The analogy to biological diversity could resonate with younger people. Most buy into the idea that biodiversity makes an ecosystem more resilient, and therefore it's an inherent good to preserve places like the Amazon rain forest even if we don't know what each and every one of those species is "good for".
It also depends on what kind of cultural variation one has in mind. Most young people will agree that preserving native cultures and languages and religions is a good thing. Preserving cultural variation in attitudes toward slavery – less so.
My point was if Hanson wants to try changing our values to fix cultural drift, why not try things considered "too progressive" by most people instead of re-implemeting ethical horrors that took us centuries to defeat?
(Not that I think cultural drift is a thing that can be controlled—culture is downstream of technology in many ways. Nor am I convinced fertility deline is the marker of misadaptation Hanson perceives it as—AI may reduce the need for human labor, and climate change may reduce our available habitat. Being in a population decline might be beneficial then.)
Any of the four things you mention can be and have been considered positive and negative by various cultures. The perceived outcomes from them also varies by culture. Alignment of perception to reality varies too.
War is an odd one out in that list, as justification for it and who actually wins both change how it's valued. Every culture I've heard about has at least some conditions which justify war. Cultures that don't allow for defending themselves won't last long.
War and slavery are implicitly allowed and supported by our regimes. The regimes are just extremely disingenuous about it. They combine a moralistic attitude of almost total sanctimony (inclusivity, peace, tolerance, equity) with policies that deliver the exact opposite. War is already allowed. It's been subsidized at historic levels for years in the West now. Slavery is enthusiastically funded, through green energy initiatives which incentivize organizers of un- and poorly-paid child laborers in the DRC and through liberal border policies which have led to an explosion of human trafficking across the Western world.
No one will ever promote war or slavery on the terms that you or I think of them. Even Antebellum Southerners weren't 'pro-slavery' in the sense that we imagine - they were pro-Bible and pro-tradition and pro-paternal support for black people. No one ever advocates for war. They advocate for national defense or the protection from enemies or the importance of deterrents. Things are always framed in a positive way by their advocates.
UBI and free childcare can be seen as the cultivation of dependence among millions of Americans and the confiscation of the earned wealth of millions of restaurant owners and carpenters and truck drivers, using the threat of force despite their rage and impotent protests. Free childcare could be explained as the same, plus the diversion of many black and brown women out of administrative and managerial and educational work into full-time paid childcare positions. Are those positives? They're not positive just because they SEEM positive to you, in your framing. They could have disastrous effects for society. The values that people proclaim in order to promote them are totally irrelevant.
I believe that the elites FEEL that their culturally constructed borders (no pointing to male-female disparities, especially when they reflect poorly on women; no questioning the basic assumptions of progressivism, i.e., that meddling in people's lives can improve things for everyone; no investigating the role of the Jews throughout history; absolutely NO exploration of racial/cultural differences in honesty or intelligence or morality or discipline; etc.) are objective and reasonable... but they're merely convention. They're arbitrary, based on the political fault lines and courtesies of one or two generations back. They're beginning to be swamped by dissenters.
I think it's useful for people to try a new heuristic: politeness and status and cultural convention shouldn't preclude or suppress conversations. Let's air it all out, and let the best ideas win. The elites still have a sense of control over society, but their control is limited to their own institutions, which have lost power and credibility because their class is uniquely conformist and cowardly and unimpressive, relative to other historical periods. Regarding courage and integrity, elites have failed at literally every turn. I'm unaware of a single instance of our elite class doing the right thing in the face of risky status incentives or peer disapproval.
Their ideas aren't their own. They were borrowed from OTHER elites, who themselves also lacked any meaningful contact with the real world, or iconoclastic tendencies. Insulated in layers of privilege and fear these half-children bumble around, relying on the orthodoxies of yesterday to make sense of reality.
