Experts are the people who know and do the most on particular valuable topics, while elites are the people of highest status … we … tend to accept many important actions only if they are taken by elites, who do it in a sufficiently elite style.
In the talk/session you gave, you expressed frustration at the fact that it is difficult to get people interested in this issue. I think the key challenges you face are:
1) Cultural drift is abstract, and the more abstract something is, the less people are able to understand it, and therefore get interested in it.
2) There are already several causes competing for the slot of "this is the key issue of our time, which will ruin our society if neglected". Some of them have lots of inertia already, such as climate change, warfare (so-called "democracies vs autocracies" on top of all local conflicts), perhaps AI, etc. Most of these have the advantage of being very concrete and digestible, or being framed as such.
3) Cultural drift isn't easy to fit into an "us vs them" mold, which naturally attracts people to fight. Even climate change is mostly framed as "the people" fighting the (financial and political) elites or as the rich (who emit CO2) oppressing the poor (who end up paying most of the price).
4) Cultural drift as you've defined it is a very novel idea, which you yourself came upon only recently. Even climate activists took decades to build the inertia they have today.
IMHO 1) is right now the most important of these. You will have to frame it in very concrete terms. Even relatively concrete predictions such as "declining innovation and growth" don't resonate with most of the population. More like "your kids might starve, because ABC". This is what climate activists do, even when it isn't accurate. Not recommending exaggerating or being dishonest, but I'm confident that more will be needed.
You should try Elon Musk. He's obsessed with the Great Filter and should be interested in Grabby Aliens if you can convince him that's the updated/better theory. He already shares your concerns about fertility. You have mutual acquaintances: Eliezer and Lex Fridman. He is too unfocused to be expert and too prominent not to fall into the elite category instead.
If you can reframe his recent political efforts (especially the relatively successful one in Brazil) as efforts against cultural drift, he's theory-minded enough to be receptive to something that gives coherence to his political impulses.
I view writers on substack (like myself) as tossing straws on the back of a camel. Individually we only get through to a few but collectively we are moving the pendulum towards truth and away from media manipulation, propaganda and lies.
Big disruptive ideas take a long time to be accepted. Generations. One proposal from one thinker, no matter how well articulated and reasoned, doesn't do it. Others have to pick up the ball and run with it - at minimum champion it, usually tweak it. Eventually if the idea is judged good elites get behind it. Vast patience is required. But someone needs to generate the original ideas. You are making a larger impact than you seem to think.
Hanson has been writing about institutions for much longer than about aliens. Even his book on psychology was a reaction to his failure to get traction for his ideas on institutions.
Not for "generations". His ideas on aliens are fascinating but are not disruptive. His ideas on institutions might get traction in 50 years or 100. If ever. If we're still around.
Maybe it's just that people don't like your ideas on some topics, and like them on others, and being an elite or expert isn't that relevant. Although for me personally I really like your ideas on institutions, and aliens have never particularly interested me. But your writing about the sacred and culture drift hasn't jumped out to me either.
If you wrote a populist book, about any topic, I bet that'd be quite popular, because the populace by definition likes populism. But a lot of your ideas are quite anti-populist and go against what a lot of people want to hear.
I see futarchy/prediction markets as a bridge between populism and elitism. Whoever the elites currently are, they can be displaced by anyone who does a better job of predicting than them.
And interestingly enough, it seems like the prediction market ideas look like they are actually being implemented in the cryptocurrency space. Perhaps there just needs to be some people that spin up some odds and payout contracts on them for cultural drift observables (and also find some kind of reliable oracle on such states).
Your largest group of natural allies on cultural drift are conservative Christians. But (a few of us excepted) they are just as repelled by rationalists as rationalists are by CCs. To do something about it, you may need to hold your nose and build some bridges, work together to identify solutions that would work for both CCs and rationalists. Both groups tend to think within their own separate boxes - maybe by bringing the two spheres together some interesting and novel ideas could arise.
Recently I spent a year finding a way to make sense of the sacred, and was also disappointed to see little interest in that.
-- I'd be the ideal audience for this and I'm sorry you're disappointed. But you're definitely an elite, you're a professor. As an actual humble stay at home mother, I'm slightly disappointed that my ideas don't even get nearly as much engagement as Robin Hanson.
You frame this as “elites vs experts” but what you, and other intellectuals similarly situated, need is better marketing. Not for nothing is the notion of the public intellectual an enduring one.
A cynical reading would say that elites generally do their own thing and have never given much credence to experts except at times of intense crisis and competition - the Cold War was a kind of heyday of expert influence with the likes of Oppenheimer, RAND corporation, technocratic secretaries of state, etc.
A more idealistic view would say that experts inform and inspire elites; they are the eminences grises that sow the seeds for tomorrow's field of ideas. But it takes the elites to push the overton windows to allow a new range of expert ideas to come to light. It's a cyclical pattern.
Consider packaging up your most important messages and interesting ideas in the form of videos that are 5 minutes long or less. Cover the key ideas, have a few slides, include recommendations for those who want to do something about it, and pointers to more information (including longer videos or interviews). Short, interesting videos can really help an idea to spread. Another kind of video that I would find super interesting would be a long-form survey of ideas related to alternative institutions - what are the key books, key fields, and most interesting ideas - like a university lecture. You could ask your Twitter following to vote on topics they would most like to see. I really like your video about prediction markets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yZKGbq1YmA and often point people to it. Some people in my field (human-computer interaction) often publish a paper accompanied with a short (30-60 second) teaser video and a longer (5 minutes +) more detailed video. If you think that some of the comments on your blog posts demonstrate a misunderstanding of your ideas, maybe there's even more need for short video explainers.
