Isn't there a simpler explanation where the rate of cultural production and exchange is proportional to the rate of mutation? It's hard to explain something like meme templates quickly going stale in terms of active moral agitation on part of the youth, and very easy to explain in terms of how often they've been seen and excavated by others. I think most forms of cultural change are subject this principle, and the driving factor in recent history is just the internet.
"On larger scales, foreign wars can be seen as advantaging the young".
Do you honestly believe that?
Most combat is done by the young, and if you see combat, there is likely no advantage, even if you don't get killed or maimed, you have the memory of colleagues who did suffer, and the death you saw, and the people you killed. Not too mention all those who might flee their homeland so that they don't have to serve.
If you really think there is an advantage perhaps pick up a gun and go fight?
If land is distributed to soldiers, then it is advantaging the young. Or if a higher social position awaits them at home. Or plunder. In ancient times warriors used to take home a few slaves. It’s certainly not as good if you take away all the traditional benefits.
One would assume that wars would get started by the side that expects to win and that the promise of spoils is required when the youth cannot be fully manipulated using propaganda alone.
I appreciate and agree with a lot in this post, but want to point out that youth do not inevitably instigate change in every cultural setting. Young people are *not literally wired to challenge the status quo* Sure, Stanley G. Hall proposed exactly this in 1904, but his claim is now considered an example of an overgeneralization of a specific human cohort to a fact of human nature. The sociologist Kingsley Davis (1940, p. 523) noted that “In other cultures, the outstanding fact is generally not the rebelliousness of youth, but its docility. There is practically no custom, no matter how tedious or painful, to which youth in primitive tribes or archaic civilizations will not willingly submit.”
So what caused young people to see the possibility of making their own future, not kow towing to their elders, not competing with other youth to show their obedience and subordination to the culture's norms? Youth going their own way began in the 20th century with the rise of youth culture, which itself was due to rapid cultural change; an emergent property of growing individualism, age segregation in schools and across society, and material abundance which allowed commercial interests to sell directly to youth.
It's not young people, it's *younger* people. Even if young people are docile when they're young, they're not going to stay young forever. At some point, they'll get old, and they'll expect the new younger people to be docile to their *idiosyncatic* ideas (if the society demands docile young people).
Consider legalizing pot. Boomers have always liked pot but despite their rebellious ways and strong influence on culture, never managed to get it passed when they were young. They were blocked by GI's and Silents. Eventually, it finally broke through when Boomers were old and in charge of everything. At this point, there are almost no more GIs and Silents.
And even though Millenials also support legalizing pot, the change happened because of the change in mindset between Silents & Boomers, not because of the change in mindset between Boomers and Xers or Millenials. On this issue, Boomers are very similar to Xers and Millenials (the generations after) in their preferences, but different from the GIs and Silents (the generations prior).
"Majorities of Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1997), Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) and Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) say the use of marijuana should be legal. Members of the Silent Generation (born between 1928 and 1945) continue to be the least supportive of legalization: Only 35% favor legalizing marijuana, while 64% are opposed.
The generational divide in views of marijuana legalization exists within both party coalitions. Large majorities of Boomer (81%), Gen X (76%) and Millennial Democrats (78%) say the use of marijuana should be made legal, compared with 53% of Silent Generation Democrats who say this.
Millennial Republicans also broadly favor legalizing marijuana use; in fact, Republicans in this generation are almost as supportive of legalization as Millennial Democrats (71% vs. 78%). Gen X and Boomer Republicans are more closely divided, with 55% of Gen X Republicans and 49% of Boomer Republicans favoring legalization. GOP members of the Silent Generation are the least likely to favor marijuana legalization: Just 21% say marijuana use should be legal, while three-quarters (76%) say it should not."
On the issue of pot, Boomers are still the *younger* people, given the inertia of the system.
I can see how the fact youth became a marketing target allows for more of a wedge between youth culture and old culture. Marketing is very much a vector of change. Think rock music but forget that it’s music, just look at the fact that it used to be a category of products that target the young. Once young people have their own cultural markers they have an incentive to make these the dominant culture, as they have superior skills at producing the products of that culture.
I remember when your major concern was that society would become too fixed and traditional and therefore innovations would be unable to prosper. "Rot," you called it. You built a theory about how UFOs might be coming from a society that rotted in this way, too centralized and stable (and therefore incompetent). Now you're upset about too much and too fast change.
To me it looks like the root cause of these contradictory views is just the American right-wing party line: you don't like regulation on businesses but you want to regulate culture.
The thing is, you can't have both. If the culture is dictated by some authority, this limits economic innovation as well, because the authority will not stop at dictating people's personal lives. The authority will also abuse their position by quashing upstart innovators and stealing value from them.
You don't see the Amish building rockets, do you? That's not a coincidence. The Islamic Golden Age ended with the rise of the fundamentalists. The European Enlightenment was both cultural and economic. Historically, overly traditional and strict culture, particularly religious fundamentalism, means suppression of economic innovation as well.
