People hate to be given direct orders, especially if they will have to visibly follow such orders, and especially if they feel rivalrous with those who give orders.
The observation is sharp — the split between regimented work and autonomous non-work life is the defining structural feature of modern economies. And you're right that it's unstable.
But I think the instability is on the wrong side of your diagnosis. The autonomous non-work life isn't drifting into maladaptation because people have too much freedom. It's failing because the work side of the trade stopped delivering what it promised.
For roughly seventy years, a set of structures made the bargain credible: floors that caught you if you fell, ladders that converted effort into durable wealth, referees that enforced fair play, constraints that checked concentration. Under those conditions, people formed families, bought houses, invested in the future — because the trade was worth it.
Those structures have eroded. When people stop having kids and stop buying houses, that's not cultural maladaptation. It's rational behavior inside a broken architecture. They've noticed, correctly, that the deal is no longer being honored.
The fix isn't less autonomy. It's restoring the structures that made the autonomy productive. Fix the deal — the culture follows.
These observations come from a framework I've been building — one that maps how the middle class was engineered, what maintained it, and why the structures that held it are eroding. The reason people are doing things differently now then they have in the past is that the things happening now are different now than in the past. Or, at least the near past, as the middle class is not natural. But thanks, I guess.
I’d be glad to discuss my point that the nreasons for differing behavior is a differing environment, not just maladaptive. People are responding to the environment as it is. Rationally.
The response was AI cleaned, not generated. I have long covid and have difficulty expressing clear thoughts so I use AI as an assistant. Full disclaimer is on my Substack.
Why are you considering Western non-work habits to be maladaptive? The actually attempted alternative is a more state-run public life, as attempted in states with official socialist, religious, or authoritarian state ideologies - isn't it kind of obvious that those have not been working out nearly as well so far?
Galton designed an alternative called Eugenics. It means focusing on adaptivity genetically and culturally while minimizing undesired side effects like being dumb (Amish) or enslaved (cyberpunk). Modern people, in their narcissism and stupidity, rejected this, and will pay the price for it, as you envision.
Perhaps genetically, due to the lack of dysgenics in the Amish (they live under more selection pressure and expel their mutants), but phenotypically they are obviously dumb. I would be really shocked if they didn't miss out on the Flynn effect due to not using modern technology and quitting school in 8th grade, thus making them 20+ points below non-Amish people on an IQ test.
"thus making them 20+ points below non-Amish people on an IQ test.", I'd love to see a case study on that (not saying it even exists or is wrong) similar to the way a Ashkenazi Jews were studied which btw, nobody calls "dumb".
I just have strong doubt a Amish person is going to score lower IQ, especially 1 or 2 SD lower as you suggest than our functional illiterate inner city black or gold toothed Polynesian Jack-in-the-box worker even conceding the Flynn effect on the cultural effects of artificially inflating IQ tests as a result present culture. You forget what the average American looks like, they aren't white nor middle class. They are smoking meth in a trailer park or subculture equivalent.
Listen, since you won't give a coherent definition of what you mean by "adaptive" in regard to culture, I'll give you one that I think captures most of what you're trying to say with it.
The domain of adaptation is a cultural bundle - a grouped bundle of cultural traits that occur together within a culture. This is not a population of humans or their DNA, nor is it a whole culture.
A trait, as part of a bundle, is adaptive within that bundle, if it causes the whole bundle to increase in prevalence over a specified, long time span T. I suggest T = 500 years. "Prevalence" can be defined as the number of human minds hosting that bundle, and we take an expected value.
I know you also want to include nonhuman minds somehow, but "prevalence" becomes trickier to define there, because a single vast civilization-spanning mind should count for more than a million small minds. You'd need to weight by some measure of the caliber of the mind, or the power it wields. So let's stick to human minds for now.
"Causes to increase" here can be understood as a comparison between a group in which each member has the whole bundle B, and a similar group having a variant of B, namely C, without the chosen trait X, or with a contrasting trait Y in its place. We set up the two groups at an initial time and ask what would happen after time T. If the prevalence of B would be greater in expected value than the prevalence of C after the time period T, then X is adaptive within B, compared to Y.