Your ideas on cultural drift read, to me, like a weak rationalization for right-wing regressive politics. There's so much about the way culture changes that you're ignoring, lumping it all together as "drift" so that you can claim it is all bad.
The main thing you're ignoring is the process of dialectic. If a person thinks about a topic for a while and talks about it with other people, he's likely to end up with better ideas about the topic. His ideas will be better justified and somewhat different than when he started. This can happen on a national level and lead to positive cultural change. But, nope, you said all recent cultural change is "drift" so it can be dismissed and we should return to "traditional" culture. Not compelling, seems like motivated reasoning.
Your ideas on "the sacred" just aren't very compelling. You're trying to say all sorts of things are like religion. But many things just aren't a good fit for a religious paradigm. Respect for elites better explains the average person's thinking about healthcare or public policy, than anything specifically religious.
You can always make the religious metaphor "work" in some way, by listing things that happen when we think about religion and trying to find similar things that happen when we think about something else. But you can make any metaphor "work" if you stretch it hard enough. You could have gone with a sports metaphor or an engineering metaphor or a marketing metaphor or a war metaphor and had just as much "success." It's not real unless you can use it to make some sort of testable predictions, not post-hoc explanations.
"rationalization for right-wing regressive politics" -> Hanson has proposed creating a market for selling shares of children's future income tax, and having the government give some shares to parents when the child is born. Then the parents can sell some of these shares to firms to lessen the expense of raising the child. Parents who are more likely to produce high-income children are more incentivized to have more children and to do a better job of raising them; firms are incentivized to pay more for shares of children most likely to earn more. For the government, it's a net win if the remaining taxes paid by the child are more than the child's expense to the state. This does not seem like "right-wing regressive politics" to me. Although I can imagine that many left wingers would recoil at the idea before thinking about it much.
You're correct, I confused the general issue of 'cultural drift' with the specific problem of 'low birth rate'. But then, isn't low birth rate a great example of how culture can drift into a maladaptive area, despite being guided by a "process of dialectic"? People can think up many personal reasons to have fewer kids, but at a societal level, this can create a problem.
Hanson's many fears about low birth rates are not convincing. The UN projections say we won't actually see decline in the global population until after 2100, a much later timetable than Hanson's few-decades-from-now doomsaying. The USA won't see decline according to national projections until after 2080.
There is no reason to think (as Hanson does) that suddenly innovation will stop as soon as population stops increasing. Innovation rate is proportional to the number of researchers (and their funding). If population eventually starts slowly decreasing, there's no reason to expect the number of researchers would suddenly drop to zero or they would lose all their funding. Innovation rate might slowly start to decrease, not suddenly drop to 0.
There is constant DNA selection for people who reproduce more despite our technological culture and economy, which Hanson barely acknowledges. This selection will eventually reverse any downward population trends. People who are genetically predisposed to reproduce more in our current culture might be those naturally less interested in competing for status, naturally more impulsive, with naturally stronger parenting instincts and desires. We'll see more such people.
Technology is advancing so rapidly that any possible decline in the world population - on a scale of centuries - will be irrelevant. If a government past 2100 decides this is a serious problem, they could mass produce babies-in-vats using AI assistants to parent them. But they probably won't do this because by then the economy will be driven much more by AI than by humans, so they won't need or want more humans.
The bigger, more pressing future threat is that AI will displace most human jobs, rendering most people economically irrelevant. That's a recipe for huge problems - riots, starvation. Having fewer humans would reduce those problems, and any population decline won't come fast enough.
Hanson's idea about selling shares of a person's future income tax is interesting to me as a tool for economic productivity. Not so much as a tool for increasing birth rates.
The UN has revised its estimates downward most recently https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/un-population-2024-vs-2022 so you can't assume the current projections are correct. Furthermore, the countries with the highest fertility tend to be less innovative ones.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I'll point out one minor correction: Hanson doesn't argue that innovation will stop suddenly, although he may have said or written something like "we have 100 years worth of innovation left". He assumes it will slow gradually, and explains his estimate at https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-much-more-innovation-before-pause : "So we are talking less than roughly sixty to ninety more years worth of innovation. (Note this isn’t literal years, but instead years-equivalent in our familiar growing world.)" The formula he used comes from writing down an equation involving two definite integrals. I don't expect this changes much of your argument, though.
In your link, he assumes innovation would fall exponentially as soon as population starts declining. (To me exponential decline reads as "suddenly drops to 0.") There is no valid justification for that. His invalid justification is that innovation grew exponentially (hmm, did it? how could that be measured?) and that this growth was solely due to increase in population (no, it was due to reaching a critical mass of prerequisite ideas for researchers to combine with other ideas), and therefore (he thinks) that this trend would be mirrored as soon as population starts to decrease.
Innovation is not directly dependent on population growth or economy growth. It's directly dependent on number of researchers and the critical ideas those researchers have available to them to combine into more ideas. And also dependent on how much of value there is actually left to discover.
That's an example of fixing one problem caused by cultural drift. His proposal for fixing drift more generally is a futarchy prioritizing humanity spreading off the planet, at which point the difficulties in communication would prevent a monoculture quashing cultural diversity (and thus selection).
