A common immature attitude to desire is to assume that you are entitled to what you passionately desire, and to then cry if you don’t get it, to pressure others to give it to you.
This still does not solve the problem of what anybody's culture really "is". What Is MY culture? I seriously don't know how to call it, I am way too cosmopolitan / globalised for this. There is even a word for it: "Third Culture Kid". Any mention of culture or nation makes my hair stand on my back. I know what cultural elements I personally cherish but they can't be combined into a set that I could explain to anyone else. The mature attitude towards culture would simply be, for me, to not worry too much about giving things names and to keep things that work. At least, temporarily.
Of course everyone has "their" culture. But culture has many dimensions. This bizarre contemporary culture debate assumes that "my" culture is necessarily the same or at least very similar to someone else's. In its most toxic formulation, this wordview babbles on about "national culture", the worst abomination of them all, the proposition that each and everyone living within the confines of some arbitrary administrative district, called a "nation", ought to have the same values, same sets of behaviors, same "culture". And that is just not the case. I don't need to "see" "my" "culture" even though it certainly exists. All I need is to acknowledge that "we" are not the same in many respects. There is no "we". Also, see Chandran Kukathas.
Regarding the second attitude, expressed indifference is often just a defense mechanism against the intuition that our cherished values lack adaptive fitness.
"Adaptive fitness" is excessively vague. Do you mean a culture that is able to memetically propagate itself against other cultures? Or do you mean a culture that leads to its members reproducing a lot? Those aren't the same. Pre-industrial cultures lost the memetic competition to modern cultures, so they weren't adaptive in that sense. Pre-industrial cultures also didn't lead to high global population, because of limited food availability. Food availability increased only due to technology, which is only due to the modern culture of scientific investigation and engineering. A return to pre-industrial cultures would lose the emphasis on science and engineering, which would cause the food supply to also collapse, resulting in a return to pre-industrial levels of population.
Biologists by and large deal with DNA or RNA genes, not memes. They use the term "adaptive" for traits that arose via DNA or RNA natural selection. It doesn't work the same way for memes (culture) which are not transmitted by DNA and vary substantially in ways *other* than random variation followed by selection.
Listen, the main ambiguity is whether you're using "adaptive" to mean traits that help the *culture* propagate its memes, or whether you're using "adaptive" to mean cultural traits that help the *person* propagate their DNA. Do you actually mean both of those? Because those are very different concepts that shouldn't be lumped. Cultures have many traits that help the culture propagate its memes, that don't help its members propagate their DNA.
The other ambiguity is over what time frame, e.g. a cultural trait may be successful at propagating its memes (or its members' DNA, whichever one you mean) for a few hundred or a few thousand years, and then the environment changes and it is no longer successful at that. Was the trait adaptive during the time it was successful? Because if so, then modern culture is adaptive because it propagates its memes successfully, however temporary that situation may be.
Re: "Biologists by and large deal with DNA or RNA genes, not memes."
Isn't that partly because of the way that the human sciences got divided up - into the humanities? I mean: there's cultural anthropology, psychology, sociology and history - which very much deal with memes - although they don't always use the term - or even acknowledge the theory of cultural evolution, the contributions of Charles Darwin or his students and successors.
An "overall" measure of adaptation might declare the combination of smallpox and humans is adaptive - since the combination helped the European settlers wipe out most of the native Americans.
It's possible to use such metrics - but it is also possible to specify in more detail which traits you are talking about - for example with virulence being adaptive to the smallpox virus, but smallpox virulence typically being maladaptive to its human host.
In cultural evolution, some are going to prefer to talk about what is adaptive to the human nuclear DNA - and not some kind of overall average that includes gut bacteria, viruses, memes and other symbionts.
Many people have genetic immune systems - to help them avoid viral infections - and memetic immune systems - to help them avoid becoming slaves to bad memes. For example, I know some things about religion. Technically, I am a carrier. However I don't necessarily allow those memes to control my behavior. So: I often don't want to use an "overall" metric of adaptation.
Jumbling DNA evolution and cultural evolution together is a common approach to the topic. Ben Cullen patronisingly referred to the typical result as a "bio-cultural muddle" - in his book: "Contagious Ideas: On Evolution, Culture, Archaeology and Cultural Virus Theory". I think that is a useful perspective.
I think it's immature to expect that the culture you were raised in is preferable to all others, and that any change away from it must be bad - like a toddler who has his favorite foods and refuses to try anything new. Culture could change by becoming better. Modern culture is preferable to medieval peasant culture, and this trend can continue.
