Hello. Thank you for having me, and good to see you.
I initiated this because I saw you tweet about some old papers on culture talking about how if people inherit behaviors from peers more compared to parents, DNA parents at least or the previous generation, then there’s more of a chance that evolution could go wrong. And that the authors you were citing had said maybe that’s an explanation for fertility decline.
Yeah, this was Boyd and Richerson’s Not by Genes Alone, all the way back in 2005, before the most significant fertility drops that we’ve seen in the past couple decades. So I find this very prescient.
It’s a book I’ve read as well.
It’s a great book. So, you’ve been thinking a lot about selection mechanisms in cultural evolution.
And how those mechanisms might go wrong.
Yes. Or lack of selection mechanisms.
Right, so your research overlaps this larger cultural area to some degree, which is why you feel some expertise in talking about it. And so I wondered what you had thought about the possibility of cultural evolution going wrong and how plausible that could be.
I’m largely in agreement with your cultural drift thesis, although I would not necessarily call it drift because I think there’s an active process underlying this. There’s a reason it’s spinning off in maladaptive directions that’s not just lack of selection.
I’ll give you my summary and then you can tell me how yours differs. There’s a process of selection which disciplines culture to make sure it stays adaptive as context changes. If that discipline weakens, then you’ll see a combination of random walk away from what was adaptive, and some other more consistent trends, and those may be what you have in mind. One consistent trend that I find theoretically understandable might be that humans are naturally selfish, myopic, and just lazy, and that culture has always been needed to move people away from that default state. Therefore when cultural pressures weaken we just become more selfish, myopic and lazy. That’s a simple decadence story: that we, say, lose self-control and are more impulse driven and more immediately do what seems in the moment selfishly beneficial. That’s plausible if we have this natural set point, although you might doubt that. There have been complaints in history about trends like this.
The other thing I might suggest is that we were naturally foragers, and that to make us into farmers required culture to push against forager nature a bit. The payoffs from farming were strong enough to induce a transition to farming, but that didn’t get as deeply embedded in us. So when you release selection pressures, then we drift back from a farming to a foraging style and behavior. Then democracy, leisure, promiscuity, less religion, less fertility, more travel, more art – those are some of the forager versus farmer correlates that you then might explain in terms of a drift back to forager styles. So those are the two trends that I could most theoretically justify in addition to just a random walk. Did you have something else in mind?
Yeah, if anything, I might tell the opposite of a decadence story. Let’s think about what the selection pressures consist of. What’s the replicator here? You’ve talked about prestige biased transmission. So – especially because we’re talking about fertility collapse as an outcome of this process – it’s important to distinguish evolution on the cultural capacity, which is potentially a worrying trend over the long haul. Like why are humans the type of beings to discipline ourselves with culture, as you said. Versus the decay of culture, and not even necessarily decay, but the evolution of cultural forms. I’ve got a paper on Simmel which I think you may have seen before.
I’ve read Simmel before, but not necessarily that.
His chapter on Human Freedom talks about the money economy freeing cultural forms to evolve according to their own internal logic. The example that comes to mind for me is the Reformation. There had been reformations throughout European history, and there is a critique that existed throughout the history of the Catholic Church that it doesn’t live up to the Christian self-conception, the sermon on the mount, what not. And that’s fair: the Catholic Church ended up looking a lot like other institutions that held societies together. That’s the main selection pressure up to that point, the necessity for institutional forms and moral norms to hold together a community, that they just don’t have to do anymore. And now we have norms and institutions which we hold non-instrumentally, because we’re cultural beings. We’re not doing it because it benefits us. So if they don’t have to provide these services that maybe now a territorial state provides, or the money economy provides, then there’s much more scope to take that self-conception and run as far as you possibly can with it. You get fundamentalism as a very modern phenomenon. We have much more scope to indulge our deeply held moral values today. And it’s not that money decays our moral values. It’s that money gives us the luxury to run with them much further than would have ever been practical in the past. And that to me is where the danger from relaxed selection comes from.
So the story is that before the Reformation, there were reformations, but they were limited in scope, duration, and impact by needing to be functional. And that by the Reformation that was no longer true, and that’s why the Reformation was a bigger thing. So you’re thinking of a large wealth effect that in 1400 Europe was rich enough to be able to go farther with Reformation than, say, year 1 or 800 Europe.
Certainly farther than in the past, because of course they’re coming out of the dark ages. There’s the commercial revolution in the 12th-ish century. That accumulates throughout the middle ages, until the Reformation is plausibly the first point at which the strength of the territorial state and the extent of the money economy were great enough to allow something like the Reformation to occur, to really run with these values that had always been latent in Christianity.
