A thought: Can you identify instances of cultural drift in *other* cultures, which you could point out to an audience more willing to see it in another culture? Then explain that we suffer from the same kind of drift.
I tried to read Spengler, but he referenced far too many scholars I'd never heard of, and his analysis is disputed. So now I read Hanson. But given the speed of change in these times, I find it frighteningly hard to diagnose what aspects of our culture need fixing. You remember when we panicked about the birth rate being too high: "One is best, two is most."
I don't follow in what sense at all you are standing outside anything. Judging cultural drift -- even assuming your empirical claims -- to be not only undesirable but more undesirable than alternatives relies on a bunch of strong value assumptions.
Someone else might see those empirical claims shrug and say: ok sounds great to me. Others (as I lean towards) might even think that selective pressure tends to lead us towards worse moral behavior and that cultural drift is desirable **regardless of it's impact on survival**.
You are just adopting a particular moral viewpoint and feeling frustrated others don't see how obviously correct it is. That seems pretty similar to me.
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And yes, you can say: ceterus parabus many people think extinction is bad or agree with you about X. But everyone can do that, the hard part is weighing things since it's essentially never true (and certainly not here) that the ceterus are parabus.
Speaking as someone who thinks Elephant in the Brain will be your magnum opus (even more than your work on Information Markets with the recent success of Information Markets, President Trump's support, Polymarket being invested in by ICE, and my own startup being an Information Market), I think you are paying insufficient attention to mimetic theory.
Interestingly, you've come to the many of the same conclusions as Girard multiple times.
In my own experience, when I try to explain mimetic theory to folks, I have a hard time convincing them of its massive influence, but it is very effective at unlocking them from the mental prison of culture = music/art/crap.
> The most prestigious intellectuals in our world are writers of op-eds, and givers of TED and keynote talks.
My prestige yardstick is a bit different. When an intellectual's compensation mostly comes from talks and op-eds and popular books, it creates a moral hazard. It's no accident that many of those implicated in recent academic publishing scandals were prominent TED speakers.
many modern people barely have a sense of 'their culture' (vs. their personalized media diet), and even less so as something they have a pro-active obligation to steward away from 'malaptiveness'. The neg-utilitarianism in the water, leading people to prioritize potential negative consequences of their actions, doesn't help.
If you take a step back, what you're asking of people is to take on 'yet another' big, 'necessary', but nebulous struggle in terms of their ability to do anything - global warming, inequality, debt, etc. And as I've discovered discussing the demographic crisis with normies - it's very difficult to get psychological traction, as the 'frame' in terms of the scale, data and trends doesn't exist for most.
Hence why I believe another approach is needed, as described on my stack. We must lean into the grain of the modern condition, give people a true free choice, including abandoning their culture...yet a universal, positive definite form that nudges in the appropriate ways
To use your vehicle metaphor, if we tell people they pick their vehicle, and no shame as to their preferences in that regard... but they should still use an odometer-based framework to guide thinking responsibly, you roughly end up where HOLYs does.
The challenge to convince readers to change their mind when they are not likely to do it reminds me of a book I once read:
Wie man mit Fundamentalisten diskutiert, ohne den Verstand zu verlieren : Anleitung zum subversiven Denken (English: How to argue with fundamentalists without losing your mind: A guide to subversive thinking)
The interesting thing is that Hubert Schleichert is using this very method the audience likes to use against their outgroup subtly on the readers themselves. Maybe worth imitating.
I wonder if Baumard & Andre's ecological approach to culture is not more congruent with the psychology of The Elephant in the Brain than the dual-inheritance approach you seem to rely upon -- and also wonder what implications it would have for your "cultural drift" diagnosis if you adopted it?
Sadly the other side of this coin is often a kind of weaponized fake humility, where people assert that there is something they don't know and/or were wrong about, and therefore everyone else is wrong and doesn't know either. I think your presentation of the type of problems you're trying to discuss might sometimes get rounded (wrongly) to that in readers' minds.
A thought: Can you identify instances of cultural drift in *other* cultures, which you could point out to an audience more willing to see it in another culture? Then explain that we suffer from the same kind of drift.
Most civs of the past fell, often due to internal cultural decay. But few seem to think that pattern relevant for our world today.
I tried to read Spengler, but he referenced far too many scholars I'd never heard of, and his analysis is disputed. So now I read Hanson. But given the speed of change in these times, I find it frighteningly hard to diagnose what aspects of our culture need fixing. You remember when we panicked about the birth rate being too high: "One is best, two is most."
