"...replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering." Isn't that what has been happening for the better part of nearly two centuries now? Hasn't society been 'steered' here, by the oligarchs and the robber barons, I mean, JD Rockefeller famously quipped "I do not want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." And our very own CIA's involvement in the Modern Art movement bankrolling ppl like deKoenig and Pollack not to mention the Music Industry promoting the objectification of women, violence, drugs...
"Cultural Drift", as you call it, HAS BEEN ORCHESTRATED by the very paragons and scions of society ostensibly seeking it's betterment. There is no 'drift', we're here as a direct result of very rich ppl doing bad things, so that they can keep their money and power. The ugliness you see around you was planned. Thank you.
Re. this: " Aside from these, I now see our most promising fixes as modest variations on the same general approach: replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering." -- I've also put years of thought into this issue, although I've always phrased it as "development of values" rather than "cultural evolution". I reject this as the worst-possible approach, because it is not the steering of evolution, but the end of it. This is clearer when you use the word "value" instead of "culture", because the circularity is immediately obvious in "We should use our values to choose our values." It is the renunciation of progress.
"Therefore, the third big thing we must accomplish, and the hardest, is to change common values to more favor adaption, either directly or indirectly." -- "Valuing adaptation" is not meaningful in this context. Adaptation comes from evolutionary theory, in which adaptation is defined as higher reproductive success. *There are no other choices for a utility function here.* If you define adaptation as anything other than higher reproductive success, then you've specified the target of your utility function, and *you have arrived at the end process of cultural evolution*, because you now have the perfect utility function. So just maximize it, analytically.
It is hard to make this point clear without switching to use the word "value" everywhere Robin says "culture", but saying "we will value adaptation", without saying how you measure adaptation, is meaningless. Reproductive success is itself a final value, and a dubious one; but it is an evolutionarily stable one, and one which leads, empirically, to an ecosystem of increasing complexity (despite anything Stephen Gould tries to sell you).
Regarding 'letting capitalism run everything.' Have you read reviews of or discussed with anyone the book by Bowles', Understanding Capitalism? It's a textbook, so I assume you would not have actually read it, since you are an academic economist and the book is an introduction to political economy -- just asking an opinion of its view; Since Bowles and colleagues advocate *not* letting capitalism run everything.
Change the word "capitalism", an inaccurate word deliberately overloaded for nearly 2 centuries with horrible connotations, to "freedom and security". "Capitalism" just means the freedom to control your own body, and enough security from bandits to keep the things you make with that body. That's it. Anybody who says they aren't a capitalist is opposed to at least one of those two things.
People often mention a need for law enforcement here, but the conditions for capitalism take care of that, as proven by the way "capitalism" originally evolved: as a growing network of people, originally all kin, making contracts with each other based on personal acquaintance, trust, and accepting the consequences of their own bad decisions on who to make contracts with. "Law" is actually a large set of contracts which, in a truly capitalist nation like the US, are all bootstrapped from some initial set of contracts which were in some meaningful sense consented to by a large majority of those to be governed by them.
I will pre-empt various objections by noting that, if one group of people make contracts with each other to become bandits and take things from other groups, that is no longer capitalism for that other group, because they no longer have security from bandits.
When you understand that's what capitalism is, it's obvious that objection to "capitalism" is always gross immorality, because being opposed to "capitalism" by definition means you want to control other people and/or take their stuff.
There are a wide variety of ways of implement a free market, and a lot of known problems with it--and a lot of known ways to reduce those problems, all of which work by making and enforcing contracts. Here we must distinguish between capitalist governments, which are based on contracts like the Magna Carta or the US Constitution, and non-capitalist governments, which don't have the consent of most of the governed and are not contracts. No capitalist government contract is signed by ALL of the people who are then ruled by it. But the ratifying of the US Constitution was a great example, with a process for specifying citizenship, electing representatives, and interpreting their votes, with very broad agreement and consent. The imposition of communism on an entire country by a tiny cabal of conspirators, who order armies around with only vague promises instead of a contract they will in fact honor, is a non-capitalist government.
The real edge cases for the free market occur because not everyone /can/ be allowed total freedom to control their own body. In fact, no one can be. Babies can't be set loose into the wild; they must be raised, which requires denying them liberty. And this opens the door for many years of child abuse on a large scale, which increases the number of antisocial people who will abuse other adults and their own children. Then there are people who choose to be bandits, and nearly everyone will choose to be a bandit if a society isn't self-sustaining. It turns out you have to severely constrain the freedom of a significant fraction of the population for anybody to be secure from bandits, because a population of something like 2% bandits is one where everything is taken by bandits.
