No offense, but the correct response to maladaption or a decayed current state, when possible, is to reset back to the last known good state. Bluntly, spiritual fitness requires a spiritual framework and community, which requires a religion and a church. Soulless orgs aren't going to fix the nihilism of modem life with metrics, there's no chance they are even capable of doing so, what is necessary is a return to God, the sacred, and the transcendental. Religious societies will outlast nonreligious ones.
Even the culture of churched folks today is far different from what it was in 1700. Amish & Haredim are winning by such a "go back" move, but who else could do similar now?
I wonder if Christianity could not actually find some sort of balance between insularity (i.e. amish etc.) and modernity (the nihilism of numbers go up). I think a union between empirics and ritual/transcendent can be made theologically coherent.
The interesting question here is can it be institutionally established? I'd argue that we are in such an unusual historical moment with mental+spiritual health, fertility collapse, community desctruction etc. that the costs are starting to show and there are signs of growing demand for older systems of meaning in my generation. Basically an advertisement that soul culture matters. But of course, whether it produces another round of trendy spirituality vs durable institutions that enshrine adaptive or meta-adaptive values into themselves is yet to be seen.
Still, I feel more bullish on this proposal (and creating or assisting in the creation of such institutions) over the idea that we will suddenly lose status signals around system culture (and have well chosen systems).
If this is right, that such institutions can be built, they should outcompete both pure-modern and pure-insular communities on measurable outcomes over time.
I happily endorse more cults and cultural experimentation. Even so, I have to estimate our likely outcomes based on the variations we see and the rate at which new ones appear. This doesn't give much grounds for optimism.
The base rate for new cults is the wrong reference class. Christianity isn't a random cultural experiment. It's a two-thousand-year-old system that has already metabolized late antiquity, Aristotelian philosophy, the Reformation, and global expansion. The theological resources for a synthesis with empirical modernity already exist; what's missing is institutional form.
Additionally, the selection environment is moving. Fertility collapse, meaning-starvation, etc. are not subtle signals. Your pessimism from what I can tell is pricing in at a stable base environment. But towards the near death of cultures, there are sometimes resurgences caused by the fallout which spark new passforwards.
Certain meta cultures may also outlive civs or be made more dominant by the collapse of civs and could act as instruments for us to put our preferences into the lightcone. Can I name any political institutions with meaningful moral continuity from 200 AD? No. Can I name religious ones? Several. The abrahamic religions have a 100% survival rate. They have high transmission fidelity for values, high(er) fertility rates, and importantly characteristics which make them viable to survive and grow in times of crisis.
Not a new type of Christianity. A new institutional form within or out of an existing one.
The base rate for "new cults" is as misleading here as treating every new company as another entry in the base rate of "new businesses," ignoring whether it's YC-backed or not.
Granting the narrower point, that the base rate for new Christian institutional forms in modernity is low, I'd still posit the selection environment is shifting. Most recent attempts (megachurches, emergent church) launched into a period of relative cultural stability where secular substitutes still seemed viable.
In response to Roman collapse we had Benedictine monasticism, for the destruction of the parish we had Mendicant orders, for the reformation the Jesuits, for industrial dislocation we had Methodists. That these movements were so successful their values became invisible background doesn't mean they weren't successful.
Regarding " our soul culture drifting into increasing maladaption" -- One of the examples Hanson has given of maladaption is the fertility crash. What are other examples?
Doomscrolling and despair. Entertainment that absorbs energy that could be spent doing things, which might be adaptive. That old song lyric "your self destruction doesn't hurt them." Squandering money that could be used for doing things, which might be adaptive. Like how we spend so much on being individualistic and losing the benefits of mass production, from this essay.
I think some of these us d to be adaptive as a peacock's tail. Show off it's cool. But an entire society spending all that resources just to keep up is less adaptive than one where those resources are used to... do something, that might be adaptive.
To introduce lots of changes fast, and thus find the adaptive changes through experimentation, perhaps it can be marketed as something very elite. Like a series of fancy communes. But those have low status now. Doesn't have to be, though. Kellogg had a fancy resort with culture ideas embedded.
I agree with this Doomscrolling and pursuing entertainment. I appreciate what you write about consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses; the need to buy products and maintain a certain lifestyle in order to signal one's status. Hanson discusses various type of signalling in The Elephant in the Room.
Indeed, I’m unclear on what counts as maladaption here. Eg is it cultures that don’t help their members survive, or cultures that don’t themselves persist (eg because they encourage novelty)?