So in previous times, would it be that a local region might run with it, but then it would just be less functional and then be displaced by neighbors who had less run with it thus far?
Yeah. If you look at church history, there’s a lot of these movements, and the Catholic Church does not always persecute them. It co-opts a lot of them. The monastic tradition is a lot of co-opting these idealistic, not really oriented toward practical life, impulses. Okay, we’re going to quarantine you, put you in a monastery. Go for it, have fun. And these end up being stable traditions because they’re shielded from practical life by the broader church.
Well, if the Reformation killed off a third of Europe, that’s not the same as evolutionary selection against it, because it was all across Europe. You might think the places in Europe that went crazier with this, killing off a third of themselves would be a pretty substantial selection pressure against it, but it still happened anyway.
But that’s still thinking in terms of biological selection. If there’s a natural tendency for humans to run with these values if they have the ability to do so, if that budget constraint is loosened enough, then you could kill off a bunch of people and the idea will still spread. And that’s the whole idea of martyrdom, right? It’s a very maladaptive norm at the individual level, but people do it.
Okay. So, I’m not hostile here; it’s not crazy. But I guess the key mechanism was both wealth and state capacity allowed going with morals in directions that would otherwise have been restrained, because you would have undermined the things that would have substituted for wealth and state capacity, i.e. local communities and their coherence and their norms and enforcing the norms. So if peasant groups had run in these directions, they would have undermined the coherence of the local community and their norms and behaviors. And now because of state capacity and trade and wealth, if you ran in these directions, you could go farther before substantially hurting the functioning of your groups.
Right. In our post-Christian environment, we have many residues of these values. People have sometimes worried about, you know, can atheists be moral? I might reverse the question. Can atheists ever compromise?
Well, they’re not just atheists, they’re in the thrall of some other moral framework. And those moral frameworks have become not just substitutes for religion, but in some sense stronger than religion. In the past, people had moral frameworks that were given to them by God or something. But then the moral framework was secondary to the God that gave it to them. If God had said other things, then you’d obey the moral frameworks to the degree that they were consistent with the other things that you had heard that God had told you to do. So the church would restrain morals in that sense.
And that strengthening is very much counter to a secularization or decadence hypothesis, it would seem.
I agree, and that’s another plausible trajectory: once we weaken selection pressures, there’s some sort of engine that could produce a motion that was previously restrained, and now is unrestrained. I’m very heartened to hear somebody else talking about the same sort of problem that I’ve been thinking about, with somewhat different framing. But it’s really hard to think of solutions to this problem. If a world of many small peasant communities was healthy when it grew slowly and was very poor, versus our large rich interconnected world of much fewer cultures and much weaker selection pressures and much faster change, we’re not willing to just go back to the world of poverty and fragmentation of centuries ago. Then the question is, what other options are there? If we had no other solutions, we’d have to predict that we’ll just decay until we reach the point where fragmentation and poverty would kick in selection pressures and variety enough to make things healthy again. Can we think of other fixes? Otherwise that’s where it’s going.
And can we avoid the cycle of empire → dark age?
Right. It certainly does seem that in history, say with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the tech and ability levels after the fall are higher than before the rise. It’s not just always going down to the same low level. At least it seems over the last few thousand years. But that could be deceptive. As you may know, people have reports of very advanced civilizations tens of thousands of years ago whose evidence is destroyed. If that were true, then that would be much worse news. It means this could really fall low and there’s no rising ratchet. So I’ve been giving a lot of thought to potential fixes. Have you?
I’ve given a lot of thought. I don’t know if I have any better answers than you. I know the one solution of yours that I might put more flesh on is adaptation itself as a terminal value. I’ve always thought about our role as economists being to some extent the shaping of values. And to that extent adaptation is certainly underrated. One project I’m working on now, in moral philosophy, argues that dynamic stability should be a terminal value, which is very much along the same lines as adaptation as a terminal value. If you are embodying a value and going as hard as you can on that in a way that’s not evolutionarily stable, maybe there’s a problem with that.