Innovation and economic progress depend on people saying the status quo is bad, and doing a lot of things that entrenched interests don't like. For this to work, the entrenched interests can't be allowed too much control.
You really have to make the distinction between innovation with selection and innovation without selection. While the former is good, as only good innovations are retained, the latter is largely bad, as most innovations are not aligned with societal function. From the point of view of social function, once selection is gone all you have is drift, and over time function is steadily reduced.
And I don’t think Robin is in favor in of fixing this via central control. I don’t recall reading him argue that appointing a tyrant would be the solution.
If anything, the selection process is happening right now (due to Generational Regime Change), and Robin is afraid that the selection won't come out in his favor.
But paradoxically, it's mostly going the way he wants. He just doesn't see it because he's identified too much with the Villains of his Story (the Boomers). Most of his attempts to lock in Boomer culture will just ensure that the trends that he laments will continue to their dystopian ends.
It seems to me that Robin’s main concern is long term survival of the modern culture, the health of which he sees being threatened by a process akin to biological aging, namely the slow accumulation of dysfunction. He is not speaking from the point of view of the boomer, but from the point of view of an analyst noting the mechanics of a system under observation. Besides, your critique suffers from the ad-hominem fallacy. Instead of dealing with the argument you discredit the motivation of the person making the argument.
The mechanics of a system dominated by 30 years of Boomer culture. What I'm saying is that when the substrate of the Culture changes (i.e. the people, due to passing of generations), that's when the real selection of memes occur.
I agree with a lot of his observations about the slow accumulation of dysfunction, but it's indicative of the society having taken (previously valuable) Boomer ideas, values, lifestyles & choices too far. When the memes jump to the new generation, the people won't have the some inclinations, even if they preserve some of the ideas. E.g. you might like an idea X that you took from someone else, but you might not think more X is always better.
So what Robin takes for granted as "the mechanics of a system under observation" will change too. He doesn't think that's possible, because he's so used to a certain notion of "That's How People Are".
Edit: And I'm not discrediting him at all. I'm discrediting his approach. I like his critique, but I think he's identified the wrong mechanism / culprit that caused it. Thus the wrong solution.
You seem to be under the impression that selection in memetic transfer is something that is capable of editing out ideas that are dysfunctional for society. Is that part of your thinking?
To me, selection in memetic transfer doesn't just happen the first time you adopt an idea. Sometimes you entertain an idea, even advocate it for a while. It doesn't mean you adopt it for all time.
A big selection event that happens collectively for a lot of people at the same time is upon a change in generational power. At some point, when a new generation comes to power, it has to execute on ideas that have been floating around. Then the new generation realizes that (some of those ideas) don't work. Worse, it'll be apparent to everyone, without the echo chamber of the Olds around promoting it.
The new generation are now the Man Behind the Curtain, and its harder than it looks. So they're going to dump some of the old ways, even though they used to be supporters of them.
That generational selection point is happening right now. Boomers are retiring, about to retiring or have retired, the next generation in charge will have to take accountability for the results, and they'll decide they aren't that committed to continuity with Boomer ideas after all. So a lot of trends have been / are being / will be tested.
So yea, I think generational change is one of the editing mechanisms of memetic transfer. Memes don't reproduce faithfully, and depends strongly on the substrates. When the substrates change, the equilibrium of memes change. If people were Ems, and Memes were code, then the situation would be different.
A dictator doesn't become a king until he manages to pass the power onto his children. Succession can be more important to the survival of a kingdom than winning wars. Robin says currently biological fertility is down, but cultural fertility might be lower than he thinks too.
Of course there is selection among cultural memes. Any time you have heritable variation with limited resources, you *must* have selection, because not all the variations can survive. Some cultural memes spread more easily and displace others. This is due to the memes cohering with other memes (the basis of human reason), or cohering with innate human nature (e.g. compassion, selfishness, tribalism).
Specifically, the cultural variations that the right-wing doesn't like are mostly about being compassionate to groups other than the culturally dominant group. This isn't random drift, this is a specific direction that appeals to a specific part of human nature.
There is no way to stop these cultural variations other than appointing some cultural authority. Elders, Imams, priests, feudal lords, corporate HR, Party leadership.
I think you’re still not getting Robin’s terminology. Of course there is selection at the level of memetic transfer. When he’s saying there’s no selection pressure he means at the culture level. If you have many small cultures that compete with one another, the ones that are less functional, less able to help members cooperate and produce good outcomes, are going to die out, either through inability to defend themselves in conflict or because members abandon them. But when you have free memetic transfer across cultural bounds, and effectively just one big culture, this type of selection at the culture level disappears. As a result features that are selected by memetic transfers are not facing selection for their contribution to social function.
Well, let's first acknowledge that you're walking back what you said earlier. First you said there's no selection pressure, and now you're acknowledging there is selection pressure but saying there's no selection pressure of a particular kind. The subtext you're implying would be that memetic selection pressure of the kind I described is of no value, and only group selection pressure of the kind you described is valuable.
