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.
We have other plausibly maladaptive cultural trends, but low fertility does seem the clearest evidence. No way below replacement fertility in good times can be adaptive, and it seems consistent enough for long enough to project it forward quite a ways. World elites today share a common culture to a large extent.
Fully agree that world elites today share a common culture to a large extent, more so than at any previous point in history.
Although there are perhaps two global elite cultures. The late sociology-of-religion scholar Peter Berger distinguished between what he somewhat tongue-in-cheek labelled the Faculty Club Culture and the Davos Culture. The global Faculty Club Culture is Human Rights, the Sustainable Development Goals, and being pro UN generally. The global Davos culture is free trade & the WTO, Washington consensus & IMF, and pro-business generally.
None of them are particularly anti-natalist, however. Nor are they particularly pro-natalist for that matter. Pro/anti natalism has not been any core item in the ideological “package” of either of these two elite cultures….I believe the main reasons for the global reduced fertility trend must be sought closer to the material base of societies, in the “production conditions for reproduction” so to speak. But, sure, with complex links to how people try to live lives they deem meaningful, i.e. with complex links to culture.
It is no so much that culture is directly natalist as it is that it strongly supports elements that happen to have anti-natalist consequences. Like gender equality, long school prep, intensive parenting, etc.
Yes, these are some of the factors behind fertility decline. But are they driven by elite-culture changes, or by a host of socio-material changes with lots of feedback loops both to elite culture and to mass culture?
A way to get some kind of handle on all the multicausality going on, is to adopt the old distinction between distal, intermediate and proximate factors used in public health studies. I do some work on this myself, and here is a suggestion:
Distal factor (behind fertility decline):
Mortality decline (driven by a host of factors, but that's another can of worms)
Intermediate factors:
Stronger states, and effective legal guarantees against interpersonal violence
Increased predictability of individual life courses implies cognitive shift to a «planned» life course
Shift from agriculture to industry-and-services economy
Child labor made illegal and effectively enforced
Introduction of formal social security systems
Urbanization
Women gain access to wage labor
Social structure opens up to allow for skill-based upward mobility
Mandatory education & higher percentage of young people in higher education
Two-income families having advantages in housing markets
Less stable family formations create higher risk when siring many children
Female life course becomes more similar to male life course
Proximate factors (closer to the actual fertility decision):
Delayed birth of first child & delayed marriages
Effective contraception made available. Particularly important is contraception that can be administered by the woman alone, and independent of coitus
Low fertility is not the only indicator (he's also referenced swiftly declining patriotism & willingness to fight wars), it's just the most obvious. And it is indeed obvious when fertility is not merely low in a sacrifice for "quality" (as in r vs K selection theory), but BELOW REPLACEMENT. Even a strategy of producing the highest quality offspring will result in extinction if the number is below replacement. That cannot possibly be an ESS.
Humanity as a whole is not at risk of extinction from an ecological disaster. We've survived much worse. And innovation occurs with growing populations, it will decline as population does (particularly since the most innovative countries now have lower fertility than the least innovative ones).
> There were similar concerns about declining fertility in Europe in the 1930, then came WW2 and fertility shot up again
> 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.
This is the crux of the matter: there is a conservation of selection pressure necessary to shift which traits are fixed, that can be sourced either externally, or, in demonstration of reason combined with will, internally.
I expect the true, ultimate value is more like the search for Nirvana - the desire to attain a mental state where all conflicts are resolved, all ideas are in harmony, the person is fully aware (not lobotomized or deluded in any way), and there is no suffering. Except, that most do not want to attain this mental state through just making themselves not care; they want to do it by altering the world so that the things they care about are resolved externally. The search for status and conformity is just one expression of this ultimate value.
To achieve this ultimate value of mental harmony, it's really helpful to have access to a broad variety of different perspectives, as we have in our modern society. It's only through being exposed to and synthesizing many ideas that we can approach the truth.
The ultimate test of what is a good idea is harmony with other ideas and with observations. This is achieved through a dialectical, rational process. If an idea helps your genes win in the vicious game of biological evolution, that's only weakly correlated with the truth and harmony of the idea.
Going Amish is a losing proposition in terms of this ultimate value of mental harmony, because the Amish worldview is limited and in many ways factually incorrect.
BTW: A totally fair response might be, "Under additional assumptions (unstated in the WSJ op-ed), my point holds."
Then you could defend your additional assumptions -- either in general, or in the specific context of a micro class (or in the context of the specific question). Do that if it's how you feel.