My most recent blog post on my blog, Overcoming Bias goes over four book authors who have argued for adaptation as a fundamental value and tried to describe how that might happen. And it’s not very encouraging. They don’t seem to have gotten much traction on getting other people to go along with their view. The first one was B.F. Skinner from ’71. And then this name social Darwinism was thrown at Hitler as an explanation for his evil failure, and therefore the conscious attempt to make your group adaptive is similar to Nazism, and that’s pushed many people away from this. So in the prior century from Hitler, since Darwin, many people did talk somewhat about trying to deliberately be more adaptive. They didn’t use the phrase social Darwinism; that was mostly made later as a disapproving phrase. It didn’t take off that much, but that idea had some degree of traction up until the end of World War II, when people decided to very consciously reject it. So first of all there’s a big taboo against it. But then secondly, even setting that aside it seems like it just has very little emotional purchase or energy in most people today. Even if you can get them to not care about this taboo, it just doesn’t seem to grab people as a goal that they could sing hymns about, or watch inspiring movies about etc. It’s not an easy thing to bind people around. These four books surely weren’t bestsellers on that ground. And in fact, B.F. Skinner, the title of this book was Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He emphasized the idea that in order to be adaptive, you might have to give up on freedom and dignity.; there might be a conflict there. And he’s right about that certainly, but it’s not a winning message. Now we could say, if this is the only other solution, then we have to decide between in the long run collapse to poverty and war and death and fragmentation, or have adaptation as a value. Communities with adaptation as a value might pick up so that when the collapse happens at least some fraction of the world is now into this new adaptive value, and then it might then win out against the part of the world that’s collapsed and fragmented. But you’d put it a ways off in your estimate. And given how little emotional allegiance you can get from it by talking to people today.
The basic problem with being evangelical about this kind of value is it requires a move that is very much not natural for people. You have to step back from your own values at least partially and ask, are these values serving me? Are they compatible with other values of mine?
I think a more attractive pitch would be to say like, however you conceive your values, you often notice conflicts and contradictions, right? So you have this process by which you tentatively say, “Oh, these values, they’re not my best version of my values. I’m going to plan to update them when I notice conflicts and find some more coherent consistent version of it. And I’m willing to accept that what my values really are is the more coherent consistent version.” And then when you say, well, look, you are this machine produced to be adaptive. These values in your head, they are in fact inconsistent with each other in many ways because they are just simply heuristic moves on the part of evolution to get you to be adaptive. Therefore, you should see adaptation as the consistent underlying goal that you actually have if you’re going to be consistent. The other things you’re thinking of having allegiance to instead, they are not actually very coherent or consistent. So the most coherent consistent thing adjacent to the values you have is adaptation. That may be a stronger pitch.
I think that’s basically true. However that’s going to require a dissolution of self for most people to really believe that.
It requires a pretty abstract representation of yourself, and you’re going to have to see it as you say from a distance. It’s not so much that you are distancing from yourself as that you are seeing yourself pretty abstractly, which is a way of distancing.
Well, there’s an easier mental move. There’s two approaches we can take practically here. The first that I think is most available to people is, there’s a verse in Jeremiah that says, “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” And I take this to mean, don’t trust your own moral intuitions. Don’t take your moral intuitions as from on high and let’s run with those as far as we can. Be a little skeptical of those, and be willing to step back, in a way that most people are not willing to do without that skepticism. And that’s very much the opposite of “find yourself” or “believe in yourself”.
Our modern world has moved to this trust your intuitions, trust your heart feelings, feel the force Luke, sort of stuff. And that wasn’t true of the ancient world. The ancient world did put some weight on their feelings, but they also put substantial weight on elites, and ancient sacred texts, and religion, and even success as evidence for morals. We’ve made this unusual historical move to tell people to just trust the voice inside you as some unquestionable authority. It does seem like it can be undermined because in the past it was undermined, but it’s not going to be fast in our world.
That’s why the monoculture that you’ve talked about is surprising, because a priori you might expect relaxed selection pressure, and especially an ethos of follow your heart, ought to lead to more variation. And yet it doesn’t.
When you look in your heart, what you find is something that was put there not too long ago by your culture. It’s not the access to moral truth; it’s just the net effect of the movies and songs and teaching that you’ve summarized inside yourself. So the more that we go to that same source, and our hearts comes from the same place, then yes, it’s going to be more converging to the same thing because that’s what we put in there. Like we all go to similar schools and heard similar songs and read similar inspiring stories, then when we look in our hearts, we’ll find similar things.
And of course every society has to have a way of naturalizing the norms it wants people to internalize. We’ve been especially good at that. The axiomatic approach to moral philosophy just is so baffling to me, but it’s so dominant that “let’s look to our intuitions for what is morally right” – where do those come from?
So we’ve been talking about this one plausible solution, that some community, including its individuals, will come to see adaptation as a core value. Now I think that’s not enough. A community could have adaptation as a core value, and they could say to their leaders “we want adaptation.” And then those leaders could claim to be producing adaptation but not actually achieving that. So the question is what governance process could allow a community honestly devoted to adaptation to achieve adaptation. Because adaptation is a pretty complicated thing to figure out in particular context. It’s a nice clean abstract concept, but to know which actual changes of behaviors follow?