To summarize your main position in these terms, you have a certain set of traits S that you grew up with, value, and want to preserve. S includes perhaps a dedication to scientific progress and open discourse, although frankly I'm not entirely clear what specifically is in your S. You want to add to S some adaptive traits A, so that the bundle B = S ∪ A increases in prevalence.
Not true that most people already understand what this word means. If you casually think you understand it without thinking deeper about what it means and resolving several ambiguities, you don't understand it.
The first ambiguity is whether we're talking about traits that promote the propagation of the culture as a meme, or whether we're talking about traits that promote the propagation of human DNA genes to the next biological generation. That's a very important distinction. Many cultural traits promote the spread of the culture as a meme, while reducing the spread of DNA of those having the culture. And many cultural traits promote the spread of DNA of those having the culture, while reducing the spread of the culture as a meme.
Pre-modern cultures lost to modern cultures, as memes, because the pre-modern cultures aren't around anymore. Therefore, those pre-modern cultures weren't adaptive by that interpretation.
The second major ambiguity is what time span we're talking about. In biology we talk about individual human generations; a trait is adaptive if it is expected to pay off with more offspring in one generation. But culture may shift over longer or shorter periods of time. It can change in 5 years, or 500 years.
Philosphical different between east and west cultural values. Eastern Chinese culture founded on social order principles laid out by Confucius prescribe obedience and submission. Western Greco-Roman based cultures value freedom and resistance and demand a voice in social order known as “democracy”. One is open to manipulation of the citizen masses and criticizes the other about lack of freedom.
Re: "My default scenario is that our main world civ falls, to be replaced by insular fertile groups like the Amish and Haredim."
Why not robots? I mean: now we can rule out the idea that the first decent software for intelligent agents would come from scanniing human brains. Which - as I recall - was the main argument for long machine intelligence timelines - and against the rise of the robots. Robots can make much better furniture than the Amish. So: why not robots?
Changing culture is someone else’s job. I don’t try to do that. On the other hand, the absolute EXTREME wealth inequality today is not due to some people being good Christians, Jews, etc. The pure leverage of wealth inside the U.S. is not sustainable. The end of so many jobs - identity’s for so many - is upon us all. The only way out is for some kind of reset. I think most people would be fine with wealth disparity of a founder/CEO being 1,000-10,000 times that of an average worker but what we see today is like an animal from another planet. It’s a form of societal cancer. It’s warped society to the point where even single digit billionaires are becoming deranged at seeing such success of others (the current president is the most obvious example). It’s terribly unhealthy.
> My default scenario is that our main world civ falls, to be replaced by insular fertile groups like the Amish and Haredim. Groups whose non-work lives are strongly set by their conservative religious cultures, which do not give individuals much room for rich autonomous artisanal non-work lives.
Isn’t fertile the key distinction - almost everything else in their culture being irrelevant, other than I assume child indoctrination, taboos against leaving, and high in-group cooperation?
“Such maladaptive culture just can’t last, however much we enjoy it. Sorry.“
Why are you so convinced the current dominant culture is doomed? I guess below-replacement fertility is a big part of the argument, but there must be more to it, because solving fertility alone isn’t nearly as intractable as you make it sound.
I would need to see some well defined evidence for this "artisanal vibe" culture you describe. In my experience the vast majority of people wear the mass produced, extremely inexpensive standard uniforms of blue jeans and t-shirts, living in mass produced rooms with mass produced bathroom fixtures, eating identical, mass produced food, day in and day out. I have personally witnessed billionaires and third world beggars whose consumption appeared much more alike than different.
Have heard claims by high-level talented+workaholic software engineers that they were able to relatively easily sync w/ superiors+peers on what impacts were wanted and pick and choose their solo / small-team efforts. Ofc. they had internal org. credibility/allies to declare success and force adoption. It may be that such motivated and capable workers, who specialize in improving internal processes, actually are valuable (all we know for sure is that they have enough credibility to act as though they are). We might suspect orgs w/ a high-autonomy culture (e.g. Valve) mostly are able to do so because they enjoy something like monopoly rents.
