Not sure why I didn’t notice before, but I’ve just realized that my key ask re cultural drift, namely let’s try to save cherished parts of our culture from being discarded by successor civs, violates key modern taboos!
Robin, I like to read your takes because they are very different from what most other people come up with. But the LLMs are not gaslighting you: some of your views are pretty weird, and the combination of them even weirder. A few things that stood out to me:
1. There is a tension between wanting to preserve the old (culture) and usher in the new (technology).
2. There is another tension between wanting to reduce government intervention in some areas (like medicine and education) while increasing government intervention in others (like child rearing).
3. You selectively want to preserve some liberalist values (like open intellectual inquiry) while not caring about others (like liberty, democracy, and civil rights).
I want to allow a lot of change, while still preserving some cherished things, but not everything others value counts as much for me. On kids, I'd prefer full property rights, the govt tax assets thing is a compromise.
The taboo is very situational. On the left there is a taboo in advocating for what is perceived as the dominant culture: White, male, English-speaking, heterosexual, affluent. Differ along any of these dimensions and you can advocate all you want. But for people squarely in that zone it's...awkward.
I don't understand where this caricature of the left comes from. I'm all those things and have worked directly with left advocacy groups for years and have never encountered this taboo.
In every US university there are advocacy groups like The Society of Women Engineers, Chinese Students Association, LGBT advocacy groups, Muslim Students Association, and so on.
Try starting a Society of Men Engineers or a White Students Association. The taboo will be quickly revealed.
The advocacy goals of your example groups are centered around trying to reach parity with the dominant cultural group. If you had an advocacy org for the dominant cultural group what would the advocacy goals be?
It's like starting a men's suffrage movement. I don't disagree with you that men should have suffrage... but they already do. So what I would want to know is what you're actually trying to accomplish and it would seem like a weird thing for you to be spending your time on.
When a member of the dominant culture looks at a marginalized group advocating for more equal treatment and their response is "but what about me?" I think it's natural to look at that with skepticism. If that's a taboo I guess there's a taboo.
> The advocacy goals of your example groups are centered around trying to reach parity with the dominant cultural group.
More often these groups are social, not political. But more to the point, "white" and "male" are no longer dominant cultural groups on US campuses. The times they are a-changin'. It will be interesting to see how long these taboos persist.
Dominant X things do not endure open racism without consequence or get penalized in selection based on X. You presuppose domination and a "group" that isn't there.
"More equal" treatment is lying. Unless you mean it the way Animal Farm uses it.
This alleged group has suffrage. It does not have equal treatment under law. What counts as evidence for discrimination in one case is disregarded in another, arbitrarily. When a person has a problem with sex or skin color ratio for CEOs or coaches, but not for players or garbage collectors, that person is lying.
If we accept that ratio matters by itself, which was a mistake, then it can't randomly not matter. That is per se' bad faith. Just like the notion that white men or any other skin color is somehow a legit, distinct culture and not an over general fabrication is bad faith.
I also don't think there is such a Taboo. Yes, some very narrow subcultures in the left are against this, but they constitute a very small number of people (I'd guess <1% of the population in the US and western Europe, and far less than this anywhere else in the world).
Of course, you could tip the scales, by phrasing the question in a particular way. But for the phrasing that Hanson gives, this is not taboo AFAICT.
I see how LLMs would answer that this is taboo, though: the RLHF and system prompts of LLMs are set very strongly against anything that smells like racism, and so they may "take the other side" as a precaution. I'm not saying necessarily that LLMs are set to be extremely woke. I'm saying that if you venture into domains that smells racist to them, they will pull hard to the left in that particular context.
I'm nor arguing, you're probably right, but this is extremely surprising to me. The whole point of the "marketplace of ideas" is that people should advocate for their culture to be as prevalent as possible, over space and over time. This is an integral part of free speech.
I have noticed a small minority on the left reject free speech and the marketplace of ideas. But it also seems like fringe groups. Are you saying that among the elites that surround you, the marketplace of ideas is rejected? Or is it that only a subset of it is rejected, e.g. "you're allowed to advocate for your culture/ideas, but you must not 'win too much', otherwise you become the baddies"?
(Of course, the idea of "you're not allowed to 'win too much'" is very ingrained in current far-left thought, so maybe it's a good theory of the case here?)
