Wilson: "Avoid the temptation of centralized planning. You and your expert consultants are not smart enough to know how to improve the complex system that is under your care. You should implement the core design principles, which are fundamentally inclusive. You should also implement evolutionary processes that identify the right targets of selection, monitor planned and unplanned variation, and replicate best practices, knowing that their implementation will be highly sensitive to context."
It's very interesting that Wilson separates authoritarian goal-selection from authoritarian planning. I was about to say that he may be the first person to do this, but there is a previous example: Hitler, who set goals, but refused to tell his underlings how to achieve them. He wanted them to fight it out between themselves, to make the organization stronger.
That comes across as a cheap shot at Wilson; but, as I said in another comment, there are no obvious non-evil approaches here. I'm sure he's nicer than Hitler. I just don't think niceness will help here.
In fact, I'll make a stronger statement: Morality is only good in beings that aren't omnipotent. A being of sufficient power will do greater harm if it's moral than if it's amoral. Hitler was an extremely moral person. (A week ago I wouldn't have said that, but I've been shocked this past week to see the old Nazi Kultur vs Zivilisation arguments re-emerge from people opposing successionism. Anti-successionism is extremely moral, and very Nazi.) Morality is a bias, and the emergence of complexity from the simple can't happen with any bias away from the narrow edge-of-chaos band in which life emerges.
> [David Sloan] Wilson says economics and economists are terrible, everything needs regulation, and we must make a world government designed to max world welfare.
Ah.
When E.O. Wilson died in 2021, Scientific American published, not an obituary, but an attack, calling Wilson just another white racist whom we should forget rather than commemorate. I remember one of its points was that Wilson had used something called the "normal distribution", which proved he was trying to establish a norm of "normality".
(The chief editor who approved that article, proving herself completely scientifically illiterate, was, last I checked, still in charge.)
I wrote to David Sloan Wilson, who often collaborated with EO Wilson, asking if he would participate in or organize some group response to this publication. He never responded. Perhaps his politics would not let him.
But this question of how to manage cultural adaption is, really, the stickiest moral dilemma in the Universe. It is in a way the Ultimate Question: Is it better to steer evolution (in which case we will never evolve any new qualia, since you cannot value a qualia you don't have); or to stay hands-off? It appears at first to force us to choose between Maoism and Nazism.
If amphibians had learned to steer evolution, they would never have let the ability to love evolve, since it seems strictly bad to someone who hasn't experienced it.
A scary downhill progression into what Hayek called "constructivism". Esp. Wilson sounds like a meta-Mao. (I hear Bullwinkle Moose confidently saying "This time for sure! Last time we didn't have the right targets of selection, didn't monitor planned and unplanned variation, didn't replicate best practices. But THIS time...").
I think Skinner was quoting C. S. Lewis' _The Abolition of Man_ (1943), which does seem relevant (recommended; it's short).
Lewis makes the larger point that, should we intentionally design people or society, that which we design will do the same - design their own descendent cultures/people. But they'll do so differently than we would, because they're different. Etc., recursively down the generations. Without some kind of anchor to survival/functionality, the path seems unpredictable, potentially chaotic, and likely to lead to extinction. Yes, capitalism could fix this, but it seems unlikely to be allowed to.
I don't think there's a solution to your concern about cultural drift short of expanding into the solar system, and eventually beyond, to get diversity of culture and competition working again. I see it as a candidate Great Filter - a monocultural self-propagating virus not subject to competitive pressures that extinguishes itself before it spreads widely enough to not be a monoculture.
[Apologies if I'm repeating myself here; I do tend to harp on this.]
Perhaps part of the solution is to decentralize deliberate cultural evolution rather than asking a common governance mechanism to optimize culture for everyone. Voluntary communities could adopt different institutional and cultural arrangements, allowing experimentation, comparison, imitation, and revision. That would preserve deliberate variation and selection while avoiding the need for a single authority to specify the objective function. The difficult condition is meaningful exit: people must be able to move among alternatives, without treating every ordinary cost of leaving as coercion. This would make cultural evolution partly a process of selection among institutional arrangements rather than selection imposed upon individuals by their governors.