I was so happy to read this sentence by Hanson that I laughed out loud --> "Many expressed horror at the idea of allowing or even encouraging cultural variety that deviates from their confident moral stances on war, slavery, democracy, gender-equality, corporal punishment, higher education, medicine for all, etc." Yay engaged elite teens!
I appreciated this from the various posted comments (among others) -- why re-implement ethical horrors that took us centuries to defeat?
Hanson says that modern values are decreasing fertility which will appear to reduce fertility, which makes it possible that our culture will be replaced by a more adaptive culture, and that more adaptive culture may not share enlightenment values.
That's too many maybes and probabilistic outcomes for me to endorse sufficiently to allow slavery, war, gender inequality, less education, etc. Another maybe may be: The more adaptive culture may have figured out ways to live that allow both good fertility levels and more humans to thrive.
Re: "Cultural evolution rewards adaptiveness, and yes you likely care about other stuff besides adaptiveness. (Stuff that prior cultural evolution told you to care about - there is no other source for such concerns.)"
Yes, there is: genes. See also: individual learning.
“encouraging subgroups who deviate on those norms, to see if such deviations might be more adaptive.” That seems dangerous. The norms people *want to* violate are probably the ones most needed for long term fitness. To arbitrarily support norm-breaking is just to give even more status to change agents who will further accelerate cultural drift, making the problem worse. Don’t you need to identify values or norms that likely point toward higher fitness and specifically encourage subgroups that are experimenting in a positive direction?
Yes, in principle a wise culture authority could authorize only good variations to allow. But we don't yet have such available. Maybe futarchy could create them.
Why does there have to be an “authority” to “authorize” the norms of subgroups? Let’s stick with non-governmental agents choosing which groups to “encourage” or upon which groups to bestow elevated status with what cultural clout they may possess.
From a more criminological standpoint, basic convention in biology is life wants to live, beings generally seeking to stay intact, and behavior embracing extinction essentially functions as a crime against the basics of what drives behavior in life forms. The philosophy is in the term "cultural" compared to existential living as a goal of evolving life forms. Religious literature contains metaphors useful for a format to mind actions that can provide a contextual analysis in the quest for meaning meant to facilitate continued living and doing good works generally. So what is the behavior data underneath the words of "cultural drift" to any specific, more functional scientific grounding in analysis? What does "culture" mean? Before there were TVs, saying it's time to pull the plug and go outside and play, would not be any clear instruction to kids in Athens 2,000 years back. So, when we ask about "cultural drift" this is not being as close to behavioral science methods as a convention of commitment to an objectively historically defined method in science on an issue of addressing social behavior choice and consequences. When has there not been "cultural drift" anyway? The history of the behavioral process of Hitler is one of failure, regardless of anyone's writings of a manifesto in word behavior as if to explain something in their chosen terms about what they call culture. There's less complicated debate and chaos when the issue is kept to specific behavior choices, to select what means we live as compared to what means we die. Is that a culture issue? Maybe, if you term things in religious language, assuming a supernatural existence after bodily death, and this meets in the conventions of biological science with a neutral social word behavior as it quickly is agreed as no scientific method to test a control in a laboratory is possible, there can be no science-based answer. You can decide your idea of death is a thing you as a culture embrace. That is your behavior, and you chose that. Is it a "cultural" thing that you say based on religious quest of meaning that you will prevent me from staying alive? This now becomes the behavioral area in criminology, because now the quest for meaning is to control my outcome for the sake of your attributed religious moral claims upon all that is reality. This is actually social behavior like the failed attempt made by Hitler in that history, demanding loyalty to your wisdom and judgment as determiner of what is legitimate. Immortalism isn't asking permission to be.
This is visible at scale at large media companies; eg NPR and public media in the US losing federal funding as they could not adapt even somewhat to a changing ideological landscape. It is quite strange as they could have very easily hired a few prominent up-and-coming conservative podcasters, given just a few off hours of broadcast time to *very* different opinions, and they would have had at least plausible deniability against the accusations of leftist bias that ultimately led to their defunding. Same can be said with MSNBC / Colbert show etc etc. The obvious framing is "exhibiting loyalty to their side of the culture war until the end" is maladaptive, but how and why do we see these maladaptions play out very publicly at scale over and over again? You see it across most western institutions. Like a suicidal effect.