I think you're grossly misunderstanding and strawmanning Robin's views on cultural drift. Most importantly, Robin hasn't offered concrete policy solutions. Second, he hasn't claimed that every single recent cultural change represents drift and should thereforebe dismissed.
Hanson is not arguing that "we should return to "traditional" culture". Traditionalists like the Amish replacing us is what he predicts if we fail to fix our fertility problem. He would prefer that not happen, but is pessimistic about modern global culture being changed to be less maladaptive. He thinks that if we did things like pay mothers for having more children, we would trade off some things (he doesn't know which in advance) we currently regard as "sacred" in order to preserve others (because we would lose much more if we all got displaced by actual traditionalists).
> If a person thinks about a topic for a while and talks about it with other people, he's likely to end up with better ideas about the topic.
> Respect for elites better explains the average person's thinking about healthcare or public policy, than anything specifically religious.
Many experts, like Hanson, have said we spend too much on healthcare for people near the end of their lives, getting very few QALYs out of it. People aren't rejecting that stance in favor of elites who endorse the status quo, it's just unpopular with the public to say we shouldn't bother so much with hopeless causes. Thy don't want to think about tradeoffs.
> You could have gone with a sports metaphor or an engineering metaphor or a marketing metaphor or a war metaphor
Could he really? Why don't you explain how any of those metaphors could apply?
It's not an issue of me assuming it will happen, it's an issue of Hanson assuming it won't. Sometimes it will happen, sometimes it won't, but Hanson doesn't distinguish; as long as memetic adoption isn't driven by a selection process involving the death or obsolescence of meme-holders, Hanson thinks it's drift and therefore bad, without bothering to consider it could be driven by beneficial dialectic.
> we spend too much on healthcare for people near the end of their lives, getting very few QALYs out of it
There's a simpler explanation. People near the end of their lives vote in greater numbers, and they also have a larger amount of wealth than younger people, and not so many things to spend it on besides health care. If you have a million dollars in savings and can extend your life a year by spending it, you're probably going to spend it. So, of course, society will end up adopting policies that favor health care for old people. Society favors the interests of those with the power.
> Why don't you explain how any of those metaphors could apply?
That would be a lot of effort I don't feel like exerting, but I've seen it many times before, where people shoehorn metaphors and post-hoc explanations onto things that don't really fit. The Art of War applied to everything in business. The Enneagram, MBTI, or astrology. Numerology. Phrenology. It's always possible to tell some just-so story where you fit observations to your model in a post-hoc way, regardless of the quality of the model, as long as there are enough knobs for you to twist to make things sort-of fit.
Hanson isn't "assuming" it won't. He's observing that it didn't happen, and is not happening.
> as long as memetic adoption isn't driven by a selection process involving the death or obsolescence of meme-holders, Hanson thinks it's drift
Drift just is what we call changes in genes not driven by selection, and Hanson borrows that metaphor for cultural evolution.
> and therefore bad
Plenty of drift is neutral. But, because it's not driven by selection, it can be bad. And, in the case of below-replacement fertility, it's definitely maladaptive.
> without bothering to consider it could be driven by beneficial dialectic.
How could below-replacement fertility be "beneficial"? It's as clear a failure to be an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy as it gets.
> There's a simpler explanation. People near the end of their lives vote in greater numbers
Hanson's colleague Bryan Caplan has studied the Self-Interested Voter Hypothesis and found it to be false. Young people are in favor of our gerontocratic welfare state.
Fertility is one thing, and I've explained my thoughts on that elsewhere in this thread. Hanson's "culture drift" is a *different* thing; if you think there is a strong reason to be concerned about fertility (I don't), that doesn't support the far more general claims of "culture drift."
Hanson uses "culture drift" in practice to attack any progressive cultural changes whatsoever. His ideas on "culture drift" would apply to, e.g., cultural opposition to slavery; advances in human rights; secular humanism; charitable foundations; body cams on police; the recent norm against beating your children; brushing your teeth; seatbelt laws; anti-pollution laws; and so on and so on. His notion of "culture drift" is so broad it would apply to virtually any modern meme. Actually this includes most conservative memes too, but he doesn't talk about that because this is meant to be his weapon against liberalism, and conservatism is at least nominally more aligned with regressiveness. The only memes that it doesn't apply to are those whose popularity directly resulted from people dying or groups failing because they didn't have the right memes. Most such memes were selected during the ancient days of humans living in small tribes, so it is a very regressive perspective.
> Young people are in favor of our gerontocratic welfare state.
The USA spends two or three times per capita on healthcare what developed European countries do, and obtains worse health outcomes. The reason for this is that the USA is *not* much of a welfare state when it comes to healthcare. Other countries have single payer systems and most services are much cheaper (and they don't spend as much on old people, comparatively). In the US, it's old rich people spending lots of their own money that drives the high healthcare spending for old people.
> I don't think there's comparable scholarship on astrology or numerology.
There's thousands of times more "scholarship" on astrology and numerology than there is on this niche topic of the "sacred." Take a look on Amazon. And both of those topics used to be a lot more respected in academic circles than they are now. It's very easy to start with a vague enough theory and claim lots of "successes" by tweaking knobs and cherry picking data. A time-tested recipe. Nostradamus knew what he was doing.
