I checked with https://www.dictionary.com/browse/adaptivist - it says: "No results found for adaptivist". Instead of making up your own terminology, you might consider adopting the well-established terminology associated with survivalism - in this case, "survivalist".
"Beware change" isn't very useful. We want more specific heuristics tied to more specific context, to judge what changes we should see as more vs less risky.
I hesitate to even call most young people activists. technically they are, of course, but the modern activity seems to be centered almost entirely around satisfying emotional impulses and a craving for attention (and excitement). No compromises are made, no tactics are formulated, no discipline is developed. It's fun and childish and unserious and melodramatic.
It truly worries me that these people (and I've spoken to dozens of them) are the residents of the most prestigious universities in the United States. I'm a middle school teacher... and even my kids seem wiser and more grounded than some of these clown-babies.
Re: "DNA evolution takes place both within and between species, with the between part mattering more for long-term innovation. Similarly, human cultural evolution also takes place at two levels: within and between cultures, with the between part also mattering more."
I think that this is unscientific. According to the theory of multi-level selection, there are multiple levels at which selection can act - not just two. For example, there are ant cells, ant individuals, ant colonies, and ant species. There is no credible competing theory that posits only two levels. The main competition to multi-level selection theory has historically been from kin selection theory. That makes almost all the same predictions - but it hypothesizes a continuum of relatedness. That does not feature two distinct levels either.
"In principle, one solution would be to prevent high school and college age youths from socializing with each other. Alas, while ending such schools and pushing kids into earlier jobs might have worked a century ago, today we’d also need to keep them from socializing via social media. And ending high school seems crazy hard to achieve."
So promote more "home schooling" and promote skepticism of content shared online from any source? No need to end "schooling" as institutions if fewer people show up (society is already moving in this direction, esp as cheaper alternatives to access to information have been around for at least 20 years at this point).
Will be tall order for the state dependants, but as its not adaptive, seems like this problem will solve itself in time as states fall under their own weight (debt, demographics)
Re. "DNA evolution takes place both within and between species, with the between part mattering more for long-term innovation" : Citation needed. Both are important, but I'm not aware of anyone comparing the two to decide which mattered more.
> We now reserve our highest honors for activists who lead and inspire groups that push and advocate for changes to our cultures,
I don't think this statement is true at all? I can think of one activist who has received these highest honors, namely, Martin Luther King Jr. I guess a bunch of the famous abolitionists (e.g. Frederick Douglass) have received high honors as well (though not as high!), and, uh, I guess maybe Susan B. Anthony has received somewhat high honors? But it gets pretty thin beyond that. I can't think of many famous activists beyond that, and the ones I can think of are at least one of:
1. from specific eras where the activists won (abolitionism, early feminism, civil rights) -- which is to say, I don't think this is a constant relevant thing; or
2. they're just not actually that famous among the general public, plenty of people wouldn't have heard of them; or
3. they're famous, but rather than having "received highest honors", they're controversial figures, admired only by a specific segment of the population (Malcolm X has received honors in many places, but nonetheless remains controversial). The one modern-day famous activist I can think of -- Greta Thunberg -- fits here.
I think that, with the exception of Martin Luther King Jr., activists are not actually as highly honored as other professions. In some cases they receive more *government* honors (streets and government buildings named after them, e.g.), although even here I think they lose out to politicians (who need not be famous as activists). But government honors don't necessarily translate to popular admiration (again, see Malcolm X, mentioned above), and in terms of who people actually look up to, activists are on the whole much less honored than, say, sports stars or actors.
In the social media age it should be possible to raise the status of mothers. If Taylor Swift has a healthy baby, starts posting and writing songs about motherhood, this could start a transformative fire.
The people who resist value changes are usually called "conservatives".
Is this a complicated way of saying "we need conservatives"?
And those who oppose conservatism believe that conserving-isn't-adaptive. They think their proposed value changes *are* adaptive.
Ultimately good and bad just mean adaptive and non-adaptive. Everyone thinks their side of the value argument is adaptive.
The problem boils down to lack of agreement on which changes are adaptive.
"Some places are pretty clear" amounts to "it's obvious which side is correct". If it were obvious to all, we wouldn't disagree.