Perhaps a review of a few of them together with some explicit analogies to our own cultures would be somewhat convincing.
I don't follow in what sense at all you are standing outside anything. Judging cultural drift -- even assuming your empirical claims -- to be not only undesirable but more undesirable than alternatives relies on a bunch of strong value assumptions.
Someone else might see those empirical claims shrug and say: ok sounds great to me. Others (as I lean towards) might even think that selective pressure tends to lead us towards worse moral behavior and that cultural drift is desirable **regardless of it's impact on survival**.
You are just adopting a particular moral viewpoint and feeling frustrated others don't see how obviously correct it is. That seems pretty similar to me.
---
And yes, you can say: ceterus parabus many people think extinction is bad or agree with you about X. But everyone can do that, the hard part is weighing things since it's essentially never true (and certainly not here) that the ceterus are parabus.
Speaking as someone who thinks Elephant in the Brain will be your magnum opus (even more than your work on Information Markets with the recent success of Information Markets, President Trump's support, Polymarket being invested in by ICE, and my own startup being an Information Market), I think you are paying insufficient attention to mimetic theory.
Interestingly, you've come to the many of the same conclusions as Girard multiple times.
In my own experience, when I try to explain mimetic theory to folks, I have a hard time convincing them of its massive influence, but it is very effective at unlocking them from the mental prison of culture = music/art/crap.
> The most prestigious intellectuals in our world are writers of op-eds, and givers of TED and keynote talks.
My prestige yardstick is a bit different. When an intellectual's compensation mostly comes from talks and op-eds and popular books, it creates a moral hazard. It's no accident that many of those implicated in recent academic publishing scandals were prominent TED speakers.
many modern people barely have a sense of 'their culture' (vs. their personalized media diet), and even less so as something they have a pro-active obligation to steward away from 'malaptiveness'. The neg-utilitarianism in the water, leading people to prioritize potential negative consequences of their actions, doesn't help.
If you take a step back, what you're asking of people is to take on 'yet another' big, 'necessary', but nebulous struggle in terms of their ability to do anything - global warming, inequality, debt, etc. And as I've discovered discussing the demographic crisis with normies - it's very difficult to get psychological traction, as the 'frame' in terms of the scale, data and trends doesn't exist for most.
Hence why I believe another approach is needed, as described on my stack. We must lean into the grain of the modern condition, give people a true free choice, including abandoning their culture...yet a universal, positive definite form that nudges in the appropriate ways
To use your vehicle metaphor, if we tell people they pick their vehicle, and no shame as to their preferences in that regard... but they should still use an odometer-based framework to guide thinking responsibly, you roughly end up where HOLYs does.
"For example, this is the usual rationale for paternalism, which justifies over half of government intervention"
I'm not skeptical of the claim, but is this a guess, or something someone has studied and quantified?
My judgement, after a lifetime of surveying such things.
The challenge to convince readers to change their mind when they are not likely to do it reminds me of a book I once read:
Wie man mit Fundamentalisten diskutiert, ohne den Verstand zu verlieren : Anleitung zum subversiven Denken (English: How to argue with fundamentalists without losing your mind: A guide to subversive thinking)
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1912919-wie-man-mit-fundamentalisten-diskutiert-ohne-den-verstand-zu-verlieren
The interesting thing is that Hubert Schleichert is using this very method the audience likes to use against their outgroup subtly on the readers themselves. Maybe worth imitating.
I wonder if Baumard & Andre's ecological approach to culture is not more congruent with the psychology of The Elephant in the Brain than the dual-inheritance approach you seem to rely upon -- and also wonder what implications it would have for your "cultural drift" diagnosis if you adopted it?
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/n7wka68pli0kqxjw8jhk5/Baumard_Andre_Ecological_approach_to_culture_with_commentaries.pdf?rlkey=aro2x0a41rk3o0womvmg0qd6b&e=3&dl=0
(Their paper, I'm told, earned the most recent Margo Wilson Award for the best paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior.)
Sadly the other side of this coin is often a kind of weaponized fake humility, where people assert that there is something they don't know and/or were wrong about, and therefore everyone else is wrong and doesn't know either. I think your presentation of the type of problems you're trying to discuss might sometimes get rounded (wrongly) to that in readers' minds.