Western culture may be unique in its high degree of systematization and the resulting over-simplification, because "Western thought" is more-or-less synonymous with "thought descended from Plato".
Or, Western culture may be unique in its high degree of over-simplification, because Western technology advanced a long enough time ago that Westerners no longer need to make fine distinctions to cope with everyday life, e.g., predicting the weather or the buffalo herd migration, but have made life much more uniform and predictable. Crossing 5th Avenue is much simpler than crossing a river. People who grow up in a very predictable environment will never learn to recognize the details needed to make the predictions they no longer need to make. Learning algorithms see those as noise and compress them out. If you start looking for crucial concepts most people don't have, you'll be surprised what you find.
For instance, most people have no conception of probability; they really don't know what mean if you say there's a 30% chance of rain, and can't reason from "smoking has a 30% chance of killing you" to "I shouldn't start smoking". I used to think they were just willing to take the risk; but after talking to enough people about it, I found they really don't understand the concept of a thing having a probability. They think either it will happen, or it won't; and can't see any way that their behavior could change that.
I am just now reading Albion's Seed (Fischer) - and so your description of randomness resonated with me. Fischer traces 4 vastly different cultures (from 4 different parts of England) that were implanted into America. When I think of what makes up the American "culture" I know - it consists of parts of each of these 4. But only parts. The really striking thing to me is when you consider a list of the original cultures individually (Puritan New England, Cavalier Virginia, Quaker Pennsylvania, Borderlanders of Appalachia), they are each an incredibly random assortment of cultural items and habits that do not seem to fit a coherent whole at all - although presumably it seemed coherent to them. What we have now - although it seems somewhat coherent to me - is, of course, just what survived from those cultures.
There was an awful lot of win in the Enlightenment. I'm wary of a general theory that says it was a bad idea. Many people (including Freeman Dyson) thought Communism was a reaction to the Enlightenment and a desire to return to pre-Enlightenment values.
Randomness is subjective; an event is random to you if you can't predict it. If a social institution seems random to you, that only means that you can't predict it. That doesn't mean no one can.
In statistics, a model that says, "this is all random!" is greatly inferior to a model that predicts it with a few simple variables, even if the latter model is imperfect.
What you call "drift" is actually people exercising their preferences in response to greater freedom and wealth. That's not random. That goes in a definite, predictable direction: the direction of greater individual preference fulfillment. For example, women are having fewer children because, given the choice, they don't want to raise a lot of children. Egalitarian policies are also predictable: people have compassion and want to see a world where others do not suffer unjustly. With enough wealth, people can fulfill their preference for compassion and justice.
Right-wing politics are also quite simple, not random or complicated. The first principle is that the strong man should do what he wants and step on who he wants, and the weak man should suffer. Taxes? A restraint on the strong man; get rid of them. Consumer protections? A restraint on the strong man and a help for the weak man; get rid of them. Environmental protections? A restraint on the strong man and a help for the weak man; get rid of them. Welfare programs? A help for the weak man; get rid of them. Homeless camps? Illegal immigrants? Weak men; get rid of them. Unions? A restraint on the strong man and support for the weak man; get rid of them. Covid-19 mandates? Reducing profit for the strong man just so the weak man doesn't die; get rid of them. Global warming science? Reducing profit for the strong man; get rid of it. Executive power? The president is a strong man; empower him, do whatever he says. This already covers 90% of right-wing policies.
The second right-wing principle is that my tribe should conquest and be granted privileges over your tribe, which is to be harmed. This covers the Christian nationalists and the neo-nazis, as well as the support for racial profiling in policing, restrictive immigration policies, and higher military budgets.
"What you call 'drift' is actually people exercising their preferences in response to greater freedom and wealth." No, what people prefer has been changing A LOT. You are suffering from the illusion of simplicity I decry in the post.
People prefer to change what they prefer when they get new information. For example, before you've tasted a new flavor of ice cream, you don't prefer it. Once you've tasted it, your preference may change, because now you know more. Now instead of ice cream, imagine you're a woman finding out about "education and careers."
