety and selection pressures, and a great rise in the rate of change of context. But on reflection these changes just don’t seem to me to be enough to explain just how fast our the health of our cultures have decayed over the last few centuries. Why are things going so bad so fast?

Our modern world greatly celebrates abstraction, and some degree of increased abstraction of our norms, etc. has been forced by our merging and mixing many previously distinct cultures. Even so, one story I’ve considered is that our norms, etc. are actually encoded at far more specific levels than we like to pretend. And very specifically-encoded norms might plausibly decay much faster as contexts change.

But in fact, many of the key norms, etc. that have changed a lot in modernity seem rather well described at pretty abstract levels. Consider new norms against slavery, religion, and corporal punishment, and for democracy and a wider range of sexual preferences. Or consider key new norms causing fertility decline, like capstone marriage, intensive parenting, and longer educational paths. None of these seems to suffer greatly from insufficient abstraction.

Thus it should have been quite feasible over the last few centuries to embrace a great deal of change in technology and business practices, while mostly retaining prior cultural attitudes toward government, trade, gender, war, marriage, sex, work, inequality, etc. What happened instead is that once some places seemed to achieve great success by making big changes to the former areas, elites in the latter eagerly and purposely switched from trying to preserve prior practices in the latter areas, to aggressively trying to change them. While they explored many new directions, the one thing they all agreed on was that they didn’t want to stay with prior traditions.

At the time, philosophy, poetry, and the arts had long been the highest status intellectual areas, but many were gaining great status via their large changes to science, tech, and business practices. That is, STEM (+ business) was threatening to overtake non-STEM in status. So non-STEM elites switched to embracing change. They claimed to be able to find innovations in their areas that were at least as fundamental and important as STEM changes. They gave high status to those among them who generated the most intriguing and compelling big changes in their areas.

Or course they haven’t found concrete data showing that their new art, politics, and morals made for healthy cultures over the long term. Even so, they managed to jumpstart our new modern era of rapid changes to such things. And once most young elites were in high school and college creating their own new youth cultures, this new cultural activism and innovation process sped up even more. And this, even more than the big bad modern changes to the three other key parameters of the evolution of cultures that I’ve previously focused on, seems to me the main reason why modern culture is going bad so fast.