But memetic selection pressure of the kind I described is very valuable, particularly the part where memes are selected for if they have coherence with other established memes. This is the basis of reasoning; for example, the memes produced by a mathematician rise or fall depending on their coherence with the axioms and definitions of mathematics. Any academic community works like that, and some of them produce very powerful and useful ideas. Reasoning, interpreted as finding ideas that cohere with other ideas, is a very valuable selective pressure.
Next, the dying off of whole cultures because they have dysfunctional memes that cripple them military or economically has long been a very weak pressure. The strength of the pressure can be measured by how often an isolated culture gets wiped out because its memes render it economically or militarily noncompetitive.
The pressure is strongest when people exist in small, independent tribes that war with each other. These tribes wiped each other out fairly often. However, most of humanity hasn't lived in small warring tribes for thousands of years. And the memes that succeeded in those small tribes are often pretty dysfunctional in modern society.
In modern times we've seen Western culture as a whole dominate non-Western culture economically and militarily, but this is effectively a *single* selection event. One animal is being eaten by a single other animal. That's not enough to put fine-grained pressure on which specific aspects of Western culture made it win.
We can also look at countries that got conquered, but this happens very infrequently in evolutionary terms. If you had a group of 100 organisms, one of which gets eaten by another every 10 years, how rapidly do you think this group could evolve? Very slowly! And it's not even necessarily the memes that dictate who wins - it may be more about the size of the country, or geography. And the culture of the country that gets conquered often survives this conquering, as only their leadership really changes as a result of the conquest.
Okay, all the points you’re making now are valid, in my mind. I’ve tried to point out what terminology I think Robin is using, without actually arguing that he’s correct. The argument for selection between cultures amounts to a form of selection at the memetic group level, with all the standard objections to group level selection coming into play. I happen to think we do have many subcultures in play and that they do compete for how good of a life they can offer. Cities and online platforms are two prominent levels at which memetic selection happens at the group level, with the help of fast-cycle feedback in the form of real-estate prices and equity valuations, respectively.
It's 180 degrees the other way. Foreign wars benefit the Olds who reap most of the financial benefits of Empire but let the young pay for it with their lives. The cultural rot is from the values of the Olds metastasizing past their organic scope, and slavishly forcing the young to follow and to ignore the inherent contradictions. In cultural battles, the Olds have the advantage as they control the money and the power structure, and get to allocate capital to their favored winners and losers.
I do agree though that the young have adjusted efforts to suit themselves and to promote change to their advantage. That's human nature, and the Olds do the same, both when they were young and now they are old. The main difference is that the young has to fit their forms of protest within the discourse of existing regimes in order to get traction, while the Olds directly control the regime.
Many of the changes the young are promoting now is mainly for disruption purposes, and some of them will be abandoned as surface dressing once they take over. You may look upon this as "dishonest" somehow, but it's strategic as they need a certain amount of support from factions among the Olds to get push through. The current Olds, the Boomers, love daring/bold/audacious ideas and taking things to an extreme, so most of the current most effective forms of change advocacy are phrased in that form.
The extremism will drop off once Boomers no longer need to be kept part of coalition due to dwindling numbers. Society will become more moderate, and paradoxically a lot of the change that you prefer, will happen sooner than you think. (Also, some changes you don't like, but that's the roll of the Generational Dice).
Over time, the current youngs (but then-current Olds) will form their own generational Cultural Rot, as previously good ideas get taken too far. C'est la vie!
You’re talking as if the current generational conflict is the only one under consideration. It’s the general pattern that is being considered. Boomers had the same conflict with their elders. Taking a side is not going to serve your observational capacity.
In the context of his fertility critique, the Boomer conflict is the main one. The Boomers also conflicted with the prior GI generation, but the critique was over different issues. GI's were plenty fertile, as they produced the "Baby Boom" of Boomer-dom.
Boomers were fighting them on social life having vastly more room for individual expression and fulfillment than the GI's allowed (which was a valuable critique in its time). Fertility naturally involves some trade-offs of a parent's individual expression and fulfillment vs the next generation.
But because those were sacred values for Boomers, the discourse never allowed discussion of the trade-offs. Sacred values are always those where people are not allowed to discuss the trade-offs. They're just viewed as pure good, a pose which future generations is allowed to laugh off.
The way I read Robin's argument, the fertility decline dynamic is much more broad than the U.S. boomers vs. the GIs and Millennial. It extends out geographically outside the U.S., and in time all the way back to pre-industrial society. The current U.S. generational conflict is just the latest thread in a broad tapestry.
But the rest of the world has had a Baby Boom too in the 20th century. The world population went from 1.7 billion in 1900 to 6 billion+ in 2000.
And Boomer culture was exported all over the world during the 20th century. The linking of the world in a giant mediasphere, not just the internet, but also American movies, TV & blue jeans earlier in the 20th century has made the elites world-wide think mostly like Boomer elites. Particularly in their self-orientation. Plus almost no one argues against more freedom & individual choice in their lives, at least in theory (i.e. when there's no cost to themselves or their power from it, which is exactly the way Boomers like to frame it too).
I'd argue the Boomers vs GIs and Millenials dynamic plays out all over much of the world now.