Even at Columbia university, right before the most recent president resigned, Katrina Armstrong was publicly signaling cooperation with the new administration's demands while privately telling the school they would not. The demands frankly seemed like "off hours broadcast time" level of effort needed. Yet the still could not adapt.
Personally? I think more research needs to be done on clingyness to moral framing in the pyschosexual / desire context. This stuff seems to run parallel to individual relationship behavior, where one partner obsessively sticks to a norm as a signal that they are not getting enough attention.
I am pretty abstract in my thinking, so your arguments just make sense to me - to find the cultural behaviors that work best, you have to try more options in more directed ways than is normally happening.
HOWEVER, I very much also understand the reluctance to overtly allow deviation from current strongly-promulgated norms. It's common advice to compromise on tactics, compromise on actions, but never compromise on values. You've written a fair bit about sacredness of values - I'm surprised that you're surprised when people confirm that they think their values are sacred.
The nuance not covered or maybe it was just assumed, is whether the cultural drift is moral and beneficial in the long run or just expedient and financially beneficial in the short run. The propensity to have children without marriage is a good example of long term destructive behavior that is perfectly acceptable to society at the current time
Robin doesn't seem to be getting into whether any culture is "truly" moral, but instead descriptively talking about culture being subject to selection.
The analogy to biological diversity could resonate with younger people. Most buy into the idea that biodiversity makes an ecosystem more resilient, and therefore it's an inherent good to preserve places like the Amazon rain forest even if we don't know what each and every one of those species is "good for".
It also depends on what kind of cultural variation one has in mind. Most young people will agree that preserving native cultures and languages and religions is a good thing. Preserving cultural variation in attitudes toward slavery – less so.
Yes, that also seems an approach worth trying.
Why must we only compromise by allowing negative things like war and slavery? Why not positives like UBI or free childcare?
The framing of your question suggests you missed the point.
My point was if Hanson wants to try changing our values to fix cultural drift, why not try things considered "too progressive" by most people instead of re-implemeting ethical horrors that took us centuries to defeat?
(Not that I think cultural drift is a thing that can be controlled—culture is downstream of technology in many ways. Nor am I convinced fertility deline is the marker of misadaptation Hanson perceives it as—AI may reduce the need for human labor, and climate change may reduce our available habitat. Being in a population decline might be beneficial then.)
Any of the four things you mention can be and have been considered positive and negative by various cultures. The perceived outcomes from them also varies by culture. Alignment of perception to reality varies too.
War is an odd one out in that list, as justification for it and who actually wins both change how it's valued. Every culture I've heard about has at least some conditions which justify war. Cultures that don't allow for defending themselves won't last long.
War and slavery are implicitly allowed and supported by our regimes. The regimes are just extremely disingenuous about it. They combine a moralistic attitude of almost total sanctimony (inclusivity, peace, tolerance, equity) with policies that deliver the exact opposite. War is already allowed. It's been subsidized at historic levels for years in the West now. Slavery is enthusiastically funded, through green energy initiatives which incentivize organizers of un- and poorly-paid child laborers in the DRC and through liberal border policies which have led to an explosion of human trafficking across the Western world.
No one will ever promote war or slavery on the terms that you or I think of them. Even Antebellum Southerners weren't 'pro-slavery' in the sense that we imagine - they were pro-Bible and pro-tradition and pro-paternal support for black people. No one ever advocates for war. They advocate for national defense or the protection from enemies or the importance of deterrents. Things are always framed in a positive way by their advocates.