A "adaptivity activist movement" just describes a "movement for good". We don't agree what's good.
(Ya, I think Futarchy is an interesting idea worth trying too - that's why I'm here. But that's not new. I suspect you have one new idea here, Robin - Futarchy. Not two.)
The word "conservative" has many and conflicting associations. Some of them overlap with what I'm saying more than others. Saying "we need conservatives" wouldn't be remotely as clear a thing to say.
I don't actually think everyone agrees that they put a very high priority on culture being adaptive.
See my expansion above. I agree that many people don't think of good and bad as being adaptive and maladaptive, but I think nonetheless that's what they ultimately mean - good is what's good for my genes/culture and vice-versa for bad.
What you say would be correct when talking about abolition of slavery, women's movements, or the Civil Rights movement. But many activists don't /have/ real proposed value changes. Western progressive movements have a long history of close alliances with movements inspired by Rousseau, Hegel, and/or Foucault. These latter movements believe that the important thing is to destroy the current system, without any specific and sane policies to produce something better. They always eventually fall back on "get rid of all the bad people". The French Revolution, Marxism, and modern art are obvious examples. They believe that Western civilization is either inherently destructive, or hopelessly degenerate, and thus destroying it is now inherently good. You'll find this expressed explicitly in the manifestos of early modern art movements. I recommend reading "Modernist Manifestos & WW1: We Didn't Start the Fire—Oh, Wait, we Totally Did" ( https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/729568/ )
Many of today's activists pretend to propose value changes, and yet their policies are obviously aimed at destabilizing our existing culture: defund the police, abolish prison, legalize shoplifting, defy federal law to prevent the feds from deporting thousands or tens of thousands of violent offenders, open the borders, abolish voter ID, delegitimize science, incite racial hatred, create a global warming crisis by banning nuclear power, abolish merit, etc.
We can take as a lower bound on the size of this purely destructive group the number of people who publicly say "I hate America". Maybe a third of the American activists I know personally have written blog posts or comments on blog posts saying they hate America. Many more probably think that, but don't post it. Or did, but I didn't see those posts or comments.
I can also point to the difference in IMDB ratings between Joker (2019, average viewer rating 8.3) and Joker: Folie à Deux (2024, viewer rating 5.2). The main difference between these two movies, written and directed and acted by the same people, is that the first glorifies burning America to the ground, but the second deconstructs that and shows up the radicals bent on destruction as privileged brutish hypocrites. More than half of all reviewers shifted their ratings from extremely high for Joker (8-10) to low for Folie a' Deux (1-6), which to me says that the fraction of IMDB reviewers who are purely destructive radicals who hate America, is about as large as the fraction who are Democrats.
So I think that purely destructive activists outnumber progressive activists today, possibly by a wide margin.
I don't disagree. But I think that bolsters my point - those who want to tear down Western civilization think that's adaptive. They think getting rid of all the 'bad' people will make society more adaptive.
I think they're wrong, but that's the point - we disagree re what's adaptive.
It's a matter of opinion, but I think it's over-generous (and maladaptive) to credit people with wanting to be adaptive when they're just full of rage.
Yes, they're full of rage. Because they have convinced themselves their proposed value change is "good". Which just means adaptive. I'm not saying they think of it that way - but what else does "good" mean?
I'm saying some of them have no proposed value change, or none seriously thought-out. They just want to smash things.
People who've put some effort into learning what the effects of their proposed change should be taken more-seriously as thinking they have adaptive values, than people who've never bothered to think through the consequences; and they in turn should be taken more-seriously than people who just want to smash things.
Expanding on my own reply - when we disagree about what's adaptive, we may sometimes be disagreeing on what's adaptive for whom. What's adaptive for my genes and my culture might be maladaptive for yours. We may both be right; we're just competitors.
The trick will be to devise a procedure to identify bad ideas before they're adopted, and critically is a procedure that most people agree is legitimate. As near as I can tell the only time humans ever do that is if there is some transcendent authority involved: a God, a Constitution, a Dear Leader.
Perhaps starting a religion is the most direct route.
The Amish & Haredim are already beating us via that religious route. But getting our global monoculture to be more religious seems even harder than what I'm suggesting.
