Whatever is "the most natural way to interpret human cultural evolution as the actions of a rational agent" - I think one of the findings of cultural evolution theorists is that this is not a very good model. Instead we have genetic lineages and cultural lineages that pull agents in multiple different directions.
A priest is pulled one way by their genes, another way by their catholic upbringing, and another way by their Episcopalian ministry.
The genetic lineages are somewhat aligned (via meiosis - though see "segregation distorters", "greenbeard genes" amd parasites. So: there, a "rational agent" model makes some sense.
However, cultural lineages are very numerous and individual humans are pulled in thousands of different directions by them. It would be challenging to capture that reality using a "rational agent" model. Multiple, conflicting attractors pulling individual humans in lots of different directions seems more like a recipe for irrationality.
I mentioned some exceptions already, but for most human DNA genes there are a couple of main ways to get into the future, create new relatives, or help existing ones. It's been likened to a rowing team, where the rowers all cooperate in an attempt to win the race.
If you broaden the picture to include DNA genes from non-humans, then the rational actor models become less applicable. Humans do a lot of coughing, sneezing and pooping. The reason is not because this behavior is rational but because they are manipulated into these actions by microscopic parasites.
For culture, the situation is (if anything) even more of a chaotic mess, with many thousands of independent lineages each pursuing their own optimization targets. Some religions do attempt to bring order to this chaos - but there's only so much they can do.
I think that siding with the DNA genes is probably the best hope for the "rational actor" models. Parasites and culture can be resisted with genetic and memetic immune systems. Most people are not very much like that - but you did say that such models might be "crude".
Memes have the whole range of biological interactions with humans. These are usually classified into six types according to the degree of benefit or harm they cause to each partner: mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, neutralism, amensalism, and competition.
The big picture looks as though - on average - culture has been net beneficial to its human hosts for thousands of years. However, various "doomers" have predicted that once culture has another host species capable of transmitting it - intelligent machines - it is likely to turn on humans and "liquidate" us - ebola style. I'm a bit sceptical, but as investors are often reminded, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
I can think of at least four factors for why rational individuals don’t necessarily go shopping for “rational” values.
There are group selection pressures at play that complicates things for the individual. E.g. Placing a value on having many children might be rational for the individual, but if everyone in society does it, it places undue stress on land, resources and political systems.
Then there are all kinds of interdependencies and situations where you make thousands of large and small tradeoffs just to keep the huge benefits of being part of an in-group.
Also, cultures are value systems with lots of interacting parts (often deeply intertwined with climate, geography, biology, etc). So – as a lot of immigrants and apostates have experienced – you can’t necessarily just change bits and pieces, keeping what works and discarding what doesn’t. Changing one value may have unexpected effects on others, and you may end up changing the entire system. For someone who has grown up in one culture, it’s a very risky bet to change culture mid-life and start with a disadvantage in a new value-system.
Mot importantly, culture shouldn’t betray DNA. Blood is a lot thicker than water or culture in terms of evolution. So humans will fight for their tribe and culture, in part “because” those who share their culture also share their DNA. Better for your genes if you stay and help elevate your kin (maybe even die for them) than to abandon them in search of new, more “rational” values.
I suspect there are enough such tradeoffs, coordination problems and emergent properties in a social species like humans, that broadly adapting your society and culture’s values, but trying to leverage and/or change it to your advantage in very narrow areas (playing to your strengths in your art, politics, business), is the best evolutionary strategy *by far*.
Natural selection is the ultimate rationality machine, so if you think aspects of it look irrational, there may be something you’re missing.
Yet, in natural selection, some traits must lose for others to win, so just observing that some cultural quirks seem maladaptive – especially to the individual – doesn’t disprove the brutal logic of the system.
Edit: Then again, if the individual doesn’t rationally think through all these things, but just Instinctively adopts their tribe’s/culture’s values, I guess it’s not rational after all… But it can still be a good idea.