After reading Hanson's blog for a few years now, I have come to suspect that the main maladaptation is the fertility crash (possibly also any below-replacement decline). But if Hanson said this outright, then readers would start discussing solutions to fertility decline, as I have in prior discussions on this substack. And Hason doesn't want to go there because he has his own ideas that are larger than ensuring population growth (futurarchy, and other ideas consistent with libertarianism).
I maintain that the main cause of fertility decline is economic inequality, combined with evolved human nature for status seeking, combined with evolved human nature for the desire to choose when to parent, combined with the technology of modern contraception. We can't completely change the two that are evolved human nature, but cultures can change things that impact the desire to have children and resistance to status seeking. Society can develop (and have in prior eras) a variety of methods to ensure widespread 'social security' (security in one's social worth, also called ontological security). Prior cultures, before widespread urbanization, amassed and inculcated tools for keeping inequality in check. When people have ontological security and are confident they can give that to their children, then the biological drive to nurture children ensures at least replacement levels of fertility, if not more.
I spent 8 months thinking mainly about fertility decline before I realized its main causes were cultural, and then digging into what could be going wrong with culture.
I’m not clear why economic inequality or status seeking would be factors. Seems to me higher incomes & government welfare, hence less need to have children to look after you in old age, are likely factors.
Also people have figured out that having 3+ children is a bit of a burden, whereas 1 or 2 satisfies the desire for children sufficiently
Economic inequality matters when cultural norms dictate constant upward aspiration, including great effort even to maintain one's economic level; these needs (or aspirations) make modern, urbanized people put off having children until they are at their desired status or economic level.
Ok but haven’t people always aspired to make more money? The difference maybe is just contraception which allows them to postpone having children; though that said, previously they could have postponed getting married
No, aspiring to make more money is part of a market economy, upward mobility, modernity, the Protestant work ethic, the evolution of the American Dream, and related relatively recent developments.
Ben, Your opinion is that low fertility is because people have less need for children to look after them in old age; and the reasons not needing children to look after them in old age, is because either they have higher incomes or they have government welfare??
I asked that because demographers think not needing children for old-age insurance was part of the shift from 4-6 children to 2-3 children. Below-replacement-level fertility is the puzzle bedeviling police makers and strategists now.
Let me ask you, is the peacock's tail maladaptive? Is stotting maladaptive? Don't be so quick to assume that traits not directly optimizing productivity aren't adaptive. By having expensive, prestigious hobbies, candidates may be doing the equivalent of stotting for their employers and for their professional contact networks.
There can be costly signaling equilibria, but these are often less efficient that other equilibria. Culture's key task is to select among possible equilibria.
Yes, a lot of it is peacocking I think. "I'm so good I can run a company and have a house in Atherton, AND do Ironman triathlons on the side."
The audience isn't employers. A little bit for professional contacts, but mostly for social circles and potential mates. The human animal is pretty simple.
Sometimes the distance between "Not a pretty or inspiring picture" and "This is fine, actually" is pretty small. It's only a small tweak to go from "regimented socialist future" to "cruise ship" or "gated community with a community center" or "all-inclusive resort" - not elite high status stuff, but things a lot of people do aspire to when vacationing or for their retirement years. In other words, when we look at the parts of people's lives where they're not trying to optimize for income or prestige-to-enable-future-income, they do in fact sometimes try to maximize the amount of other things they want for a given budget, and that does in fact sometimes look like turning over a lot of control to a third party to optimize decisions on their behalf. I do hope future competition in these spaces leads to greater diversity of offerings optimized for different types of individuals, but we aren't necessarily starting from scratch.
Regarding the historical fear that "such regimentation would spread to all the rest of their lives, including their food, clothes, homes, friends, lovers, and parenting." Today I saw evidence that some people -- often political right-wingers -- do hold, today, exactly this fear. This is hilariously lampooned in a skit fom the Daily Show. The show features "freedom fighter" and conspiracy theorist Katie Hopkins arguing that car-free communities are designed to take away our individual freedoms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu6ozB7mKDQ
Goodharting becomes catastrophic when the tail of the metric is fatter than the tail of the target value. The value goes to zero as you optimize for the metric.
It seems likely that all the quantifiable metrics we have for "good culture" are fatter-tailed than actual good culture, by more than a linear amount; so optimizing for any cultural metric is likely to drive good culture to zero.
One suggested amelioration is quantilizing, instead of optimizing: randomly select from the N best-by-the-metric options. This seems like a model for the elite behavior you note: preventing full optimization by forcing people to spend some optimization points on pursuits uncorrelated with the primary metrics.