Or you could say, "Without digging into the specific details of this example, my point was simply that I think basic micro-theory is unappreciated."
I live in flyover country, a red county in a west coastal blue state. People in large cities and especially DC and other bastions of elite opinion have no clue about the cultures and microcultures of red America. There is much talk of the fertility crisis. But here in red America, a relative in my generation has been married for 49 nine years, has five children, 25 grandchildren and 1 great-grandchild. Three of the five children live on farms. One couple is making their living on the farm; the husband/fathers of the other two have high-paying jobs in the trades (data-center HVAC installer, diesel mechanic). The wives manage the home farms, and their children all grow up with farm responsibilities. They attend conservative Christian churches. They play outside, mostly unsupervised. The idea that a boy might really be a girl or vice versa is unfathomable to all of them. Most of the children are homeschooled. (This started after one young child reported being shown porn on a classmate’s smart phone on the public school bus.) That one’s mom reentered college and earned her teaching certificate. She demurred the higher pay of a public school to work in a local Catholic school. Her oldest son, age 18, is reluctant to finish high school, but will because a relative is a hiring manager for a nearby longshoreman’s operation. He is engaged to a beautiful young woman who works in her parents’ law office! They are thrilled to welcome him into their family! I can’t imagine an upwardly-mobile Vassar coed thinking this anything but an abomination. These are the people who are having children and passing their values along. So I’m not too worried about the broader culture. I am worried about the elites in academia and government who want to destroy it.
In the past Culture changed slowly, and each modification was time tested for value before gaihning general acceptance. Digital media has changed that paradigm. A false illusion of consensus promotes premature acceptance before reality has a chance to weigh in
Example, wealthy single movie/media personalities decide to become single mothers....digital media glorifies that choice, then the behavior is emulated by young not so wealthy women with very different outcomes. To late, culture has already validated single moms and questioning that choice is viewed as reactionary thinking that must be condemned. Doesn't change reality. Statistically, the choice (note-choice, many times the woman isn't given a choice) of being a single parent family is a sure path to poverty. Culture will eventually correct but at a snails pace after the damage is already done.
Is there not a basic meta-problem with cultural values in some sense determining value? If we are rationally assigning utility and maximising utility can we not simply assign infinite utility to a single choice A and choose A to maximise utility? This is similar to the Freudian problem of why we don't simply fantasise infinite pleasure.
You can’t rationally assign utility, is the assumption: the utility function is given. And in the real world, not model, that also seems to be the case, although we seem to be able to influence it a bit.
Isn't this just the "Pace Layer" framework in action? Some things change slowly because they are 'deeper', and some things change quickly because they are 'more superficial'. Your self-image is something that changes slowly, so you'll think "I'm a vanilla ice cream type of person, but I sometimes try other ice creams for variety". But your daily choices are fast-changing to the point of being a high variance random walk - "I'll try the mango sherbet today, even though I'm a vanilla ice cream person". And then you enjoy the mango sherbet, and that biases you to try mango sherbet again tomorrow, but it takes a whole month of you buying mango sherbet to start thinking "I'm a mango sherbet type of person". It seems to me that having a binary distinction between "fixed" values and "changing" decisions is silly. They are all decisions, they are all changeable, the only difference is the rate of change? What am I missing?
This all is great but what I was really hoping to learn is which existing cultures might be the most well adapted for the long term and/or how to build a new culture partially from scratch that could out compete existing cultures (assuming some minimum set of members/adherants/co-culturists can be recruited to kick things off)
Some interesting questions here. As an aside, are you using 'adaptive' and 'maladaptive' to refer to things that affect fitness? Why do we particularly care about human fitness values? Cultural values and individual values will determine how much (if any) importance we put on human population growth.
It seems to me that representing differing cultural values and especially change in values over time in a culture requires a model that allows values to change. So a SDTM is a bad fit for the task precisely because it rules that out. Whether values are modeled at the individual level (so cultural values supervene on individual values) or independently, I think it isn't particularly problematic to model mechanisms of value change as a supplement to the SDT approach. The standard suite of cultural transmission mechanisms could be the inspiration, or one could just posit something simple like drift.
An alternative, I suppose, could be to posit unchanging individual values, and suppose that cultural change happens via individuals being born and dying, and different cultural values depend on the different distributions of individual level values. But that just then pushes the question of cultural value change to the mechanism by which new individuals acquire their values in the first place, which will still need to be specified.