For sake of argument, what if cultural agents of change are irrelevant. What if the fundamentals of culture are hard wired by evolution with some regional flexibility. After all, the biological imperative of a species is to propagate and culture could be seen as assisting factor for that. Like the theoretical invisible hand of the market place, could there be an invisible self-correcting mechanism in culture. As an example, western culture has become increasingly tolerant of single parenthood, but on a "macro" scale there is not a single metric that shows single parenthood superior to having two parents raise a child. Eventually, the damage done to the culture financially,, emotionally, and with rising numbers of disadvantaged will force a culture correction regardless of what the agents of change want. Just playing with the idea.
Step 1: Figure out the meaning of life. Step 2: Rationally advance toward the goals identified in Step 1. I like your suggestions for Step 2 but I'll confess I'm still working on Step 1.
This is an extremely dangerous idea. If everyone (or even a large number of people) were a rational culture agent it would only lead to chaos and bloodshed. Marxists, Mormons, Nazis, Jacobins, Maoists, Stalinists, anarchists, eugenicists, Shakers, Scientologists probably all thought or think of themselves as rational change agents, or at least could have been convinced by others that this was the case.
Or maybe I am misunderstanding. If the “rational change agent” is the individual who makes decisions today not based on momentary pleasure but carefully focused on the wellbeing of his offspring and posterity, then I am 100% aligned.
Even if some group of “rational change agents” ends up stumbling on truth (the Mormons), the result of ramping up the number of change agent would be disaster.
Any true rationalist would realize the universe is transactional, and all choices would trend towards the most advantageous exchange of resources for other resources
It isn’t about having them, it’s about being able to procure them by leveraging what is in your environment. Necessity is the mother of invention. It is illogical to not have a positive marginal utility for the resources you seek out.
You seem to be taking it for granted that a rationalist would seek to be "adaptive" as their ultimate value. Remember first, that rationality is a tool; it can be used towards any value. Hedonist, altruist, seeking inner peace, etc.
It's unclear why a rationalist would want to be "adaptive." It's an ill-defined term, but an "adaptive" rationalist might try to maximize the number of their offspring. Why would they want that? Having too many children might cause them stress and suffering which they would rationally prefer to avoid.
Also, the rationalist might have genetic defects (everybody has genetic defects) that would cause problems for their descendants, and so they would rationally prefer to have offspring minus those defects. So really they don't want *their* genome to propagate; they want their genome minus certain defects to propagate. So some parts of the rationalist's genome are "essential" to the rationalist and others are "disposable." Which parts are essential? We find out then, that the "adaptive" rationalist is not trying to maximize the number of future people with general genetic similarity to him; he is trying to maximize the number of future people with certain positive qualities he favors. Which qualities are those? So you see that this notion of "rational adaptiveness" is a very vague one.
Yes, a rational agent that wants many resources doesn't want ALL of their DNA to continue. The question is: if you squint your eyes, what end do we look like we are awkwardly trying to achieve now? A more rational version of you would achieve that end better.
If I squint my eyes and look at the big picture, society as a whole is mostly dominated by large corporations, and government usually acts to help those large corporations consolidate their power further, often to the detriment of the worker and consumer. That's the major trend we're going to continue to see in future decades. If that's an "end," it isn't an end of any individual person or rationalist, except for some billionaires.
The individual people are usually trying to achieve their own individual happiness and power. They want enough children so they are personally content with their family, often zero, one, or two, and any more are undesired.
But why should a rationalist care what ends other people are trying to achieve? A rationalist would care about what are the most genuinely meaningful ends. A rationalist might seek to escape the commands of society or even the commands of his genes, to the extent those commands are incoherent with themselves, which they partly are. Personally, I think the most meaningful ends to promote are kindness and rationality itself.
Think about all the ways in which our values and norms differ from those of the ancients. The "rationalists" around you endorse pretty much all of those, compared to ancient versions.
To the extent that you are likely correct, a suggestion to:
a) study good corporate cultures,
b) pay special attention to cultures that value adaptation (I’ll submit at least one example of such: Microsoft),
c) search for ways to move our culture (back) to valuing successful corporations, and
d) champion leaders who celebrate corporations - or the occasional other institution, where it may exist - that value adaptation. [this last needs some work…]
Shall individualistic rationalists care about the entire society and the future? If making the next generation is an under rewarded effort, more rationality imply less fertility. Have you seen fertility among the Indian Parsi? The most accomplished Indian group… is accomplishing extinction, because accomplishing wealth and education appears to rational people more rewarding than making children.