UBI and free childcare can be seen as the cultivation of dependence among millions of Americans and the confiscation of the earned wealth of millions of restaurant owners and carpenters and truck drivers, using the threat of force despite their rage and impotent protests. Free childcare could be explained as the same, plus the diversion of many black and brown women out of administrative and managerial and educational work into full-time paid childcare positions. Are those positives? They're not positive just because they SEEM positive to you, in your framing. They could have disastrous effects for society. The values that people proclaim in order to promote them are totally irrelevant.
I believe that the elites FEEL that their culturally constructed borders (no pointing to male-female disparities, especially when they reflect poorly on women; no questioning the basic assumptions of progressivism, i.e., that meddling in people's lives can improve things for everyone; no investigating the role of the Jews throughout history; absolutely NO exploration of racial/cultural differences in honesty or intelligence or morality or discipline; etc.) are objective and reasonable... but they're merely convention. They're arbitrary, based on the political fault lines and courtesies of one or two generations back. They're beginning to be swamped by dissenters.
I think it's useful for people to try a new heuristic: politeness and status and cultural convention shouldn't preclude or suppress conversations. Let's air it all out, and let the best ideas win. The elites still have a sense of control over society, but their control is limited to their own institutions, which have lost power and credibility because their class is uniquely conformist and cowardly and unimpressive, relative to other historical periods. Regarding courage and integrity, elites have failed at literally every turn. I'm unaware of a single instance of our elite class doing the right thing in the face of risky status incentives or peer disapproval.
Their ideas aren't their own. They were borrowed from OTHER elites, who themselves also lacked any meaningful contact with the real world, or iconoclastic tendencies. Insulated in layers of privilege and fear these half-children bumble around, relying on the orthodoxies of yesterday to make sense of reality.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/horizontal-information-flow
I was so happy to read this sentence by Hanson that I laughed out loud --> "Many expressed horror at the idea of allowing or even encouraging cultural variety that deviates from their confident moral stances on war, slavery, democracy, gender-equality, corporal punishment, higher education, medicine for all, etc." Yay engaged elite teens!
I appreciated this from the various posted comments (among others) -- why re-implement ethical horrors that took us centuries to defeat?
Hanson says that modern values are decreasing fertility which will appear to reduce fertility, which makes it possible that our culture will be replaced by a more adaptive culture, and that more adaptive culture may not share enlightenment values.
That's too many maybes and probabilistic outcomes for me to endorse sufficiently to allow slavery, war, gender inequality, less education, etc. Another maybe may be: The more adaptive culture may have figured out ways to live that allow both good fertility levels and more humans to thrive.
Re: "Cultural evolution rewards adaptiveness, and yes you likely care about other stuff besides adaptiveness. (Stuff that prior cultural evolution told you to care about - there is no other source for such concerns.)"
Yes, there is: genes. See also: individual learning.
Vibes with the Bene Gesserit from the Dune series.
"You do not speak truth; you speak only your truths. Each of us sees our own reality.”
— Paul Atreides, Dune Messiah
"Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”
— Bene Gesserit proverb, Heretics of Dune
“encouraging subgroups who deviate on those norms, to see if such deviations might be more adaptive.” That seems dangerous. The norms people *want to* violate are probably the ones most needed for long term fitness. To arbitrarily support norm-breaking is just to give even more status to change agents who will further accelerate cultural drift, making the problem worse. Don’t you need to identify values or norms that likely point toward higher fitness and specifically encourage subgroups that are experimenting in a positive direction?
Yes, in principle a wise culture authority could authorize only good variations to allow. But we don't yet have such available. Maybe futarchy could create them.
Why does there have to be an “authority” to “authorize” the norms of subgroups? Let’s stick with non-governmental agents choosing which groups to “encourage” or upon which groups to bestow elevated status with what cultural clout they may possess.