Could this essay have been called: Embrace a version of totalitarian dystopias? I would admit that a totalitarian dystopia is preferable to extinction, my intuition is that it doesn’t have to be strictly one or the other, we’ll end up somewhere in between.
I think of a contrast functioning similar to your "work" and "non-work" social dynamics, where I consider the "linked online interactive social media" and the "unlinked online interactive passive researching viewing" as two contrasting internet modes. Both are visible at all times to the AI agency that is the "smart" search engine response capacity in the internet interaction process of a person. But someone on a social media platform will have a history identified to them personally, which by default is a kind of regimental influence. The time that someone is simply searching and viewing on a browser or search engine, but not personally communicating or engaging with another online in that process, is a minimal amount of signal profile, usually only viewed by the AI agent smart browser looking for ways to sell a product, or invite a new subscription that will earn fee payments to that agency.
However, both these modes involve an economic reward system incentive and, in that regard, contain some level of a regimentation influence. So then, the operative question would be this: the advancing AI online influence is a new aspect of an influence that tends toward some level of regimentation of the behaviors of the users online. It's like "Big Brother" watching in "1984"; however, non-reactive measures of subjects' behavior are obtained by an AI agency online without the subjects' knowledge, and there is no incentive for the AI to use fear-provoking tactics as the character in the novel, "1984" does with the slogan, "Big Brother is watching." I'm thinking of distinctions about urban life, such as large populations, dense settlement infrastructure, high ideological or religious focused purposeful chosen activities, and yet also sociological diversity (Louis Wirth; Chicago School of Sociology). The internet, as a domain of social dynamics, offers challenges to understanding which levels and reinforcement systems of regimentation are the greater consideration upon this mix, populating the frequent use of internet resources.
What is clear is that this will factor somehow and globally influence the meaning of "work" and "non-work" social dynamics as well as understanding where and how much regimentation influence may be found in the advancing scale of AI agency, affecting the dynamic experiences in daily human lives, where so much necessarily requires an online presence to survive.
We should care to study it, even if so many shrug and say, given how the internet now works, nobody has authentic privacy anymore anyway.
It makes me remember Dornbusch's Law is that crises take longer than you imagine, but happen faster when they do happen, than you would imagine. If there is a Hemingway Law of Motion to the internet with an AI agency, this may be the single largest risk of a fiercely regimented dystopian future. You may think you're off the clock, as the FRS technology in the shopping mall continues recording every move you make. So if you don't hear the threat commercial, "Big Brother is watching," it does not mean you're not walking right straight into "1984" anyway.
If you've ever worked somewhere that does this well, I think they largely avoid giving orders. Here thinking of FAANGs and finance and a few of my own companies.
So obviously, when you're the founder or director or are executive level, you mostly have a domain, and within that domain it's up to you to come up with ideas and execute on them in profitable ways. But you're very much not following orders - the literal value you provide IS driven by noticing new ways to create value and executing on them.
Part of how you do that is farming out discovery and surfacing insights to the people below you, which then trickle up, and then making a decision with the menu of options available. That means those people below you are ALSO demonstrating creativity, leeway, and autonomy.
Leadership done well looks like giving each person down to the IC's some leeway and autonomy. So as a leader, I would dedicate 20% of my team's bandwidth to A/B tests, exploratory analyses and projects, "new concept or technique" deep dives, and things like that. Everyone gets to feel creative, everyone gets rewarded for surfacing good ideas up, and everyone contributes to overall value creation.
Do you still have to spend most time executing? Yes, 80% of the time! But anyone and everyone must do this to help some new capability or pattern come into the world. And when your people were part of coming up with and advocating for a given idea, they're actually excited and fully bought in when it comes to executing it, too.
The observation is sharp — the split between regimented work and autonomous non-work life is the defining structural feature of modern economies. And you're right that it's unstable.
But I think the instability is on the wrong side of your diagnosis. The autonomous non-work life isn't drifting into maladaptation because people have too much freedom. It's failing because the work side of the trade stopped delivering what it promised.
For roughly seventy years, a set of structures made the bargain credible: floors that caught you if you fell, ladders that converted effort into durable wealth, referees that enforced fair play, constraints that checked concentration. Under those conditions, people formed families, bought houses, invested in the future — because the trade was worth it.