To avoid any kind of value change in the model, you probably need to suppose some very simple value system that all humans share (e.g. homo economicus) and then all cultural differences are represented in terms of differing beliefs in the relevant probabilities. Then it's the beliefs that are culturally transmitted. But that still doesn't fit very well with the general approach of decision theory which focuses more on ideal rationality than some kind of culturally transmitted set of weights that will vary widely from what the evidence says we should believe.
It seems weird to hear that Amish or Haredim cultures are more likely to succeed "in the long run", especially from someone with transhumanist sympathies, except perhaps in a collapse scenario.
Their cultures are currently reproductively successful in the narrow sense (but far less successful than mainstream liberal culture in terms of converts), but surely they're totally unequipped for a transhumanist future, where narrowly-defined reproductive success
While the space of potential behavioral or cultural (or perspectival) modifications is obviously infinite, the suggestive sequence of idealized progressive development is plausibly directionally projectable, potentially incrementally increasingly so. We necessarily construct these sequences subconsciously all day everyday while conspiring to instigate our own outcomes. The progress, you rightly indicate, comes from hypothecating novel furure implementations prior to them being naturally suggested or further implied over time. The question becomes, where does the future progressive Schelling point, say Schelling "line", reside over time, or is such a meta-probability even discernable through the noise? How can we find a common language for thinking about where we want to or should be in the temporal spectrum of the future, so that we arrive there collectively around the same time? I suspect that the recognition of your premise that apparent changes in values can potentially be ascribed, plausibally more often than not, to a change in perspective that reflects that underlying capacity to maintain a consistent internal narrative and overall rationale, will be a likely "a-ha" moment/realization for many. A recognition of oneself in the behavior of others is the literal act of cultural drift, and the process of possible positive change.
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.
There must be some force working in opposition to these three rewards, else everyone would be obese, overheated, nymphomaniacs.
Maybe mortality and legacy? Or the reward of “being remembered fondly.”
A culture that aspires to no higher values is not an adaptive culture that will succeed at anything.
Oh, there's plenty of "aspiring" going on. Along with distancing from the "base" desires and the denigration of those who promote them.
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.
We have other plausibly maladaptive cultural trends, but low fertility does seem the clearest evidence. No way below replacement fertility in good times can be adaptive, and it seems consistent enough for long enough to project it forward quite a ways. World elites today share a common culture to a large extent.
Fully agree that world elites today share a common culture to a large extent, more so than at any previous point in history.
Although there are perhaps two global elite cultures. The late sociology-of-religion scholar Peter Berger distinguished between what he somewhat tongue-in-cheek labelled the Faculty Club Culture and the Davos Culture. The global Faculty Club Culture is Human Rights, the Sustainable Development Goals, and being pro UN generally. The global Davos culture is free trade & the WTO, Washington consensus & IMF, and pro-business generally.
None of them are particularly anti-natalist, however. Nor are they particularly pro-natalist for that matter. Pro/anti natalism has not been any core item in the ideological “package” of either of these two elite cultures….I believe the main reasons for the global reduced fertility trend must be sought closer to the material base of societies, in the “production conditions for reproduction” so to speak. But, sure, with complex links to how people try to live lives they deem meaningful, i.e. with complex links to culture.
It is no so much that culture is directly natalist as it is that it strongly supports elements that happen to have anti-natalist consequences. Like gender equality, long school prep, intensive parenting, etc.
Yes, these are some of the factors behind fertility decline. But are they driven by elite-culture changes, or by a host of socio-material changes with lots of feedback loops both to elite culture and to mass culture?
A way to get some kind of handle on all the multicausality going on, is to adopt the old distinction between distal, intermediate and proximate factors used in public health studies. I do some work on this myself, and here is a suggestion:
Distal factor (behind fertility decline):
Mortality decline (driven by a host of factors, but that's another can of worms)
Intermediate factors:
Stronger states, and effective legal guarantees against interpersonal violence
Increased predictability of individual life courses implies cognitive shift to a «planned» life course
Shift from agriculture to industry-and-services economy
Child labor made illegal and effectively enforced
Introduction of formal social security systems
Urbanization
Women gain access to wage labor
Social structure opens up to allow for skill-based upward mobility
Mandatory education & higher percentage of young people in higher education
Two-income families having advantages in housing markets
Less stable family formations create higher risk when siring many children
Female life course becomes more similar to male life course
Proximate factors (closer to the actual fertility decision):
Delayed birth of first child & delayed marriages
Effective contraception made available. Particularly important is contraception that can be administered by the woman alone, and independent of coitus
Widespread access to risk-free abortion
Low fertility is not the only indicator (he's also referenced swiftly declining patriotism & willingness to fight wars), it's just the most obvious. And it is indeed obvious when fertility is not merely low in a sacrifice for "quality" (as in r vs K selection theory), but BELOW REPLACEMENT. Even a strategy of producing the highest quality offspring will result in extinction if the number is below replacement. That cannot possibly be an ESS.