I think it is a very small minority in the left. But they do have outsized power to get their way. Let's take your example below, of inviting a conservative to speak at a US university. This will often get shut down. But if you actually check in a secret ballot how many people actually want the person to be barred from speaking, it will be a very small minority. It's just that they're very loud, and can extract a substantial price from decisionmakers.
That's what I'm saying: the taboo is not real. But some very loud minority has a very vocal opinion that this taboo SHOULD be applied. And they are policing it very actively, and no one wants to fight with them. I agree with you that de facto, if you are in a left-wing circle and you try to violate this taboo, then you will often get yelled at loudly, and no one will come to your defense. But in fact, the number of people who yell at you, is a very small minority.
In other words: left wing circles are being policed by a sub-culture that is a small minority. And I'm claiming that LLMs duplicate the preferences of this minority, specifically because of how loud these people are (therefore making them prominent in the training set, and in RLHF).
Taboos that are physically enforced are real regardless of their popular support or legitimacy. What people say on a piece of paper did not change what actually occurred.
But isn't it the function of the elites that they lead the masses? Masses are frequently amorphous and they are just begging to be led. What I am saying - maybe Marat, Danton, St Just and Robespierre were just a tiny minority - but they were successful in inflicting terreur on the whole of Revolutionary France. But hey, Marat and Robespierre were not alone - there were Jacobins who supported them and there were Sansculottes. Not to forget Madame Therese Defarge, knitting at the guillotine...
Just go to any US university and try to invite an open conservative to give a lecture. You don't even have to invite a pro-Israel conservative. Just any pro-Trump conservative will do.
In evolutionary terms, both mutation and selection are critical for fitness gain. You complain about "drift" (excessive mutation) and seek to preserve an older culture. Why so little talk about the selection side of the process? What reason is there to believe that current selection methods are maladaptive? (Or that selection methods in previous eras were beneficially adaptive?) Wouldn't it be best to address this issue instead of trying to lock in a culture adapted for a previous era?
My guess is that if you look at the whole picture, culture you consider adaptive is surging worldwide. Example, you'd plausibly agree that taboos on cousin marriage were a positive cultural feature in Western Europe. I'll bet cousin marriage is falling if you look worldwide. Similarly, literacy and vaccination have surged worldwide:
In general, recent improvements in global outcomes (see link above) seem incongruous with your idea that some type of terrible cultural drift is happening. I would argue the opposite: On net, developing countries are acquiring characteristics of developed countries, a beneficial form of "drift".
I personally think you raise some excellent points.
But one aspect of cultural drift you haven't addressed: traditionally, the driver of cultural evolution is external forces like natural disasters, wars, competition with other societies for land and resources, and so on.
If you accept the premise that culture is merging into one globe-spanning blob, then the selection pressures disappear and you risk drift or stagnation.
Whether or not that premise is the right way to think about things isn't obvious to me. If you don't accept the premise, maybe global coordination merely changes the environment in which cultural evolution is taking place, much like the present capitalist economy is enabled by nation states.
Not sure how this relates to my comment which is not questioning cultural evolution as a real. It is only questioning the premise that all cultures are merging into a global monoculture.
Nowadays, individuals have many choices about the type of culture they adopt. They can adopt a new religion, move to a different city or a different country, learn a new language or get a new job, join a subculture, hop on a social media trend. Individuals may have friends from other cultures, or parents from two different cultures which present a choice as to which cultural features they will adopt.
The internet provides an incredible quantity of information regarding various cultural options. It provides endless meta-discussion of the merits and demerits of various cultural features. This is a dramatic change from the pre-industrial era, where most people were illiterate peasants who simply did things the way they were always done.
This human-centered motor for cultural evolution could well be superior to an "external forces" or "might makes right" motor, from a utilitarian perspective.
Robin would probably focus on ways in which our current human-centered motor is unrelated to, or detrimental for, species welfare. But there are also ways in which the "might makes right" motor was unrelated to species welfare. The Mongols were incredibly successful from a "might makes right" standpoint, and also did incredible damage to our welfare as a species.
Both of the motors discussed have but a noisy relationship with species welfare. At best we can hope for slow gains in welfare over time, two steps forward and one step back. So pointing at particular "steps back" is not strong evidence against any given motor.
It should be noted that the manner in which individuals "adopt" new cultures is a superficial one. The main cultural substrate never leaves and it's just liberal enough to allow "adoption" of a new style/aesthetic. The reality of being part of a culture is that it's much harder and deeper than just adopting a new outfit and a few new mannerisms. It's just cosplay, it's not adaption you're actually observing.