Re prestige of work vs leisure, both can now attract prestige, but at one time more was associated with leisure because it was a luxury item the rich had more of. So I don’t know whether in this list ‘low vs high status’ should be added or not:
>The modern world thus has a big split, variously described as STEM vs humanities, quantitative vs qualitative, competition vs cooperation, profane vs sacred, and leisure vs work
Cf in C P Snow’s famous 1950s lecture/book The Two Cultures, he distinguishes science & humanities, and (though I haven’t read the book) AFAIK he made the point that science was then considered lower class and humanities upper class, no doubt as aristocrats of the time disdained practical matters since they didn’t need to work for a living. (Hence for example UK private schools teaching Latin and Greek, as many still do!)
> The modern world thus has a big split, variously described as STEM vs humanities, quantitative vs qualitative, competition vs cooperation, profane vs sacred, and leisure vs work
>If you don’t want descendant cultures to be as different from us today as we are from most random past culture, but instead want some precious parts of our present soul culture to last far into the future, then we will need to find a way to package such precious parts with an overall adaptive whole cultural package.
Well, people still revere figures from millennia ago, so arguably some precious parts tend to persevere in adaptive packages by default. I'm still not really sure what is it that you wish to ensure preservation of in particular, and why you're certain that it isn't maladaptive in the first place.
We do still value Greek democratic and rationalist ideals, Jewish and Buddhist spiritual teachings, Chinese statecraft insights, etc. Sure, that's far from the complete packages of the originating cultures, but much of that was contingent on geography, tech levels, and other incidental circumstances. Likewise, I don't expect the contingent features of our culture to persist either, while some ideals just might stand the test of time.
Interesting. Feels like a pretty well reasoned premise. I think people may be a bit too violently allergic to it until past a considerable degree of decline but it does make sense.
No offense, but the correct response to maladaption or a decayed current state, when possible, is to reset back to the last known good state. Bluntly, spiritual fitness requires a spiritual framework and community, which requires a religion and a church. Soulless orgs aren't going to fix the nihilism of modem life with metrics, there's no chance they are even capable of doing so, what is necessary is a return to God, the sacred, and the transcendental. Religious societies will outlast nonreligious ones.
Even the culture of churched folks today is far different from what it was in 1700. Amish & Haredim are winning by such a "go back" move, but who else could do similar now?
I wonder if Christianity could not actually find some sort of balance between insularity (i.e. amish etc.) and modernity (the nihilism of numbers go up). I think a union between empirics and ritual/transcendent can be made theologically coherent.
The interesting question here is can it be institutionally established? I'd argue that we are in such an unusual historical moment with mental+spiritual health, fertility collapse, community desctruction etc. that the costs are starting to show and there are signs of growing demand for older systems of meaning in my generation. Basically an advertisement that soul culture matters. But of course, whether it produces another round of trendy spirituality vs durable institutions that enshrine adaptive or meta-adaptive values into themselves is yet to be seen.
Still, I feel more bullish on this proposal (and creating or assisting in the creation of such institutions) over the idea that we will suddenly lose status signals around system culture (and have well chosen systems).
If this is right, that such institutions can be built, they should outcompete both pure-modern and pure-insular communities on measurable outcomes over time.
I happily endorse more cults and cultural experimentation. Even so, I have to estimate our likely outcomes based on the variations we see and the rate at which new ones appear. This doesn't give much grounds for optimism.
The base rate for new cults is the wrong reference class. Christianity isn't a random cultural experiment. It's a two-thousand-year-old system that has already metabolized late antiquity, Aristotelian philosophy, the Reformation, and global expansion. The theological resources for a synthesis with empirical modernity already exist; what's missing is institutional form.
Additionally, the selection environment is moving. Fertility collapse, meaning-starvation, etc. are not subtle signals. Your pessimism from what I can tell is pricing in at a stable base environment. But towards the near death of cultures, there are sometimes resurgences caused by the fallout which spark new passforwards.
Certain meta cultures may also outlive civs or be made more dominant by the collapse of civs and could act as instruments for us to put our preferences into the lightcone. Can I name any political institutions with meaningful moral continuity from 200 AD? No. Can I name religious ones? Several. The abrahamic religions have a 100% survival rate. They have high transmission fidelity for values, high(er) fertility rates, and importantly characteristics which make them viable to survive and grow in times of crisis.
You are positing a new type of Christianity, and so for that the past rates at which such groups arise and prosper is a relevant base rate.
Not a new type of Christianity. A new institutional form within or out of an existing one.
The base rate for "new cults" is as misleading here as treating every new company as another entry in the base rate of "new businesses," ignoring whether it's YC-backed or not.