Those structures have eroded. When people stop having kids and stop buying houses, that's not cultural maladaptation. It's rational behavior inside a broken architecture. They've noticed, correctly, that the deal is no longer being honored.
The fix isn't less autonomy. It's restoring the structures that made the autonomy productive. Fix the deal — the culture follows.
What is the point of pasting GPT output here?
These observations come from a framework I've been building — one that maps how the middle class was engineered, what maintained it, and why the structures that held it are eroding. The reason people are doing things differently now then they have in the past is that the things happening now are different now than in the past. Or, at least the near past, as the middle class is not natural. But thanks, I guess.
Why did you post an AI generated response
I’d be glad to discuss my point that the nreasons for differing behavior is a differing environment, not just maladaptive. People are responding to the environment as it is. Rationally.
The response was AI cleaned, not generated. I have long covid and have difficulty expressing clear thoughts so I use AI as an assistant. Full disclaimer is on my Substack.
Why are you considering Western non-work habits to be maladaptive? The actually attempted alternative is a more state-run public life, as attempted in states with official socialist, religious, or authoritarian state ideologies - isn't it kind of obvious that those have not been working out nearly as well so far?
The alternative he thinks will replace our non-work habits are those of insular religious communities like the Amish & ultra-Orthodox.
Galton designed an alternative called Eugenics. It means focusing on adaptivity genetically and culturally while minimizing undesired side effects like being dumb (Amish) or enslaved (cyberpunk). Modern people, in their narcissism and stupidity, rejected this, and will pay the price for it, as you envision.
"like being dumb (Amish)", I've see no evidence of that. In fact I'd bet they have an higher intelligence than the average American.
Perhaps genetically, due to the lack of dysgenics in the Amish (they live under more selection pressure and expel their mutants), but phenotypically they are obviously dumb. I would be really shocked if they didn't miss out on the Flynn effect due to not using modern technology and quitting school in 8th grade, thus making them 20+ points below non-Amish people on an IQ test.
"thus making them 20+ points below non-Amish people on an IQ test.", I'd love to see a case study on that (not saying it even exists or is wrong) similar to the way a Ashkenazi Jews were studied which btw, nobody calls "dumb".
I just have strong doubt a Amish person is going to score lower IQ, especially 1 or 2 SD lower as you suggest than our functional illiterate inner city black or gold toothed Polynesian Jack-in-the-box worker even conceding the Flynn effect on the cultural effects of artificially inflating IQ tests as a result present culture. You forget what the average American looks like, they aren't white nor middle class. They are smoking meth in a trailer park or subculture equivalent.
Listen, since you won't give a coherent definition of what you mean by "adaptive" in regard to culture, I'll give you one that I think captures most of what you're trying to say with it.
The domain of adaptation is a cultural bundle - a grouped bundle of cultural traits that occur together within a culture. This is not a population of humans or their DNA, nor is it a whole culture.
A trait, as part of a bundle, is adaptive within that bundle, if it causes the whole bundle to increase in prevalence over a specified, long time span T. I suggest T = 500 years. "Prevalence" can be defined as the number of human minds hosting that bundle, and we take an expected value.
I know you also want to include nonhuman minds somehow, but "prevalence" becomes trickier to define there, because a single vast civilization-spanning mind should count for more than a million small minds. You'd need to weight by some measure of the caliber of the mind, or the power it wields. So let's stick to human minds for now.
"Causes to increase" here can be understood as a comparison between a group in which each member has the whole bundle B, and a similar group having a variant of B, namely C, without the chosen trait X, or with a contrasting trait Y in its place. We set up the two groups at an initial time and ask what would happen after time T. If the prevalence of B would be greater in expected value than the prevalence of C after the time period T, then X is adaptive within B, compared to Y.
To summarize your main position in these terms, you have a certain set of traits S that you grew up with, value, and want to preserve. S includes perhaps a dedication to scientific progress and open discourse, although frankly I'm not entirely clear what specifically is in your S. You want to add to S some adaptive traits A, so that the bundle B = S ∪ A increases in prevalence.