If I'm understanding correctly, your "human-centered motor" is sort of thinking about cultures as goods that are endorsed by humans in a cultural marketplace. From this point of view, cultural selection is basically a popularity contest.
The problem with this model is that it only explains how cultures are chosen in the short term, but not how they evolve in the long run.
The basic example is fertility. Let's say a civilization embraces a culture that leads to low fertility. Depending on how you measure species welfare, that culture may be good, at least in the short term (if it leads to short term happiness). But the civilization will go extinct in a few generations.
Cultural drift, at least the way Hanson speaks about it, is about these long term effects.
I'm not sure the "might makes right" motor is somehow inherently more long-run focused.
Let me attempt a reframe here. Perhaps what we need is to think of fertility as a third motor alongside military might and the cultural good marketplace.
In an ancient context where fertility is Malthusian (no birth control), and there is minimal cultural good marketplace (no printing press or widespread literacy), the military motor dominates.
In the modern world, we have a conflict between the cultural good marketplace motor and the fertility motor. From the POV of the cultural good marketplace, the fertility motor is dystopian since high-fertility regions tend to be underdeveloped and gender-unequal. I.e. the fertility selection criterion is less correlated with human welfare than the cultural good marketplace selection criterion.
> What reason is there to believe that current selection methods are maladaptive?
He's written about this. Cultural group selection worked when there were lots of little cultures competing against each other, frequently going extinct (thereby negatively selecting against the least adapted cultures). There are far fewer separate cultures nowadays, and the dominant world culture is large enough that even being severely maladaptive will take quite a while before causing extinction. In genetics, small populations are more subject to drift (which can be neutral, but also deleterious at times), whereas selection is stronger in larger populations. If our unit is cultures rather than individuals/genes, then the "population" of multiple cultures is vastly smaller, and these cultures aren't spawning off separate cultures (in the way that a language in Papua New Guinea would spawn off lots of descendant languages in neighboring valleys), again because we're so inter-connected.
Another way of thinking about it is that the previous tribal-selection regime has been replaced by a layered selection regime. Firms compete to make the most profits, religions compete for the most adherents, entertainers compete for the largest audience, etc. In a tribal context, each group of humans would tend to have distinct economic activity, religious beliefs, and recreational practices. Nowadays you can mix and match by working for an arbitrary firm, believing in arbitrary gods, consuming arbitrary entertainment media (within reason).
At the national level, nations don't compete as much through war, but they still compete for national prestige: having the best numbers for health, crime, economy, even soccer competence (observe how invested nations are in the World Cup). A recent illustrative example: consider the surge in right-wing politics across Latin America, looking to copy Bukele's success at suppressing crime in El Salvador. Under Robin's implicit model, such improvements can only happen as Bukele's El Salvador gradually subsumes the rest of the continent through armed conquest. Obviously this is false. Conquest would seem a far inferior method of cultural selection in terms of its humanitarian impact, selection speed, and correlation with human welfare.
Culture is not at the level of an individual. Language is for communicating between individuals, for example. Below-replacement fertility is a big problem Robin has pointed out as a symptom of maladaptive cultural drift, and reproduction isn't an individual matter (as it might be for an asexually reproducing species) but instead requires multiple people.
Can culture exist at the level of a family, firm, or congregation? If so, why not at the level of an individual?
>Language is for communicating between individuals, for example.
English is widely spoken in both Nigeria and New Zealand. Does that mean Nigeria and New Zealand are culturally identical?
>Below-replacement fertility is a big problem Robin has pointed out as a symptom of maladaptive cultural drift
See the paragraphs I added to the grandparent of this comment. Policymakers are concerned about the problem of fertility. They are testing various measures and comparing notes. The problem hasn't yet been cracked, but there is an ongoing distributed effort to crack it. See also my "two steps forwards, one step back" remark here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-politics/comment/286436776
You didn’t notice it before because you didn’t notice the taboo before. Neither did I.
But I think the whole of what you have been calling ‘cultural drift’ is downstream of that taboo. Also, more importantly the taboo implies that the proclaimed goals of progressive activism must either be understood ironically, or implausibly, must constitute taboo breaking by progressives, precisely the group from whom people most fear taboo enforcement.
According to many global priorities researchers, the best things to do to prevent nearterm civ collapse are to co-ordinate to avoid extinction risks from new tech, and to promote rapid tech progress in other areas so we can reduce risks and expand. These goals seem at odds with splitting the world into many insular units (one of your 4 ideas listed above). How do you think about these tradeoffs?