If we’re to focus on, say, fertility, that’s a clearer marker. We could say to our leaders, “make us more fertile” and then we could see how fertility changed. So in my mind one of the key ways that we can have robust governance that works is to pick a number, and if the number goes up, yay leader, we keep you. And number goes down, we fire you. Or there’s several other ways to tie a leader to a number. For example, in capitalism, firms are often tied to the a number of profits or the capital value of an organization. And then you reward leaders who make that number go up, and punish them if number goes down.
So then I might ask, what number could work for a community to want adaptation to be its goal? And again, if you’re willing to just reduce it to fertility, then you could just use population or fertility as a key number. But as we know, that’s only one of many parts contributing to adaptation. So you might worry that that would fail to produce adaptation if you’re over-focusing just on fertility, but it could still be a substantial improvement over our world now. I might still be encouraged to see a group like organized like that in our world today compared to all the other groups, but you could still get something closer to adaptation. So my idea has been that we commit to measuring influence in a century or two of groups today. That is, we measure who’s doing what today, and then later on we measure who’s doing what, and then we make some correlation attributions of saying, among the groups today, how much of what they were doing is happening later? We could also check DNA influence too. So for any one group A, we’d have some combination of, how much of their DNA is in the future and also how much of their behaviors are in the future. Then we could have a measure of ex post adaptive success of groups today in terms of future group behavior. And maybe we could start by just measuring that today versus people in the past, and produce some habit and then argue about how best to do it.
Roughly any decent approximation would seem to serve a key function: if we could measure ex post adaptive success, then we could make a futures market in an asset tracking that, and then that price today could be our number that we tie leaders to. Speculators would be making their best guess about any group’s adaptive success. And when a leader changes a policy speculators would say, “what do I think of that? Is that going to achieve more or less adaptive success?” And they would move the price of those assets according to their best guesses. That might be a better way for citizens members of a group to hold their leader accountable; to actually achieve adaptation, by telling their leader basically make this price number go up, which is the asset price estimating the future adaptive success. So, I feel better that that’s a thing that could work, if only groups had enough emotional attachment to adaptation as a goal that they would be willing to prioritize that for their leaders and say, “We’re willing to sacrifice other things in order to achieve this. Please achieve this.”
We have to be clear on what is the thing that we want to be adaptive. Is it the biological community? – you mentioned DNA inheritance, so that’s important. Or is it the community as constituted by some lineage of ideas? And those are different replicators, that can be adapted in different ways. Now, of course, they’re more linked than probably most of us are comfortable admitting. And so they’re not necessarily opposed.
Well, the question is how accurate we need this to be to function. Clearly, if it’s completely random, it’s not going to work. But say you just did a 50/50 culture DNA weighting, for example, and then you did simple measures of behaviors in the future in terms of their similarity to behaviors now. Now, that seems to me like that might be good enough, because we’re just trying to get our leaders today to do things roughly in the direction of making sure that our DNA and our behaviors are influential for the future.
Yeah. The problem with actually implementing this is you have to get people on board with committing, with using these metrics this way. As you know there’s a huge pushback to the use of prediction markets anywhere where there is real decisions at stake. Maybe with the large and partial exception of the stock market.
It’s about often just financial market prices as goals. That’s acceptable in capitalism within its sphere. But people want to limit that sphere and have this other more sacred human sphere where we don’t even try to achieve numbers, much less by numbers in prices. So many people just object to numbers at all as a way to keep track of what we value. That anything that you could measure with a number couldn’t really be what we really valued because that’s so crude and low. But a number expressed in a price was even worse. Because people think money is also low. But in addition, we have the social Darwinism take, and the lack of any much emotional energy for this.
I have two other solutions we could discuss. They move in sort of opposite directions from this one. One solution is through the following framing. We might say that what’s happened in the modern world is that we unleashed capitalism. And for the things we allow capitalism to run, we have quite rapid and healthy evolution: products and services and how to make food and how to organize workplaces, we have been making innovations and improving efficiency, and that stuff is going fine. But there are many parts of our lives and world that we don’t let capitalism run. And those are the things with the problem. Because capitalism been moving so fast, it’s changing the context for these other things at a much faster rate than these things can adapt. So fundamentally the problem is the areas where we have not let capitalism run, like governance and fertility. And then they can plausibly go bad. So then the solution is to just let capitalism run everything. Let it go wild.
Is that different from your previous solution? What would it mean to let capitalism run these things?
One thing would be, say, for-profit governance, which is something is has been experimented with at small scales. We don’t we don’t usually let it happen at large scales, but like a cruise ship is in some sense a for-profit government on the cruise ship. Or like the area of Disney in Orlando is sort of a company town, and they’re running everything there. So governance could be just owned by capitalism. And then you could also even have capitalism for fertility. The most simple form would be to let parents endow their kids with debt that they owe to the parents, and then parents can sell that debt to pay for parenting, and then parenting is a business. You could even make larger firms based on that model. There’s lots of more palatable versions of this that we could walk through, but that’s the key concept.