Why is it that important to explicitly define the word "adaptive" when most people already understand what this word means?
Not true that most people already understand what this word means. If you casually think you understand it without thinking deeper about what it means and resolving several ambiguities, you don't understand it.
The first ambiguity is whether we're talking about traits that promote the propagation of the culture as a meme, or whether we're talking about traits that promote the propagation of human DNA genes to the next biological generation. That's a very important distinction. Many cultural traits promote the spread of the culture as a meme, while reducing the spread of DNA of those having the culture. And many cultural traits promote the spread of DNA of those having the culture, while reducing the spread of the culture as a meme.
Pre-modern cultures lost to modern cultures, as memes, because the pre-modern cultures aren't around anymore. Therefore, those pre-modern cultures weren't adaptive by that interpretation.
The second major ambiguity is what time span we're talking about. In biology we talk about individual human generations; a trait is adaptive if it is expected to pay off with more offspring in one generation. But culture may shift over longer or shorter periods of time. It can change in 5 years, or 500 years.
Philosphical different between east and west cultural values. Eastern Chinese culture founded on social order principles laid out by Confucius prescribe obedience and submission. Western Greco-Roman based cultures value freedom and resistance and demand a voice in social order known as “democracy”. One is open to manipulation of the citizen masses and criticizes the other about lack of freedom.
Eastern folks also don't like direct orders, esp. from rivals.
Re: "My default scenario is that our main world civ falls, to be replaced by insular fertile groups like the Amish and Haredim."
Why not robots? I mean: now we can rule out the idea that the first decent software for intelligent agents would come from scanniing human brains. Which - as I recall - was the main argument for long machine intelligence timelines - and against the rise of the robots. Robots can make much better furniture than the Amish. So: why not robots?
Changing culture is someone else’s job. I don’t try to do that. On the other hand, the absolute EXTREME wealth inequality today is not due to some people being good Christians, Jews, etc. The pure leverage of wealth inside the U.S. is not sustainable. The end of so many jobs - identity’s for so many - is upon us all. The only way out is for some kind of reset. I think most people would be fine with wealth disparity of a founder/CEO being 1,000-10,000 times that of an average worker but what we see today is like an animal from another planet. It’s a form of societal cancer. It’s warped society to the point where even single digit billionaires are becoming deranged at seeing such success of others (the current president is the most obvious example). It’s terribly unhealthy.
> My default scenario is that our main world civ falls, to be replaced by insular fertile groups like the Amish and Haredim. Groups whose non-work lives are strongly set by their conservative religious cultures, which do not give individuals much room for rich autonomous artisanal non-work lives.
Isn’t fertile the key distinction - almost everything else in their culture being irrelevant, other than I assume child indoctrination, taboos against leaving, and high in-group cooperation?
“Such maladaptive culture just can’t last, however much we enjoy it. Sorry.“
Why are you so convinced the current dominant culture is doomed? I guess below-replacement fertility is a big part of the argument, but there must be more to it, because solving fertility alone isn’t nearly as intractable as you make it sound.
I think we know how to solve fertility; its just that we won't do it. And if you dig into the reasons why, they are beloved cultural trends.
If you lowered the pressure to succeed, you’ll get more babies. Any doubt about that?
I would need to see some well defined evidence for this "artisanal vibe" culture you describe. In my experience the vast majority of people wear the mass produced, extremely inexpensive standard uniforms of blue jeans and t-shirts, living in mass produced rooms with mass produced bathroom fixtures, eating identical, mass produced food, day in and day out. I have personally witnessed billionaires and third world beggars whose consumption appeared much more alike than different.
Those were the days generally were not. With age of death earlier and probably more vile. Opportunities less available. Freedom is never free.
It’s just a function of the society you are in. Better ? Worse? Arbitrary notions borne of fear, pleasant memories and personal traits of perspective.
Suggestion-enjoy what you got. It’s all how you look at it and live it
Have heard claims by high-level talented+workaholic software engineers that they were able to relatively easily sync w/ superiors+peers on what impacts were wanted and pick and choose their solo / small-team efforts. Ofc. they had internal org. credibility/allies to declare success and force adoption. It may be that such motivated and capable workers, who specialize in improving internal processes, actually are valuable (all we know for sure is that they have enough credibility to act as though they are). We might suspect orgs w/ a high-autonomy culture (e.g. Valve) mostly are able to do so because they enjoy something like monopoly rents.
