The potty training example is from the point of view of someone that already has power. From our point of view, since we have little power, only Nature is a viable strategy. Once we get some power, we can go Culture, and finally once we rule, we can do Law. At the current moment, choice is very limited.
Interesting idea dividing up actions into three main approaches. Yes, I agree, some combination of the three—rather than each one separate of the other—seems best. Still has us arguing over how much to emphasize each approach, but we reduce conflation in thinking about our actions. Clarity of thought is never a bad thing.
Sufficiently low fertility will harm more than innovation, and makes a stable culture seem impossible.
It's an extremely important instrumental goal. At the scale of civilizations, comparable to having enough food. Without, whatever culture you create will be auto replaced by one that has it.
"CULTURE - Second, we could join the usual fights over directions of shared cultures, to move them toward more adaptive corners of the vast space of possible cultures. We’d also need to move them to become much more reluctant to change afterward, including wariness of the sort of cultural activism we’d have just used to induce these moves. Oh, and if this only happens in one part of Earth, we’d also need to move this part’s culture to be very insular, strongly resisting influences from other parts.
We have several options for adaptive corners to move culture. We could try to induce a deep multiculturalism, a full capitalism, or an explicitly evolutionary-selfish set of key values. A RETVRN to some adaptive pre-1800 culture set is also possible. But to be workable, all options need to be generalized to allow for changing tech and context."
I think that puts too much on our own shoulders as highly online nerds.
I do think culture *will* shift *dramatically* towards pronatalism, but it won't fall on highly online nerds to change the culture ourselves. I think simply by informing the world about
(a) The fact that there is a global low fertility crisis, and
(b) There are particular levers that can shift fertility upward, namely:
(i) Education on the fertility window, and the need to have children *early-ish* in life
(ii) Marriage and particularly young marriage,
(iii) Religiosity,
(iv) Lower density, non-apartment tower housing, and ways for young people to afford it
(v) An explicit pronatal goal in the minds of a public that is aware of the deep social need for fertility,
(vi) Better ways for young people to meet, including more marriage-centric apps and matchmaking,
(vii) A culture of young people leaving home by around age 20/21,
(viii) A culture of freedom / tolerance where many models from the Amish and TradCaths to Repro Tech, traditional and nontraditional family models are all accepted
(ix) Fewer unnecessary C-sections which reduce final number of children
and a few more...
Then the hivemind and thousands of influential people will ultimately come around to many varieties of solutions to the low birthrate crisis.
Knowing what the problem is and what the fertility levers are, leaders and policy makers and influencers of all stripes can work in their own ways to solve the problem. Religious leaders could start giving pronatal sermons to their flock, techies can work on dating apps that with constraints and incentives that encourage marriage, celebrities can encourage pronatalism. The OB/Gyn profession will shift away from C-sections. Politicians can incentivize family friendly housing and good financing. Regular social influencers can encourage a culture of large families.
The idea of a society wide push by thousands of is not a stretch. It is probably exactly how this problem will be solved ultimately. On what basis do I ground this optimism?
There is an analogy with what happened with COVID-19 response. The data crunchers and chart-makers did not impose lockdowns or shutter schools or impose masking and social distancing or develop vaccines and vaccine mandates. They didn't have either the power or the direct social influence. But they did persuade the world that there was a huge crisis and dramatic shifts in culture happened overnight. The culture shifts around Covid were incredibly massive and happened in the blink of an eye.
You can have whatever opinion you like about whether the collective reaction around Covid-19 was good or bad. That isn't the point.
The point is that society -- the Hivemind -- has shown it is capable of massive cultural shifts practically overnight. Lockdowns? Closing schools for a year worldwide? Universal masking in countries that never did such a thing? Everyone working from home? Vaccine mandates? Travel bans worldwide? Who in the 2019 could have thought these things were remotely possible?
Compared to such massive changes to culture that we just witnessed, wouldn't a few pronatal lessons in Sex-Ed, a marriage norm at age 25 instead of 32, incentives favoring the building of single-family homes, social approval of big families, and dating apps that deboost profiles of people that avoid commitment be an easy lift for the Hivemind?
The Hivemind has not collectively turned its attention to this problem. But when it does, with full awareness of the problem and what all the different fertility levers are, I think we will see miracles.
Fertility seems like the last place you should be worried about cultural drift. Let's take a simple model where an individual's fertility choices are influenced by both their parents fertility norms, modified by social pressure to confirm to the average fertility norms of their generation plus some random element.
Then the more fertility falls in any given generation the stronger the rebound effect should be in the next since the lower the average fertility is the more the next generation will tend to be composed of people with high fertility norms -- which in turn changes the direction of social pressure from low to high fertility.