Pre-industrial to Industrial era change I would agree is different. The tech fundamentally changed,changing the carrying capacity of society. Improved medicine and sanitation reduced the death rates and extended life expectancies. Fertility rates should drop in that case as a rational response to the new world, and isn't just driven by culture.
I notice that the reverse situation is supposed to arise with AI risk. There, the young have their lives ahead of them and so are more conservative, while the older folk (especially those who are childless) are more likely to be "pedal-to-the-metal" and"immortality or bust". In that case it is the old - not the young - who are pushing for more rapid cultural change.
Sounds true for the minority of people that understand the reality you’re describing, but not about cultural change, just R&D spending. Not everything is culture. If I start quoting ChatGPT here I expect the old to push back more than the young. You can’t get any closer to immortality by asking an AI for relationship advice.
Young people are as conformist and apathetic as any other group. The slavish devotion to movements as diverse as the Cultural Revolution and Black Lives Matter is, for the vast majority, nothing more than a desire to be part of the latest trend and to have some stimulus for their short-term, dopamine-driven thinking. Anything that promises a shake-up of existing structures (which invariably preference the wealthy older generations) is additionally welcomed out of pure self-interest. This isn't a rejection of the status quo, as much as it is an element of it, accounted for and allowed to occur within bounded parameters. The only movements that carry weight and which are likely to pose a danger of true social change will invariably be led by a vanguard nested in the older/wealthier castes. For the majority of young people the intricacies of the issues underlying their protest will be lost on them and, at best, they will voice some superficial grievances that look at the issue in a simplistic and black and white manner. Those that have a better understanding, a tiny minority, will be identified by those with greater status/wealth/influence and be redirected; either co-opted into the establishment as the positive face of 'youth activism' or brought into the camp of the elder dissidents and groomed to one day take their place. In all of this, nothing inherent to 'the youth', other than their level of physical energy and desire for stimulus, set them apart from their elder counterparts.
I'd argue that the rate of change is better predicted simply by changes in communication technology. The limiting factor in cultural change is exposure to the new practices. Thus, the more intermediaries that any change has to pass through the longer it takes.
The adoption of technology which allows cheap and easy many to many communication naturally increases the rate at which new ideas can spread.
Seems to me that what you're describing might reflect an inversion of Stewart Brand's pace layers model. Normally, slow controls fast, but in this age of acceleration and visibility, it looks like fast is starting to control slow. I'm not adding anything new to your argument per se, just highlighting the pace layers model as it seems fitting and might be useful for readers to consider. --> https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2
It's a very insightful point. When I was teenager I participated in many activist activities. Even at the time, looking at what was going on around me, I always had the suspicion that sexual-matching was the true purpose, and the politics just a signaling device in service of that greater goal.
It's also a feedback loop - we had incentives to care more about our elders when things weren't changing so quickly that their skills and intuitions were useless. Any young person now finds it intuitively obvious that a couple-years-older influencer on TikTok knows more about success than her parents do.
I really don't think the world is forces of order vs. the forces of chaos, but rather, the unstoppable force of order which expertly manipulates the mindless force of chaos. There's a myth or an intuition of harmony which gets taken for granted because this idea is ingrained culturally. It's sounds something like,
"Well, you see, old people establish order which can be degrees of bad/good, but this stagnates or may be tyrannical, so then the young bring revolution and freshness, which also can be bad/good."
I do not actually believe the above or anything like it is the case, although I think many people have this sort of intuition. Another way this idea gets expressed is in a gendered way, so it's very broad and encompassing.
What I actually believe happens is order is a bit like a black hole. It generally only grows in strength, and cannot be disturbed. It impinges its force on things around it more and more, and there's really no "revolution", at least in any short term sense. Perhaps it has a shelf life in the largest scopes/scales, but it's not at all like how we think. Power is everpresent and rarely changing in the world. It camouflages and shapeshifts, but there's no real change.
The young do not bring about any genuine revolution, but rather, they are cattle for the elite. They are not a threat to them(although it brings many a young mind great joy to think they are somehow "part of the resistance movement" or some other fantasy nonsense), or to culture, but rather, they are a shapeshifting of the exact same thing from which they grew from. There's no change, only the illusion of change. There's no progress, only the illusion of progress. These superficial appearances are very, very compelling, and so it sounds absurd to make these claims. If you care about the truth, you just have to look more carefully than you previously did.
"Young people are literally wired...."
Not literally "literally".
Pedantic, I?
[Silently contemplating a roll of wire vs. human tendency to act in accordance with own interest]
Isn't there a simpler explanation where the rate of cultural production and exchange is proportional to the rate of mutation? It's hard to explain something like meme templates quickly going stale in terms of active moral agitation on part of the youth, and very easy to explain in terms of how often they've been seen and excavated by others. I think most forms of cultural change are subject this principle, and the driving factor in recent history is just the internet.
That's also a plausible story, just a bit less plausible to me.
That sounds much more likely. I don't know if we have any defence mechanism against the extreme virality of memes nowadays.