Humanity as a whole is not at risk of extinction from an ecological disaster. We've survived much worse. And innovation occurs with growing populations, it will decline as population does (particularly since the most innovative countries now have lower fertility than the least innovative ones).
> There were similar concerns about declining fertility in Europe in the 1930, then came WW2 and fertility shot up again
The baby boom began somewhat before, in the mid 1930s https://worksinprogress.co/issue/understanding-the-baby-boom/
> As with the French Revolution, the impact of low fertility on the future of humanity is too early to tell.
The actual quote was referring to the 1968 riots. Chas Freeman cleared that up some years ago.
> 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.
This is the crux of the matter: there is a conservation of selection pressure necessary to shift which traits are fixed, that can be sourced either externally, or, in demonstration of reason combined with will, internally.
I expect the true, ultimate value is more like the search for Nirvana - the desire to attain a mental state where all conflicts are resolved, all ideas are in harmony, the person is fully aware (not lobotomized or deluded in any way), and there is no suffering. Except, that most do not want to attain this mental state through just making themselves not care; they want to do it by altering the world so that the things they care about are resolved externally. The search for status and conformity is just one expression of this ultimate value.
To achieve this ultimate value of mental harmony, it's really helpful to have access to a broad variety of different perspectives, as we have in our modern society. It's only through being exposed to and synthesizing many ideas that we can approach the truth.
The ultimate test of what is a good idea is harmony with other ideas and with observations. This is achieved through a dialectical, rational process. If an idea helps your genes win in the vicious game of biological evolution, that's only weakly correlated with the truth and harmony of the idea.
Going Amish is a losing proposition in terms of this ultimate value of mental harmony, because the Amish worldview is limited and in many ways factually incorrect.
ye olde backlink 00s style
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/rational-culture-choice-as-an-example
or
https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/rational-culture-choice-as-an-example-of-worlding.html
Robin: You're a great guy, but you really can't wade into the waters of intellectual combat and then retreat when someone punches back.
https://x.com/ben_golub/status/1821248068622119081
Respond.
I'm generally a fan of yours, but if you're the bigshot intellectual you claim to be -- you can't just go silent.
BTW: A totally fair response might be, "Under additional assumptions (unstated in the WSJ op-ed), my point holds."
Then you could defend your additional assumptions -- either in general, or in the specific context of a micro class (or in the context of the specific question). Do that if it's how you feel.
Or you could say, "Without digging into the specific details of this example, my point was simply that I think basic micro-theory is unappreciated."
I think it's worth defending your point though.
I live in flyover country, a red county in a west coastal blue state. People in large cities and especially DC and other bastions of elite opinion have no clue about the cultures and microcultures of red America. There is much talk of the fertility crisis. But here in red America, a relative in my generation has been married for 49 nine years, has five children, 25 grandchildren and 1 great-grandchild. Three of the five children live on farms. One couple is making their living on the farm; the husband/fathers of the other two have high-paying jobs in the trades (data-center HVAC installer, diesel mechanic). The wives manage the home farms, and their children all grow up with farm responsibilities. They attend conservative Christian churches. They play outside, mostly unsupervised. The idea that a boy might really be a girl or vice versa is unfathomable to all of them. Most of the children are homeschooled. (This started after one young child reported being shown porn on a classmate’s smart phone on the public school bus.) That one’s mom reentered college and earned her teaching certificate. She demurred the higher pay of a public school to work in a local Catholic school. Her oldest son, age 18, is reluctant to finish high school, but will because a relative is a hiring manager for a nearby longshoreman’s operation. He is engaged to a beautiful young woman who works in her parents’ law office! They are thrilled to welcome him into their family! I can’t imagine an upwardly-mobile Vassar coed thinking this anything but an abomination. These are the people who are having children and passing their values along. So I’m not too worried about the broader culture. I am worried about the elites in academia and government who want to destroy it.
In the past Culture changed slowly, and each modification was time tested for value before gaihning general acceptance. Digital media has changed that paradigm. A false illusion of consensus promotes premature acceptance before reality has a chance to weigh in
Example, wealthy single movie/media personalities decide to become single mothers....digital media glorifies that choice, then the behavior is emulated by young not so wealthy women with very different outcomes. To late, culture has already validated single moms and questioning that choice is viewed as reactionary thinking that must be condemned. Doesn't change reality. Statistically, the choice (note-choice, many times the woman isn't given a choice) of being a single parent family is a sure path to poverty. Culture will eventually correct but at a snails pace after the damage is already done.