Granting the narrower point, that the base rate for new Christian institutional forms in modernity is low, I'd still posit the selection environment is shifting. Most recent attempts (megachurches, emergent church) launched into a period of relative cultural stability where secular substitutes still seemed viable.
In response to Roman collapse we had Benedictine monasticism, for the destruction of the parish we had Mendicant orders, for the reformation the Jesuits, for industrial dislocation we had Methodists. That these movements were so successful their values became invisible background doesn't mean they weren't successful.
Regarding " our soul culture drifting into increasing maladaption" -- One of the examples Hanson has given of maladaption is the fertility crash. What are other examples?
Doomscrolling and despair. Entertainment that absorbs energy that could be spent doing things, which might be adaptive. That old song lyric "your self destruction doesn't hurt them." Squandering money that could be used for doing things, which might be adaptive. Like how we spend so much on being individualistic and losing the benefits of mass production, from this essay.
I think some of these us d to be adaptive as a peacock's tail. Show off it's cool. But an entire society spending all that resources just to keep up is less adaptive than one where those resources are used to... do something, that might be adaptive.
To introduce lots of changes fast, and thus find the adaptive changes through experimentation, perhaps it can be marketed as something very elite. Like a series of fancy communes. But those have low status now. Doesn't have to be, though. Kellogg had a fancy resort with culture ideas embedded.
I agree with this Doomscrolling and pursuing entertainment. I appreciate what you write about consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses; the need to buy products and maintain a certain lifestyle in order to signal one's status. Hanson discusses various type of signalling in The Elephant in the Room.
Indeed, I’m unclear on what counts as maladaption here. Eg is it cultures that don’t help their members survive, or cultures that don’t themselves persist (eg because they encourage novelty)?
Both of those paths of influence contribute.
After reading Hanson's blog for a few years now, I have come to suspect that the main maladaptation is the fertility crash (possibly also any below-replacement decline). But if Hanson said this outright, then readers would start discussing solutions to fertility decline, as I have in prior discussions on this substack. And Hason doesn't want to go there because he has his own ideas that are larger than ensuring population growth (futurarchy, and other ideas consistent with libertarianism).
I maintain that the main cause of fertility decline is economic inequality, combined with evolved human nature for status seeking, combined with evolved human nature for the desire to choose when to parent, combined with the technology of modern contraception. We can't completely change the two that are evolved human nature, but cultures can change things that impact the desire to have children and resistance to status seeking. Society can develop (and have in prior eras) a variety of methods to ensure widespread 'social security' (security in one's social worth, also called ontological security). Prior cultures, before widespread urbanization, amassed and inculcated tools for keeping inequality in check. When people have ontological security and are confident they can give that to their children, then the biological drive to nurture children ensures at least replacement levels of fertility, if not more.
I spent 8 months thinking mainly about fertility decline before I realized its main causes were cultural, and then digging into what could be going wrong with culture.
Indeed, this is much more palatable to normies than his normal state of culture posts
I’m not clear why economic inequality or status seeking would be factors. Seems to me higher incomes & government welfare, hence less need to have children to look after you in old age, are likely factors.
Also people have figured out that having 3+ children is a bit of a burden, whereas 1 or 2 satisfies the desire for children sufficiently
Economic inequality matters when cultural norms dictate constant upward aspiration, including great effort even to maintain one's economic level; these needs (or aspirations) make modern, urbanized people put off having children until they are at their desired status or economic level.
Ok but haven’t people always aspired to make more money? The difference maybe is just contraception which allows them to postpone having children; though that said, previously they could have postponed getting married
No, aspiring to make more money is part of a market economy, upward mobility, modernity, the Protestant work ethic, the evolution of the American Dream, and related relatively recent developments.
Ben, Your opinion is that low fertility is because people have less need for children to look after them in old age; and the reasons not needing children to look after them in old age, is because either they have higher incomes or they have government welfare??
Yes (among other factors eg contraception, like you said)
I asked that because demographers think not needing children for old-age insurance was part of the shift from 4-6 children to 2-3 children. Below-replacement-level fertility is the puzzle bedeviling police makers and strategists now.
I don’t know much about the subject but don’t see why that trend shouldn’t continue to fewer children
> I’ve been exploring how autarchy might help
Did you mean to write "futarchy" or "autarky"?
Yes; fixed.
Let me ask you, is the peacock's tail maladaptive? Is stotting maladaptive? Don't be so quick to assume that traits not directly optimizing productivity aren't adaptive. By having expensive, prestigious hobbies, candidates may be doing the equivalent of stotting for their employers and for their professional contact networks.