I see global coordination issues as less important than many other issues. And that was just one out of four options in conflict with global coordination.
Since you believe cultural drift is the biggest problem, you should abandon atheism and pick something else.
Atheism is at best an unproven vehicle for solving the malaise you've identified. One likely needs to have some form of traditional religious beliefs to believe in the necessity of propagating ones values and ensuring continued survival of humanity.
After all religion is the only plausible space where, "My belief [culture] ought to persist and yours ought not," can be said.
If you are atheist because you don't "believe," you might try to pick a religion and adhere to its practices and rituals. You may come to believe over time because of this immersion, but even if this doesn't happen, you will be functionally the same as a religious person and a member of a group working towards eternity. You can then attempt to influence the arc of that trajectory.
Of the four names, I much prefer Evolutionary Capitalist.
It captures what seems to be the unifying thread running through your recent essays: not a blanket preference for markets, but a belief that capitalism is humanity's most powerful discovery process because it subjects ideas, organizations, and institutions to continuous selection. The emphasis is on adaptation through competition rather than on markets as an end in themselves.
The other labels strike me as either too abstract (Selectionist), too narrow (Cultural Selectionist), or too generic (Adaptive Futurist). Evolutionary Capitalist also makes it immediately clear why you keep returning to prediction markets, incentive contracts, futarchy, and cultural drift because they're all mechanisms for improving evolutionary selection.
Whether one agrees with the framework or not, the name points readers toward the core idea rather than a particular political tribe.
"I thought: this seems another way that the topic of culture has moved me to the right. In addition to my agreeing with traditionalists who complained that we were changing culture too fast. And my wanting more capitalism. Am I more typically conservative now?"
The implication that a move to the right would make you more typically conservative seems to be a non-sequitur to me.
You are a bizarro-intellectual. Typical people's ideas tend to be too bland. The smarter they are, the greater the proportion of their ideas that are interesting. Stupid typical people have completely banal ideas; smart typical people have some interesting things to say but remain deeply rooted in conventional ideaspace.
On the other hand, bizarro people's ideas tend to be too colorful. Stupid bizarro people are completely nuts and have only garish, confused ideas; smart bizarro people have some interesting ideas but still branch out far into the diamond sky.
So if you moved to the right, you would not become more typical, you would remain as weird as you are but become more conservative. If on the other hand you became more typical, this would not per se affect your position on the left-right spectrum.
Based on your list it seems that you have indeed joined the bizarro-conservatives without becoming much more typical.
Summary: "I want efficiency in every system controlled by a small group, but don't understand why culture is converging into a single comprise of ideas with little range or experimentation"
Adaptive futurist is a no-no. A large section of intellectuals who formed several transformations of Mussolini's party were futurists. So if one calls oneself futurist, one opens oneself to being called with the f word.
Do medicare and medicaid have value as advanced market commitments to buy new medicines and hence induce more investment in medical technology development?
For all its flaws the American culture has performed admirably for the last 250 years. Protecting the family, free speech, and individual liberty while reaping the rewards of Capitalism. Name another culture in that league. F*ck AI, our culture is worth protecting. AI is a LLM that still reads the NYT. Need I say more.
Robin, I like to read your takes because they are very different from what most other people come up with. But the LLMs are not gaslighting you: some of your views are pretty weird, and the combination of them even weirder. A few things that stood out to me:
1. There is a tension between wanting to preserve the old (culture) and usher in the new (technology).
2. There is another tension between wanting to reduce government intervention in some areas (like medicine and education) while increasing government intervention in others (like child rearing).
3. You selectively want to preserve some liberalist values (like open intellectual inquiry) while not caring about others (like liberty, democracy, and civil rights).
I want to allow a lot of change, while still preserving some cherished things, but not everything others value counts as much for me. On kids, I'd prefer full property rights, the govt tax assets thing is a compromise.
>>> 3 top LLMs agree that is now taboo to explicitly work to make your culture persist
Why do you think they are correct? Taboo to the average American? European? People under 30?
Or are you saying to is taboo to make your specific cultural beliefs persist?
I ask because it doesn't seem, in general, like a taboo to me. In fact, seems like most people I know what their culture to persist
The taboo is very situational. On the left there is a taboo in advocating for what is perceived as the dominant culture: White, male, English-speaking, heterosexual, affluent. Differ along any of these dimensions and you can advocate all you want. But for people squarely in that zone it's...awkward.