Dick Minnis
removingthecataract.substack.com
Is there not a basic meta-problem with cultural values in some sense determining value? If we are rationally assigning utility and maximising utility can we not simply assign infinite utility to a single choice A and choose A to maximise utility? This is similar to the Freudian problem of why we don't simply fantasise infinite pleasure.
You can’t rationally assign utility, is the assumption: the utility function is given. And in the real world, not model, that also seems to be the case, although we seem to be able to influence it a bit.
Isn't this just the "Pace Layer" framework in action? Some things change slowly because they are 'deeper', and some things change quickly because they are 'more superficial'. Your self-image is something that changes slowly, so you'll think "I'm a vanilla ice cream type of person, but I sometimes try other ice creams for variety". But your daily choices are fast-changing to the point of being a high variance random walk - "I'll try the mango sherbet today, even though I'm a vanilla ice cream person". And then you enjoy the mango sherbet, and that biases you to try mango sherbet again tomorrow, but it takes a whole month of you buying mango sherbet to start thinking "I'm a mango sherbet type of person". It seems to me that having a binary distinction between "fixed" values and "changing" decisions is silly. They are all decisions, they are all changeable, the only difference is the rate of change? What am I missing?
Great post. Here’s the question I would like to ask: what happens when we consider vanilla and mango as two notes in a melody?
This all is great but what I was really hoping to learn is which existing cultures might be the most well adapted for the long term and/or how to build a new culture partially from scratch that could out compete existing cultures (assuming some minimum set of members/adherants/co-culturists can be recruited to kick things off)
Some interesting questions here. As an aside, are you using 'adaptive' and 'maladaptive' to refer to things that affect fitness? Why do we particularly care about human fitness values? Cultural values and individual values will determine how much (if any) importance we put on human population growth.
It seems to me that representing differing cultural values and especially change in values over time in a culture requires a model that allows values to change. So a SDTM is a bad fit for the task precisely because it rules that out. Whether values are modeled at the individual level (so cultural values supervene on individual values) or independently, I think it isn't particularly problematic to model mechanisms of value change as a supplement to the SDT approach. The standard suite of cultural transmission mechanisms could be the inspiration, or one could just posit something simple like drift.
An alternative, I suppose, could be to posit unchanging individual values, and suppose that cultural change happens via individuals being born and dying, and different cultural values depend on the different distributions of individual level values. But that just then pushes the question of cultural value change to the mechanism by which new individuals acquire their values in the first place, which will still need to be specified.
To avoid any kind of value change in the model, you probably need to suppose some very simple value system that all humans share (e.g. homo economicus) and then all cultural differences are represented in terms of differing beliefs in the relevant probabilities. Then it's the beliefs that are culturally transmitted. But that still doesn't fit very well with the general approach of decision theory which focuses more on ideal rationality than some kind of culturally transmitted set of weights that will vary widely from what the evidence says we should believe.
It seems weird to hear that Amish or Haredim cultures are more likely to succeed "in the long run", especially from someone with transhumanist sympathies, except perhaps in a collapse scenario.
Their cultures are currently reproductively successful in the narrow sense (but far less successful than mainstream liberal culture in terms of converts), but surely they're totally unequipped for a transhumanist future, where narrowly-defined reproductive success
Defection rates from the Amish have declined, in a kind of boiling off process. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/boiling-off/
While the space of potential behavioral or cultural (or perspectival) modifications is obviously infinite, the suggestive sequence of idealized progressive development is plausibly directionally projectable, potentially incrementally increasingly so. We necessarily construct these sequences subconsciously all day everyday while conspiring to instigate our own outcomes. The progress, you rightly indicate, comes from hypothecating novel furure implementations prior to them being naturally suggested or further implied over time. The question becomes, where does the future progressive Schelling point, say Schelling "line", reside over time, or is such a meta-probability even discernable through the noise? How can we find a common language for thinking about where we want to or should be in the temporal spectrum of the future, so that we arrive there collectively around the same time? I suspect that the recognition of your premise that apparent changes in values can potentially be ascribed, plausibally more often than not, to a change in perspective that reflects that underlying capacity to maintain a consistent internal narrative and overall rationale, will be a likely "a-ha" moment/realization for many. A recognition of oneself in the behavior of others is the literal act of cultural drift, and the process of possible positive change.