"Americans have not replaced one form of interaction with another; they have reduced social interaction across the board. These findings point to a temporal reorganization of social life marked by the disappearance of the "night out."" - The End of Friday Nights with Friends, Neal Caren, August 2026
Maybe this? This can't be adaptive? Or maybe due to Covid, those monkish habits were optimal? (this is on top of the invisible hand pushing down fertility). I think Robin brushes with big strokes, and he hasn't proven his larger claim 'that evolution is broken', when evolution itself says it is presumed to work.
I agree with the counsel. I want to push on one sentence.
You grant that evolution is "blind in many ways, and so maybe you can see things that it cannot." The next sentence puts the deliberation back — the process has "taken into account" things you don't appreciate, your package may be a better bet than you realize. The concession doesn't survive its own paragraph. I don't think that's carelessness. Saying it is easy; adjusting your thinking to run on it is hard, and I couldn't do it a year ago either. A blind process has no objective, so "seeing what it cannot" has nothing to compare against. You and it are not two forecasters looking at the same board. There is no board.
That matters most for your last paragraph. If the process is unusually broken right now, what broke isn't only the inherited instincts — it's the return signal. Differential retention is the thing that tells you your steering was wrong. Take it offline and conscious analysis doesn't get sharper, it gets unchecked. It can grow more internally consistent every year while quietly losing contact with anything that would correct it. A broken window is the worst moment to trust the wheel, not the best.
On Henderson's question in his comment, the strongest example I know is the high-fertility religious enclaves. But look at what they actually show: a deliberately loaded package riding a host society they neither maintain nor could reproduce. That's mixing what you love with somebody else's life. It may be the honest version of your slogan, and it's a weaker one.
I keep thinking Hanson's looking at declining fertility and exclaiming "crisis!" without thinking whether the return signals driving it means a decline may actually be adaptive. That could be the case if AI is about to automate most human labor and climate change disrupts the habitats of a few billion people. Massively boosting your culture's fertility on the eve of that doesn't seem like a good idea.
Suppose you're optimising for cultural survival. If you have lots of children and they stay in the same place, that's probably a losing move. If you have lots of children and they spread throughout the world, so that some are in winning locations, that could be a winning move.
But *how* do you mix what you love into an adaptive package? That kind of deliberate cultural design seems out of reach for human nature--if we could coordinate to change our culture in response to the fertility crisis you fear, we could just coordinate to raise fertility. The most you could do is make a subculture you *think* is adaptive and *hope* it survives the chaotic centuries of collapse-and-rebuild to gain prominence.
Rather than “make peace with Darwin” , perhaps we should try to “domesticate Darwin.”
We should take advantage of its discovery mechanisms and of the power of selection while building welfare-enhancing systems that persist and spread. However we need to be careful to not mistake whatever wins the evolutionary contest for what is good.
Half of that we already do — make a lot of variants, cull against a test we wrote. That works because the test is ours and nothing can rewrite it on us.
But I don’t think Darwin is the kind of thing that can be domesticated. You domesticate a population, not the process. What we did with wheat and dogs wasn’t taming selection — it was starting a new line whose filter is us. And the old filter never paused. Wolves are still out there. Stop farming and wheat is gone in a season.
So a domesticated line lasts exactly as long as its keeper does. Propose it for a culture and you’ve proposed something that persists only while the domesticator persists — and nobody is keeping us. Which is why your last sentence matters more than the first. We’re not outside the pen picking winners. We’re in it.
Well, considering the Singularity is here, the domesticator for humans may be ASI. But that by itself would be quite disturbing: we selected farm animals for *our* benefit, not *theirs*, after all. Hopefully the optimists are right and ASI will be more ethical by virtue of being smarter.
Well, greed works against evolution, so it's a nice theory but it's at odds with economics.
I don't anticipate folks will be taming their addicted compulsion to accumulate wealth. They were told it's totally "rational." You're supposed to get as much money as you can, no matter what damage it was going to do to their brains.
Their mPFCs are shot from decoupling because you have to do cognitive defense mechanisms, not actual logic to justify anxiety, aka greed. Greed basically is cognitive bias, but denial income in 3...2...1...