Startup founders get this point intuitively
After Product/Market Fit, it's maybe the only job where you viscerally feel that if you'd don't evolve an adaptive culture your team will die
From a more criminological standpoint, basic convention in biology is life wants to live, beings generally seeking to stay intact, and behavior embracing extinction essentially functions as a crime against the basics of what drives behavior in life forms. The philosophy is in the term "cultural" compared to existential living as a goal of evolving life forms. Religious literature contains metaphors useful for a format to mind actions that can provide a contextual analysis in the quest for meaning meant to facilitate continued living and doing good works generally. So what is the behavior data underneath the words of "cultural drift" to any specific, more functional scientific grounding in analysis? What does "culture" mean? Before there were TVs, saying it's time to pull the plug and go outside and play, would not be any clear instruction to kids in Athens 2,000 years back. So, when we ask about "cultural drift" this is not being as close to behavioral science methods as a convention of commitment to an objectively historically defined method in science on an issue of addressing social behavior choice and consequences. When has there not been "cultural drift" anyway? The history of the behavioral process of Hitler is one of failure, regardless of anyone's writings of a manifesto in word behavior as if to explain something in their chosen terms about what they call culture. There's less complicated debate and chaos when the issue is kept to specific behavior choices, to select what means we live as compared to what means we die. Is that a culture issue? Maybe, if you term things in religious language, assuming a supernatural existence after bodily death, and this meets in the conventions of biological science with a neutral social word behavior as it quickly is agreed as no scientific method to test a control in a laboratory is possible, there can be no science-based answer. You can decide your idea of death is a thing you as a culture embrace. That is your behavior, and you chose that. Is it a "cultural" thing that you say based on religious quest of meaning that you will prevent me from staying alive? This now becomes the behavioral area in criminology, because now the quest for meaning is to control my outcome for the sake of your attributed religious moral claims upon all that is reality. This is actually social behavior like the failed attempt made by Hitler in that history, demanding loyalty to your wisdom and judgment as determiner of what is legitimate. Immortalism isn't asking permission to be.
This is visible at scale at large media companies; eg NPR and public media in the US losing federal funding as they could not adapt even somewhat to a changing ideological landscape. It is quite strange as they could have very easily hired a few prominent up-and-coming conservative podcasters, given just a few off hours of broadcast time to *very* different opinions, and they would have had at least plausible deniability against the accusations of leftist bias that ultimately led to their defunding. Same can be said with MSNBC / Colbert show etc etc. The obvious framing is "exhibiting loyalty to their side of the culture war until the end" is maladaptive, but how and why do we see these maladaptions play out very publicly at scale over and over again? You see it across most western institutions. Like a suicidal effect.
Even at Columbia university, right before the most recent president resigned, Katrina Armstrong was publicly signaling cooperation with the new administration's demands while privately telling the school they would not. The demands frankly seemed like "off hours broadcast time" level of effort needed. Yet the still could not adapt.
Personally? I think more research needs to be done on clingyness to moral framing in the pyschosexual / desire context. This stuff seems to run parallel to individual relationship behavior, where one partner obsessively sticks to a norm as a signal that they are not getting enough attention.
I am pretty abstract in my thinking, so your arguments just make sense to me - to find the cultural behaviors that work best, you have to try more options in more directed ways than is normally happening.
HOWEVER, I very much also understand the reluctance to overtly allow deviation from current strongly-promulgated norms. It's common advice to compromise on tactics, compromise on actions, but never compromise on values. You've written a fair bit about sacredness of values - I'm surprised that you're surprised when people confirm that they think their values are sacred.
The nuance not covered or maybe it was just assumed, is whether the cultural drift is moral and beneficial in the long run or just expedient and financially beneficial in the short run. The propensity to have children without marriage is a good example of long term destructive behavior that is perfectly acceptable to society at the current time
Dick Minnis removingthecataract.substack.com
Robin doesn't seem to be getting into whether any culture is "truly" moral, but instead descriptively talking about culture being subject to selection.
I recommend asking this about political party drift in the connection of media voter theorem.
I'm sure 1/10 people can answer usefully