As legacy religions fade I see an opportunity to start a "Church of the Inquisitive Mind" without all the supernatural woo woo that turns people off. Religion confers a lot of benefit to individuals and society, and it would be a loss if it vanished entirely.
It's been tried. The French Revolution's Cult of the Supreme Being, Comte's Religion of Humanity, the Church of the Subgenius, Technopaganism, New Atheism, the Buddhisms of David Chapman & Sam Harris, Vibecamp.
One key problem is that all these conscious attempts to create a good religion, create altruistic belief systems. Real religions are never altruistic. There's always a carrot and a stick. See the opening chapter of /Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others/ by David Sloan Wilson.
I think it would suffice to devise a procedure to identify bad ideas *after* they're adopted. But we still can't even agree that Marxism was a bad idea.
I'm guessing you've looked into this and judge it as not a major driving factor relative to the main variables you focus on, but what role does government play in cultural drift?
As an example, I'm tangentially involved in animal welfare. I see both the activist side: plausible moral intuitions suggest that factory farming causes extreme animal suffering.
And the elder/conservative side: if governments passed laws to enforce activist desires, then this would plausibly be a net negative to society.
This has all the features of cultural drift but it would only have a large societal impact if the government intervened. Otherwise, as it stands, it's just a niche, voluntary subculture (independent animal welfare certification bodies, etc.).
Could it be that the various factors you've been focused on regarding drift are necessary but insufficient variables? How can we test/experiment about cultural drift causality, empirically?
Government is an important channel by which culture is changed, but changes there are downstream of cultural activism. First groups get it into their mind they want to achieve changes, and then they use all available channels. It might well be that things would go better if that channel were less available.
As an aficionado of complex adaptive systems, I can get behind this nomenclature!
I like life and markets too.
I checked with https://www.dictionary.com/browse/adaptivist - it says: "No results found for adaptivist". Instead of making up your own terminology, you might consider adopting the well-established terminology associated with survivalism - in this case, "survivalist".
Robin has invented conservatism from first principles.
I've tried to look up prior defenses of conservatism and not found them that persuasive. Maybe I've discovered what they really had in mind.
What do you think of Chesterton's fence?
"Beware change" isn't very useful. We want more specific heuristics tied to more specific context, to judge what changes we should see as more vs less risky.
I hesitate to even call most young people activists. technically they are, of course, but the modern activity seems to be centered almost entirely around satisfying emotional impulses and a craving for attention (and excitement). No compromises are made, no tactics are formulated, no discipline is developed. It's fun and childish and unserious and melodramatic.
It truly worries me that these people (and I've spoken to dozens of them) are the residents of the most prestigious universities in the United States. I'm a middle school teacher... and even my kids seem wiser and more grounded than some of these clown-babies.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/pretend-revolutionaries
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/a-feast-of-impotent-vanity
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/wasted-anger-and-misdirected-youth
Re: "DNA evolution takes place both within and between species, with the between part mattering more for long-term innovation. Similarly, human cultural evolution also takes place at two levels: within and between cultures, with the between part also mattering more."
I think that this is unscientific. According to the theory of multi-level selection, there are multiple levels at which selection can act - not just two. For example, there are ant cells, ant individuals, ant colonies, and ant species. There is no credible competing theory that posits only two levels. The main competition to multi-level selection theory has historically been from kin selection theory. That makes almost all the same predictions - but it hypothesizes a continuum of relatedness. That does not feature two distinct levels either.
"In principle, one solution would be to prevent high school and college age youths from socializing with each other. Alas, while ending such schools and pushing kids into earlier jobs might have worked a century ago, today we’d also need to keep them from socializing via social media. And ending high school seems crazy hard to achieve."
So promote more "home schooling" and promote skepticism of content shared online from any source? No need to end "schooling" as institutions if fewer people show up (society is already moving in this direction, esp as cheaper alternatives to access to information have been around for at least 20 years at this point).
Will be tall order for the state dependants, but as its not adaptive, seems like this problem will solve itself in time as states fall under their own weight (debt, demographics)
Re. "DNA evolution takes place both within and between species, with the between part mattering more for long-term innovation" : Citation needed. Both are important, but I'm not aware of anyone comparing the two to decide which mattered more.