Your "true" preferences are the preferences you would hold if you were fully informed about all alternatives. These are not the same as the preferences you hold in a position of ignorance.
There is no such thing as "true preferences", just preferences that actually existed, as no one is ever "fully informed about all alternatives", because we don't know what all possible alternatives are.
There's the choice you make, and the choice you would make if you were informed.
There's a superiority, a legitimacy, to making choices on better information compared to less information.
True, no one is ever fully informed about all alternatives; that's an ideal for theoretical purposes, not an actuality. People can be informed enough to make the right choice though, so it's as if they were fully informed; they can be informed to an extent such that further information and understanding, no matter how carefully considered, won't lead them to change their decision.
How do you know how much is "enough", and how do you know which is the "right" choice? Unless you have all the information, how can you know whether more information WOULD change a decision?
Sometimes you know when enough evidence is enough, because you can construct a rigorous proof. More often you don't know. It's like the halting problem: we know there is some correct answer to the question of whether a program eventually halts or does not halt. We can run all of them in parallel and see which ones halt. But if a program hasn't halted yet, there's not necessarily any way to prove that it never will.
The change isn't that women are now able to have the number of children they want, rather the number of children they want has changed (and the number of children achieved is now below the number they report wanting).
As soon as you educate women and give them birth control, the birth rate drops off a cliff. That happened everywhere around the world, and it speaks to the true number of children they want being lower than before you educated them and gave them the choice.
There is also a secondary factor that women can't afford to stay home and raise children anymore. This is driven more by the demands of capitalism for more workers, as well as by the rising costs of raising and educating children to what is deemed an acceptable standard, which is also driven by the demands of capitalism for well-educated workers.
Your causal story is just wrong. The demographic transition began in France around 1760, long before birth control or before female education was common.
Society is wealthier today, so we can afford more. Subcultures that prefer having more children do, they are not prevented from doing so by the cost. Education is full of wasteful signalling, employers haven't cared at all about most of the courses I took (education could be more vocational, focusing on skills relevant to employment, but that's not very popular here).
Have a look at recent declines in fertility rates around the world: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate Look at India, Kenya, Sweden. It's 20th century mostly.
Employers might not care about most of the courses you took, but that doesn't matter. They want to know that you graduated, and from where, and what your degree was in, and your first employer will care about your GPA. Education increases your IQ, gives you connections, and gets your foot in the door. It's very expensive to raise a child to where they can graduate from a good college.
Yes, some subcultures can afford more children, but most women want to raise a child who will be successful and educated, and *that* is very expensive. We have very recent norms about not leaving your child alone at all; that means you have to pay for daycare and babysitters.
Women in the US used to be non-working housewives, but this is less affordable these days. The rising cost of housing means both spouses need to work. Why did housing cost rise? Because people had more money. Why did they have more money? Because women started working. Why did women start working? Because the employers were willing to pay them, because they wanted more labor and profits.
If neither of those links address 18th century France, then I dismiss them. You need to be able to explain that, the actual beginning of the trend, rather than where the trend spread to afterward.
> It's very expensive to raise a child to where they can graduate from a good college.
Not for Greg Cochran. He just let his kids go to the local public schools with terrible reputations, and they grew up to be National Merit Scholars and physicists (like him).
> Yes, some subcultures can afford more children, but most women want to raise a child who will be successful and educated, and *that* is very expensive.
Again, that didn't seem to be the case for Cochran.
> We have very recent norms about not leaving your child alone at all; that means you have to pay for daycare and babysitters.
To give a hint of how recent those norms are, my own mother was raised by her older sisters because her mother died when she was very young and her dad moved to another city for work. In large families, the babysitters ARE the older siblings. Families could reject those new norms in favor of older ones, which would be more compatible with having more children.
> Why did housing cost rise? Because people had more money.
The cost of many other things went down even though people had more money. For housing, the problem is supply constraints. Austin has been building more than other cities (because they allow it), so rents have been dropping rather than rising.
> Why did women start working?
Technological advances reduced the amount of time required for housework, and opened up more careers to women. Employers have always wanted profits, you need a change to explain a change.