Hanson's idea of cultural drift is a general thing. Fertility is just the most obvious example where it is maladaptive. Plenty of other cultural drift is neutral rather than adaptive (which brushing your teeth may well be) or maladaptive, but the existence of maladaptive drift (such as below-replacement fertility) is why he considers it a problem.
> The USA spends two or three times per capita on healthcare what developed European countries do, and obtains worse health outcomes. The reason for this is that the USA is *not* much of a welfare state when it comes to healthcare.
> In the US, it's old rich people spending lots of their own money that drives the high healthcare spending for old people.
The elderly are covered by Medicare, which takes up ~10% of the federal budget, and ~18% of healthcare expenditures. Social Security is another gerontocratic program, though it's not healthcare. However, if you add up SS (~22%) with our various healthcare programs (~28%) including Medcare, you get ~50% of the federal budget.
> There's thousands of times more "scholarship" on astrology and numerology
I said "comparable", and books available on Amazon on those subjects isn't comparable to Atran & Tetlock publishing in academic journals. I don't see you making any specific critiques of either of those scholars, nor do I expect you have read them. The reason why Hanson is using the ideas of such scholars rather than astrologists or numerologists is so obvious that I'm sure you know it. If you want, you could even explain Hanson's own actions as part of cultural drift.
> However, if you add up SS (~22%) with our various healthcare programs (~28%) including Medcare, you get ~50% of the federal budget
What's your point here? Social Security isn't healthcare, so why are you including it? Using https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-much-does-federal-government-spend-health-care we find that 2022 federal healthcare spending was 1477 billion (23.5% of total federal spending of 6272 billion, and 33% of total healthcare spending of 4464 billion), of which Medicare cost $747 billion (11.9% of federal spending; 16.7% of healthcare spending).
If you're trying to check payer broken down by age, I'm not sure that data is available. But my feeling is that old people with lots of savings tend to spend lots of their savings on health care. And they also tend to vote for Medicare for themselves.
And remember that the USA spends a lot more on healthcare per capita than other countries, and also has a much higher percentage of people not covered, and a shorter life expectancy. Most of those western European countries have universal health care or something like it.
I agree with you that healthcare among Western countries probably doesn't have much relationship with life expectancy. The thing that's notable is that the US spends 2-3x more than other countries with nothing to show for it. That's a big waste, *especially* if healthcare doesn't improve life expectancy.
> The reason why Hanson is using the ideas of such scholars rather than astrologists or numerologists is so obvious that I'm sure you know it.
Tetlock at least does seem to be a reputable source. But I don't see Tetlock doing what Hanson does - building long lists of associations with "sacred" and then talking about these associations as if they are fact. That's quite similar to what is done in astrology, where they list personality traits that different birth signs supposedly have, and then talk about them with gravitas.
To do science you would need to take, say, a single association, and then statistically demonstrate through experiments and data analysis that it really is a meaningful association. You can't just race ahead saying all sorts of "intuitive" things, as Hanson does with the sacred.
And remember, again, that astrology was *once* very prestigious, much moreso than Hanson's speculations. So it's not fair to dismiss it as incomparable because of its modern reputation. It was a similar social phenomenon.
"I’ve spent much of my life trying to invent better institutions, and have been disappointed to see so little interest in such great ideas."
The Chinese launched the same search in 500BC, at the urging of Confucius, the world's first and only successful political scientist.
They spent 500 years discussing his design, then began implementation around the time of Christ's birth.
After another 500 years, as we entered the Dark Ages, they considered implementation complete, and opened institutional access to everybody through examinations.
Since then, they've been refining their institutional design through policies that reduced nepotism, corruption, etc.
Today's government is the most refined version of Confucius' design which, as we see, delights the Chinese.
Look I know Yudkowski kinda accidently on purpose made a big cult, but his stuff was angstier. Well he didn't intend for it to be so cultish but the angst appealed to a wide crowd that sorta pushed in that direction.
You focus on one path that might work, but it's a rough pill to think about let alone swallow. There are also other problems that could be solved to mitigate cultural homogeneity/infertility. Some countries set aside funds to create culture like films and art, if more variety of countries did, for a greater definition of culture, that would be something. If a growing fraction of the population will be from less innovative groups, then why are they less innovative, and how can that be changed without colonizing with our cultural hegemony of infertility? Kenya's making power plants, that could help.
Short videos could help spread the work. Hell, long videos or podcasts might help. Blogs are for those who prefer reading, and we're a minority nowadays.
In the talk/session you gave, you expressed frustration at the fact that it is difficult to get people interested in this issue. I think the key challenges you face are:
1) Cultural drift is abstract, and the more abstract something is, the less people are able to understand it, and therefore get interested in it.
2) There are already several causes competing for the slot of "this is the key issue of our time, which will ruin our society if neglected". Some of them have lots of inertia already, such as climate change, warfare (so-called "democracies vs autocracies" on top of all local conflicts), perhaps AI, etc. Most of these have the advantage of being very concrete and digestible, or being framed as such.
3) Cultural drift isn't easy to fit into an "us vs them" mold, which naturally attracts people to fight. Even climate change is mostly framed as "the people" fighting the (financial and political) elites or as the rich (who emit CO2) oppressing the poor (who end up paying most of the price).
4) Cultural drift as you've defined it is a very novel idea, which you yourself came upon only recently. Even climate activists took decades to build the inertia they have today.