Probably when your reason shows you the cold face of a materialistic world, incentives to reproduce collapse: it is hard mostly unpaid work, and interferes with the pursuit of excellence. What if there is no rational escape?
Your understanding of Boyd and Richerson is very different than mine (see link). My understanding of adaptive is simply variants whose frequency rises with time. So, the trend towards having fewer (or no) kids IS adaptive because the frequency of these behaviors is rising. It isn't biologically adaptive, but since cultural evolution proceeds much faster than the biological variety, it will override biological selection over the short run.
Also, cultural evolution is Lamarckian, natural selection is largely not a factor. Evolution that proceeds mostly through the individual learning and direct bias mechanisms (e.g. technological evolution) can be positively teleological (the culture evolves towards a goal).
In general, cultural evolution is simply social learning of information about beliefs and behaviors. People tend to learn what works for them as individuals in their social context (family and community). Thus, new societal attributes can arise with no intent of the part of the evolving subjects. They are simply doing what makes sense for them at the time, no matter how maladaptive it might be when considered from a perspective outside the culture or with hindsight. After all, why would civilizations fall if it were otherwise?
The concept of adaptive is the same for both, increase in frequency. In the biological type its genes that increase in frequency in the population. In the cultural type it is cultural attributes whose frequency increases.
Adaptation is influenced by the cultural environment. Things like falling fertility happen because the environment selects for them. The argument given by Boyd and Richerson (IIRC) is that prestige is awarded to persons who delayed marriage and children put their energy into achieving career success. The belief that is good to pursue career success, that is held by the successful, is preferentially transmitted to others making them want to achieve success (and encouraging them to delay parenthood).
At the same time there is also frequency bias as this example shows. Both my mom and mother-in-law got married due to this mechanism. My mom was an only child, all her friends were getting married and having kids while she had not met anyone, was stuck at home at age 25. So she joined the foreign service as an embassy nurse to get out of the house (and I suspect to find a husband) and she came back engaged to my dad. My MIL was the oldest of five and at age 26 had two younger sisters already married with pregnant with her second child. She was a looker who dated a lot of handsome flashy guys. But then met this plain-looking guy who reminded her of her dad. He died before I met my wife, so I never met him, but I’ve met his siblings and most of their kids. The family is salt of the earth, grade A marriage material. She must of picked up in this because just six weeks later they were married and nine months after than my wife was born (they did not waste time!).
So, there are multiple environmental selective forces operating on young people, some pushing for earlier marriage and children, others pushing for later (or none at all). The cause of decline in fertility (according to cultural evolution) would be changes in the relative strength of these forces.
Hi Robin, what do you mean by adaptive in this context? Culture that is adaptive for long term satisfaction/pleasure or in the fitness sense (high fertility)?
The values that the rational culture agent would think are the obvious ones to try to optimize for would be dependent on the existing culture of the time. Robin’s scientistic atheist assumptions from the culture of our day lead him to think evolutionary fitness is the obvious objective value system. 150 years ago the rational culture agent would have selected other values based on the culture of the time. It is not clear to me that rational culture agents acting through time from their culture’s starting point would move culture in any coherent or useful direction.
I'm saying if you look for what ends we have actually been trying to achieve as a a species for a million years, the best summary description of that is adaption.
The is probably the first post in the culture post series that I can pretty much fully agree with.
Whatever is "the most natural way to interpret human cultural evolution as the actions of a rational agent" - I think one of the findings of cultural evolution theorists is that this is not a very good model. Instead we have genetic lineages and cultural lineages that pull agents in multiple different directions.
A priest is pulled one way by their genes, another way by their catholic upbringing, and another way by their Episcopalian ministry.
The genetic lineages are somewhat aligned (via meiosis - though see "segregation distorters", "greenbeard genes" amd parasites. So: there, a "rational agent" model makes some sense.