That raises an interesting disconnect. I’ve have friends who have been to Japan or South Korea, and they walk around with kids and they’re like, “Oh, these are such wonderful places to have kids. Everybody’s friendly to the kid.” And in our society, everybody loves kids. Every does everything for the kids. Kids are very high status. And that that’s going to be the problem with that solution, is that that makes children themselves lower status.
Right. We put kids on a pedestal so high that we aren’t actually willing to have them. So I would say the the fundamental problem is that we’ve relied on parenting being a gift to children. And if parents are no longer willing to give it as a gift, we’ll have to switch to more of a deal for children, which means then the parents need to get paid more for their parenting. And the obvious person to pay is the child. And then the question is just how to arrange that payment where the child pays the parents to exist.
That would be a class of a broader set of cultural changes, which would be to raise the status of parents, lower the status of children.
But my proposal here would be just legal changes that allow exchanges and behaviors that then might have an impact on status. But the more direct you could just more directly cause the change by changing these legal rulings.
What I’m saying is you might need to change the status first before people are okay with it.
Sure. But I think the most concise summary of the proposal would be let capitalism run wild. And then let capitalism run parenting, is basically saying allow parents and child to find ways to make the deals that capitalism could find to promote them. And yes, the main obstacle to doing that today is that it would reverse some key cultural trends that are the trends causing low fertility, which many people like. Including intensive parenting, parents putting a lot of effort on children. I think parenting would become less intensive if we found a way to promote more of it, because that’s an obvious way to do that, but then people wouldn’t like that. So obviously people have a more basic dislike of the whole let capitalism run everything scenario. Now today capitalism tends to have a low time value of the future, a high discounting rate, which is an obstacle to capitalism trying to remake society to be better in the long run. But I think that’s a side effect of our having prevented long-term foundations that simply reinvest their assets. We made a legal choice a while back to require most foundations to not accumulate assets, to spend enough of their capital that they do not grow. If we would allow them to reinvest most of their assets to grow, then the fact that rates of return are typically higher than the growth rate of the economy would mean they would grow as a fraction of the economy until that was no longer true. At which point interest rates would be down at the growth rate of the economy, at which point the future would loom larger in the minds of capitalists, and therefore they would naturally make longer term investments. But we’ve done many things to hinder capitalism. And clearly there’s just a big opposition to this. Many people dislike the idea of capitalism running everything. Certainly that’s the most plausible explanation for why we have so few for-profit governments at large scales.
I mean here and there we have charter cities, and the special economic zones they have in China.
Charter cities are small. And the SEZs aren’t owned by somebody. Those are zones where you’re allowed to do more capitalist things, but it’s not like the entire special economic zone is owned by a capitalist owner.
My understanding is that the governor acts as a residual claimant.
And to the extent they could sell shares in that.
Okay, so you need a secondary market.
So a key question is, are kings for-profit governance? The case for this is because the king is running the place for his own benefit. And that’s not really the same, but yeah. We spent a long time working out how to run for-profit firms, and having a CEO and a board and investors, and a king just isn’t that structure.
This is why Yarvinism is so crazy to me. There’s a nice little anecdote in the North Wallace and Weingast book Violence and Social Orders about a chancellor of the exchequer in England who tried to run the office as a for-profit business, and did really well; he was very profitable. But he was out of there very quickly, because that’s not what helps you succeed in a governance situation.
Now I think also one of the things people wouldn’t like about capitalism running wild is the idea that we the talky collective elites don’t get to run it. Many elites, professors and intellectuals etc., we want a world where our talk is especially influential in the trajectory of civilization. And that’s why we often like government intervention, because we think that it’ll be influenced by our talk, and we like the idea that our talk will be influential. So if we admit it’s just a capitalist running all these things, if you want to influence anything, influence the capitalist. And many people in a democracy like the idea of the public influencing key choices through democracy, and for some reason feel less of that when influencing choices as a customer or investor or employee. They don’t think those are such noble ways to influence the world. They want to influence it through the governance process. So the lack of that here is I think a negative for many people. But again, if some place in the world would just let capitalism run wild, that would in fact work, if they would do it in all these ways. But it is a big ask because nothing is very close at the moment.
What keeps coming up in all of these solutions is how do values have to change prior to these even entering the Overton window?
Presumably these are all a matter of multiple kinds of change that reinforce each other, and it’s less clear which will take the lead at what stage. There are many kinds of change being asked for here, but yes, values are certainly part of the mix.
There’s no way of getting around the the economist as preacher.