I don't understand where this caricature of the left comes from. I'm all those things and have worked directly with left advocacy groups for years and have never encountered this taboo.
In every US university there are advocacy groups like The Society of Women Engineers, Chinese Students Association, LGBT advocacy groups, Muslim Students Association, and so on.
Try starting a Society of Men Engineers or a White Students Association. The taboo will be quickly revealed.
The advocacy goals of your example groups are centered around trying to reach parity with the dominant cultural group. If you had an advocacy org for the dominant cultural group what would the advocacy goals be?
It's like starting a men's suffrage movement. I don't disagree with you that men should have suffrage... but they already do. So what I would want to know is what you're actually trying to accomplish and it would seem like a weird thing for you to be spending your time on.
When a member of the dominant culture looks at a marginalized group advocating for more equal treatment and their response is "but what about me?" I think it's natural to look at that with skepticism. If that's a taboo I guess there's a taboo.
> The advocacy goals of your example groups are centered around trying to reach parity with the dominant cultural group.
More often these groups are social, not political. But more to the point, "white" and "male" are no longer dominant cultural groups on US campuses. The times they are a-changin'. It will be interesting to see how long these taboos persist.
Dominant X things do not endure open racism without consequence or get penalized in selection based on X. You presuppose domination and a "group" that isn't there.
"More equal" treatment is lying. Unless you mean it the way Animal Farm uses it.
This alleged group has suffrage. It does not have equal treatment under law. What counts as evidence for discrimination in one case is disregarded in another, arbitrarily. When a person has a problem with sex or skin color ratio for CEOs or coaches, but not for players or garbage collectors, that person is lying.
If we accept that ratio matters by itself, which was a mistake, then it can't randomly not matter. That is per se' bad faith. Just like the notion that white men or any other skin color is somehow a legit, distinct culture and not an over general fabrication is bad faith.
I also don't think there is such a Taboo. Yes, some very narrow subcultures in the left are against this, but they constitute a very small number of people (I'd guess <1% of the population in the US and western Europe, and far less than this anywhere else in the world).
Of course, you could tip the scales, by phrasing the question in a particular way. But for the phrasing that Hanson gives, this is not taboo AFAICT.
I see how LLMs would answer that this is taboo, though: the RLHF and system prompts of LLMs are set very strongly against anything that smells like racism, and so they may "take the other side" as a precaution. I'm not saying necessarily that LLMs are set to be extremely woke. I'm saying that if you venture into domains that smells racist to them, they will pull hard to the left in that particular context.
It is more taboo among elites, but they are most of my world, so for me it is taboo,
Elites do more to preserve their culture than any other group because they have the power to do so.
They may act that way, but they taboo talking that way.
Elites may well preserve their own family's micro-culture, but they're absolutely not trying to preserve that of their nations.
I'm nor arguing, you're probably right, but this is extremely surprising to me. The whole point of the "marketplace of ideas" is that people should advocate for their culture to be as prevalent as possible, over space and over time. This is an integral part of free speech.
I have noticed a small minority on the left reject free speech and the marketplace of ideas. But it also seems like fringe groups. Are you saying that among the elites that surround you, the marketplace of ideas is rejected? Or is it that only a subset of it is rejected, e.g. "you're allowed to advocate for your culture/ideas, but you must not 'win too much', otherwise you become the baddies"?
(Of course, the idea of "you're not allowed to 'win too much'" is very ingrained in current far-left thought, so maybe it's a good theory of the case here?)
It's not a small minority on the left that reject free speech for conservatives.
I think it is a very small minority in the left. But they do have outsized power to get their way. Let's take your example below, of inviting a conservative to speak at a US university. This will often get shut down. But if you actually check in a secret ballot how many people actually want the person to be barred from speaking, it will be a very small minority. It's just that they're very loud, and can extract a substantial price from decisionmakers.
That's what I'm saying: the taboo is not real. But some very loud minority has a very vocal opinion that this taboo SHOULD be applied. And they are policing it very actively, and no one wants to fight with them. I agree with you that de facto, if you are in a left-wing circle and you try to violate this taboo, then you will often get yelled at loudly, and no one will come to your defense. But in fact, the number of people who yell at you, is a very small minority.
