Rational Culture Choice
I’ve been on a culture kick the last few months, and I know many of you don’t get it, as I didn’t until recently. Here is why it matters so much: you inherit most of your values from your culture, via a process that looks pretty arbitrary, and is now broken, giving you maladaptive values. That should startle you, and make you ask: how could I adopt more reliable values? That is what I want to think about here.
Standard decision theory is our best account of ideal choices.This theory assumes a set of possible states of everything, and says to pick the act with the highest expected utility, which is a sum over states of state utility times act-conditional state probability. Beliefs are about the world, saying the chance of each state, while utilities (= preferences, values) are about a person, saying how much that person likes each state. Utilities never change, but beliefs update via info using Bayes’ rule. (Further complexities are re committing to limiting future choices, but I’ll ignore that here.)
We often take sets of actual and hypothetical choices, and try to find a closest fit standard decision theory model (SDTM). These almost always fit with noise, suggesting that we could improve our choices by cutting this noise, i.e., by making our choices more closely approximate a best fit model of them. And in fact, large literatures in rationality, statistics, operations research, computer science, etc., show many concrete ways to use such models to make more consistent choices.
Most of these methods make less noisy probabilities, but some make less noisy utilities. For example, we sometimes ask people re many random hypothetical choices, and fit utility estimates to those. Can something like this help for cultural values?
A key startling fact about culture is that different co-existing cultures teach different values, the values that each culture teaches change a lot over time, and most of these differences in space and time can’t be accounted for by differing context, like climate, disease, lifespans, or wealth. So if we made a best fit SDTM for a sample of choices for a particular place and time time, the best fit utilities from that SDTM would be different from those for other places and times. But as utilities aren’t supposed to change unless context changes in a related meaningful way, this makes culture-set values seem a poor approximation to SDTM.
However, we can often explain choices that look like different values as instead learning how to achieve constant underlying values. For example, If we track an individual’s ice cream choices, we might find that while last year they tended to pick vanilla, this year they tend to pick mango sherbet. While one way to describe this is via changing preferences, another way is as constant underlying preferences mixed with learning about new flavors. Maybe this person had just never tried mango sherbet before, and upon trying it they learned how it better matched their constant underlying dessert preferences.
So can we do this for cultural changes? One approach would say that each person’s main underlying preference is really just to conform to their cultures norms, and rank high on their culture’s status markers. So that explains why they act like they share the values taught them by their particular culture, and change those values as their culture changes its values. That seems a rational account of an individual who is just trying to get along in their culture, and not trying to lead or change it, or switch between cultures.
What about someone willing and able to switch cultures? All else equal, they might seek to join the most adaptive cultures, the ones most likely to succeed in the long run. (Today they might try to join the Amish or Haredim.) Once moved, they’d try to adopt and track local values, to conform to local norms and achieve the local status markers.
What could be a rational account of a group of people large enough to have a chance of changing their culture? Such a group might see humanity as slowly learning which cultures work best, and so try to get their culture to change to adopt features of the most adaptive cultures on Earth so far. They might even try to estimate the features produced by future selection effects, and try to jump to those future features on purpose without waiting for selection to induce them. If, as I’ve suggested, our main world culture is suffering from cultural drift, they might try to jump to an adaptive culture that no longer suffers this problem.
I expect there are even more possible ways to see typical culture-conforming behaviors, that appear on the surface to involve value changes, as actual expressing learning to achieve constant underlying preferences.
Reinforcement learning offers another perspective on this issue. It pictures values as based on rewards - which are usually based on chemical concentrations in the nervous system. Food, warmth and orgasms are rewarding, while pain, irritation and suffering are disvalued. It is possible to hack into the reward system using electrodes and drugs. However, it is mostly out of reach to other cultural changes - unless they provide more or less food, warmth, orgasms, etc. So, for example the obesity epidemic is the result of more food, and barrier contraceptives are likely to result in more frequent orgasms. Many humans do profess to having many other "higher" values - but that's more like the PR department talking.
Finding ways to combine RAT with core insights from sociology and anthropology is a worthy aim.
And among the contenders for a synthesis, you are on the same track as those who combine insights from the theory of games with asymmetric information (and consequent need for reputation-building, adopting pseudo-self-binding strategies, evolutionary arms races to detect cheaters & evolve more subtle ways to cheat etc.) with Goffman-style sociology (Interaction rituals, The presentation of self in everyday life, Strategic interaction and symbolic interactionism more generally) and acculturation theories (Konner's 700+ tome The Evolution of Childhood and others). The sentence “each person’s main underlying preference is really just to conform to their cultures norms, and rank high on their culture’s status markers.” is quite apt as a nutshell statement in this regard.
“Cultural drift” is also a useful concept to use as an umbrella turm for the various mechanisms that underlie cultural change.
BUT you move very fast (too fast) from such a “positive” synthetic theory to normative assessments of “maladaptive” cultures. Your single proxy indicator for maladaptiveness appears to be low fertility. That’s your Archimedian fulcrum on which you plant your moral lever, in your attempt to move the world. I must protest: Not so fast! For several reasons:
(1) Low fertility need not be maladaptive. Fewer children means that more can be invested in each. More investments = higher long-run survival probability. It’s a human version of the old evolutionary distinction between K-strategists and r-strategists.
(2) …more generally, be careful to assume you, or anyone else, can be smarter than evolution. Stronger: Never argue with evolution.
(3) Even if below 2.1. fertility should be considered maladaptive on the individual level, it can be adaptive for humanity as a whole. Thus it can be a case where what is individually not rational is collectively rational. Fewer humans = less risk of an ecological disaster. Plus fewer, but higher human capital, human beings = higher probability of new innovations & higher societal dynamism.
(4) It is in any case too early to tell if today's global low fertility trend is maladaptive or not. It is also too early to tell if the long-term trend will never break. There were similar concerns about declining fertility in Europe in the 1930, then came WW2 and fertility shot up again. (Actually, it is obvious that the trend will break at some point. Humans are not going to keep getting below 2.1. children per woman until we go extinct.)
(5) Even if it should turn out that below reproduction fertility is forever, it is unlikely to be driven by any particular “culture” alone. Since declining fertility is a global phenomenon, across all world cultures. Including Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, Muslim and animistic cultures. It has nothing particularly to do with the brands of liberal & conservative Americanism that dominates ideologically in the US.
In short: We must collect data on fertility developments for at least a few hundred more years before we can move on to moral statements. As with the French Revolution, the impact of low fertility on the future of humanity is too early to tell.