Well, if you want anything to last into the future it needs to be mixed into an adaptive package. So whatever it is you love, if you want it to last, you’ll have to be paying attention to adaptation. I’m forced to give it substantial weight and priority because that’s the only way to make something last.
I like the modern world. I share values with moderns because that’s what I’ve internalized.
I’ve made the analogy to an invading army coming to your city in the middle of the night. You’re warned. You have an hour to pack a suitcase and leave. What do you put in the suitcase? You can’t take everything. And it may well be that to make our world adaptive again, we won’t be able to take very much of our world that we cherish along with us. But we should choose carefully what we most value and try to see if we can take it with us.
I’m not even that pessimistic in terms of we won’t be able to take it all, or most of it, with us. But it is a reasonable question: what are the minimal changes in modern values necessary to ensure adaptivity?
And the minimum might be a lot.
I have just one more change we can consider. I have more, but they seem much less plausible as we go down the list. We’ve discussed two of them. One is to have at least some groups driven by an adaptation metric: they’re instructing their leaders to make their group more adaptive, and we find a way to give them a metric that would actually function in that role. Second, we find a way for at least some groups to just unleash capitalism across the life areas that we have so far not let it run, like governance and fertility.
Now, these those two approaches actually work at pretty small scales. It’s not clear what the minimum scale is, but you don’t need a big fraction of the world to adopt each of these other two approaches. Unfortunately for this third approach, I think you need a substantial percentage, maybe 5% of the world, to adopt this approach, because it’s going to be tied to a goal in terms of the trajectory of the world. The idea is for some group to pick some sacred goals that have more emotional resonance, but that happen to be inconsistent with civilization collapse. Not just any goal will do. You need goals that if civilization were to collapse, they would get in the way of achieving this goal. So now if we were to pick one of these goals as our key goal and assign our leaders to pursue it in an effective way, then in fact the first task their first task would be say: how do we prevent civilization collapse, so that we can achieve this goal?
But people are not very emotionally into the goal of preventing civilization collapse, but they might be more into some of these other goals that would be prevented by collapse. An example of such a goal was, when do a million people live in space? I ran some surveys, and many people seem to find that an emotionally compelling goal. More than than “let capitalism run wild” ” or “let’s be adaptive”. So it has a better shot for our descendants at least sooner engaging around this goal. Another goal that would fit like this is achieving physical immortality. Like we might make human bodies effective, you know, live a thousand years. And that’s a goal people could also get around, but it’s also a goal that is going to take a while and therefore collapse would delay it.
So the idea is to do this number-go-up governance where we have a number estimating when we’ll achieve our big goal, and then we assign to our leaders the task of making this date earlier. What we’ll need of course is a actual effective estimate of when this date is, such that that’s an effective discipline on our leaders. So again, I’m tempted to have a futures market in that that pays off in proportion to this date, so that investors now set this price according to their best estimate of when we would in fact achieve this date. Then that disciplines leaders who are trying to make that date look earlier according to the market.
You would need a very low discount rate for a lot of these long-term goals.
And it does cost more to induce speculators to speculate on a longer term asset than a short one. So you’ll have to subsidize it more. But the main advantage here is better able to inspire the community to get behind this goal.
Yes, space travel is inspiring.
I did spent about a year studying the sacred. I would understand that the sacred means if you could make this feel sacred to people, they would be ashamed to abandon it, and even proud to sacrifice for it. Which allows more resources going to that goal. I.e., if you put a 5% weight on this goal compared to all the other usual goals, it probably wouldn’t be enough to actually induce people to do what’s necessary to achieve it. But if you made it a 50/50 goal, or even 50% of all things that are important, or even more, then that might be enough to get people to actually do what it takes to make the goal be achieved.
So out of these three approaches, this seems the one that people could emotionally get behind most easily. The disadvantage primarily is that it requires a larger group of the world to get behind it. You’ll need this group to have a substantial impact on the overall decline of civilization through their policies. Otherwise, it doesn’t work.
You know, speaking of the sacred, my favorite solution of yours, which I’m surprised you didn’t mention, is: start a cult.
So let’s walk through this. One of the problems today is too little cultural variety. Cults are atoms of cultural variety.
Be the variation you want to see in the world.
Exactly. And obviously it might be that enough variety is enough to solve things. And then the question is, how plausible is it that you could get enough people to form cults with enough varied cultures. One thing to mention is that many people today think they like multiculturalism, but what they like is a shallow cultural variety of different songs, or hairstyles, or clothes, or holidays, or food etc. But if you talk about variety in terms of attitude toward democracy, war, death, beating children, things like that, they hate that kind of variety and want to crush it. I know many somewhat weird people all my life, and they mix a lot, and they like the more shallow kinds of variety, but they mostly don’t like those deep kinds of variety.