There can be costly signaling equilibria, but these are often less efficient that other equilibria. Culture's key task is to select among possible equilibria.
"Efficient" isn't the same as "adaptive." The peacock's tail is not efficient, but it is adaptive.
Yes, a lot of it is peacocking I think. "I'm so good I can run a company and have a house in Atherton, AND do Ironman triathlons on the side."
The audience isn't employers. A little bit for professional contacts, but mostly for social circles and potential mates. The human animal is pretty simple.
Sometimes the distance between "Not a pretty or inspiring picture" and "This is fine, actually" is pretty small. It's only a small tweak to go from "regimented socialist future" to "cruise ship" or "gated community with a community center" or "all-inclusive resort" - not elite high status stuff, but things a lot of people do aspire to when vacationing or for their retirement years. In other words, when we look at the parts of people's lives where they're not trying to optimize for income or prestige-to-enable-future-income, they do in fact sometimes try to maximize the amount of other things they want for a given budget, and that does in fact sometimes look like turning over a lot of control to a third party to optimize decisions on their behalf. I do hope future competition in these spaces leads to greater diversity of offerings optimized for different types of individuals, but we aren't necessarily starting from scratch.
Regarding the historical fear that "such regimentation would spread to all the rest of their lives, including their food, clothes, homes, friends, lovers, and parenting." Today I saw evidence that some people -- often political right-wingers -- do hold, today, exactly this fear. This is hilariously lampooned in a skit fom the Daily Show. The show features "freedom fighter" and conspiracy theorist Katie Hopkins arguing that car-free communities are designed to take away our individual freedoms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu6ozB7mKDQ
https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/fuSaKr6t6Zuh6GKaQ/when-is-goodhart-catastrophic
Goodharting becomes catastrophic when the tail of the metric is fatter than the tail of the target value. The value goes to zero as you optimize for the metric.
It seems likely that all the quantifiable metrics we have for "good culture" are fatter-tailed than actual good culture, by more than a linear amount; so optimizing for any cultural metric is likely to drive good culture to zero.
https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/5bd75cc58225bf06703750b1/another-view-of-quantilizers-avoiding-goodhart-s-law
One suggested amelioration is quantilizing, instead of optimizing: randomly select from the N best-by-the-metric options. This seems like a model for the elite behavior you note: preventing full optimization by forcing people to spend some optimization points on pursuits uncorrelated with the primary metrics.
I'm focused on adaptive culture, not "good" by your personal values. I think we can find good enough metrics of adaptive culture.
Re prestige of work vs leisure, both can now attract prestige, but at one time more was associated with leisure because it was a luxury item the rich had more of. So I don’t know whether in this list ‘low vs high status’ should be added or not:
>The modern world thus has a big split, variously described as STEM vs humanities, quantitative vs qualitative, competition vs cooperation, profane vs sacred, and leisure vs work
Cf in C P Snow’s famous 1950s lecture/book The Two Cultures, he distinguishes science & humanities, and (though I haven’t read the book) AFAIK he made the point that science was then considered lower class and humanities upper class, no doubt as aristocrats of the time disdained practical matters since they didn’t need to work for a living. (Hence for example UK private schools teaching Latin and Greek, as many still do!)
That lecture is famous, but not very good.
> The modern world thus has a big split, variously described as STEM vs humanities, quantitative vs qualitative, competition vs cooperation, profane vs sacred, and leisure vs work
Should read ‘work vs leisure’.
true; fixed
FYI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
Yes, that is the We novel I mention in the post.
>If you don’t want descendant cultures to be as different from us today as we are from most random past culture, but instead want some precious parts of our present soul culture to last far into the future, then we will need to find a way to package such precious parts with an overall adaptive whole cultural package.
Well, people still revere figures from millennia ago, so arguably some precious parts tend to persevere in adaptive packages by default. I'm still not really sure what is it that you wish to ensure preservation of in particular, and why you're certain that it isn't maladaptive in the first place.
Having historical records of people is far from preserving their culture.
We do still value Greek democratic and rationalist ideals, Jewish and Buddhist spiritual teachings, Chinese statecraft insights, etc. Sure, that's far from the complete packages of the originating cultures, but much of that was contingent on geography, tech levels, and other incidental circumstances. Likewise, I don't expect the contingent features of our culture to persist either, while some ideals just might stand the test of time.
Interesting. Feels like a pretty well reasoned premise. I think people may be a bit too violently allergic to it until past a considerable degree of decline but it does make sense.