Given we know that there are at least some elements of society (eg the Amish) whose high fertility norms are strong enough to balance the pressure to conform to the social average it seems like we have good reason to think that provides something like a lower bound on how low fertility can get. Worst case population shrinks until the high fertility norm children dominate a generation.
--
It's unfortunate it's such a long time scale or I'd consider making a bet but not much benefit to me betting that fertility will bottom out withing 2-3 generations.
Regarding fertility it might be helpful if you gave a toy model of how you think this works, e.g., just give some functions that seem plausible to you that describe the expected number of children someone has as a function of the expected number of children their parents had and the expected number of children the rest of their generation has since I'm having trouble seeing how social pressure doesn't eventually end up reversed because the high fertility subgroup children end up dominating a generation if things ever start getting bad enough.
I was thinking of trying to prove a theorem to that effect but I wasn't sure what kind of assumptions you would think were reasonable.
Can you clarify what you mean by 'cultural drift'? This was also confusing in your recentish conversation with Agnes.
Do you mean:
1. Global cultural homogenization (i.e. everywhere becoming more Western)?
2. Our culture (or othe cultures) changing in various ways over time.
From context you generally seem to mean 1, but the term 'cultural drift' sounds much more like 2. If you mean 1, you should probably use the term 'homogenization', not 'drift', because it's a bit confusing.
Good post. One thing to add is that 'we' includes a lot of different groups and there's room for different groups to try different solutions to this problem -- in fact it's desirable. So the 'meta-solution' might be to preserve enough diverse political units that this is in fact feasible.
Depends on the scope you're looking at and what you really mean when you say "race".
The ultimate minority race is the individual. From there, grouping isn't trivial, even using DNA.
Many allegedly "racist" associations come alongside tons of non race context, which sometimes gets confused as "racial". Ironically, both those for and against discrimination by race do this, albeit with different motivations.
The potty training example is from the point of view of someone that already has power. From our point of view, since we have little power, only Nature is a viable strategy. Once we get some power, we can go Culture, and finally once we rule, we can do Law. At the current moment, choice is very limited.
Do you have a blog post that explains what you mean by “Full Capitalism Industrial Orphanages”?
I don't know if he has one of those, but he has mentioned the efficiencies of orphanages:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/why-borg-at-work-not-homehtml
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/diy-vs-pfr-matchmakinghtml
Interesting idea dividing up actions into three main approaches. Yes, I agree, some combination of the three—rather than each one separate of the other—seems best. Still has us arguing over how much to emphasize each approach, but we reduce conflation in thinking about our actions. Clarity of thought is never a bad thing.
Fertility's a potential means to the goal of innovation, right? Not an end in itself. Might be solving for the wrong problem here.
Sufficiently low fertility will harm more than innovation, and makes a stable culture seem impossible.
It's an extremely important instrumental goal. At the scale of civilizations, comparable to having enough food. Without, whatever culture you create will be auto replaced by one that has it.
Kids used to be a really good retirement investment. Now we have 401ks and Roth IRAs and annuities and life insurance and...
"CULTURE - Second, we could join the usual fights over directions of shared cultures, to move them toward more adaptive corners of the vast space of possible cultures. We’d also need to move them to become much more reluctant to change afterward, including wariness of the sort of cultural activism we’d have just used to induce these moves. Oh, and if this only happens in one part of Earth, we’d also need to move this part’s culture to be very insular, strongly resisting influences from other parts.
We have several options for adaptive corners to move culture. We could try to induce a deep multiculturalism, a full capitalism, or an explicitly evolutionary-selfish set of key values. A RETVRN to some adaptive pre-1800 culture set is also possible. But to be workable, all options need to be generalized to allow for changing tech and context."
I think that puts too much on our own shoulders as highly online nerds.
I do think culture *will* shift *dramatically* towards pronatalism, but it won't fall on highly online nerds to change the culture ourselves. I think simply by informing the world about
(a) The fact that there is a global low fertility crisis, and
(b) There are particular levers that can shift fertility upward, namely:
(i) Education on the fertility window, and the need to have children *early-ish* in life
(ii) Marriage and particularly young marriage,
(iii) Religiosity,
(iv) Lower density, non-apartment tower housing, and ways for young people to afford it
(v) An explicit pronatal goal in the minds of a public that is aware of the deep social need for fertility,
(vi) Better ways for young people to meet, including more marriage-centric apps and matchmaking,
(vii) A culture of young people leaving home by around age 20/21,
(viii) A culture of freedom / tolerance where many models from the Amish and TradCaths to Repro Tech, traditional and nontraditional family models are all accepted
(ix) Fewer unnecessary C-sections which reduce final number of children
and a few more...