And another thing is, one of the most important features of a cult to make it potentially successful with respect to cultural evolution is insularity. Today we have say the Amish and Haredim who are successfully separating themselves from the rest of our world culture. The Amish are doubling every 20 years, and have been doing so for a century. They’re on track to beat the rest of us merely by continuing the way they’re going. And yes they have distinctive values, but the key point is they maintain enough insularity to preserve those values and to retain 93% of their kids inside their culture.
Is it that high?
Yes. And it’s like 2/3 in the Haredim, but I think it’s like 93% for the Amish. And they are succeeding with that degree of insularity. But most of the cultish people I’ve known, and I’ve known a lot of cultish people in my life, don’t remotely have that degree of insularity, and they’re simply not succeeding at making their children be part of their cults. But they are producing some degree of cultural variety in our world. I’m certainly happy to praise them for that. But what you’ll need to actually have a substantial chance of being successful is to be quite insular, and be quite different on key cultural values. But even then I fear you’re just throwing yourself into the cultural evolution mix that we had from centuries ago. These other processes seem to me to have better chance of directing the evolution toward being adaptive. Merely being a cult without any particular way you run your cult toward adaptation.
I mean starting a cult not just as fodder for the variation and selection meat grinder, but a cult specifically oriented toward one of these values you were talking about. It would be a complement to one of these other approaches. Instead of trying to convince some existing large group to adopt one of these three approaches, you could try to start a new group to adopt them.
And I’m happy to support that. I don’t know that I have any particular skills or characteristics conducive to starting cults. I have been around other people who seem to have effectively started cults, and I can see the characteristics that makes them work. But yes, but I’m happy to say world needs more cults, and especially cults that see that we need to be more adaptive and are willing to try to orient themselves in that direction.
But again, I see these three approaches. They could just be completely pro-capitalist or they could be directly pro-adaptation and tracking some metric of adaptation or they could be tracking some goal that’s inconsistent with collapse and then working toward getting big enough so that they could have an impact on that.
Well, let’s think about a quasi cult that you know something about, which is the effective altruist Silicon Valley rationalist community.
Those are two different communities, you know.
Yeah, I’m lumping several things together. But it seems like it ought to be the best candidate for a cult that specifically prioritizes adaptation. And so far, it has conspicuously not.
Yeah, I’m less hopeful than you about them, but I’m certainly happy to jump on any indications of hope to help try to move things.
I don’t say this hopefully. What is the explanation for why a community with epistemic virtues like this has not jumped on adaptation as a virtue?
As you know, much of the rationalist community was actually designed to be an AI risk community. And in fact much of the effective altruism community has been recruited to become an AI risk community. So in fact the core goal was AI risk, and rationalism was more of a vehicle to promote that. The core AI risk view has been: we have these values that we accept and hold dear, and we are not willing to consider changes. And then we’re going to be rational in pursuing those values. But they are not really open to thinking “my values are kind of random, and breaking, and we need to think about the process that produces them.” They’re certainly intelligent enough to understand that they come from somewhere. But – and I’ve had these discussions many times – most of them basically just say, “I just have my values, and I want to push them, and and I don’t care where they came from, or what virtues they have. They are just my values and that’s it.” They are taking the standard modern stance of “I can feel my values, and that’s just where I’m going to anchor my analysis.”
Right. I’m going to make a value judgment here, but it’s been disappointing how dominant AI risk as a concern has become to the exclusion of almost everything else.
It is monomaniacal.
Yeah. I cannot imagine a plausible combination of probability distribution and risk aversion under which AI acceleration comes out worse than the demographic situation we’re in right now.
But you can see from the point of view of a cult how it functions well to bind a cult together. I’ve been adjacent to many of these groups for a long time. And well before AI risk became dominant, I said my one-factor explanation for what they have in common is a taste for abstraction. They are smart and abstract, so they love things like many worlds quantum mechanics, or utility theory, or other things that don’t have much to do with each other except that they have high abstraction.
So what they want is a cause in the world where their abstraction is their key superpower, and that other people don’t get the problem because they aren’t willing to think abstractly enough. And AI risk serves that role very well. They can say, other people don’t see the problem because they’re not thinking abstractly about AIs. And they have these very abstract accounts for why AI risk is so compelling that you and I might find questionable, especially as economists. But since most of them aren’t economists, they’re using abstractions that aren’t grounded so much by the usual economic discipline of related abstractions. And so they find it quite comfortable to think abstractly that obviously AI is a risk. But nevertheless, that’s somewhat tangential for our main topic here.
And that’s the downside of cults, is that they are not known for being self-critical. And that could be a problem for adaptation as a virtue.