So "capitalism" isn't pure or easy. But anyone objecting to it, wants either to control you, or to take your stuff.
I don't understand why it suggests we need to value adaption more or even what that means in this context. I get the idea that adaptation means something like ability to respond to evolutionary pressures but once you no longer have cultural evolution I don't understand what that even means.
I mean imagine we can manage culture in a really productive and efficient way but that only works because there is a single global culture, ie, the practice could be exploited if we ever had to again compete against a different culture. Does that mean that is an anti-adaptive practice because it would be disfavored in a system of cultural adaptation?
---
More generally, I think this is what I don't understand about this whole view. I agree that in some sense there are dangers associated with losing the prior competetive environment but you seem to think we can derive that some specific property we need more of -- adaptation.
Is this trivial and you just mean something like good or efficient or what?
I think the major cultural drift happened well before AI.
Culture was once reinforced by scarcity and repetition. A society might have had three television networks, five major radio stations, a few newspapers, common schools, common institutions, and relatively homogeneous local communities. People did not agree on everything, but they were repeatedly exposed to the same stories, public figures, rituals, and reference points.
Cable television, satellite TV, YouTube, and eventually social media broke that shared environment apart. Once everyone could choose among thousands or millions of channels, culture stopped being something a society broadly received together and became something each person assembled for themselves.
That brought real benefits. Minority interests could find communities. Gatekeepers lost control. More voices could participate. But it also meant that cultural selection no longer happened primarily at the level of the society. It began happening inside increasingly isolated attention markets.
We now live in overlapping bubbles with different facts, heroes, moral priorities, enemies, and definitions of success. The problem is not simply that culture drifts. It is that there is no longer one cultural environment doing the selecting.
AI may intensify this by giving every person an endlessly personalized media universe, but it did not originate the process. It is the next stage of a transition from mass culture to individualized culture.
That makes deliberate cultural steering harder than managing a corporate culture. A company can define membership, leadership, incentives, and objectives. A modern society cannot easily decide who is steering, which values count as adaptation, or whether a shared culture should even be the goal.
I doubt a highly fragmented information environment is capable of producing a coherent culture at all.
"...replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering." Isn't that what has been happening for the better part of nearly two centuries now? Hasn't society been 'steered' here, by the oligarchs and the robber barons, I mean, JD Rockefeller famously quipped "I do not want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." And our very own CIA's involvement in the Modern Art movement bankrolling ppl like deKoenig and Pollack not to mention the Music Industry promoting the objectification of women, violence, drugs...
"Cultural Drift", as you call it, HAS BEEN ORCHESTRATED by the very paragons and scions of society ostensibly seeking it's betterment. There is no 'drift', we're here as a direct result of very rich ppl doing bad things, so that they can keep their money and power. The ugliness you see around you was planned. Thank you.
Re. this: " Aside from these, I now see our most promising fixes as modest variations on the same general approach: replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering." -- I've also put years of thought into this issue, although I've always phrased it as "development of values" rather than "cultural evolution". I reject this as the worst-possible approach, because it is not the steering of evolution, but the end of it. This is clearer when you use the word "value" instead of "culture", because the circularity is immediately obvious in "We should use our values to choose our values." It is the renunciation of progress.
"Therefore, the third big thing we must accomplish, and the hardest, is to change common values to more favor adaption, either directly or indirectly." -- "Valuing adaptation" is not meaningful in this context. Adaptation comes from evolutionary theory, in which adaptation is defined as higher reproductive success. *There are no other choices for a utility function here.* If you define adaptation as anything other than higher reproductive success, then you've specified the target of your utility function, and *you have arrived at the end process of cultural evolution*, because you now have the perfect utility function. So just maximize it, analytically.
It is hard to make this point clear without switching to use the word "value" everywhere Robin says "culture", but saying "we will value adaptation", without saying how you measure adaptation, is meaningless. Reproductive success is itself a final value, and a dubious one; but it is an evolutionarily stable one, and one which leads, empirically, to an ecosystem of increasing complexity (despite anything Stephen Gould tries to sell you).
Agree. re: Rockefeller, Rhodes, Rothschild, et al., All guilty of "steering". (Sst doesn't register when i click 'like' on a comment)
Regarding 'letting capitalism run everything.' Have you read reviews of or discussed with anyone the book by Bowles', Understanding Capitalism? It's a textbook, so I assume you would not have actually read it, since you are an academic economist and the book is an introduction to political economy -- just asking an opinion of its view; Since Bowles and colleagues advocate *not* letting capitalism run everything.