Then the hivemind and thousands of influential people will ultimately come around to many varieties of solutions to the low birthrate crisis.
Knowing what the problem is and what the fertility levers are, leaders and policy makers and influencers of all stripes can work in their own ways to solve the problem. Religious leaders could start giving pronatal sermons to their flock, techies can work on dating apps that with constraints and incentives that encourage marriage, celebrities can encourage pronatalism. The OB/Gyn profession will shift away from C-sections. Politicians can incentivize family friendly housing and good financing. Regular social influencers can encourage a culture of large families.
The idea of a society wide push by thousands of is not a stretch. It is probably exactly how this problem will be solved ultimately. On what basis do I ground this optimism?
There is an analogy with what happened with COVID-19 response. The data crunchers and chart-makers did not impose lockdowns or shutter schools or impose masking and social distancing or develop vaccines and vaccine mandates. They didn't have either the power or the direct social influence. But they did persuade the world that there was a huge crisis and dramatic shifts in culture happened overnight. The culture shifts around Covid were incredibly massive and happened in the blink of an eye.
You can have whatever opinion you like about whether the collective reaction around Covid-19 was good or bad. That isn't the point.
The point is that society -- the Hivemind -- has shown it is capable of massive cultural shifts practically overnight. Lockdowns? Closing schools for a year worldwide? Universal masking in countries that never did such a thing? Everyone working from home? Vaccine mandates? Travel bans worldwide? Who in the 2019 could have thought these things were remotely possible?
Compared to such massive changes to culture that we just witnessed, wouldn't a few pronatal lessons in Sex-Ed, a marriage norm at age 25 instead of 32, incentives favoring the building of single-family homes, social approval of big families, and dating apps that deboost profiles of people that avoid commitment be an easy lift for the Hivemind?
The Hivemind has not collectively turned its attention to this problem. But when it does, with full awareness of the problem and what all the different fertility levers are, I think we will see miracles.
Fertility seems like the last place you should be worried about cultural drift. Let's take a simple model where an individual's fertility choices are influenced by both their parents fertility norms, modified by social pressure to confirm to the average fertility norms of their generation plus some random element.
Then the more fertility falls in any given generation the stronger the rebound effect should be in the next since the lower the average fertility is the more the next generation will tend to be composed of people with high fertility norms -- which in turn changes the direction of social pressure from low to high fertility.
Given we know that there are at least some elements of society (eg the Amish) whose high fertility norms are strong enough to balance the pressure to conform to the social average it seems like we have good reason to think that provides something like a lower bound on how low fertility can get. Worst case population shrinks until the high fertility norm children dominate a generation.
--
It's unfortunate it's such a long time scale or I'd consider making a bet but not much benefit to me betting that fertility will bottom out withing 2-3 generations.
Regarding fertility it might be helpful if you gave a toy model of how you think this works, e.g., just give some functions that seem plausible to you that describe the expected number of children someone has as a function of the expected number of children their parents had and the expected number of children the rest of their generation has since I'm having trouble seeing how social pressure doesn't eventually end up reversed because the high fertility subgroup children end up dominating a generation if things ever start getting bad enough.
I was thinking of trying to prove a theorem to that effect but I wasn't sure what kind of assumptions you would think were reasonable.
Can you clarify what you mean by 'cultural drift'? This was also confusing in your recentish conversation with Agnes.
Do you mean:
1. Global cultural homogenization (i.e. everywhere becoming more Western)?
2. Our culture (or othe cultures) changing in various ways over time.
From context you generally seem to mean 1, but the term 'cultural drift' sounds much more like 2. If you mean 1, you should probably use the term 'homogenization', not 'drift', because it's a bit confusing.
https://quillette.com/2024/04/11/beware-cultural-drift/
I guess the author is considering joining the culture wars?
Good post. One thing to add is that 'we' includes a lot of different groups and there's room for different groups to try different solutions to this problem -- in fact it's desirable. So the 'meta-solution' might be to preserve enough diverse political units that this is in fact feasible.
"...the races aren’t really that different..." When your premises are wrong, you reach the wrong conclusion/solution.
He just means similar enough in relevant senses, obviously.
Depends on the scope you're looking at and what you really mean when you say "race".
The ultimate minority race is the individual. From there, grouping isn't trivial, even using DNA.
Many allegedly "racist" associations come alongside tons of non race context, which sometimes gets confused as "racial". Ironically, both those for and against discrimination by race do this, albeit with different motivations.