In other words: left wing circles are being policed by a sub-culture that is a small minority. And I'm claiming that LLMs duplicate the preferences of this minority, specifically because of how loud these people are (therefore making them prominent in the training set, and in RLHF).
Taboos that are physically enforced are real regardless of their popular support or legitimacy. What people say on a piece of paper did not change what actually occurred.
But isn't it the function of the elites that they lead the masses? Masses are frequently amorphous and they are just begging to be led. What I am saying - maybe Marat, Danton, St Just and Robespierre were just a tiny minority - but they were successful in inflicting terreur on the whole of Revolutionary France. But hey, Marat and Robespierre were not alone - there were Jacobins who supported them and there were Sansculottes. Not to forget Madame Therese Defarge, knitting at the guillotine...
Can you name some examples. This doesn't ring true to me at all.
Just go to any US university and try to invite an open conservative to give a lecture. You don't even have to invite a pro-Israel conservative. Just any pro-Trump conservative will do.
By "taboo" he means for white middle class Americans, Brits, and Germans. The LLM are very leftist, like wiki in its language.
In evolutionary terms, both mutation and selection are critical for fitness gain. You complain about "drift" (excessive mutation) and seek to preserve an older culture. Why so little talk about the selection side of the process? What reason is there to believe that current selection methods are maladaptive? (Or that selection methods in previous eras were beneficially adaptive?) Wouldn't it be best to address this issue instead of trying to lock in a culture adapted for a previous era?
My guess is that if you look at the whole picture, culture you consider adaptive is surging worldwide. Example, you'd plausibly agree that taboos on cousin marriage were a positive cultural feature in Western Europe. I'll bet cousin marriage is falling if you look worldwide. Similarly, literacy and vaccination have surged worldwide:
https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions
In general, recent improvements in global outcomes (see link above) seem incongruous with your idea that some type of terrible cultural drift is happening. I would argue the opposite: On net, developing countries are acquiring characteristics of developed countries, a beneficial form of "drift".
I'm talking about evolution OF cultures, not IN cultures. Its going great within.
Why do we need both kinds? Why can’t we just rely on in-culture evolution if that is going so great?
https://quillette.com/2024/04/11/beware-cultural-drift/
I personally think you raise some excellent points.
But one aspect of cultural drift you haven't addressed: traditionally, the driver of cultural evolution is external forces like natural disasters, wars, competition with other societies for land and resources, and so on.
If you accept the premise that culture is merging into one globe-spanning blob, then the selection pressures disappear and you risk drift or stagnation.
Whether or not that premise is the right way to think about things isn't obvious to me. If you don't accept the premise, maybe global coordination merely changes the environment in which cultural evolution is taking place, much like the present capitalist economy is enabled by nation states.
Cultural evolution is real, and accepted to be real. This isn't some vague guess of a possibility.
Not sure how this relates to my comment which is not questioning cultural evolution as a real. It is only questioning the premise that all cultures are merging into a global monoculture.
Nowadays, individuals have many choices about the type of culture they adopt. They can adopt a new religion, move to a different city or a different country, learn a new language or get a new job, join a subculture, hop on a social media trend. Individuals may have friends from other cultures, or parents from two different cultures which present a choice as to which cultural features they will adopt.
The internet provides an incredible quantity of information regarding various cultural options. It provides endless meta-discussion of the merits and demerits of various cultural features. This is a dramatic change from the pre-industrial era, where most people were illiterate peasants who simply did things the way they were always done.
This human-centered motor for cultural evolution could well be superior to an "external forces" or "might makes right" motor, from a utilitarian perspective.
Robin would probably focus on ways in which our current human-centered motor is unrelated to, or detrimental for, species welfare. But there are also ways in which the "might makes right" motor was unrelated to species welfare. The Mongols were incredibly successful from a "might makes right" standpoint, and also did incredible damage to our welfare as a species.
Both of the motors discussed have but a noisy relationship with species welfare. At best we can hope for slow gains in welfare over time, two steps forward and one step back. So pointing at particular "steps back" is not strong evidence against any given motor.
It should be noted that the manner in which individuals "adopt" new cultures is a superficial one. The main cultural substrate never leaves and it's just liberal enough to allow "adoption" of a new style/aesthetic. The reality of being part of a culture is that it's much harder and deeper than just adopting a new outfit and a few new mannerisms. It's just cosplay, it's not adaption you're actually observing.
Agreed.
I disagree.