You write:
"On larger scales, foreign wars can be seen as advantaging the young".
Do you honestly believe that?
Most combat is done by the young, and if you see combat, there is likely no advantage, even if you don't get killed or maimed, you have the memory of colleagues who did suffer, and the death you saw, and the people you killed. Not too mention all those who might flee their homeland so that they don't have to serve.
If you really think there is an advantage perhaps pick up a gun and go fight?
If land is distributed to soldiers, then it is advantaging the young. Or if a higher social position awaits them at home. Or plunder. In ancient times warriors used to take home a few slaves. It’s certainly not as good if you take away all the traditional benefits.
Unless the young are starting the war, one must assume that it is some other group that is attaining the advantage.
Rewards are not the same as advantage.
And one side loses the war ... The young on that side do not receive any advantage, if they even live
One would assume that wars would get started by the side that expects to win and that the promise of spoils is required when the youth cannot be fully manipulated using propaganda alone.
The promise of spoils is not the same as the receipt of spoils.
If the soldiers get the spoils, and the soldiers are young, then yes "young people get the spoils".
But the young are 'forced' to be the soldiers.
So it's really soldiers who have this 'advantage', not the young ... Otherwise why wouldn't older people volunteer to fight?
Is the promise of spoils any less enticing to a 40 year old than a 20 year old?
Yeah that claim seems pretty silly to me
I appreciate and agree with a lot in this post, but want to point out that youth do not inevitably instigate change in every cultural setting. Young people are *not literally wired to challenge the status quo* Sure, Stanley G. Hall proposed exactly this in 1904, but his claim is now considered an example of an overgeneralization of a specific human cohort to a fact of human nature. The sociologist Kingsley Davis (1940, p. 523) noted that “In other cultures, the outstanding fact is generally not the rebelliousness of youth, but its docility. There is practically no custom, no matter how tedious or painful, to which youth in primitive tribes or archaic civilizations will not willingly submit.”
So what caused young people to see the possibility of making their own future, not kow towing to their elders, not competing with other youth to show their obedience and subordination to the culture's norms? Youth going their own way began in the 20th century with the rise of youth culture, which itself was due to rapid cultural change; an emergent property of growing individualism, age segregation in schools and across society, and material abundance which allowed commercial interests to sell directly to youth.
It's not young people, it's *younger* people. Even if young people are docile when they're young, they're not going to stay young forever. At some point, they'll get old, and they'll expect the new younger people to be docile to their *idiosyncatic* ideas (if the society demands docile young people).
Consider legalizing pot. Boomers have always liked pot but despite their rebellious ways and strong influence on culture, never managed to get it passed when they were young. They were blocked by GI's and Silents. Eventually, it finally broke through when Boomers were old and in charge of everything. At this point, there are almost no more GIs and Silents.
And even though Millenials also support legalizing pot, the change happened because of the change in mindset between Silents & Boomers, not because of the change in mindset between Boomers and Xers or Millenials. On this issue, Boomers are very similar to Xers and Millenials (the generations after) in their preferences, but different from the GIs and Silents (the generations prior).
See e.g. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/11/14/americans-support-marijuana-legalization/
"Majorities of Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1997), Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) and Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) say the use of marijuana should be legal. Members of the Silent Generation (born between 1928 and 1945) continue to be the least supportive of legalization: Only 35% favor legalizing marijuana, while 64% are opposed.
The generational divide in views of marijuana legalization exists within both party coalitions. Large majorities of Boomer (81%), Gen X (76%) and Millennial Democrats (78%) say the use of marijuana should be made legal, compared with 53% of Silent Generation Democrats who say this.
Millennial Republicans also broadly favor legalizing marijuana use; in fact, Republicans in this generation are almost as supportive of legalization as Millennial Democrats (71% vs. 78%). Gen X and Boomer Republicans are more closely divided, with 55% of Gen X Republicans and 49% of Boomer Republicans favoring legalization. GOP members of the Silent Generation are the least likely to favor marijuana legalization: Just 21% say marijuana use should be legal, while three-quarters (76%) say it should not."
On the issue of pot, Boomers are still the *younger* people, given the inertia of the system.
I can see how the fact youth became a marketing target allows for more of a wedge between youth culture and old culture. Marketing is very much a vector of change. Think rock music but forget that it’s music, just look at the fact that it used to be a category of products that target the young. Once young people have their own cultural markers they have an incentive to make these the dominant culture, as they have superior skills at producing the products of that culture.
You are ugly
Smoking weed is not a personality.
I remember when your major concern was that society would become too fixed and traditional and therefore innovations would be unable to prosper. "Rot," you called it. You built a theory about how UFOs might be coming from a society that rotted in this way, too centralized and stable (and therefore incompetent). Now you're upset about too much and too fast change.
To me it looks like the root cause of these contradictory views is just the American right-wing party line: you don't like regulation on businesses but you want to regulate culture.
The thing is, you can't have both. If the culture is dictated by some authority, this limits economic innovation as well, because the authority will not stop at dictating people's personal lives. The authority will also abuse their position by quashing upstart innovators and stealing value from them.
