Join We Meta-Adaptionists

Standard decision theory says that all decisions combine two key factors: opinions on values, and beliefs about facts. My social/political stances are split into those same two factors: I’m adaptionist on values, and meta-institutional on facts. Let me explain.

First, let’s consider values. Here I’m talking my values re our social coordinations in culture, law, and governance. I gave my personal values in my last post.

As a member of our shared world monoculture, I of course prefer it to known alternatives. And as activists who push for culture changes have long been our highest heroes, I dutifully hold opinions on which change directions I’d prefer. But once I realized that we are plausibly suffering from serious maladaptive cultural drift, (biological) adaption has become my main priority. If we can’t find a way to make our world culture, or some offshoot of it, more adaptive, we risk most of it being replaced by small insular fertile subcultures like the Amish and Haredim, who may reject much of our culture as sinful.

I am thus willing to make common cause with others also willing to prioritize adaption, even if I disagree with them on other priorities. I am now wary of, not eager for, cultural activism. And I see now that conservatives have quite often been right over the centuries when they’ve warned against our too freely moving away from traditional cultures. Even so, it isn’t clear to me how often the changes pushed by today’s “conservative” are adaptive.

A key problem for we adaptionists is to distinguish cultural dimensions which are easy to vary locally, and should thus plausibly still have healthy cultural evolution, from dimensions tied up with things hard to vary locally, like norms and status markers, which more plausibly suffer from cultural drift. We should worry little about changes to the former, but much about changes to the latter.

As long as those of us willing to prioritize adaption remain a minority, we will have to form alliances with folks with other priorities. We must judge which alliance partners, and what deals with them, are likely to work best to promote adaption.

So how can we best estimate key facts, such as which dimensions are hard to vary locally, what changes to those dimensions are more adaptive, and who best to ally with how? The traditional approach is for everyone to think and argue about them, and then vote for politicians they guess are best informed. But that approach doesn’t usually work out very well; the median voter is very poorly informed.

Which brings me to my other key social stance. Relative to arguing about the value of specific policies, I think it is much more important to identify and use better institutions (than simple public arguing) for aggregating info on those more specific policies. The most important topics for us to think and argue about, or to inquire into via any other mechanism, are our choices of such institutions. That’s the sense in which I’m “meta-institutional” about facts.

Now I do have more specific opinions on which institutions work best for info aggregation. When profits are a reasonable proxy for social value, for-profit orgs do spectacularly well, on average. Otherwise decision markets seem our best robust choice, at least when we have sufficient after-the-fact measures of social value. So I want our societies to create, test, and then use decisions markets to advise on how best to achieve our shared social goals. And more specifically I want we adaptionists to use decision markets to find out how best to achieve adaption.

However, I’m open to being persuaded that I’m wrong here, and that other info institutions actually work better. So I’m more committed to the meta view that we should care most about choosing such institutions well.

I’m especially intrigued by the possibility that a nation, or alliance of nations, could fix cultural drift via a futarchy-type government tied to a national welfare measure that put a lot of weight on a sacred long term goal, like when we have a million people living in space, a goal that seems in conflict with civilization collapsing over the next few centuries. Preventing such collapse seems a good way to promote adaptation, and citizens are less likely to balk when futarchy demands sacrifices in the name of a sacred goal, compared to more profane goals.

So there you have it. I’m adaptionist on social values, and prioritize making my culture more adaptive, as a way to save as much of it as possible. And I’m meta-institutional on facts, in that I want us to focus on arguing about what institutions we should use to aggregate info about key policy facts, instead of arguing mostly about those facts. My bet now is on decision markets as our best info institution, but I might be wrong about that.