If I'm understanding correctly, your "human-centered motor" is sort of thinking about cultures as goods that are endorsed by humans in a cultural marketplace. From this point of view, cultural selection is basically a popularity contest.
The problem with this model is that it only explains how cultures are chosen in the short term, but not how they evolve in the long run.
The basic example is fertility. Let's say a civilization embraces a culture that leads to low fertility. Depending on how you measure species welfare, that culture may be good, at least in the short term (if it leads to short term happiness). But the civilization will go extinct in a few generations.
Cultural drift, at least the way Hanson speaks about it, is about these long term effects.
I'm not sure the "might makes right" motor is somehow inherently more long-run focused.
Let me attempt a reframe here. Perhaps what we need is to think of fertility as a third motor alongside military might and the cultural good marketplace.
In an ancient context where fertility is Malthusian (no birth control), and there is minimal cultural good marketplace (no printing press or widespread literacy), the military motor dominates.
In the modern world, we have a conflict between the cultural good marketplace motor and the fertility motor. From the POV of the cultural good marketplace, the fertility motor is dystopian since high-fertility regions tend to be underdeveloped and gender-unequal. I.e. the fertility selection criterion is less correlated with human welfare than the cultural good marketplace selection criterion.
> What reason is there to believe that current selection methods are maladaptive?
He's written about this. Cultural group selection worked when there were lots of little cultures competing against each other, frequently going extinct (thereby negatively selecting against the least adapted cultures). There are far fewer separate cultures nowadays, and the dominant world culture is large enough that even being severely maladaptive will take quite a while before causing extinction. In genetics, small populations are more subject to drift (which can be neutral, but also deleterious at times), whereas selection is stronger in larger populations. If our unit is cultures rather than individuals/genes, then the "population" of multiple cultures is vastly smaller, and these cultures aren't spawning off separate cultures (in the way that a language in Papua New Guinea would spawn off lots of descendant languages in neighboring valleys), again because we're so inter-connected.
How about considering the individual as the unit of cultural selection? From that perspective, modern opportunities for cultural evolution seem incredibly rich: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-politics/comment/286436776
Another way of thinking about it is that the previous tribal-selection regime has been replaced by a layered selection regime. Firms compete to make the most profits, religions compete for the most adherents, entertainers compete for the largest audience, etc. In a tribal context, each group of humans would tend to have distinct economic activity, religious beliefs, and recreational practices. Nowadays you can mix and match by working for an arbitrary firm, believing in arbitrary gods, consuming arbitrary entertainment media (within reason).
At the national level, nations don't compete as much through war, but they still compete for national prestige: having the best numbers for health, crime, economy, even soccer competence (observe how invested nations are in the World Cup). A recent illustrative example: consider the surge in right-wing politics across Latin America, looking to copy Bukele's success at suppressing crime in El Salvador. Under Robin's implicit model, such improvements can only happen as Bukele's El Salvador gradually subsumes the rest of the continent through armed conquest. Obviously this is false. Conquest would seem a far inferior method of cultural selection in terms of its humanitarian impact, selection speed, and correlation with human welfare.
Culture is not at the level of an individual. Language is for communicating between individuals, for example. Below-replacement fertility is a big problem Robin has pointed out as a symptom of maladaptive cultural drift, and reproduction isn't an individual matter (as it might be for an asexually reproducing species) but instead requires multiple people.
>Culture is not at the level of an individual.
Can culture exist at the level of a family, firm, or congregation? If so, why not at the level of an individual?
>Language is for communicating between individuals, for example.
English is widely spoken in both Nigeria and New Zealand. Does that mean Nigeria and New Zealand are culturally identical?
>Below-replacement fertility is a big problem Robin has pointed out as a symptom of maladaptive cultural drift
See the paragraphs I added to the grandparent of this comment. Policymakers are concerned about the problem of fertility. They are testing various measures and comparing notes. The problem hasn't yet been cracked, but there is an ongoing distributed effort to crack it. See also my "two steps forwards, one step back" remark here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-politics/comment/286436776
> Can culture exist at the level of a family
Too small. The children of that family have to reproduce with outsiders, or suffer inbreeding.
> English is widely spoken in both Nigeria and New Zealand. Does that mean Nigeria and New Zealand are culturally identical?
Not identical (the English they speak isn't either), but they aren't independent cultures like old groups used to be.
Your linked comment doesn't mention fertility. If you want to cite other comments that do, link to them instead.