Culture isn't random. It's formed by millions of people optimizing their individual preferences. The more information people have, the better they are able to optimize their preferences. So we would expect further cultural improvement in the future, as long as available information also continues to improve.
A more mature stance is to admit that the future won’t preserve your culture by default, and that in fact it might not preserve very much of it. But then to ask what you most value in your culture, and to search for ways to preserve those best features. Even if you maybe can’t save much.
Is this equally valid?
%s/culture/species/
A more mature stance is to admit that the future won’t preserve your species by default, and that in fact it might not preserve very much of it. But then to ask what you most value in your species, and to search for ways to preserve those best features. Even if you maybe can’t save much.
No because honestly nobody seriously thinks the antisocial cultural trends will lower TFR to extinction levels. Sure transhumanists singularity people have those sort of existential worries but they don't really care about culture nor TFR. Children happen regardless of culture for the most part, nothing gets lost, it's genetic. Western Enlightenment values on the other hand aren't innate and can get lost to time like chattel slavery and human sacrifice.
I was thinking of AI replacing humans. Lots of people are trying to prevent it; nobody seems to be trying to ensure that, if it happens, important things like consciousness, qualia, and love will be passed on.
Tl;dr particular moral beliefs are somewhat undeciable, but his answer to 1st-level-meta morality - how to get along with people who don't share your entire object-level morality - is simple and hard to argue against.
I couldn't comment over there (I'm not a paid subscriber), but his opening paragraph seems wrong. He provided no actual data (I would link to some tweets by Phil Magness on citations, but since Magness blocked me recently the twitter search function doesn't include him), but merely provided his own impressions of his own field, which is hardly the same as academia as a whole. Tyler Harper just made a big splash with his article on the Mellon Foundation dominating grants for the humanities, and that perspective is hardly limited to Mellon. DEI got extended into hiring for STEM, and Heath's fellow political philosophers preferring Rawls doesn't contradict that at all. Even pointing out that the commonly heard variants of CRT don't match what originated in law schools doesn't contradict the fact that these heretical https://zermatist.medium.com/on-pretentious-rhetoric-bf034a25bd41 versions have spread to administrators, and they can impose that ideology on other parts of the university.
His opening paragraph is definitely, blatantly false in most of the humanities. But perhaps it's true in the fields of political philosophy, legal theory, and political science? I mean, woke legal theory is copied directly from the Nazis: codified law is an inherently evil tool by which the civilized Jewish capitalists oppress the people of Kultur. Probably hard to fill a law department with people who hate the law. (Although English Lit departments have already done their equivalent.)
That seems prima facie reasonable, but it seems to minimize the very real cases when 'the best feasible options' are just not good enough for you, and you'd rather just be indifferent or see it all burn down in those cases. Culture is a good example: if our replacer is sufficiently distant from us, why care about them at all? I don't see this as an issue of maturity. There are sometimes choices between two unacceptable options, i.e, would you rather be tortured with this implement or with this other one?
I believe that the right kind of AGI deployment is our best chance of fostering the kind of culture we want -- because it is rational.
"All of an AGI’s advantages culminate in its ability to learn to ... dependably discover objective knowledge or truths. This will be of tremendous help not only to create material abundance for everyone, but also to improve our individual ability to think more clearly. A dedicated personal AGI (you own it, and it serves your purpose, not some megacorporation’s) can be like a little angel on your shoulder to help you make better choices and to flourish."
I'm more inclined to believe that with all the focus on 'alignment' we are more likely to align with AIs that are aligned with our group, only to find the looming spectre of Dunbar's Number. Those of us who cannot survive that relative amount of anonymity -- well we're outside of the bonds of the plurality of humanity. This only puts digital steel around our bubbles, for which we will be called to perform, because it remembers everything.
All this is to say that perhaps we're making too much of culture itself. We need it too much because we've submitted our moral priorities to 'the world', and believe ourselves to be greatly capable of multicultural respect and flexibility.
This still does not solve the problem of what anybody's culture really "is". What Is MY culture? I seriously don't know how to call it, I am way too cosmopolitan / globalised for this. There is even a word for it: "Third Culture Kid". Any mention of culture or nation makes my hair stand on my back. I know what cultural elements I personally cherish but they can't be combined into a set that I could explain to anyone else. The mature attitude towards culture would simply be, for me, to not worry too much about giving things names and to keep things that work. At least, temporarily.
Yes people find it hard to see their culture. Even so, it very much exists.