IMHO 1) is right now the most important of these. You will have to frame it in very concrete terms. Even relatively concrete predictions such as "declining innovation and growth" don't resonate with most of the population. More like "your kids might starve, because ABC". This is what climate activists do, even when it isn't accurate. Not recommending exaggerating or being dishonest, but I'm confident that more will be needed.
You should try Elon Musk. He's obsessed with the Great Filter and should be interested in Grabby Aliens if you can convince him that's the updated/better theory. He already shares your concerns about fertility. You have mutual acquaintances: Eliezer and Lex Fridman. He is too unfocused to be expert and too prominent not to fall into the elite category instead.
If you can reframe his recent political efforts (especially the relatively successful one in Brazil) as efforts against cultural drift, he's theory-minded enough to be receptive to something that gives coherence to his political impulses.
It is sad that so much of our future seems to depend on one person. (It would be sadder if we didn't have him, of course.)
Okay he is expert on rocket design but that shouldn't conflict.
How have you adjusted your messaging style to improve your success at persuading others?
Well, I guess we can put to rest the great blog theory of history.
I view writers on substack (like myself) as tossing straws on the back of a camel. Individually we only get through to a few but collectively we are moving the pendulum towards truth and away from media manipulation, propaganda and lies.
Dick Minnis removingthecataract.substack.com
Do you actually have evidence that the sanity waterline is being raised for the population as a whole, on average?
Big disruptive ideas take a long time to be accepted. Generations. One proposal from one thinker, no matter how well articulated and reasoned, doesn't do it. Others have to pick up the ball and run with it - at minimum champion it, usually tweak it. Eventually if the idea is judged good elites get behind it. Vast patience is required. But someone needs to generate the original ideas. You are making a larger impact than you seem to think.
Hanson has been writing about institutions for much longer than about aliens. Even his book on psychology was a reaction to his failure to get traction for his ideas on institutions.
Not for "generations". His ideas on aliens are fascinating but are not disruptive. His ideas on institutions might get traction in 50 years or 100. If ever. If we're still around.
Maybe it's just that people don't like your ideas on some topics, and like them on others, and being an elite or expert isn't that relevant. Although for me personally I really like your ideas on institutions, and aliens have never particularly interested me. But your writing about the sacred and culture drift hasn't jumped out to me either.
If you wrote a populist book, about any topic, I bet that'd be quite popular, because the populace by definition likes populism. But a lot of your ideas are quite anti-populist and go against what a lot of people want to hear.
I see futarchy/prediction markets as a bridge between populism and elitism. Whoever the elites currently are, they can be displaced by anyone who does a better job of predicting than them.
And interestingly enough, it seems like the prediction market ideas look like they are actually being implemented in the cryptocurrency space. Perhaps there just needs to be some people that spin up some odds and payout contracts on them for cultural drift observables (and also find some kind of reliable oracle on such states).
Your largest group of natural allies on cultural drift are conservative Christians. But (a few of us excepted) they are just as repelled by rationalists as rationalists are by CCs. To do something about it, you may need to hold your nose and build some bridges, work together to identify solutions that would work for both CCs and rationalists. Both groups tend to think within their own separate boxes - maybe by bringing the two spheres together some interesting and novel ideas could arise.
Recently I spent a year finding a way to make sense of the sacred, and was also disappointed to see little interest in that.
-- I'd be the ideal audience for this and I'm sorry you're disappointed. But you're definitely an elite, you're a professor. As an actual humble stay at home mother, I'm slightly disappointed that my ideas don't even get nearly as much engagement as Robin Hanson.
You frame this as “elites vs experts” but what you, and other intellectuals similarly situated, need is better marketing. Not for nothing is the notion of the public intellectual an enduring one.
Here's a dialogue with ChatGPT which explains this in more detail: https://chatgpt.com/share/9d232039-a658-448a-99c9-68d31cfc5854
A cynical reading would say that elites generally do their own thing and have never given much credence to experts except at times of intense crisis and competition - the Cold War was a kind of heyday of expert influence with the likes of Oppenheimer, RAND corporation, technocratic secretaries of state, etc.
A more idealistic view would say that experts inform and inspire elites; they are the eminences grises that sow the seeds for tomorrow's field of ideas. But it takes the elites to push the overton windows to allow a new range of expert ideas to come to light. It's a cyclical pattern.
Consider packaging up your most important messages and interesting ideas in the form of videos that are 5 minutes long or less. Cover the key ideas, have a few slides, include recommendations for those who want to do something about it, and pointers to more information (including longer videos or interviews). Short, interesting videos can really help an idea to spread. Another kind of video that I would find super interesting would be a long-form survey of ideas related to alternative institutions - what are the key books, key fields, and most interesting ideas - like a university lecture. You could ask your Twitter following to vote on topics they would most like to see. I really like your video about prediction markets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yZKGbq1YmA and often point people to it. Some people in my field (human-computer interaction) often publish a paper accompanied with a short (30-60 second) teaser video and a longer (5 minutes +) more detailed video. If you think that some of the comments on your blog posts demonstrate a misunderstanding of your ideas, maybe there's even more need for short video explainers.
Some of your ideas just aren't as good as others.
Your ideas on cultural drift read, to me, like a weak rationalization for right-wing regressive politics. There's so much about the way culture changes that you're ignoring, lumping it all together as "drift" so that you can claim it is all bad.