You haven't told me any factual information on 18th century France. Something about a cultural shift in 1780, you said, with no supporting data. There's nothing to refute. And in any case, just because education and birth control are the major driving forces of birth rate decline in most countries in the 20th century, doesn't mean there can't be other driving forces in 18th century France.
Greg Cochran is one example - an anecdote is not evidence. Sending your children to public schools, anyway, doesn't do away with the other costs. People pay $40k per child for daycare in good neighborhoods.
Yes, older children raising younger children made it cheaper. But it also meant the children didn't spend as much time in school. Nowadays this is less legally feasible as well because of changing norms on child endangerment.
I see the present chaos as a matter of timescales. Let A be the timescale for some system (genes, culture) to adapt to its environment, and C be the timescale over which that environment changes.
Throughout most of human history we had A << C for culture changes. Meaning that the culture had plenty of time to adapt fully to its situation and enter into a self-perpetuating norm, a kind of quasi-stasis. Whatever adaptation was happening only happened in small increments. (Conversely for most genetic adaptations since becoming Homo Sapiens we've always had A >> C, which explains our bad knees and overindulgence in high-calorie foods.)
What's changed in the modern era is that C has gotten so much shorter because of technology, and we now have A >> C for culture too. A is overwhelmed by its endlessly wandering target and the "adaptation" steps it takes are huge, and seemingly directed at random.
The conservative inclination is to make C long again...slow down the pace of change. But that's driven by technology and there's no putting that genie back in the bottle.
Is it possible for technology to evolve but culture to remain fixed? Religious communities like the Amish effectively put the brakes on both. If culture and technology are two sides of the same coin then perhaps a bit of culture chaos is the price we pay for rapid progress.
Western culture may be unique in its high degree of systematization and the resulting over-simplification, because "Western thought" is more-or-less synonymous with "thought descended from Plato".
Or, Western culture may be unique in its high degree of over-simplification, because Western technology advanced a long enough time ago that Westerners no longer need to make fine distinctions to cope with everyday life, e.g., predicting the weather or the buffalo herd migration, but have made life much more uniform and predictable. Crossing 5th Avenue is much simpler than crossing a river. People who grow up in a very predictable environment will never learn to recognize the details needed to make the predictions they no longer need to make. Learning algorithms see those as noise and compress them out. If you start looking for crucial concepts most people don't have, you'll be surprised what you find.
For instance, most people have no conception of probability; they really don't know what mean if you say there's a 30% chance of rain, and can't reason from "smoking has a 30% chance of killing you" to "I shouldn't start smoking". I used to think they were just willing to take the risk; but after talking to enough people about it, I found they really don't understand the concept of a thing having a probability. They think either it will happen, or it won't; and can't see any way that their behavior could change that.
Yes our culture might be especially prone to over simplification.
I am just now reading Albion's Seed (Fischer) - and so your description of randomness resonated with me. Fischer traces 4 vastly different cultures (from 4 different parts of England) that were implanted into America. When I think of what makes up the American "culture" I know - it consists of parts of each of these 4. But only parts. The really striking thing to me is when you consider a list of the original cultures individually (Puritan New England, Cavalier Virginia, Quaker Pennsylvania, Borderlanders of Appalachia), they are each an incredibly random assortment of cultural items and habits that do not seem to fit a coherent whole at all - although presumably it seemed coherent to them. What we have now - although it seems somewhat coherent to me - is, of course, just what survived from those cultures.
All Protestant?
Yes, although very different forms
There was an awful lot of win in the Enlightenment. I'm wary of a general theory that says it was a bad idea. Many people (including Freeman Dyson) thought Communism was a reaction to the Enlightenment and a desire to return to pre-Enlightenment values.
Not all drift is bad. We have to be selective.
The whole point of random drift is that some is good and some is bad, but that it is bad on average if it is not driven by selection pressures.
Yes, and that's why Communism is mostly gone now. The people who advocated for it thought it was adaptive. They were wrong.
Randomness is subjective; an event is random to you if you can't predict it. If a social institution seems random to you, that only means that you can't predict it. That doesn't mean no one can.