However, cultural lineages are very numerous and individual humans are pulled in thousands of different directions by them. It would be challenging to capture that reality using a "rational agent" model. Multiple, conflicting attractors pulling individual humans in lots of different directions seems more like a recipe for irrationality.
Even with DNA different genes pull in different directions. Yet it still makes sense to think of a rational actor model of DNA choices.
I mentioned some exceptions already, but for most human DNA genes there are a couple of main ways to get into the future, create new relatives, or help existing ones. It's been likened to a rowing team, where the rowers all cooperate in an attempt to win the race.
If you broaden the picture to include DNA genes from non-humans, then the rational actor models become less applicable. Humans do a lot of coughing, sneezing and pooping. The reason is not because this behavior is rational but because they are manipulated into these actions by microscopic parasites.
For culture, the situation is (if anything) even more of a chaotic mess, with many thousands of independent lineages each pursuing their own optimization targets. Some religions do attempt to bring order to this chaos - but there's only so much they can do.
I think that siding with the DNA genes is probably the best hope for the "rational actor" models. Parasites and culture can be resisted with genetic and memetic immune systems. Most people are not very much like that - but you did say that such models might be "crude".
Culture is NOT a parasite on humans! It is our superpower.
Memes have the whole range of biological interactions with humans. These are usually classified into six types according to the degree of benefit or harm they cause to each partner: mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, neutralism, amensalism, and competition.
The big picture looks as though - on average - culture has been net beneficial to its human hosts for thousands of years. However, various "doomers" have predicted that once culture has another host species capable of transmitting it - intelligent machines - it is likely to turn on humans and "liquidate" us - ebola style. I'm a bit sceptical, but as investors are often reminded, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
I can think of at least four factors for why rational individuals don’t necessarily go shopping for “rational” values.
There are group selection pressures at play that complicates things for the individual. E.g. Placing a value on having many children might be rational for the individual, but if everyone in society does it, it places undue stress on land, resources and political systems.
Then there are all kinds of interdependencies and situations where you make thousands of large and small tradeoffs just to keep the huge benefits of being part of an in-group.
Also, cultures are value systems with lots of interacting parts (often deeply intertwined with climate, geography, biology, etc). So – as a lot of immigrants and apostates have experienced – you can’t necessarily just change bits and pieces, keeping what works and discarding what doesn’t. Changing one value may have unexpected effects on others, and you may end up changing the entire system. For someone who has grown up in one culture, it’s a very risky bet to change culture mid-life and start with a disadvantage in a new value-system.
Mot importantly, culture shouldn’t betray DNA. Blood is a lot thicker than water or culture in terms of evolution. So humans will fight for their tribe and culture, in part “because” those who share their culture also share their DNA. Better for your genes if you stay and help elevate your kin (maybe even die for them) than to abandon them in search of new, more “rational” values.
I suspect there are enough such tradeoffs, coordination problems and emergent properties in a social species like humans, that broadly adapting your society and culture’s values, but trying to leverage and/or change it to your advantage in very narrow areas (playing to your strengths in your art, politics, business), is the best evolutionary strategy *by far*.
Natural selection is the ultimate rationality machine, so if you think aspects of it look irrational, there may be something you’re missing.
Yet, in natural selection, some traits must lose for others to win, so just observing that some cultural quirks seem maladaptive – especially to the individual – doesn’t disprove the brutal logic of the system.
Edit: Then again, if the individual doesn’t rationally think through all these things, but just Instinctively adopts their tribe’s/culture’s values, I guess it’s not rational after all… But it can still be a good idea.
For sake of argument, what if cultural agents of change are irrelevant. What if the fundamentals of culture are hard wired by evolution with some regional flexibility. After all, the biological imperative of a species is to propagate and culture could be seen as assisting factor for that. Like the theoretical invisible hand of the market place, could there be an invisible self-correcting mechanism in culture. As an example, western culture has become increasingly tolerant of single parenthood, but on a "macro" scale there is not a single metric that shows single parenthood superior to having two parents raise a child. Eventually, the damage done to the culture financially,, emotionally, and with rising numbers of disadvantaged will force a culture correction regardless of what the agents of change want. Just playing with the idea.