The main thing you're ignoring is the process of dialectic. If a person thinks about a topic for a while and talks about it with other people, he's likely to end up with better ideas about the topic. His ideas will be better justified and somewhat different than when he started. This can happen on a national level and lead to positive cultural change. But, nope, you said all recent cultural change is "drift" so it can be dismissed and we should return to "traditional" culture. Not compelling, seems like motivated reasoning.
Your ideas on "the sacred" just aren't very compelling. You're trying to say all sorts of things are like religion. But many things just aren't a good fit for a religious paradigm. Respect for elites better explains the average person's thinking about healthcare or public policy, than anything specifically religious.
You can always make the religious metaphor "work" in some way, by listing things that happen when we think about religion and trying to find similar things that happen when we think about something else. But you can make any metaphor "work" if you stretch it hard enough. You could have gone with a sports metaphor or an engineering metaphor or a marketing metaphor or a war metaphor and had just as much "success." It's not real unless you can use it to make some sort of testable predictions, not post-hoc explanations.
"rationalization for right-wing regressive politics" -> Hanson has proposed creating a market for selling shares of children's future income tax, and having the government give some shares to parents when the child is born. Then the parents can sell some of these shares to firms to lessen the expense of raising the child. Parents who are more likely to produce high-income children are more incentivized to have more children and to do a better job of raising them; firms are incentivized to pay more for shares of children most likely to earn more. For the government, it's a net win if the remaining taxes paid by the child are more than the child's expense to the state. This does not seem like "right-wing regressive politics" to me. Although I can imagine that many left wingers would recoil at the idea before thinking about it much.
None of that is on the topic of "cultural drift," so your out-of-context quote of me does not apply.
You're correct, I confused the general issue of 'cultural drift' with the specific problem of 'low birth rate'. But then, isn't low birth rate a great example of how culture can drift into a maladaptive area, despite being guided by a "process of dialectic"? People can think up many personal reasons to have fewer kids, but at a societal level, this can create a problem.
Hanson's many fears about low birth rates are not convincing. The UN projections say we won't actually see decline in the global population until after 2100, a much later timetable than Hanson's few-decades-from-now doomsaying. The USA won't see decline according to national projections until after 2080.
There is no reason to think (as Hanson does) that suddenly innovation will stop as soon as population stops increasing. Innovation rate is proportional to the number of researchers (and their funding). If population eventually starts slowly decreasing, there's no reason to expect the number of researchers would suddenly drop to zero or they would lose all their funding. Innovation rate might slowly start to decrease, not suddenly drop to 0.
There is constant DNA selection for people who reproduce more despite our technological culture and economy, which Hanson barely acknowledges. This selection will eventually reverse any downward population trends. People who are genetically predisposed to reproduce more in our current culture might be those naturally less interested in competing for status, naturally more impulsive, with naturally stronger parenting instincts and desires. We'll see more such people.
Technology is advancing so rapidly that any possible decline in the world population - on a scale of centuries - will be irrelevant. If a government past 2100 decides this is a serious problem, they could mass produce babies-in-vats using AI assistants to parent them. But they probably won't do this because by then the economy will be driven much more by AI than by humans, so they won't need or want more humans.
The bigger, more pressing future threat is that AI will displace most human jobs, rendering most people economically irrelevant. That's a recipe for huge problems - riots, starvation. Having fewer humans would reduce those problems, and any population decline won't come fast enough.
Hanson's idea about selling shares of a person's future income tax is interesting to me as a tool for economic productivity. Not so much as a tool for increasing birth rates.
The UN has revised its estimates downward most recently https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/un-population-2024-vs-2022 so you can't assume the current projections are correct. Furthermore, the countries with the highest fertility tend to be less innovative ones.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I'll point out one minor correction: Hanson doesn't argue that innovation will stop suddenly, although he may have said or written something like "we have 100 years worth of innovation left". He assumes it will slow gradually, and explains his estimate at https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-much-more-innovation-before-pause : "So we are talking less than roughly sixty to ninety more years worth of innovation. (Note this isn’t literal years, but instead years-equivalent in our familiar growing world.)" The formula he used comes from writing down an equation involving two definite integrals. I don't expect this changes much of your argument, though.
In your link, he assumes innovation would fall exponentially as soon as population starts declining. (To me exponential decline reads as "suddenly drops to 0.") There is no valid justification for that. His invalid justification is that innovation grew exponentially (hmm, did it? how could that be measured?) and that this growth was solely due to increase in population (no, it was due to reaching a critical mass of prerequisite ideas for researchers to combine with other ideas), and therefore (he thinks) that this trend would be mirrored as soon as population starts to decrease.
Innovation is not directly dependent on population growth or economy growth. It's directly dependent on number of researchers and the critical ideas those researchers have available to them to combine into more ideas. And also dependent on how much of value there is actually left to discover.
Again, strawmanning. Robin has never claimed innovation would suddenly stop as soon as population stops increasing.
That's an example of fixing one problem caused by cultural drift. His proposal for fixing drift more generally is a futarchy prioritizing humanity spreading off the planet, at which point the difficulties in communication would prevent a monoculture quashing cultural diversity (and thus selection).
I think you're grossly misunderstanding and strawmanning Robin's views on cultural drift. Most importantly, Robin hasn't offered concrete policy solutions. Second, he hasn't claimed that every single recent cultural change represents drift and should thereforebe dismissed.