In statistics, a model that says, "this is all random!" is greatly inferior to a model that predicts it with a few simple variables, even if the latter model is imperfect.
What you call "drift" is actually people exercising their preferences in response to greater freedom and wealth. That's not random. That goes in a definite, predictable direction: the direction of greater individual preference fulfillment. For example, women are having fewer children because, given the choice, they don't want to raise a lot of children. Egalitarian policies are also predictable: people have compassion and want to see a world where others do not suffer unjustly. With enough wealth, people can fulfill their preference for compassion and justice.
Right-wing politics are also quite simple, not random or complicated. The first principle is that the strong man should do what he wants and step on who he wants, and the weak man should suffer. Taxes? A restraint on the strong man; get rid of them. Consumer protections? A restraint on the strong man and a help for the weak man; get rid of them. Environmental protections? A restraint on the strong man and a help for the weak man; get rid of them. Welfare programs? A help for the weak man; get rid of them. Homeless camps? Illegal immigrants? Weak men; get rid of them. Unions? A restraint on the strong man and support for the weak man; get rid of them. Covid-19 mandates? Reducing profit for the strong man just so the weak man doesn't die; get rid of them. Global warming science? Reducing profit for the strong man; get rid of it. Executive power? The president is a strong man; empower him, do whatever he says. This already covers 90% of right-wing policies.
The second right-wing principle is that my tribe should conquest and be granted privileges over your tribe, which is to be harmed. This covers the Christian nationalists and the neo-nazis, as well as the support for racial profiling in policing, restrictive immigration policies, and higher military budgets.
All fairly coherent and simple.
"What you call 'drift' is actually people exercising their preferences in response to greater freedom and wealth." No, what people prefer has been changing A LOT. You are suffering from the illusion of simplicity I decry in the post.
People prefer to change what they prefer when they get new information. For example, before you've tasted a new flavor of ice cream, you don't prefer it. Once you've tasted it, your preference may change, because now you know more. Now instead of ice cream, imagine you're a woman finding out about "education and careers."
Your "true" preferences are the preferences you would hold if you were fully informed about all alternatives. These are not the same as the preferences you hold in a position of ignorance.
There is no such thing as "true preferences", just preferences that actually existed, as no one is ever "fully informed about all alternatives", because we don't know what all possible alternatives are.
There's what you want, and what you really want.
There's the choice you make, and the choice you would make if you were informed.
There's a superiority, a legitimacy, to making choices on better information compared to less information.
True, no one is ever fully informed about all alternatives; that's an ideal for theoretical purposes, not an actuality. People can be informed enough to make the right choice though, so it's as if they were fully informed; they can be informed to an extent such that further information and understanding, no matter how carefully considered, won't lead them to change their decision.
How do you know how much is "enough", and how do you know which is the "right" choice? Unless you have all the information, how can you know whether more information WOULD change a decision?
Sometimes you know when enough evidence is enough, because you can construct a rigorous proof. More often you don't know. It's like the halting problem: we know there is some correct answer to the question of whether a program eventually halts or does not halt. We can run all of them in parallel and see which ones halt. But if a program hasn't halted yet, there's not necessarily any way to prove that it never will.
The change isn't that women are now able to have the number of children they want, rather the number of children they want has changed (and the number of children achieved is now below the number they report wanting).
As soon as you educate women and give them birth control, the birth rate drops off a cliff. That happened everywhere around the world, and it speaks to the true number of children they want being lower than before you educated them and gave them the choice.
There is also a secondary factor that women can't afford to stay home and raise children anymore. This is driven more by the demands of capitalism for more workers, as well as by the rising costs of raising and educating children to what is deemed an acceptable standard, which is also driven by the demands of capitalism for well-educated workers.
Your causal story is just wrong. The demographic transition began in France around 1760, long before birth control or before female education was common.
Society is wealthier today, so we can afford more. Subcultures that prefer having more children do, they are not prevented from doing so by the cost. Education is full of wasteful signalling, employers haven't cared at all about most of the courses I took (education could be more vocational, focusing on skills relevant to employment, but that's not very popular here).