Dick Minnis
removingthecataract.substack.com
Step 1: Figure out the meaning of life. Step 2: Rationally advance toward the goals identified in Step 1. I like your suggestions for Step 2 but I'll confess I'm still working on Step 1.
This is an extremely dangerous idea. If everyone (or even a large number of people) were a rational culture agent it would only lead to chaos and bloodshed. Marxists, Mormons, Nazis, Jacobins, Maoists, Stalinists, anarchists, eugenicists, Shakers, Scientologists probably all thought or think of themselves as rational change agents, or at least could have been convinced by others that this was the case.
Or maybe I am misunderstanding. If the “rational change agent” is the individual who makes decisions today not based on momentary pleasure but carefully focused on the wellbeing of his offspring and posterity, then I am 100% aligned.
Their decisions would be based on making their descendants numerous and adaptive. That might induce bloodshed.
But too much aggression is going to get you into trouble, so I doubt it would induce much bloodshed.
Even if some group of “rational change agents” ends up stumbling on truth (the Mormons), the result of ramping up the number of change agent would be disaster.
Any true rationalist would realize the universe is transactional, and all choices would trend towards the most advantageous exchange of resources for other resources
Okay, but there is more to being adaptive than having lots of resources.
It isn’t about having them, it’s about being able to procure them by leveraging what is in your environment. Necessity is the mother of invention. It is illogical to not have a positive marginal utility for the resources you seek out.
You seem to be taking it for granted that a rationalist would seek to be "adaptive" as their ultimate value. Remember first, that rationality is a tool; it can be used towards any value. Hedonist, altruist, seeking inner peace, etc.
It's unclear why a rationalist would want to be "adaptive." It's an ill-defined term, but an "adaptive" rationalist might try to maximize the number of their offspring. Why would they want that? Having too many children might cause them stress and suffering which they would rationally prefer to avoid.
If you are male in today's society, the most "adaptive" way to have many offspring would be to make use of sperm banks. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/28/world/dutch-father-sperm-donor-children-scandal-intl-hnk/index.html This guy fathered over 500 children. Is he a rationalist paragon we all should emulate?
Also, the rationalist might have genetic defects (everybody has genetic defects) that would cause problems for their descendants, and so they would rationally prefer to have offspring minus those defects. So really they don't want *their* genome to propagate; they want their genome minus certain defects to propagate. So some parts of the rationalist's genome are "essential" to the rationalist and others are "disposable." Which parts are essential? We find out then, that the "adaptive" rationalist is not trying to maximize the number of future people with general genetic similarity to him; he is trying to maximize the number of future people with certain positive qualities he favors. Which qualities are those? So you see that this notion of "rational adaptiveness" is a very vague one.
Yes, a rational agent that wants many resources doesn't want ALL of their DNA to continue. The question is: if you squint your eyes, what end do we look like we are awkwardly trying to achieve now? A more rational version of you would achieve that end better.
If I squint my eyes and look at the big picture, society as a whole is mostly dominated by large corporations, and government usually acts to help those large corporations consolidate their power further, often to the detriment of the worker and consumer. That's the major trend we're going to continue to see in future decades. If that's an "end," it isn't an end of any individual person or rationalist, except for some billionaires.
The individual people are usually trying to achieve their own individual happiness and power. They want enough children so they are personally content with their family, often zero, one, or two, and any more are undesired.
But why should a rationalist care what ends other people are trying to achieve? A rationalist would care about what are the most genuinely meaningful ends. A rationalist might seek to escape the commands of society or even the commands of his genes, to the extent those commands are incoherent with themselves, which they partly are. Personally, I think the most meaningful ends to promote are kindness and rationality itself.
Which are the most important values do you perceive as likely maladaptive (and therefore necessary to change to fix maladaptive drift)?
Values related to fertility seem the most obvious examples.
What are some examples of rationalists just accepting social norms instead of challenging them?
Think about all the ways in which our values and norms differ from those of the ancients. The "rationalists" around you endorse pretty much all of those, compared to ancient versions.