Follow the link.
To "Beware Cultural Drift"? Sorry; I can't afford that subscription.
People have studied the relative impact of these types of selection on various traits. E.g. see:
* Jablonski, D. (2008). Species selection: theory and data.
* Jablonski, D. (2017). Approaches to macroevolution: 1. General concepts and origin of variation.
> We now reserve our highest honors for activists who lead and inspire groups that push and advocate for changes to our cultures,
I don't think this statement is true at all? I can think of one activist who has received these highest honors, namely, Martin Luther King Jr. I guess a bunch of the famous abolitionists (e.g. Frederick Douglass) have received high honors as well (though not as high!), and, uh, I guess maybe Susan B. Anthony has received somewhat high honors? But it gets pretty thin beyond that. I can't think of many famous activists beyond that, and the ones I can think of are at least one of:
1. from specific eras where the activists won (abolitionism, early feminism, civil rights) -- which is to say, I don't think this is a constant relevant thing; or
2. they're just not actually that famous among the general public, plenty of people wouldn't have heard of them; or
3. they're famous, but rather than having "received highest honors", they're controversial figures, admired only by a specific segment of the population (Malcolm X has received honors in many places, but nonetheless remains controversial). The one modern-day famous activist I can think of -- Greta Thunberg -- fits here.
I think that, with the exception of Martin Luther King Jr., activists are not actually as highly honored as other professions. In some cases they receive more *government* honors (streets and government buildings named after them, e.g.), although even here I think they lose out to politicians (who need not be famous as activists). But government honors don't necessarily translate to popular admiration (again, see Malcolm X, mentioned above), and in terms of who people actually look up to, activists are on the whole much less honored than, say, sports stars or actors.
OK, I changed the text to "We reserve some of our highest honors for"
In the social media age it should be possible to raise the status of mothers. If Taylor Swift has a healthy baby, starts posting and writing songs about motherhood, this could start a transformative fire.
Forgive me...
The people who resist value changes are usually called "conservatives".
Is this a complicated way of saying "we need conservatives"?
And those who oppose conservatism believe that conserving-isn't-adaptive. They think their proposed value changes *are* adaptive.
Ultimately good and bad just mean adaptive and non-adaptive. Everyone thinks their side of the value argument is adaptive.
The problem boils down to lack of agreement on which changes are adaptive.
"Some places are pretty clear" amounts to "it's obvious which side is correct". If it were obvious to all, we wouldn't disagree.
A "adaptivity activist movement" just describes a "movement for good". We don't agree what's good.
(Ya, I think Futarchy is an interesting idea worth trying too - that's why I'm here. But that's not new. I suspect you have one new idea here, Robin - Futarchy. Not two.)
The word "conservative" has many and conflicting associations. Some of them overlap with what I'm saying more than others. Saying "we need conservatives" wouldn't be remotely as clear a thing to say.
I don't actually think everyone agrees that they put a very high priority on culture being adaptive.
See my expansion above. I agree that many people don't think of good and bad as being adaptive and maladaptive, but I think nonetheless that's what they ultimately mean - good is what's good for my genes/culture and vice-versa for bad.
If not, whatever DO they mean?
What you say would be correct when talking about abolition of slavery, women's movements, or the Civil Rights movement. But many activists don't /have/ real proposed value changes. Western progressive movements have a long history of close alliances with movements inspired by Rousseau, Hegel, and/or Foucault. These latter movements believe that the important thing is to destroy the current system, without any specific and sane policies to produce something better. They always eventually fall back on "get rid of all the bad people". The French Revolution, Marxism, and modern art are obvious examples. They believe that Western civilization is either inherently destructive, or hopelessly degenerate, and thus destroying it is now inherently good. You'll find this expressed explicitly in the manifestos of early modern art movements. I recommend reading "Modernist Manifestos & WW1: We Didn't Start the Fire—Oh, Wait, we Totally Did" ( https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/729568/ )
Many of today's activists pretend to propose value changes, and yet their policies are obviously aimed at destabilizing our existing culture: defund the police, abolish prison, legalize shoplifting, defy federal law to prevent the feds from deporting thousands or tens of thousands of violent offenders, open the borders, abolish voter ID, delegitimize science, incite racial hatred, create a global warming crisis by banning nuclear power, abolish merit, etc.
