Many Culture Causes
I asked a set of polls, and 3 LLMs (ChatGPT,Claude,Gemini) to rate the relative explanatory power of the following 16 causes of cultural change for the two periods 1700-1900 and 1900-2025. I asked polls re picking 1 of 4 causes, and asked LLMs to think of 50 culture changes in each period, score each cause on a 0-10 scale re each change, and then add up scores per cause. (I also asked Grok, but its rounded sums suggested that it lied about generating detailed scores.)
Elite Youth Culture - Rise of high school and college, youth culture and movements; changes had to appeal to elite youths.
Lazy/Myopic/Selfish/Pleas - Revert to be more lazy, myopic, selfish, pleasure-oriented.
Forager Reversion - Revert to forager styles: more art, leisure, democracy, and equality, and less religion, fertility, and domination.
Individualism, Authentic - Rise in status of individualism, authenticity: think for yourself, follow your heart, be true to yourself.
Innovate, Explore, Create - Rise in status of innovation, exploration, creativity.
Abstract Concept, Reason - Rise in status of more abstract concepts and reasoning.
Rich, Safe, Trade/Talk - Stuff that appeals more to people who are richer and safer, with more/wider talk/travel/trade.
Merging Culture Appeal - Stuff accessible to and can appeal to the wide range of cultures merging in this period.
Fashion/Elite Displace - Rise in fashion as change process; changes must appeal to elites seeking to displace other elites.
Media/Word Legibile - Legibility of change symbols to spread via words and mass media.
Big Org/Inst. Codify - New stuff can be seen and codified by our new large orgs and institutions.
Sounds Good, Short-Run - Prefer stuff that sounds good and shows visible short-run gains.
Visible Sacrifice - Visible sacrifices show allegiance; we figure we value what we’ve seen recent big visible sacrifices for.
Lose Religion/Fragment - Loss of religion and traditions as core cultural glues induce fragmentation, divergence.
Low War/Internal Polarize - Less war and outside threats make more wealth inequality, stronger internal conflict, polarization.
Adapt Tech/Demography - Sensible adaptation to other behavior changes, not of culture type, eg, tech, demographic, and business practices.
Here are priority out of 100 poll scores, and median of the 3 LLM sum scores:
Scores don’t vary that much, correlations between sources are weak, and I overall disagree a lot with them. From which I conclude that either this is quite hard to figure out, and/or there really were quite a few strong causes.