Hanson is not arguing that "we should return to "traditional" culture". Traditionalists like the Amish replacing us is what he predicts if we fail to fix our fertility problem. He would prefer that not happen, but is pessimistic about modern global culture being changed to be less maladaptive. He thinks that if we did things like pay mothers for having more children, we would trade off some things (he doesn't know which in advance) we currently regard as "sacred" in order to preserve others (because we would lose much more if we all got displaced by actual traditionalists).
> If a person thinks about a topic for a while and talks about it with other people, he's likely to end up with better ideas about the topic.
Scott Alexander wrote about that not happening long ago https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/06/asymmetric-weapons-gone-bad/ You can't simply assume that will happen.
> Respect for elites better explains the average person's thinking about healthcare or public policy, than anything specifically religious.
Many experts, like Hanson, have said we spend too much on healthcare for people near the end of their lives, getting very few QALYs out of it. People aren't rejecting that stance in favor of elites who endorse the status quo, it's just unpopular with the public to say we shouldn't bother so much with hopeless causes. Thy don't want to think about tradeoffs.
> You could have gone with a sports metaphor or an engineering metaphor or a marketing metaphor or a war metaphor
Could he really? Why don't you explain how any of those metaphors could apply?
> You can't simply assume that will happen.
It's not an issue of me assuming it will happen, it's an issue of Hanson assuming it won't. Sometimes it will happen, sometimes it won't, but Hanson doesn't distinguish; as long as memetic adoption isn't driven by a selection process involving the death or obsolescence of meme-holders, Hanson thinks it's drift and therefore bad, without bothering to consider it could be driven by beneficial dialectic.
> we spend too much on healthcare for people near the end of their lives, getting very few QALYs out of it
There's a simpler explanation. People near the end of their lives vote in greater numbers, and they also have a larger amount of wealth than younger people, and not so many things to spend it on besides health care. If you have a million dollars in savings and can extend your life a year by spending it, you're probably going to spend it. So, of course, society will end up adopting policies that favor health care for old people. Society favors the interests of those with the power.
> Why don't you explain how any of those metaphors could apply?
That would be a lot of effort I don't feel like exerting, but I've seen it many times before, where people shoehorn metaphors and post-hoc explanations onto things that don't really fit. The Art of War applied to everything in business. The Enneagram, MBTI, or astrology. Numerology. Phrenology. It's always possible to tell some just-so story where you fit observations to your model in a post-hoc way, regardless of the quality of the model, as long as there are enough knobs for you to twist to make things sort-of fit.
Hanson isn't "assuming" it won't. He's observing that it didn't happen, and is not happening.
> as long as memetic adoption isn't driven by a selection process involving the death or obsolescence of meme-holders, Hanson thinks it's drift
Drift just is what we call changes in genes not driven by selection, and Hanson borrows that metaphor for cultural evolution.
> and therefore bad
Plenty of drift is neutral. But, because it's not driven by selection, it can be bad. And, in the case of below-replacement fertility, it's definitely maladaptive.
> without bothering to consider it could be driven by beneficial dialectic.
How could below-replacement fertility be "beneficial"? It's as clear a failure to be an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy as it gets.
> There's a simpler explanation. People near the end of their lives vote in greater numbers
Hanson's colleague Bryan Caplan has studied the Self-Interested Voter Hypothesis and found it to be false. Young people are in favor of our gerontocratic welfare state.
Hanson didn't invent the idea of taboo tradeoffs of the sacred. See Scott Atran https://www.jstor.org/stable/25427491 or Philip Tetlock https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jenniferlerner/files/2000_the_psychology_of_the_unthinkable.pdf?m=145089665 I don't think there's comparable scholarship on astrology or numerology.
Fertility is one thing, and I've explained my thoughts on that elsewhere in this thread. Hanson's "culture drift" is a *different* thing; if you think there is a strong reason to be concerned about fertility (I don't), that doesn't support the far more general claims of "culture drift."
Hanson uses "culture drift" in practice to attack any progressive cultural changes whatsoever. His ideas on "culture drift" would apply to, e.g., cultural opposition to slavery; advances in human rights; secular humanism; charitable foundations; body cams on police; the recent norm against beating your children; brushing your teeth; seatbelt laws; anti-pollution laws; and so on and so on. His notion of "culture drift" is so broad it would apply to virtually any modern meme. Actually this includes most conservative memes too, but he doesn't talk about that because this is meant to be his weapon against liberalism, and conservatism is at least nominally more aligned with regressiveness. The only memes that it doesn't apply to are those whose popularity directly resulted from people dying or groups failing because they didn't have the right memes. Most such memes were selected during the ancient days of humans living in small tribes, so it is a very regressive perspective.
> Young people are in favor of our gerontocratic welfare state.
The USA spends two or three times per capita on healthcare what developed European countries do, and obtains worse health outcomes. The reason for this is that the USA is *not* much of a welfare state when it comes to healthcare. Other countries have single payer systems and most services are much cheaper (and they don't spend as much on old people, comparatively). In the US, it's old rich people spending lots of their own money that drives the high healthcare spending for old people.
> I don't think there's comparable scholarship on astrology or numerology.
There's thousands of times more "scholarship" on astrology and numerology than there is on this niche topic of the "sacred." Take a look on Amazon. And both of those topics used to be a lot more respected in academic circles than they are now. It's very easy to start with a vague enough theory and claim lots of "successes" by tweaking knobs and cherry picking data. A time-tested recipe. Nostradamus knew what he was doing.