Taking the prisoner's dilema as an arena for greed, my understanding is that there is a circular hierarchy:
- tit-for-tat wins against always-defect if there are enough tit-for-tatters that they sometimes meet
- given sources of noise, increasingly generous modified tit-for-tats win against simple tit-for-tat
- the end-point of that journey is always-cooperate
- always-defect wins against always-cooperate
As for whether occupying a position on that hierarcy is a cognitive bias, please direct me to your preferred account of a distinction between cognitive biasses and preferences.
Since your host censored my other account. I'll try to get this across to help you, but they'll probably just delete this too because they don't actually want you to be logical or healthy.
First of all, the prisoner's dilemma, you must believe in Individualism, right? That doesn't apply to Collectivism, which is a different brain state that coordinates social activity.
Game Theory is bullshit to 3.5 billion people, I have two pieces on my account if you want to go learn about how it's debunked by sociology, physics, traffic patterns, etc. If you actually think the world runs universally on individualism, you kinda fell for WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) Science. Maybe you don't know, individualism isn't the only biological brain state. Check studies on the self and close other representation in the medial prefrontal cortex.
So why do you believe in a theory made for board games and simple economies? Do you think it actually applies to a complex one?
You're just self reporting that the Manosphere and cold war propaganda appeals to you. Game Theory isn't some grand truth. Why do you personally choose to believe in it? You're going to have to prove it works first before I could answer your question, it's a coping mechanism for people with anxiety who don't have social skills. So they need to make their relationships into math equations, because they hope they can control their life that way.
A cognitive bias is a systematic generation of your own brain, usually unconscious error in thinking that affects how people process information, judge others, and make decisions. It's you assuming you know cause and effect, when you matched the wrong cause to the wrong outcome.
Can you not tell a preference for one ice cream over another from an error in reasoning? Can't tell a bias from your desires? If you can't, you're definitely doing cognitive defense mechanisms. Do you not know there's these things called logical fallacies?
We can tell your ideas aren't logical from a set of rules that have been put forth over the last couple thousand years. If you don't use any of those rules then you don't know emotional from rational. Rationalizing, making excuses or finding reasons for behaviors that are actually driven by greed, guilt, etc isn't the same thing as rationality. You seem to be conflating the two. Can't tell your emotions from logic.
Yep, that's greed turning into anxiety, which will now generate ideas you might want to fact check.
> I actually think that we now live at a special time when our Darwinian evolution process is unusually broken, making conscious analysis unusually good at figuring out how to be more adaptive
The comedy! In a post about making peace with Darwin we get this hand grenade in the final paragraph.
Making peace with God means: Accepting the greater wisdom of a higher power. You don't get to keep shaking your fist at God when something happens that you don't like or understand. To make peace is to let go of ego.
I would ‘replace it’ with what it pretends to replace: Creation. As the holes in evolution get more and more evident, I am wondering what atheists will replace it with.
You might wish to examine your statement logically. Those two things do not contradict. It is perfectly possible the holes in evolution are getting more and more evident (as they are, as the literature continually shows under the surface), and yet belief in creation declines. Belief in creation is not related to holes in evolution. Evolution gets taught unquestioningly by more and more people… regardless of the evidence for or against.
If it's "evident", then to who is it evident? Not the people in aggregate being surveyed. And certainly less so the people who've actually read "the literature", as that's anti-correlated with belief in Creation.
Yes… https://vonwriting.substack.com/p/what-is-evidence?r=6csnmecause ‘the literature’ is solidly pro-evolution. What choice do they have? Would you like to write and try to get published a pro-creation or pro-intelligent design paper in ‘the literature’? Your career would be finished, or you would have to go and work exclusively for the dark side.
And philosophically… being ‘pro-creation’ is not even a possibility. One would have to first accept the idea of a creator God, then try to compare what a created universe looks like compared to an evolved one.
I think you're making a good point. Like much of your writing, it's pretty abstract. Can you give an example or two and show how you would mix it?
"Americans have not replaced one form of interaction with another; they have reduced social interaction across the board. These findings point to a temporal reorganization of social life marked by the disappearance of the "night out."" - The End of Friday Nights with Friends, Neal Caren, August 2026
Maybe this? This can't be adaptive? Or maybe due to Covid, those monkish habits were optimal? (this is on top of the invisible hand pushing down fertility). I think Robin brushes with big strokes, and he hasn't proven his larger claim 'that evolution is broken', when evolution itself says it is presumed to work.
