Our Rationality Future : Quit, All-in, or Bust

Animal brains compute DNA-encoded behavioral strategies, using DNA chosen by simple natural selection. Such brains can “reason”, but not very abstractly, and mostly about how to execute their DNA-given instincts. Animals don’t reason about where such strategies came from.

In humans, DNA encodes sufficiently-sophisticated brains to let us copy others’ behaviors. As a result, in humans a cultural form of natural selection allows us to evolve behaviors far faster than do other animals. This is humanity’s superpower. It induces us to reason more, about how best to generalize from the behaviors we see, and also about which humans to copy which behaviors from.

The invention of language let humans more easily transfer many things between our brains, to do so more abstractly, and to reason more easily about it all. We humans thus became more ambitious about the scope and abstraction of our reasoning.

We humans eventually came to realize that we could try to reason critically about the behaviors which we have inherited via cultural evolution. But as natural selection didn’t document its code, we mostly made up plausible-sounding reasons for such behaviors. While some of us were sometimes willing to change behavior based on such reasoning, this typically went badly, as we didn’t understand why evolution had made its choices. Thankfully, most others didn’t much respect or heed such reasoning.

During the Industrial Revolution, humanity saw many big fast changes to tech and social practices, and initially tried to preserve prior cultural values, norms, and status markers in the face of such changes. But then around roughly 1900, elites suddenly began a big new “modernism” project to try to remake culture via abstract reason. Abstract reason was then high status, it had been credited for much of those tech and business changes, and was the central focus of the new schools that most everyone now attended into until adulthood, and which decided much about their status in life.

The cause of this sudden change seems to be a combination of a rise in mixing of folks from different cultures making their prior traditions seem less compelling, plus a rise in the autonomy of professions, here in particular of art/culture specialists. Young adults kept together in schools created youth cultures, which began youth movements to change culture, movements justified in terms of abstract reasons, and which consistently won against older opponents.

Though abstract reason has fallen somewhat in status since then, cultural change driven by young activists has continued at a rapid pace. Now if these youth activists had focused their reason on which practices, norms, and status markers could make our culture more adaptive, we might have stayed adaptive even in the face of rapid tech/social change. Alas, young activists did not much consider cultural adaptiveness in picking changes to advocate. They mainly based their abstract reasoning on strong moral intuitions, and were largely uninterested in reflecting on the cultural processes that created such intuitions.

As a result, fast cultural change largely uncorrelated with adaptiveness has been a key driver of our cultures drifting into maladaption. That and fast tech/social change, the huge fall in deep cultural variety due to increasing ease of travel, travel, and talk, and the fall in selection pressures due to increased wealth, peace, and health. This drift will plausibly cause our civilization to fall, and likely be replaced by now insular fertile religious cultures. More similar rises and falls may follow.

Our choices are stark. Either 1) do nothing and slowly go bust, 2) quit embracing abstract reason so much, returning to a world of tradition, ignorance, war, poverty, and strong selection pressures, or 3) find and adopt ways to go all-in on using abstract reason to choose adaptive cultural elements. Or maybe do this indirectly via adopting a very competent form of government (e.g., futarchy) and assigning to it a sacred goal that aligns with adaption over centuries (e.g., 1M living in space ASAP).

Alas going bust seems by far our most likely outcome. If so, our current industrial era will be remembered a unique dreamtime, with horror by descendants see us as having indulged a great excess of reason, and with a wistful sense of loss by descendants who try to recreate and improve on it many centuries later.