You didn’t notice it before because you didn’t notice the taboo before. Neither did I.
But I think the whole of what you have been calling ‘cultural drift’ is downstream of that taboo. Also, more importantly the taboo implies that the proclaimed goals of progressive activism must either be understood ironically, or implausibly, must constitute taboo breaking by progressives, precisely the group from whom people most fear taboo enforcement.
According to many global priorities researchers, the best things to do to prevent nearterm civ collapse are to co-ordinate to avoid extinction risks from new tech, and to promote rapid tech progress in other areas so we can reduce risks and expand. These goals seem at odds with splitting the world into many insular units (one of your 4 ideas listed above). How do you think about these tradeoffs?
I see global coordination issues as less important than many other issues. And that was just one out of four options in conflict with global coordination.
Since you believe cultural drift is the biggest problem, you should abandon atheism and pick something else.
Atheism is at best an unproven vehicle for solving the malaise you've identified. One likely needs to have some form of traditional religious beliefs to believe in the necessity of propagating ones values and ensuring continued survival of humanity.
After all religion is the only plausible space where, "My belief [culture] ought to persist and yours ought not," can be said.
If you are atheist because you don't "believe," you might try to pick a religion and adhere to its practices and rituals. You may come to believe over time because of this immersion, but even if this doesn't happen, you will be functionally the same as a religious person and a member of a group working towards eternity. You can then attempt to influence the arc of that trajectory.
Of the four names, I much prefer Evolutionary Capitalist.
It captures what seems to be the unifying thread running through your recent essays: not a blanket preference for markets, but a belief that capitalism is humanity's most powerful discovery process because it subjects ideas, organizations, and institutions to continuous selection. The emphasis is on adaptation through competition rather than on markets as an end in themselves.
The other labels strike me as either too abstract (Selectionist), too narrow (Cultural Selectionist), or too generic (Adaptive Futurist). Evolutionary Capitalist also makes it immediately clear why you keep returning to prediction markets, incentive contracts, futarchy, and cultural drift because they're all mechanisms for improving evolutionary selection.
Whether one agrees with the framework or not, the name points readers toward the core idea rather than a particular political tribe.
"I thought: this seems another way that the topic of culture has moved me to the right. In addition to my agreeing with traditionalists who complained that we were changing culture too fast. And my wanting more capitalism. Am I more typically conservative now?"
The implication that a move to the right would make you more typically conservative seems to be a non-sequitur to me.
You are a bizarro-intellectual. Typical people's ideas tend to be too bland. The smarter they are, the greater the proportion of their ideas that are interesting. Stupid typical people have completely banal ideas; smart typical people have some interesting things to say but remain deeply rooted in conventional ideaspace.
On the other hand, bizarro people's ideas tend to be too colorful. Stupid bizarro people are completely nuts and have only garish, confused ideas; smart bizarro people have some interesting ideas but still branch out far into the diamond sky.
So if you moved to the right, you would not become more typical, you would remain as weird as you are but become more conservative. If on the other hand you became more typical, this would not per se affect your position on the left-right spectrum.
Based on your list it seems that you have indeed joined the bizarro-conservatives without becoming much more typical.
Why a domestication hypothesis over zoo, quarantine, or surveillance? They all seem equally as coherent.
https://claude.ai/share/7c7ab8bd-f8bf-41bf-a6f7-add0e4d5ef8c
Summary: "I want efficiency in every system controlled by a small group, but don't understand why culture is converging into a single comprise of ideas with little range or experimentation"
"We can only save parts, by mixing them into a more adaptive package. I’d most save: open intellectual inquiry."
What are other parts you would want to save?
you forgot to post the gigachad
Adaptive futurist is a no-no. A large section of intellectuals who formed several transformations of Mussolini's party were futurists. So if one calls oneself futurist, one opens oneself to being called with the f word.
Regarding redistribution as poverty insurance- do you currently feel that the US is meeting that target, or falling short?
Our redistribution is very inefficient, being largely in the form of Medicare, which recipients value far less than cash.
Do medicare and medicaid have value as advanced market commitments to buy new medicines and hence induce more investment in medical technology development?
For all its flaws the American culture has performed admirably for the last 250 years. Protecting the family, free speech, and individual liberty while reaping the rewards of Capitalism. Name another culture in that league. F*ck AI, our culture is worth protecting. AI is a LLM that still reads the NYT. Need I say more.
Dick Minnis
removingthecataract.substack.com