We Need Elites To Value Adaption

The world’s dominant civilization today seems on track to decline and be replaced in a few centuries by what are now small insular fertile subcultures, like the Amish and Haredim. We’ve broken humanity’s superpower of cultural evolution, at least at the level of whole cultures, rather than at the level of stuff that can vary easily within cultures. Centuries ago our slowly changing world had many cultures that resisted change and faced strong selection pressures. Now all four of these parameters have gone bad.

This seems tragic to me, as I value many distinctive features of our main world culture, especially open inquiry. So I’m looking for how we might fix this problem. We are on a ship heading for an iceberg; our main options are to turn the ship, or get off onto lifeboats. I’d rather turn our ship.

I’ve previously outlined three levels of attack:

• (A) try to separately correct dozens of specific maladaptive cultural trends,

• (B) revert these four key parameters of the cultural evolution process, and

• (C) adopt governance systems, like futarchy, that are very effective at achieving stated goals, and then tie those systems to sacred long term goals that conflict with civ collapse, such as immortality or space colonization.

The first two options (A,B) require us to persuade many (most?) cultural elites (not just experts) to support policies that are more (culturally = biologically) adaptive. They wouldn’t have to support them because they are adaptive, but alas it’s hard to see them consistently supporting specific adaptive choices in each area unless they consciously think in terms of valuing a correlated abstract concept. Which seems a big ask as they now think they hate “Social Darwinism”.

Thus option (C) has seemed attractive to me, as it could in principle achieve adaptive policies by just directly adopting them, without needing cultural elites to consciously support adaptiveness. Some positive evidence suggesting that this might be possible is the standard habit of business journalists and wonks to defer to market price estimates when discussing business events and policy. So maybe cultural elites could do similarly regarding futarchy decisions.

Alas, five good LLMs agree that this habitual elite deference to price estimates usually disappears when topics turn to key norms and values. These LLMs even mentioned my own Policy Analysis Market scandal as an instructive example. When price estimates seem to conflict with deep shared morals, they are denounced. And so no form of government requiring substantial public support, and thus also elite support, will actually often implement policies that elites see as immoral.

Thus it seems insufficient to just adopt futarchy tied to a sacred long term goal. We’d also need to get most cultural elites to value the cultural adaptiveness that such a system would try to promote in its policies as a means to achieving that goal. So that they would tend to support or at least not loudly oppose such policies.

I thus now retreat in defeat to the simple but difficult position that was obvious at the start of my intellectual inquiry into this topic, but to which I had hoped to find attractive alternatives. I now declare: to turn our cultural ship, we will need:

• (D) our cultural elites to look much more favorably on “Social Darwinist” values.

Alas even that is not enough, as modestly pro Social Darwinism elites might still fail to actually identify and support sufficiently adaptive policies. Governance systems might push for other policies, and elites might pander to the preconceptions and expectations of their audiences, instead of actually figuring out what works.

Futarchy could help with better governance, and I have another prediction-market-based idea for getting academic elites to pander less. And both of those are at risk if we can’t get elites to defer enough to market prices on a wider range of topics than is common so far. So we need an expanded practice and legitimacy of market estimates.

All of this lowers my already low estimate that we can turn the ship of world culture before it hits an iceberg. But it still seems worth trying. Even if we fail this time, what we learn may help the next great cycle of civilization to deal better when it’s their turn.