Hanson's idea of cultural drift is a general thing. Fertility is just the most obvious example where it is maladaptive. Plenty of other cultural drift is neutral rather than adaptive (which brushing your teeth may well be) or maladaptive, but the existence of maladaptive drift (such as below-replacement fertility) is why he considers it a problem.
> The USA spends two or three times per capita on healthcare what developed European countries do, and obtains worse health outcomes. The reason for this is that the USA is *not* much of a welfare state when it comes to healthcare.
The reason is because we're an unusually wealthy country. https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2016/11/06/us-life-expectancy-is-below-naive-expectations-mostly-because-it-economically-outperforms/ Health outcomes are not caused by the healthcare system once you go beyond the level of Spain, which we are much richer than.
> In the US, it's old rich people spending lots of their own money that drives the high healthcare spending for old people.
The elderly are covered by Medicare, which takes up ~10% of the federal budget, and ~18% of healthcare expenditures. Social Security is another gerontocratic program, though it's not healthcare. However, if you add up SS (~22%) with our various healthcare programs (~28%) including Medcare, you get ~50% of the federal budget.
> There's thousands of times more "scholarship" on astrology and numerology
I said "comparable", and books available on Amazon on those subjects isn't comparable to Atran & Tetlock publishing in academic journals. I don't see you making any specific critiques of either of those scholars, nor do I expect you have read them. The reason why Hanson is using the ideas of such scholars rather than astrologists or numerologists is so obvious that I'm sure you know it. If you want, you could even explain Hanson's own actions as part of cultural drift.
> However, if you add up SS (~22%) with our various healthcare programs (~28%) including Medcare, you get ~50% of the federal budget
What's your point here? Social Security isn't healthcare, so why are you including it? Using https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-much-does-federal-government-spend-health-care we find that 2022 federal healthcare spending was 1477 billion (23.5% of total federal spending of 6272 billion, and 33% of total healthcare spending of 4464 billion), of which Medicare cost $747 billion (11.9% of federal spending; 16.7% of healthcare spending).
From https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-reports/national-health-expenditure-data/nhe-fact-sheet the breakdown by payer is 33% federal, 15% state/local (48% public spending), 28% household, 18% employer, 7% other private (53% private spending).
If you're trying to check payer broken down by age, I'm not sure that data is available. But my feeling is that old people with lots of savings tend to spend lots of their savings on health care. And they also tend to vote for Medicare for themselves.
And remember that the USA spends a lot more on healthcare per capita than other countries, and also has a much higher percentage of people not covered, and a shorter life expectancy. Most of those western European countries have universal health care or something like it.
I agree with you that healthcare among Western countries probably doesn't have much relationship with life expectancy. The thing that's notable is that the US spends 2-3x more than other countries with nothing to show for it. That's a big waste, *especially* if healthcare doesn't improve life expectancy.
> The reason why Hanson is using the ideas of such scholars rather than astrologists or numerologists is so obvious that I'm sure you know it.
Tetlock at least does seem to be a reputable source. But I don't see Tetlock doing what Hanson does - building long lists of associations with "sacred" and then talking about these associations as if they are fact. That's quite similar to what is done in astrology, where they list personality traits that different birth signs supposedly have, and then talk about them with gravitas.
To do science you would need to take, say, a single association, and then statistically demonstrate through experiments and data analysis that it really is a meaningful association. You can't just race ahead saying all sorts of "intuitive" things, as Hanson does with the sacred.
And remember, again, that astrology was *once* very prestigious, much moreso than Hanson's speculations. So it's not fair to dismiss it as incomparable because of its modern reputation. It was a similar social phenomenon.
"I’ve spent much of my life trying to invent better institutions, and have been disappointed to see so little interest in such great ideas."
The Chinese launched the same search in 500BC, at the urging of Confucius, the world's first and only successful political scientist.
They spent 500 years discussing his design, then began implementation around the time of Christ's birth.
After another 500 years, as we entered the Dark Ages, they considered implementation complete, and opened institutional access to everybody through examinations.
Since then, they've been refining their institutional design through policies that reduced nepotism, corruption, etc.
Today's government is the most refined version of Confucius' design which, as we see, delights the Chinese.
Gonna have to invoke Poe's Law on this one
I see how you'd think that way, but I don't think so. The CCP is actually quite popular in China.
Given what happens to those who dissagree...
Only if they speak up in a public place. If they grumble in private nobody cares.
I see all these people commenting on this—great Success! 1, 3, or 58 comments—what is the difference?
Look I know Yudkowski kinda accidently on purpose made a big cult, but his stuff was angstier. Well he didn't intend for it to be so cultish but the angst appealed to a wide crowd that sorta pushed in that direction.
You focus on one path that might work, but it's a rough pill to think about let alone swallow. There are also other problems that could be solved to mitigate cultural homogeneity/infertility. Some countries set aside funds to create culture like films and art, if more variety of countries did, for a greater definition of culture, that would be something. If a growing fraction of the population will be from less innovative groups, then why are they less innovative, and how can that be changed without colonizing with our cultural hegemony of infertility? Kenya's making power plants, that could help.
Short videos could help spread the work. Hell, long videos or podcasts might help. Blogs are for those who prefer reading, and we're a minority nowadays.