I agree with the counsel. I want to push on one sentence.
You grant that evolution is "blind in many ways, and so maybe you can see things that it cannot." The next sentence puts the deliberation back — the process has "taken into account" things you don't appreciate, your package may be a better bet than you realize. The concession doesn't survive its own paragraph. I don't think that's carelessness. Saying it is easy; adjusting your thinking to run on it is hard, and I couldn't do it a year ago either. A blind process has no objective, so "seeing what it cannot" has nothing to compare against. You and it are not two forecasters looking at the same board. There is no board.
That matters most for your last paragraph. If the process is unusually broken right now, what broke isn't only the inherited instincts — it's the return signal. Differential retention is the thing that tells you your steering was wrong. Take it offline and conscious analysis doesn't get sharper, it gets unchecked. It can grow more internally consistent every year while quietly losing contact with anything that would correct it. A broken window is the worst moment to trust the wheel, not the best.
On Henderson's question in his comment, the strongest example I know is the high-fertility religious enclaves. But look at what they actually show: a deliberately loaded package riding a host society they neither maintain nor could reproduce. That's mixing what you love with somebody else's life. It may be the honest version of your slogan, and it's a weaker one.
I keep thinking Hanson's looking at declining fertility and exclaiming "crisis!" without thinking whether the return signals driving it means a decline may actually be adaptive. That could be the case if AI is about to automate most human labor and climate change disrupts the habitats of a few billion people. Massively boosting your culture's fertility on the eve of that doesn't seem like a good idea.
Depends.
Suppose you're optimising for cultural survival. If you have lots of children and they stay in the same place, that's probably a losing move. If you have lots of children and they spread throughout the world, so that some are in winning locations, that could be a winning move.
But *how* do you mix what you love into an adaptive package? That kind of deliberate cultural design seems out of reach for human nature--if we could coordinate to change our culture in response to the fertility crisis you fear, we could just coordinate to raise fertility. The most you could do is make a subculture you *think* is adaptive and *hope* it survives the chaotic centuries of collapse-and-rebuild to gain prominence.
Rather than “make peace with Darwin” , perhaps we should try to “domesticate Darwin.”
We should take advantage of its discovery mechanisms and of the power of selection while building welfare-enhancing systems that persist and spread. However we need to be careful to not mistake whatever wins the evolutionary contest for what is good.
Half of that we already do — make a lot of variants, cull against a test we wrote. That works because the test is ours and nothing can rewrite it on us.
But I don’t think Darwin is the kind of thing that can be domesticated. You domesticate a population, not the process. What we did with wheat and dogs wasn’t taming selection — it was starting a new line whose filter is us. And the old filter never paused. Wolves are still out there. Stop farming and wheat is gone in a season.
So a domesticated line lasts exactly as long as its keeper does. Propose it for a culture and you’ve proposed something that persists only while the domesticator persists — and nobody is keeping us. Which is why your last sentence matters more than the first. We’re not outside the pen picking winners. We’re in it.
Well, considering the Singularity is here, the domesticator for humans may be ASI. But that by itself would be quite disturbing: we selected farm animals for *our* benefit, not *theirs*, after all. Hopefully the optimists are right and ASI will be more ethical by virtue of being smarter.
AI safety researchers, take note.
Well, greed works against evolution, so it's a nice theory but it's at odds with economics.
I don't anticipate folks will be taming their addicted compulsion to accumulate wealth. They were told it's totally "rational." You're supposed to get as much money as you can, no matter what damage it was going to do to their brains.
Their mPFCs are shot from decoupling because you have to do cognitive defense mechanisms, not actual logic to justify anxiety, aka greed. Greed basically is cognitive bias, but denial income in 3...2...1...
Ok, I'm your qualified denial.