Wilson: "Avoid the temptation of centralized planning. You and your expert consultants are not smart enough to know how to improve the complex system that is under your care. You should implement the core design principles, which are fundamentally inclusive. You should also implement evolutionary processes that identify the right targets of selection, monitor planned and unplanned variation, and replicate best practices, knowing that their implementation will be highly sensitive to context."
It's very interesting that Wilson separates authoritarian goal-selection from authoritarian planning. I was about to say that he may be the first person to do this, but there is a previous example: Hitler, who set goals, but refused to tell his underlings how to achieve them. He wanted them to fight it out between themselves, to make the organization stronger.
That comes across as a cheap shot at Wilson; but, as I said in another comment, there are no obvious non-evil approaches here. I'm sure he's nicer than Hitler. I just don't think niceness will help here.
In fact, I'll make a stronger statement: Morality is only good in beings that aren't omnipotent. A being of sufficient power will do greater harm if it's moral than if it's amoral. Hitler was an extremely moral person. (A week ago I wouldn't have said that, but I've been shocked this past week to see the old Nazi Kultur vs Zivilisation arguments re-emerge from people opposing successionism. Anti-successionism is extremely moral, and very Nazi.) Morality is a bias, and the emergence of complexity from the simple can't happen with any bias away from the narrow edge-of-chaos band in which life emerges.
> [David Sloan] Wilson says economics and economists are terrible, everything needs regulation, and we must make a world government designed to max world welfare.
Ah.
When E.O. Wilson died in 2021, Scientific American published, not an obituary, but an attack, calling Wilson just another white racist whom we should forget rather than commemorate. I remember one of its points was that Wilson had used something called the "normal distribution", which proved he was trying to establish a norm of "normality".
(The chief editor who approved that article, proving herself completely scientifically illiterate, was, last I checked, still in charge.)
I wrote to David Sloan Wilson, who often collaborated with EO Wilson, asking if he would participate in or organize some group response to this publication. He never responded. Perhaps his politics would not let him.
But this question of how to manage cultural adaption is, really, the stickiest moral dilemma in the Universe. It is in a way the Ultimate Question: Is it better to steer evolution (in which case we will never evolve any new qualia, since you cannot value a qualia you don't have); or to stay hands-off? It appears at first to force us to choose between Maoism and Nazism.
If amphibians had learned to steer evolution, they would never have let the ability to love evolve, since it seems strictly bad to someone who hasn't experienced it.
A scary downhill progression into what Hayek called "constructivism". Esp. Wilson sounds like a meta-Mao. (I hear Bullwinkle Moose confidently saying "This time for sure! Last time we didn't have the right targets of selection, didn't monitor planned and unplanned variation, didn't replicate best practices. But THIS time...").
I think Skinner was quoting C. S. Lewis' _The Abolition of Man_ (1943), which does seem relevant (recommended; it's short).
Lewis makes the larger point that, should we intentionally design people or society, that which we design will do the same - design their own descendent cultures/people. But they'll do so differently than we would, because they're different. Etc., recursively down the generations. Without some kind of anchor to survival/functionality, the path seems unpredictable, potentially chaotic, and likely to lead to extinction. Yes, capitalism could fix this, but it seems unlikely to be allowed to.
I don't think there's a solution to your concern about cultural drift short of expanding into the solar system, and eventually beyond, to get diversity of culture and competition working again. I see it as a candidate Great Filter - a monocultural self-propagating virus not subject to competitive pressures that extinguishes itself before it spreads widely enough to not be a monoculture.
[Apologies if I'm repeating myself here; I do tend to harp on this.]
Perhaps part of the solution is to decentralize deliberate cultural evolution rather than asking a common governance mechanism to optimize culture for everyone. Voluntary communities could adopt different institutional and cultural arrangements, allowing experimentation, comparison, imitation, and revision. That would preserve deliberate variation and selection while avoiding the need for a single authority to specify the objective function. The difficult condition is meaningful exit: people must be able to move among alternatives, without treating every ordinary cost of leaving as coercion. This would make cultural evolution partly a process of selection among institutional arrangements rather than selection imposed upon individuals by their governors.