The scholarly consensus is that yes, contraceptives and female education are the major factors. https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/09/08/how-birth-control-girls-education-can-slow-population-growth/
Have a look at recent declines in fertility rates around the world: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate Look at India, Kenya, Sweden. It's 20th century mostly.
Employers might not care about most of the courses you took, but that doesn't matter. They want to know that you graduated, and from where, and what your degree was in, and your first employer will care about your GPA. Education increases your IQ, gives you connections, and gets your foot in the door. It's very expensive to raise a child to where they can graduate from a good college.
Yes, some subcultures can afford more children, but most women want to raise a child who will be successful and educated, and *that* is very expensive. We have very recent norms about not leaving your child alone at all; that means you have to pay for daycare and babysitters.
Women in the US used to be non-working housewives, but this is less affordable these days. The rising cost of housing means both spouses need to work. Why did housing cost rise? Because people had more money. Why did they have more money? Because women started working. Why did women start working? Because the employers were willing to pay them, because they wanted more labor and profits.
If neither of those links address 18th century France, then I dismiss them. You need to be able to explain that, the actual beginning of the trend, rather than where the trend spread to afterward.
> It's very expensive to raise a child to where they can graduate from a good college.
Not for Greg Cochran. He just let his kids go to the local public schools with terrible reputations, and they grew up to be National Merit Scholars and physicists (like him).
> Yes, some subcultures can afford more children, but most women want to raise a child who will be successful and educated, and *that* is very expensive.
Again, that didn't seem to be the case for Cochran.
> We have very recent norms about not leaving your child alone at all; that means you have to pay for daycare and babysitters.
To give a hint of how recent those norms are, my own mother was raised by her older sisters because her mother died when she was very young and her dad moved to another city for work. In large families, the babysitters ARE the older siblings. Families could reject those new norms in favor of older ones, which would be more compatible with having more children.
> Why did housing cost rise? Because people had more money.
The cost of many other things went down even though people had more money. For housing, the problem is supply constraints. Austin has been building more than other cities (because they allow it), so rents have been dropping rather than rising.
> Why did women start working?
Technological advances reduced the amount of time required for housework, and opened up more careers to women. Employers have always wanted profits, you need a change to explain a change.
You haven't told me any factual information on 18th century France. Something about a cultural shift in 1780, you said, with no supporting data. There's nothing to refute. And in any case, just because education and birth control are the major driving forces of birth rate decline in most countries in the 20th century, doesn't mean there can't be other driving forces in 18th century France.
Greg Cochran is one example - an anecdote is not evidence. Sending your children to public schools, anyway, doesn't do away with the other costs. People pay $40k per child for daycare in good neighborhoods.
Yes, older children raising younger children made it cheaper. But it also meant the children didn't spend as much time in school. Nowadays this is less legally feasible as well because of changing norms on child endangerment.
I see the present chaos as a matter of timescales. Let A be the timescale for some system (genes, culture) to adapt to its environment, and C be the timescale over which that environment changes.
Throughout most of human history we had A << C for culture changes. Meaning that the culture had plenty of time to adapt fully to its situation and enter into a self-perpetuating norm, a kind of quasi-stasis. Whatever adaptation was happening only happened in small increments. (Conversely for most genetic adaptations since becoming Homo Sapiens we've always had A >> C, which explains our bad knees and overindulgence in high-calorie foods.)
What's changed in the modern era is that C has gotten so much shorter because of technology, and we now have A >> C for culture too. A is overwhelmed by its endlessly wandering target and the "adaptation" steps it takes are huge, and seemingly directed at random.
The conservative inclination is to make C long again...slow down the pace of change. But that's driven by technology and there's no putting that genie back in the bottle.
Yes, but if culture goes badly enough that will stop our tech and related stuff from improving for a while. And many other bad effects.
Is it possible for technology to evolve but culture to remain fixed? Religious communities like the Amish effectively put the brakes on both. If culture and technology are two sides of the same coin then perhaps a bit of culture chaos is the price we pay for rapid progress.