You don't see the Amish building rockets, do you? That's not a coincidence. The Islamic Golden Age ended with the rise of the fundamentalists. The European Enlightenment was both cultural and economic. Historically, overly traditional and strict culture, particularly religious fundamentalism, means suppression of economic innovation as well.
Innovation and economic progress depend on people saying the status quo is bad, and doing a lot of things that entrenched interests don't like. For this to work, the entrenched interests can't be allowed too much control.
You really have to make the distinction between innovation with selection and innovation without selection. While the former is good, as only good innovations are retained, the latter is largely bad, as most innovations are not aligned with societal function. From the point of view of social function, once selection is gone all you have is drift, and over time function is steadily reduced.
And I don’t think Robin is in favor in of fixing this via central control. I don’t recall reading him argue that appointing a tyrant would be the solution.
If anything, the selection process is happening right now (due to Generational Regime Change), and Robin is afraid that the selection won't come out in his favor.
But paradoxically, it's mostly going the way he wants. He just doesn't see it because he's identified too much with the Villains of his Story (the Boomers). Most of his attempts to lock in Boomer culture will just ensure that the trends that he laments will continue to their dystopian ends.
It seems to me that Robin’s main concern is long term survival of the modern culture, the health of which he sees being threatened by a process akin to biological aging, namely the slow accumulation of dysfunction. He is not speaking from the point of view of the boomer, but from the point of view of an analyst noting the mechanics of a system under observation. Besides, your critique suffers from the ad-hominem fallacy. Instead of dealing with the argument you discredit the motivation of the person making the argument.
The mechanics of a system dominated by 30 years of Boomer culture. What I'm saying is that when the substrate of the Culture changes (i.e. the people, due to passing of generations), that's when the real selection of memes occur.
I agree with a lot of his observations about the slow accumulation of dysfunction, but it's indicative of the society having taken (previously valuable) Boomer ideas, values, lifestyles & choices too far. When the memes jump to the new generation, the people won't have the some inclinations, even if they preserve some of the ideas. E.g. you might like an idea X that you took from someone else, but you might not think more X is always better.
So what Robin takes for granted as "the mechanics of a system under observation" will change too. He doesn't think that's possible, because he's so used to a certain notion of "That's How People Are".
Edit: And I'm not discrediting him at all. I'm discrediting his approach. I like his critique, but I think he's identified the wrong mechanism / culprit that caused it. Thus the wrong solution.
You seem to be under the impression that selection in memetic transfer is something that is capable of editing out ideas that are dysfunctional for society. Is that part of your thinking?
To me, selection in memetic transfer doesn't just happen the first time you adopt an idea. Sometimes you entertain an idea, even advocate it for a while. It doesn't mean you adopt it for all time.
A big selection event that happens collectively for a lot of people at the same time is upon a change in generational power. At some point, when a new generation comes to power, it has to execute on ideas that have been floating around. Then the new generation realizes that (some of those ideas) don't work. Worse, it'll be apparent to everyone, without the echo chamber of the Olds around promoting it.
The new generation are now the Man Behind the Curtain, and its harder than it looks. So they're going to dump some of the old ways, even though they used to be supporters of them.
That generational selection point is happening right now. Boomers are retiring, about to retiring or have retired, the next generation in charge will have to take accountability for the results, and they'll decide they aren't that committed to continuity with Boomer ideas after all. So a lot of trends have been / are being / will be tested.
So yea, I think generational change is one of the editing mechanisms of memetic transfer. Memes don't reproduce faithfully, and depends strongly on the substrates. When the substrates change, the equilibrium of memes change. If people were Ems, and Memes were code, then the situation would be different.
A dictator doesn't become a king until he manages to pass the power onto his children. Succession can be more important to the survival of a kingdom than winning wars. Robin says currently biological fertility is down, but cultural fertility might be lower than he thinks too.
Of course there is selection among cultural memes. Any time you have heritable variation with limited resources, you *must* have selection, because not all the variations can survive. Some cultural memes spread more easily and displace others. This is due to the memes cohering with other memes (the basis of human reason), or cohering with innate human nature (e.g. compassion, selfishness, tribalism).
Specifically, the cultural variations that the right-wing doesn't like are mostly about being compassionate to groups other than the culturally dominant group. This isn't random drift, this is a specific direction that appeals to a specific part of human nature.
There is no way to stop these cultural variations other than appointing some cultural authority. Elders, Imams, priests, feudal lords, corporate HR, Party leadership.
I think you’re still not getting Robin’s terminology. Of course there is selection at the level of memetic transfer. When he’s saying there’s no selection pressure he means at the culture level. If you have many small cultures that compete with one another, the ones that are less functional, less able to help members cooperate and produce good outcomes, are going to die out, either through inability to defend themselves in conflict or because members abandon them. But when you have free memetic transfer across cultural bounds, and effectively just one big culture, this type of selection at the culture level disappears. As a result features that are selected by memetic transfers are not facing selection for their contribution to social function.