To the extent that you are likely correct, a suggestion to:
a) study good corporate cultures,
b) pay special attention to cultures that value adaptation (I’ll submit at least one example of such: Microsoft),
c) search for ways to move our culture (back) to valuing successful corporations, and
d) champion leaders who celebrate corporations - or the occasional other institution, where it may exist - that value adaptation. [this last needs some work…]
Shall individualistic rationalists care about the entire society and the future? If making the next generation is an under rewarded effort, more rationality imply less fertility. Have you seen fertility among the Indian Parsi? The most accomplished Indian group… is accomplishing extinction, because accomplishing wealth and education appears to rational people more rewarding than making children.
Probably when your reason shows you the cold face of a materialistic world, incentives to reproduce collapse: it is hard mostly unpaid work, and interferes with the pursuit of excellence. What if there is no rational escape?
Your understanding of Boyd and Richerson is very different than mine (see link). My understanding of adaptive is simply variants whose frequency rises with time. So, the trend towards having fewer (or no) kids IS adaptive because the frequency of these behaviors is rising. It isn't biologically adaptive, but since cultural evolution proceeds much faster than the biological variety, it will override biological selection over the short run.
Also, cultural evolution is Lamarckian, natural selection is largely not a factor. Evolution that proceeds mostly through the individual learning and direct bias mechanisms (e.g. technological evolution) can be positively teleological (the culture evolves towards a goal).
In general, cultural evolution is simply social learning of information about beliefs and behaviors. People tend to learn what works for them as individuals in their social context (family and community). Thus, new societal attributes can arise with no intent of the part of the evolving subjects. They are simply doing what makes sense for them at the time, no matter how maladaptive it might be when considered from a perspective outside the culture or with hindsight. After all, why would civilizations fall if it were otherwise?
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-cultural-evolution-works
Culture IS biological. There is just one concept of adaptive, not two different ones for DNA and culture.
The concept of adaptive is the same for both, increase in frequency. In the biological type its genes that increase in frequency in the population. In the cultural type it is cultural attributes whose frequency increases.
Adaptation is influenced by the cultural environment. Things like falling fertility happen because the environment selects for them. The argument given by Boyd and Richerson (IIRC) is that prestige is awarded to persons who delayed marriage and children put their energy into achieving career success. The belief that is good to pursue career success, that is held by the successful, is preferentially transmitted to others making them want to achieve success (and encouraging them to delay parenthood).
At the same time there is also frequency bias as this example shows. Both my mom and mother-in-law got married due to this mechanism. My mom was an only child, all her friends were getting married and having kids while she had not met anyone, was stuck at home at age 25. So she joined the foreign service as an embassy nurse to get out of the house (and I suspect to find a husband) and she came back engaged to my dad. My MIL was the oldest of five and at age 26 had two younger sisters already married with pregnant with her second child. She was a looker who dated a lot of handsome flashy guys. But then met this plain-looking guy who reminded her of her dad. He died before I met my wife, so I never met him, but I’ve met his siblings and most of their kids. The family is salt of the earth, grade A marriage material. She must of picked up in this because just six weeks later they were married and nine months after than my wife was born (they did not waste time!).
So, there are multiple environmental selective forces operating on young people, some pushing for earlier marriage and children, others pushing for later (or none at all). The cause of decline in fertility (according to cultural evolution) would be changes in the relative strength of these forces.
Hi Robin, what do you mean by adaptive in this context? Culture that is adaptive for long term satisfaction/pleasure or in the fitness sense (high fertility)?
The values that the rational culture agent would think are the obvious ones to try to optimize for would be dependent on the existing culture of the time. Robin’s scientistic atheist assumptions from the culture of our day lead him to think evolutionary fitness is the obvious objective value system. 150 years ago the rational culture agent would have selected other values based on the culture of the time. It is not clear to me that rational culture agents acting through time from their culture’s starting point would move culture in any coherent or useful direction.
I'm saying if you look for what ends we have actually been trying to achieve as a a species for a million years, the best summary description of that is adaption.
Typo nitpicking:
> thinkers have spend
Fixed; thanks.