We can take as a lower bound on the size of this purely destructive group the number of people who publicly say "I hate America". Maybe a third of the American activists I know personally have written blog posts or comments on blog posts saying they hate America. Many more probably think that, but don't post it. Or did, but I didn't see those posts or comments.
I can also point to the difference in IMDB ratings between Joker (2019, average viewer rating 8.3) and Joker: Folie à Deux (2024, viewer rating 5.2). The main difference between these two movies, written and directed and acted by the same people, is that the first glorifies burning America to the ground, but the second deconstructs that and shows up the radicals bent on destruction as privileged brutish hypocrites. More than half of all reviewers shifted their ratings from extremely high for Joker (8-10) to low for Folie a' Deux (1-6), which to me says that the fraction of IMDB reviewers who are purely destructive radicals who hate America, is about as large as the fraction who are Democrats.
So I think that purely destructive activists outnumber progressive activists today, possibly by a wide margin.
I don't disagree. But I think that bolsters my point - those who want to tear down Western civilization think that's adaptive. They think getting rid of all the 'bad' people will make society more adaptive.
I think they're wrong, but that's the point - we disagree re what's adaptive.
It's a matter of opinion, but I think it's over-generous (and maladaptive) to credit people with wanting to be adaptive when they're just full of rage.
Yes, they're full of rage. Because they have convinced themselves their proposed value change is "good". Which just means adaptive. I'm not saying they think of it that way - but what else does "good" mean?
I'm saying some of them have no proposed value change, or none seriously thought-out. They just want to smash things.
People who've put some effort into learning what the effects of their proposed change should be taken more-seriously as thinking they have adaptive values, than people who've never bothered to think through the consequences; and they in turn should be taken more-seriously than people who just want to smash things.
Expanding on my own reply - when we disagree about what's adaptive, we may sometimes be disagreeing on what's adaptive for whom. What's adaptive for my genes and my culture might be maladaptive for yours. We may both be right; we're just competitors.
I agree that can happen in principle, but don't think it actually explains much of our cultural or political disagreement.
The trick will be to devise a procedure to identify bad ideas before they're adopted, and critically is a procedure that most people agree is legitimate. As near as I can tell the only time humans ever do that is if there is some transcendent authority involved: a God, a Constitution, a Dear Leader.
Perhaps starting a religion is the most direct route.
The Amish & Haredim are already beating us via that religious route. But getting our global monoculture to be more religious seems even harder than what I'm suggesting.
As legacy religions fade I see an opportunity to start a "Church of the Inquisitive Mind" without all the supernatural woo woo that turns people off. Religion confers a lot of benefit to individuals and society, and it would be a loss if it vanished entirely.
It's been tried. The French Revolution's Cult of the Supreme Being, Comte's Religion of Humanity, the Church of the Subgenius, Technopaganism, New Atheism, the Buddhisms of David Chapman & Sam Harris, Vibecamp.
One key problem is that all these conscious attempts to create a good religion, create altruistic belief systems. Real religions are never altruistic. There's always a carrot and a stick. See the opening chapter of /Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others/ by David Sloan Wilson.
I think it would suffice to devise a procedure to identify bad ideas *after* they're adopted. But we still can't even agree that Marxism was a bad idea.
I'm guessing you've looked into this and judge it as not a major driving factor relative to the main variables you focus on, but what role does government play in cultural drift?
As an example, I'm tangentially involved in animal welfare. I see both the activist side: plausible moral intuitions suggest that factory farming causes extreme animal suffering.
And the elder/conservative side: if governments passed laws to enforce activist desires, then this would plausibly be a net negative to society.
This has all the features of cultural drift but it would only have a large societal impact if the government intervened. Otherwise, as it stands, it's just a niche, voluntary subculture (independent animal welfare certification bodies, etc.).
Could it be that the various factors you've been focused on regarding drift are necessary but insufficient variables? How can we test/experiment about cultural drift causality, empirically?
Government is an important channel by which culture is changed, but changes there are downstream of cultural activism. First groups get it into their mind they want to achieve changes, and then they use all available channels. It might well be that things would go better if that channel were less available.