Well, let's first acknowledge that you're walking back what you said earlier. First you said there's no selection pressure, and now you're acknowledging there is selection pressure but saying there's no selection pressure of a particular kind. The subtext you're implying would be that memetic selection pressure of the kind I described is of no value, and only group selection pressure of the kind you described is valuable.
But memetic selection pressure of the kind I described is very valuable, particularly the part where memes are selected for if they have coherence with other established memes. This is the basis of reasoning; for example, the memes produced by a mathematician rise or fall depending on their coherence with the axioms and definitions of mathematics. Any academic community works like that, and some of them produce very powerful and useful ideas. Reasoning, interpreted as finding ideas that cohere with other ideas, is a very valuable selective pressure.
Next, the dying off of whole cultures because they have dysfunctional memes that cripple them military or economically has long been a very weak pressure. The strength of the pressure can be measured by how often an isolated culture gets wiped out because its memes render it economically or militarily noncompetitive.
The pressure is strongest when people exist in small, independent tribes that war with each other. These tribes wiped each other out fairly often. However, most of humanity hasn't lived in small warring tribes for thousands of years. And the memes that succeeded in those small tribes are often pretty dysfunctional in modern society.
In modern times we've seen Western culture as a whole dominate non-Western culture economically and militarily, but this is effectively a *single* selection event. One animal is being eaten by a single other animal. That's not enough to put fine-grained pressure on which specific aspects of Western culture made it win.
We can also look at countries that got conquered, but this happens very infrequently in evolutionary terms. If you had a group of 100 organisms, one of which gets eaten by another every 10 years, how rapidly do you think this group could evolve? Very slowly! And it's not even necessarily the memes that dictate who wins - it may be more about the size of the country, or geography. And the culture of the country that gets conquered often survives this conquering, as only their leadership really changes as a result of the conquest.
Okay, all the points you’re making now are valid, in my mind. I’ve tried to point out what terminology I think Robin is using, without actually arguing that he’s correct. The argument for selection between cultures amounts to a form of selection at the memetic group level, with all the standard objections to group level selection coming into play. I happen to think we do have many subcultures in play and that they do compete for how good of a life they can offer. Cities and online platforms are two prominent levels at which memetic selection happens at the group level, with the help of fast-cycle feedback in the form of real-estate prices and equity valuations, respectively.
It's 180 degrees the other way. Foreign wars benefit the Olds who reap most of the financial benefits of Empire but let the young pay for it with their lives. The cultural rot is from the values of the Olds metastasizing past their organic scope, and slavishly forcing the young to follow and to ignore the inherent contradictions. In cultural battles, the Olds have the advantage as they control the money and the power structure, and get to allocate capital to their favored winners and losers.
I do agree though that the young have adjusted efforts to suit themselves and to promote change to their advantage. That's human nature, and the Olds do the same, both when they were young and now they are old. The main difference is that the young has to fit their forms of protest within the discourse of existing regimes in order to get traction, while the Olds directly control the regime.
Many of the changes the young are promoting now is mainly for disruption purposes, and some of them will be abandoned as surface dressing once they take over. You may look upon this as "dishonest" somehow, but it's strategic as they need a certain amount of support from factions among the Olds to get push through. The current Olds, the Boomers, love daring/bold/audacious ideas and taking things to an extreme, so most of the current most effective forms of change advocacy are phrased in that form.
The extremism will drop off once Boomers no longer need to be kept part of coalition due to dwindling numbers. Society will become more moderate, and paradoxically a lot of the change that you prefer, will happen sooner than you think. (Also, some changes you don't like, but that's the roll of the Generational Dice).
Over time, the current youngs (but then-current Olds) will form their own generational Cultural Rot, as previously good ideas get taken too far. C'est la vie!
You’re talking as if the current generational conflict is the only one under consideration. It’s the general pattern that is being considered. Boomers had the same conflict with their elders. Taking a side is not going to serve your observational capacity.
In the context of his fertility critique, the Boomer conflict is the main one. The Boomers also conflicted with the prior GI generation, but the critique was over different issues. GI's were plenty fertile, as they produced the "Baby Boom" of Boomer-dom.
Boomers were fighting them on social life having vastly more room for individual expression and fulfillment than the GI's allowed (which was a valuable critique in its time). Fertility naturally involves some trade-offs of a parent's individual expression and fulfillment vs the next generation.
But because those were sacred values for Boomers, the discourse never allowed discussion of the trade-offs. Sacred values are always those where people are not allowed to discuss the trade-offs. They're just viewed as pure good, a pose which future generations is allowed to laugh off.
The way I read Robin's argument, the fertility decline dynamic is much more broad than the U.S. boomers vs. the GIs and Millennial. It extends out geographically outside the U.S., and in time all the way back to pre-industrial society. The current U.S. generational conflict is just the latest thread in a broad tapestry.
But the rest of the world has had a Baby Boom too in the 20th century. The world population went from 1.7 billion in 1900 to 6 billion+ in 2000.