Taking the prisoner's dilema as an arena for greed, my understanding is that there is a circular hierarchy:
- tit-for-tat wins against always-defect if there are enough tit-for-tatters that they sometimes meet
- given sources of noise, increasingly generous modified tit-for-tats win against simple tit-for-tat
- the end-point of that journey is always-cooperate
- always-defect wins against always-cooperate
As for whether occupying a position on that hierarcy is a cognitive bias, please direct me to your preferred account of a distinction between cognitive biasses and preferences.
Since your host censored my other account. I'll try to get this across to help you, but they'll probably just delete this too because they don't actually want you to be logical or healthy.
First of all, the prisoner's dilemma, you must believe in Individualism, right? That doesn't apply to Collectivism, which is a different brain state that coordinates social activity.
Game Theory is bullshit to 3.5 billion people, I have two pieces on my account if you want to go learn about how it's debunked by sociology, physics, traffic patterns, etc. If you actually think the world runs universally on individualism, you kinda fell for WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) Science. Maybe you don't know, individualism isn't the only biological brain state. Check studies on the self and close other representation in the medial prefrontal cortex.
So why do you believe in a theory made for board games and simple economies? Do you think it actually applies to a complex one?
You're just self reporting that the Manosphere and cold war propaganda appeals to you. Game Theory isn't some grand truth. Why do you personally choose to believe in it? You're going to have to prove it works first before I could answer your question, it's a coping mechanism for people with anxiety who don't have social skills. So they need to make their relationships into math equations, because they hope they can control their life that way.
A cognitive bias is a systematic generation of your own brain, usually unconscious error in thinking that affects how people process information, judge others, and make decisions. It's you assuming you know cause and effect, when you matched the wrong cause to the wrong outcome.
Can you not tell a preference for one ice cream over another from an error in reasoning? Can't tell a bias from your desires? If you can't, you're definitely doing cognitive defense mechanisms. Do you not know there's these things called logical fallacies?
We can tell your ideas aren't logical from a set of rules that have been put forth over the last couple thousand years. If you don't use any of those rules then you don't know emotional from rational. Rationalizing, making excuses or finding reasons for behaviors that are actually driven by greed, guilt, etc isn't the same thing as rationality. You seem to be conflating the two. Can't tell your emotions from logic.
Yep, that's greed turning into anxiety, which will now generate ideas you might want to fact check.
The mechanism is variation without direction plus selection by
environment, which makes adaptiveness a property read off after the
fact. Existing now is not evidence of having been selected, and the
package is not a bet the process placed. Drift, hitchhiking,
developmental constraint, and traits that simply have not been
eliminated yet all sit in the gap between surviving and being adapted.
> I actually think that we now live at a special time when our Darwinian evolution process is unusually broken, making conscious analysis unusually good at figuring out how to be more adaptive
The comedy! In a post about making peace with Darwin we get this hand grenade in the final paragraph.
Making peace with God means: Accepting the greater wisdom of a higher power. You don't get to keep shaking your fist at God when something happens that you don't like or understand. To make peace is to let go of ego.
I will have peace with Darwinian Evolution, when the idea is settled permanently in its grave.
What exactly do you imagine replacing it with?
No imagination needed :)
I would ‘replace it’ with what it pretends to replace: Creation. As the holes in evolution get more and more evident, I am wondering what atheists will replace it with.
It is not the case that "the holes in evolution get more and more evident". Belief in Creationism has declined over time rather than risen.
You might wish to examine your statement logically. Those two things do not contradict. It is perfectly possible the holes in evolution are getting more and more evident (as they are, as the literature continually shows under the surface), and yet belief in creation declines. Belief in creation is not related to holes in evolution. Evolution gets taught unquestioningly by more and more people… regardless of the evidence for or against.
If it's "evident", then to who is it evident? Not the people in aggregate being surveyed. And certainly less so the people who've actually read "the literature", as that's anti-correlated with belief in Creation.
Yes… https://vonwriting.substack.com/p/what-is-evidence?r=6csnmecause ‘the literature’ is solidly pro-evolution. What choice do they have? Would you like to write and try to get published a pro-creation or pro-intelligent design paper in ‘the literature’? Your career would be finished, or you would have to go and work exclusively for the dark side.
And philosophically… being ‘pro-creation’ is not even a possibility. One would have to first accept the idea of a creator God, then try to compare what a created universe looks like compared to an evolved one.