17 Comments
User's avatar
warty dog's avatar

at least we can admire the intellectual wild on overcoming bias 😌

Expand full comment
To The Pith's avatar

Your writing’s a bit clunky and awkward in places. Might benefit from an editor before you publish.

Expand full comment
Robin Hanson's avatar

Good editors are expensive.

Expand full comment
To The Pith's avatar

💁

Expand full comment
Phil Getts's avatar

What is the sample size in that poll? Also, I don't understand what "relative priority (max 100, min 0) in 4-way comparison polls" means.

Expand full comment
Robin Hanson's avatar

I updated the post with response counts. I fit responses to a model where % picking each answer is proportional to a priority for that answer.

Expand full comment
Kamaar Taliaferro's avatar

Oh ... so you're selecting for likemindedness. This series is a social experiment. Got it.

Expand full comment
Kamaar Taliaferro's avatar

Hmm, so I live in the U.S.A. where our supreme court is in an era of rewriting settled precedents along what are widely understood, and accepted, to be conservative preferences.

There is no better example of elite capture of legal mechanisms for controlling and recreating cultural values.

How does the logic present in this series contend with this material reality?

Expand full comment
Robin Hanson's avatar

That's the sort of thing you should expect to happen regardless of the health of cultural evolution processes.

Expand full comment
Jack's avatar

The best way to maintain diversity seems to be through isolation. Languages are a good microcosm; as long as people are interconnected there is a strong bias away from small local languages toward a few dominant ones. The small languages that aren't isolated are dying out quickly.

How to create cultural isolation? Literal isolation seems impossible in the present era (until we start colonizing Mars and the asteroids, at least). Maybe we should welcome the fracturing of culture in the online era (e.g., the news sources people self-select into). Perhaps that's the closest we can come to sustainable diversity, although it does mean never-ending polarization.

Expand full comment
Robin Hanson's avatar

I doubt Mars is far enough away.

Expand full comment
DemystifySci's avatar

what percentage of these do you figure are norms that evolved in the social wild before getting adopted by elites?

Expand full comment
Enoch Lambert's avatar

Can you provide a reference for the best theories of cultural evolution promoting the social wild? Would love to look it up

Expand full comment
Robin Hanson's avatar

I'm just talking about our standard theories of cultural evolution, not something unusual.

Expand full comment
Enoch Lambert's avatar

It would just be nice for those wanting to learn to have a place to go. Are you talking about formal models with variables for the social wild? Informal discussions with standard examples of how the social wild impacted cultural evolution? Just trying to learn . . . .

Expand full comment