Change the word "capitalism", an inaccurate word deliberately overloaded for nearly 2 centuries with horrible connotations, to "freedom and security". "Capitalism" just means the freedom to control your own body, and enough security from bandits to keep the things you make with that body. That's it. Anybody who says they aren't a capitalist is opposed to at least one of those two things.
People often mention a need for law enforcement here, but the conditions for capitalism take care of that, as proven by the way "capitalism" originally evolved: as a growing network of people, originally all kin, making contracts with each other based on personal acquaintance, trust, and accepting the consequences of their own bad decisions on who to make contracts with. "Law" is actually a large set of contracts which, in a truly capitalist nation like the US, are all bootstrapped from some initial set of contracts which were in some meaningful sense consented to by a large majority of those to be governed by them.
I will pre-empt various objections by noting that, if one group of people make contracts with each other to become bandits and take things from other groups, that is no longer capitalism for that other group, because they no longer have security from bandits.
When you understand that's what capitalism is, it's obvious that objection to "capitalism" is always gross immorality, because being opposed to "capitalism" by definition means you want to control other people and/or take their stuff.
There are a wide variety of ways of implement a free market, and a lot of known problems with it--and a lot of known ways to reduce those problems, all of which work by making and enforcing contracts. Here we must distinguish between capitalist governments, which are based on contracts like the Magna Carta or the US Constitution, and non-capitalist governments, which don't have the consent of most of the governed and are not contracts. No capitalist government contract is signed by ALL of the people who are then ruled by it. But the ratifying of the US Constitution was a great example, with a process for specifying citizenship, electing representatives, and interpreting their votes, with very broad agreement and consent. The imposition of communism on an entire country by a tiny cabal of conspirators, who order armies around with only vague promises instead of a contract they will in fact honor, is a non-capitalist government.
The real edge cases for the free market occur because not everyone /can/ be allowed total freedom to control their own body. In fact, no one can be. Babies can't be set loose into the wild; they must be raised, which requires denying them liberty. And this opens the door for many years of child abuse on a large scale, which increases the number of antisocial people who will abuse other adults and their own children. Then there are people who choose to be bandits, and nearly everyone will choose to be a bandit if a society isn't self-sustaining. It turns out you have to severely constrain the freedom of a significant fraction of the population for anybody to be secure from bandits, because a population of something like 2% bandits is one where everything is taken by bandits.
So "capitalism" isn't pure or easy. But anyone objecting to it, wants either to control you, or to take your stuff.
I don't understand why it suggests we need to value adaption more or even what that means in this context. I get the idea that adaptation means something like ability to respond to evolutionary pressures but once you no longer have cultural evolution I don't understand what that even means.
I mean imagine we can manage culture in a really productive and efficient way but that only works because there is a single global culture, ie, the practice could be exploited if we ever had to again compete against a different culture. Does that mean that is an anti-adaptive practice because it would be disfavored in a system of cultural adaptation?
---
More generally, I think this is what I don't understand about this whole view. I agree that in some sense there are dangers associated with losing the prior competetive environment but you seem to think we can derive that some specific property we need more of -- adaptation.
Is this trivial and you just mean something like good or efficient or what?
I think the major cultural drift happened well before AI.
Culture was once reinforced by scarcity and repetition. A society might have had three television networks, five major radio stations, a few newspapers, common schools, common institutions, and relatively homogeneous local communities. People did not agree on everything, but they were repeatedly exposed to the same stories, public figures, rituals, and reference points.
Cable television, satellite TV, YouTube, and eventually social media broke that shared environment apart. Once everyone could choose among thousands or millions of channels, culture stopped being something a society broadly received together and became something each person assembled for themselves.
That brought real benefits. Minority interests could find communities. Gatekeepers lost control. More voices could participate. But it also meant that cultural selection no longer happened primarily at the level of the society. It began happening inside increasingly isolated attention markets.
We now live in overlapping bubbles with different facts, heroes, moral priorities, enemies, and definitions of success. The problem is not simply that culture drifts. It is that there is no longer one cultural environment doing the selecting.
AI may intensify this by giving every person an endlessly personalized media universe, but it did not originate the process. It is the next stage of a transition from mass culture to individualized culture.
That makes deliberate cultural steering harder than managing a corporate culture. A company can define membership, leadership, incentives, and objectives. A modern society cannot easily decide who is steering, which values count as adaptation, or whether a shared culture should even be the goal.
I doubt a highly fragmented information environment is capable of producing a coherent culture at all.
I probably have the wrong definition of cultural drift in mind. Because why would you not want that? Do you want culture to be entirely planned?