Of course everyone has "their" culture. But culture has many dimensions. This bizarre contemporary culture debate assumes that "my" culture is necessarily the same or at least very similar to someone else's. In its most toxic formulation, this wordview babbles on about "national culture", the worst abomination of them all, the proposition that each and everyone living within the confines of some arbitrary administrative district, called a "nation", ought to have the same values, same sets of behaviors, same "culture". And that is just not the case. I don't need to "see" "my" "culture" even though it certainly exists. All I need is to acknowledge that "we" are not the same in many respects. There is no "we". Also, see Chandran Kukathas.
Regarding the second attitude, expressed indifference is often just a defense mechanism against the intuition that our cherished values lack adaptive fitness.
I doubt that it's true apathy.
Yes of course, that's what I was implying.
"Adaptive fitness" is excessively vague. Do you mean a culture that is able to memetically propagate itself against other cultures? Or do you mean a culture that leads to its members reproducing a lot? Those aren't the same. Pre-industrial cultures lost the memetic competition to modern cultures, so they weren't adaptive in that sense. Pre-industrial cultures also didn't lead to high global population, because of limited food availability. Food availability increased only due to technology, which is only due to the modern culture of scientific investigation and engineering. A return to pre-industrial cultures would lose the emphasis on science and engineering, which would cause the food supply to also collapse, resulting in a return to pre-industrial levels of population.
"Adaptive" is a well defined biological concept.
When you are applying this term to cultures, you aren't using the normal biological sense of the term.
I've named a specific point of vagueness - you can't disambiguate this by just claiming it isn't vague.
Culture is biological, and has several paths to inheritance. "Adaptive" is an overall measure, including all of the paths.
Biologists by and large deal with DNA or RNA genes, not memes. They use the term "adaptive" for traits that arose via DNA or RNA natural selection. It doesn't work the same way for memes (culture) which are not transmitted by DNA and vary substantially in ways *other* than random variation followed by selection.
Listen, the main ambiguity is whether you're using "adaptive" to mean traits that help the *culture* propagate its memes, or whether you're using "adaptive" to mean cultural traits that help the *person* propagate their DNA. Do you actually mean both of those? Because those are very different concepts that shouldn't be lumped. Cultures have many traits that help the culture propagate its memes, that don't help its members propagate their DNA.
The other ambiguity is over what time frame, e.g. a cultural trait may be successful at propagating its memes (or its members' DNA, whichever one you mean) for a few hundred or a few thousand years, and then the environment changes and it is no longer successful at that. Was the trait adaptive during the time it was successful? Because if so, then modern culture is adaptive because it propagates its memes successfully, however temporary that situation may be.
Re: "Biologists by and large deal with DNA or RNA genes, not memes."
Isn't that partly because of the way that the human sciences got divided up - into the humanities? I mean: there's cultural anthropology, psychology, sociology and history - which very much deal with memes - although they don't always use the term - or even acknowledge the theory of cultural evolution, the contributions of Charles Darwin or his students and successors.
An "overall" measure of adaptation might declare the combination of smallpox and humans is adaptive - since the combination helped the European settlers wipe out most of the native Americans.
It's possible to use such metrics - but it is also possible to specify in more detail which traits you are talking about - for example with virulence being adaptive to the smallpox virus, but smallpox virulence typically being maladaptive to its human host.
In cultural evolution, some are going to prefer to talk about what is adaptive to the human nuclear DNA - and not some kind of overall average that includes gut bacteria, viruses, memes and other symbionts.
Many people have genetic immune systems - to help them avoid viral infections - and memetic immune systems - to help them avoid becoming slaves to bad memes. For example, I know some things about religion. Technically, I am a carrier. However I don't necessarily allow those memes to control my behavior. So: I often don't want to use an "overall" metric of adaptation.
Jumbling DNA evolution and cultural evolution together is a common approach to the topic. Ben Cullen patronisingly referred to the typical result as a "bio-cultural muddle" - in his book: "Contagious Ideas: On Evolution, Culture, Archaeology and Cultural Virus Theory". I think that is a useful perspective.
Is the professional field of Cultural Preservation an institutionalized expression of this attitude?
I think it's immature to expect that the culture you were raised in is preferable to all others, and that any change away from it must be bad - like a toddler who has his favorite foods and refuses to try anything new. Culture could change by becoming better. Modern culture is preferable to medieval peasant culture, and this trend can continue.
Culture isn't random. It's formed by millions of people optimizing their individual preferences. The more information people have, the better they are able to optimize their preferences. So we would expect further cultural improvement in the future, as long as available information also continues to improve.