And Boomer culture was exported all over the world during the 20th century. The linking of the world in a giant mediasphere, not just the internet, but also American movies, TV & blue jeans earlier in the 20th century has made the elites world-wide think mostly like Boomer elites. Particularly in their self-orientation. Plus almost no one argues against more freedom & individual choice in their lives, at least in theory (i.e. when there's no cost to themselves or their power from it, which is exactly the way Boomers like to frame it too).
I'd argue the Boomers vs GIs and Millenials dynamic plays out all over much of the world now.
Pre-industrial to Industrial era change I would agree is different. The tech fundamentally changed,changing the carrying capacity of society. Improved medicine and sanitation reduced the death rates and extended life expectancies. Fertility rates should drop in that case as a rational response to the new world, and isn't just driven by culture.
I notice that the reverse situation is supposed to arise with AI risk. There, the young have their lives ahead of them and so are more conservative, while the older folk (especially those who are childless) are more likely to be "pedal-to-the-metal" and"immortality or bust". In that case it is the old - not the young - who are pushing for more rapid cultural change.
Sounds true for the minority of people that understand the reality you’re describing, but not about cultural change, just R&D spending. Not everything is culture. If I start quoting ChatGPT here I expect the old to push back more than the young. You can’t get any closer to immortality by asking an AI for relationship advice.
Young people are as conformist and apathetic as any other group. The slavish devotion to movements as diverse as the Cultural Revolution and Black Lives Matter is, for the vast majority, nothing more than a desire to be part of the latest trend and to have some stimulus for their short-term, dopamine-driven thinking. Anything that promises a shake-up of existing structures (which invariably preference the wealthy older generations) is additionally welcomed out of pure self-interest. This isn't a rejection of the status quo, as much as it is an element of it, accounted for and allowed to occur within bounded parameters. The only movements that carry weight and which are likely to pose a danger of true social change will invariably be led by a vanguard nested in the older/wealthier castes. For the majority of young people the intricacies of the issues underlying their protest will be lost on them and, at best, they will voice some superficial grievances that look at the issue in a simplistic and black and white manner. Those that have a better understanding, a tiny minority, will be identified by those with greater status/wealth/influence and be redirected; either co-opted into the establishment as the positive face of 'youth activism' or brought into the camp of the elder dissidents and groomed to one day take their place. In all of this, nothing inherent to 'the youth', other than their level of physical energy and desire for stimulus, set them apart from their elder counterparts.
What sets the youth apart is lower status and wealth. That’s where the preference for revolution comes from. The youth are the oppressed.
I'd argue that the rate of change is better predicted simply by changes in communication technology. The limiting factor in cultural change is exposure to the new practices. Thus, the more intermediaries that any change has to pass through the longer it takes.
The adoption of technology which allows cheap and easy many to many communication naturally increases the rate at which new ideas can spread.
Seems to me that what you're describing might reflect an inversion of Stewart Brand's pace layers model. Normally, slow controls fast, but in this age of acceleration and visibility, it looks like fast is starting to control slow. I'm not adding anything new to your argument per se, just highlighting the pace layers model as it seems fitting and might be useful for readers to consider. --> https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2
It's a very insightful point. When I was teenager I participated in many activist activities. Even at the time, looking at what was going on around me, I always had the suspicion that sexual-matching was the true purpose, and the politics just a signaling device in service of that greater goal.
These activities push out older folks as competition for the young of the opposite gender.
It's also a feedback loop - we had incentives to care more about our elders when things weren't changing so quickly that their skills and intuitions were useless. Any young person now finds it intuitively obvious that a couple-years-older influencer on TikTok knows more about success than her parents do.
I really don't think the world is forces of order vs. the forces of chaos, but rather, the unstoppable force of order which expertly manipulates the mindless force of chaos. There's a myth or an intuition of harmony which gets taken for granted because this idea is ingrained culturally. It's sounds something like,
"Well, you see, old people establish order which can be degrees of bad/good, but this stagnates or may be tyrannical, so then the young bring revolution and freshness, which also can be bad/good."
I do not actually believe the above or anything like it is the case, although I think many people have this sort of intuition. Another way this idea gets expressed is in a gendered way, so it's very broad and encompassing.
What I actually believe happens is order is a bit like a black hole. It generally only grows in strength, and cannot be disturbed. It impinges its force on things around it more and more, and there's really no "revolution", at least in any short term sense. Perhaps it has a shelf life in the largest scopes/scales, but it's not at all like how we think. Power is everpresent and rarely changing in the world. It camouflages and shapeshifts, but there's no real change.
The young do not bring about any genuine revolution, but rather, they are cattle for the elite. They are not a threat to them(although it brings many a young mind great joy to think they are somehow "part of the resistance movement" or some other fantasy nonsense), or to culture, but rather, they are a shapeshifting of the exact same thing from which they grew from. There's no change, only the illusion of change. There's no progress, only the illusion of progress. These superficial appearances are very, very compelling, and so it sounds absurd to make these claims. If you care about the truth, you just have to look more carefully than you previously did.
kids these days eh 😆
How big is the pool of values?
The pool of possible values is huge.
"And it is intrinsically argue against value changes typo
Fixed; thanks.