Some people find they like structure. Say your prayers before bed etc.
Nearly everyone likes structure, arbitrary chaos tends to drive people crazy in case studies of torture, prisoners, etc.
Could this essay have been called: Embrace a version of totalitarian dystopias? I would admit that a totalitarian dystopia is preferable to extinction, my intuition is that it doesn’t have to be strictly one or the other, we’ll end up somewhere in between.
I think of a contrast functioning similar to your "work" and "non-work" social dynamics, where I consider the "linked online interactive social media" and the "unlinked online interactive passive researching viewing" as two contrasting internet modes. Both are visible at all times to the AI agency that is the "smart" search engine response capacity in the internet interaction process of a person. But someone on a social media platform will have a history identified to them personally, which by default is a kind of regimental influence. The time that someone is simply searching and viewing on a browser or search engine, but not personally communicating or engaging with another online in that process, is a minimal amount of signal profile, usually only viewed by the AI agent smart browser looking for ways to sell a product, or invite a new subscription that will earn fee payments to that agency.
However, both these modes involve an economic reward system incentive and, in that regard, contain some level of a regimentation influence. So then, the operative question would be this: the advancing AI online influence is a new aspect of an influence that tends toward some level of regimentation of the behaviors of the users online. It's like "Big Brother" watching in "1984"; however, non-reactive measures of subjects' behavior are obtained by an AI agency online without the subjects' knowledge, and there is no incentive for the AI to use fear-provoking tactics as the character in the novel, "1984" does with the slogan, "Big Brother is watching." I'm thinking of distinctions about urban life, such as large populations, dense settlement infrastructure, high ideological or religious focused purposeful chosen activities, and yet also sociological diversity (Louis Wirth; Chicago School of Sociology). The internet, as a domain of social dynamics, offers challenges to understanding which levels and reinforcement systems of regimentation are the greater consideration upon this mix, populating the frequent use of internet resources.
What is clear is that this will factor somehow and globally influence the meaning of "work" and "non-work" social dynamics as well as understanding where and how much regimentation influence may be found in the advancing scale of AI agency, affecting the dynamic experiences in daily human lives, where so much necessarily requires an online presence to survive.
We should care to study it, even if so many shrug and say, given how the internet now works, nobody has authentic privacy anymore anyway.
It makes me remember Dornbusch's Law is that crises take longer than you imagine, but happen faster when they do happen, than you would imagine. If there is a Hemingway Law of Motion to the internet with an AI agency, this may be the single largest risk of a fiercely regimented dystopian future. You may think you're off the clock, as the FRS technology in the shopping mall continues recording every move you make. So if you don't hear the threat commercial, "Big Brother is watching," it does not mean you're not walking right straight into "1984" anyway.
If you've ever worked somewhere that does this well, I think they largely avoid giving orders. Here thinking of FAANGs and finance and a few of my own companies.
So obviously, when you're the founder or director or are executive level, you mostly have a domain, and within that domain it's up to you to come up with ideas and execute on them in profitable ways. But you're very much not following orders - the literal value you provide IS driven by noticing new ways to create value and executing on them.
Part of how you do that is farming out discovery and surfacing insights to the people below you, which then trickle up, and then making a decision with the menu of options available. That means those people below you are ALSO demonstrating creativity, leeway, and autonomy.
Leadership done well looks like giving each person down to the IC's some leeway and autonomy. So as a leader, I would dedicate 20% of my team's bandwidth to A/B tests, exploratory analyses and projects, "new concept or technique" deep dives, and things like that. Everyone gets to feel creative, everyone gets rewarded for surfacing good ideas up, and everyone contributes to overall value creation.
Do you still have to spend most time executing? Yes, 80% of the time! But anyone and everyone must do this to help some new capability or pattern come into the world. And when your people were part of coming up with and advocating for a given idea, they're actually excited and fully bought in when it comes to executing it, too.