Robin wrote:
A more mature stance is to admit that the future won’t preserve your culture by default, and that in fact it might not preserve very much of it. But then to ask what you most value in your culture, and to search for ways to preserve those best features. Even if you maybe can’t save much.
Is this equally valid?
%s/culture/species/
A more mature stance is to admit that the future won’t preserve your species by default, and that in fact it might not preserve very much of it. But then to ask what you most value in your species, and to search for ways to preserve those best features. Even if you maybe can’t save much.
No because honestly nobody seriously thinks the antisocial cultural trends will lower TFR to extinction levels. Sure transhumanists singularity people have those sort of existential worries but they don't really care about culture nor TFR. Children happen regardless of culture for the most part, nothing gets lost, it's genetic. Western Enlightenment values on the other hand aren't innate and can get lost to time like chattel slavery and human sacrifice.
I was thinking of AI replacing humans. Lots of people are trying to prevent it; nobody seems to be trying to ensure that, if it happens, important things like consciousness, qualia, and love will be passed on.
This is startlingly aligned with this recent piece of John Rawls https://open.substack.com/pub/persuasion1/p/the-unexpected-persistence-of-john?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=cd06p
Tl;dr particular moral beliefs are somewhat undeciable, but his answer to 1st-level-meta morality - how to get along with people who don't share your entire object-level morality - is simple and hard to argue against.
I couldn't comment over there (I'm not a paid subscriber), but his opening paragraph seems wrong. He provided no actual data (I would link to some tweets by Phil Magness on citations, but since Magness blocked me recently the twitter search function doesn't include him), but merely provided his own impressions of his own field, which is hardly the same as academia as a whole. Tyler Harper just made a big splash with his article on the Mellon Foundation dominating grants for the humanities, and that perspective is hardly limited to Mellon. DEI got extended into hiring for STEM, and Heath's fellow political philosophers preferring Rawls doesn't contradict that at all. Even pointing out that the commonly heard variants of CRT don't match what originated in law schools doesn't contradict the fact that these heretical https://zermatist.medium.com/on-pretentious-rhetoric-bf034a25bd41 versions have spread to administrators, and they can impose that ideology on other parts of the university.
His opening paragraph is definitely, blatantly false in most of the humanities. But perhaps it's true in the fields of political philosophy, legal theory, and political science? I mean, woke legal theory is copied directly from the Nazis: codified law is an inherently evil tool by which the civilized Jewish capitalists oppress the people of Kultur. Probably hard to fill a law department with people who hate the law. (Although English Lit departments have already done their equivalent.)
That seems prima facie reasonable, but it seems to minimize the very real cases when 'the best feasible options' are just not good enough for you, and you'd rather just be indifferent or see it all burn down in those cases. Culture is a good example: if our replacer is sufficiently distant from us, why care about them at all? I don't see this as an issue of maturity. There are sometimes choices between two unacceptable options, i.e, would you rather be tortured with this implement or with this other one?
All the more reason to work hard to preserve as much as possible of our civ.
Hey, nice to see you here, Sir! You've made yourself scarce in The Other Place.
I believe that the right kind of AGI deployment is our best chance of fostering the kind of culture we want -- because it is rational.
"All of an AGI’s advantages culminate in its ability to learn to ... dependably discover objective knowledge or truths. This will be of tremendous help not only to create material abundance for everyone, but also to improve our individual ability to think more clearly. A dedicated personal AGI (you own it, and it serves your purpose, not some megacorporation’s) can be like a little angel on your shoulder to help you make better choices and to flourish."
https://petervoss.substack.com/p/agi-intelligence-is-different-in
If we see a problem that afflicts us, and will also afflict future AI, why not start working on it now, instead of waiting for AI to fix it?
Personally, I can do a *lot* more by focusing on AGI. I believe that with our approach we're only low single digit years away from AGI.
I'm more inclined to believe that with all the focus on 'alignment' we are more likely to align with AIs that are aligned with our group, only to find the looming spectre of Dunbar's Number. Those of us who cannot survive that relative amount of anonymity -- well we're outside of the bonds of the plurality of humanity. This only puts digital steel around our bubbles, for which we will be called to perform, because it remembers everything.
All this is to say that perhaps we're making too much of culture itself. We need it too much because we've submitted our moral priorities to 'the world', and believe ourselves to be greatly capable of multicultural respect and flexibility.
Sounds good! Good luck with the acting part. Myself, you know I'd be more inclined to making Caroline immortal.