"Notice that cultural natural selection of individual behaviors seems insufficient to evolve better norms and status markers, as these are features of key game-theoretic equilibria, where individuals deviations are punished."
Isn’t the reason cultures encourage thinking & talking mostly about mid-level goals rather than (very) high-level ones, that high-level goals tend to be long-term, complex and hence much less likely to succeed, requiring too many lesser goals to go right? (Eg become a multi-millionaire, conquer another country.) So not worth it for cultures to encourage most people to attempt these grand plans, rather than more attainable mid-level goals (eg become a teacher, grow a field of crops).
I ran this through Claude to interpret - delete it if you don't think it's helpful:
First, our goals come in layers — from huge ones (have a good life) down through middle ones (get to the airport on time) to tiny ones (move my foot). Lots of things change smoothly as you go down this ladder: lower goals are smaller, faster, easier to measure, more automatic.
Second, but some things don't change smoothly — they peak in the middle of the ladder. Specifically: the goals we're consciously aware of, talk about, judge each other on, make laws about, and that vary across cultures. We don't consciously deliberate about twitching a muscle, and we don't really enforce norms about "live a meaningful life" either. The action is in the middle.
Third, here's why he thinks that is: norms only work if people can describe what someone did in words and complain about it. So culture evolved to put our conscious narration, our rule-following, and our social judgment at whatever level is low enough to be concrete and verifiable but high enough to actually talk about. That's the middle. Our conscious minds, in his view, basically exist to manage justifications at this level.
Fourth, the exception and the worry. Big companies (and militaries) figured out how to enforce accountability at much higher levels than culture normally does, using money and measurable targets — and they're remarkably effective at coordinating people. But letting them run more of life clashes with our inherited norms. Meanwhile, he thinks cultural evolution itself is breaking down (less variety between cultures, too much change too fast), so our norms are decaying and civilization may collapse in a century or two.
It seems to me that the dominant trend of the modern world (more pervasive and influential than almost any other) is the subsuming of our lives in large, bureaucratic organizations... which almost no individual can affect or redirect.
We speculate about AI, but our society is already captive to algorithms. They're simply institutional and incentive-based, rather than computational.
Possibly relevant to personal relationships too? When the articulable floor inside a couple sits low — partners can fluently complain about dishwasher-loading or tone-on-Tuesday — but higher-level concerns like "we've been drifting" lose the modularity that makes complaint-and-repair tractable, even though both partners can articulate them. So they get raised but not really enforced, or get reflexively translated into a low-level countable the other person knows how to address.
"For example, we have more conscious awareness of, give more conscious attention to, and make more deliberate choices re mid level goals. We can more clearly articulate them and their relations to other goals, and we can more easily teach others to manage them."
I would have guessed these all peak for low-level goals. Perhaps this would make sense to me if you quantified the timescale of low, mid, and high-level, and also whether your measurement of conscious awareness and conscious attention normalize for timescale.
It's basic as a construct in the concept of administration for a military medical service in a mobile station hospital to have a hierarchy of goals. It functions to give some organizational cohesion to priorities in the course of whatever happens dynamically in the field.
i wish you would give more examples
"Notice that cultural natural selection of individual behaviors seems insufficient to evolve better norms and status markers, as these are features of key game-theoretic equilibria, where individuals deviations are punished."
This is beautifully concise.
Isn’t the reason cultures encourage thinking & talking mostly about mid-level goals rather than (very) high-level ones, that high-level goals tend to be long-term, complex and hence much less likely to succeed, requiring too many lesser goals to go right? (Eg become a multi-millionaire, conquer another country.) So not worth it for cultures to encourage most people to attempt these grand plans, rather than more attainable mid-level goals (eg become a teacher, grow a field of crops).
I ran this through Claude to interpret - delete it if you don't think it's helpful:
First, our goals come in layers — from huge ones (have a good life) down through middle ones (get to the airport on time) to tiny ones (move my foot). Lots of things change smoothly as you go down this ladder: lower goals are smaller, faster, easier to measure, more automatic.
Second, but some things don't change smoothly — they peak in the middle of the ladder. Specifically: the goals we're consciously aware of, talk about, judge each other on, make laws about, and that vary across cultures. We don't consciously deliberate about twitching a muscle, and we don't really enforce norms about "live a meaningful life" either. The action is in the middle.
Third, here's why he thinks that is: norms only work if people can describe what someone did in words and complain about it. So culture evolved to put our conscious narration, our rule-following, and our social judgment at whatever level is low enough to be concrete and verifiable but high enough to actually talk about. That's the middle. Our conscious minds, in his view, basically exist to manage justifications at this level.
Fourth, the exception and the worry. Big companies (and militaries) figured out how to enforce accountability at much higher levels than culture normally does, using money and measurable targets — and they're remarkably effective at coordinating people. But letting them run more of life clashes with our inherited norms. Meanwhile, he thinks cultural evolution itself is breaking down (less variety between cultures, too much change too fast), so our norms are decaying and civilization may collapse in a century or two.
It seems to me that the dominant trend of the modern world (more pervasive and influential than almost any other) is the subsuming of our lives in large, bureaucratic organizations... which almost no individual can affect or redirect.
We speculate about AI, but our society is already captive to algorithms. They're simply institutional and incentive-based, rather than computational.
Possibly relevant to personal relationships too? When the articulable floor inside a couple sits low — partners can fluently complain about dishwasher-loading or tone-on-Tuesday — but higher-level concerns like "we've been drifting" lose the modularity that makes complaint-and-repair tractable, even though both partners can articulate them. So they get raised but not really enforced, or get reflexively translated into a low-level countable the other person knows how to address.
> people who mange
Should be "manage".
fixed; thanks
"For example, we have more conscious awareness of, give more conscious attention to, and make more deliberate choices re mid level goals. We can more clearly articulate them and their relations to other goals, and we can more easily teach others to manage them."
I would have guessed these all peak for low-level goals. Perhaps this would make sense to me if you quantified the timescale of low, mid, and high-level, and also whether your measurement of conscious awareness and conscious attention normalize for timescale.
It's basic as a construct in the concept of administration for a military medical service in a mobile station hospital to have a hierarchy of goals. It functions to give some organizational cohesion to priorities in the course of whatever happens dynamically in the field.
Yes many familiar planning processes involved creating hierarchies of goals