Of course, it’s not an accident that cultural evolution has selected cultures to be very confident in themselves. So in the world of cultural evolution from centuries ago, each culture, each local peasant community not only had their values, but they felt quite confident in them. And they felt quite confident that other groups with different values were just doing it wrong. This confidence – even irrational confidence – was selected for by cultural evolution as a way to make each group perpetuate itself in the face of hostile outside groups, and not to be absorbed by them. The problem is, we’re moving to this very different world where we broke the old cultural evolution process. And now we face the choice of either restarting that through poverty and destruction and fragmentation, or producing a new replacement process that could produce a similar effective progression toward adaptation without using this old process. But the old process relied on confidence. And in this new process, confidence could be misplaced and not adaptive. Modernity is a really huge gamble about earth and humanity, that we could make manage some really large changes. And we have created some really large changes. The question is, can they continue together as a coherent whole that functions and perpetuates itself? Or is it unfortunately an amazing attempt to make a lot of big changes that isn’t in fact coherent and successful enough to actually last? In which case, modernity will fall and our civilization will fall. And it might be a while before something rises again and plausibly rather different from ours.
There’s a scary thought for Halloween. The orientation of self-criticism that is so characteristic of big parts of the western intelligentsia is interesting in this context, because it looks self-critical but in a lot of ways it’s not.
If you go back to typical intellectual styles of 300 years ago in a peasant community, realize how many huge changes we’ve made. One of the big things that happened in modernity is much more abstraction, much more explicit reason, much more explicit calculation of what we do. In a peasant world, you mostly just inherit habits that are pretty old. You don’t actually have to calculate very much about what to do differently, because there aren’t that many options and you don’t have to go very deep in your analysis. So our modern world has pioneered an enormous increase in the level of abstraction or analysis, and the wide range of choices we each have and collectively have, and our need and habit of abstract analysis to try to navigate those large spaces of choices. We are nowhere near the ideal we might wish we had, but if we look from where we came from, we do have to credit a pretty amazing degree of change and even advance. But politics isn’t very much about choosing policies on the basis of the real reasonable analyses about consequences. We are much more analytic and abstract than our ancestors, but we’re just not remotely to the place of being able to collectively reasonably sit down and walk through an analysis of what works better and then do that. As an economist, I’m very aware of all the different ways in which our policy is not very effective because it’s dominated by pandering to ignorant public opinion.
But that’s what’s happening here too. I made a post recently about the difference between folk and expert morality. Most of our stances are based on a folk morality, which is what most people believe about morality. And we also have folk physics. Honestly if most of our world were built on folk physics, that would go pretty badly. So thankfully we allow physics experts to have substantial influence over our physics related constructions. But not so much in economics, and definitely not in morality.
But to flip that, one idea I’ve been tossing around is, we talked earlier about about the rationalist community being people with a taste for abstraction who might like to believe that, “let’s accept all of the problems we’re talking about. The way through is more abstraction.” So what do we do with the fact that historically you have waves of intellectuals going nuts? You can think of like situations throughout history where the intellectual class is driving this boneheaded in retrospect change, some very recently. Do you know the Ron Heiner paper, “The Origin of Predictable Behavior“?
Ron Heiner was a colleague of mine here. I know of some of his research. He had a sort of game theoretic account for some kinds of behavior.
Right. So let’s think about the behavioral repertoire of an organism and how complex behavior it can manage. When is it worth it to add a new behavior to your repertoire? It’s only worth it if the errors of omission from not having it are more serious than the errors of commission you make when you have this new behavior. And I wonder if abstraction is very similar.
Oh, sure. Abstraction can go wrong in so many ways.
Yeah. So I wonder – and this is maybe the scariest thought – is intelligence, is abstraction, even adaptive, if the errors it leads you to are serious enough to outweigh the behavioral flexibility it gives you?
I would think it’s more about how disciplined you are with your abstractions. One of the things that happened in modernity is that we saw rapid technological and economic innovation. And that raised the status of change and innovation. But the places that were doing that were facing commercial and scientific discipline. So their new abstractions that were driving their innovations were disciplined enough that they were trustworthy and valuable. And then other parts of culture, cultural elites said, “Wow, innovation is sure prestigious. We’ve so far just been celebrating the past and trying to preserve things. We should instead be pushing innovation.” And culture flipped in a somewhat discrete way at the rise of modernity, around 1900 or so, to instead of trying to preserve the past and see themselves as the upholding long-standing insights, they saw themselves as aggressively searching in the space of innovation for better culture, including better values and norms. But they didn’t actually have a good enough discipline to effectively search in that space. But they nevertheless did search in the space for new versions of, not only artistic abstractions, but also organizational abstractions and value abstractions. And for a long time people saw such a huge variety, they thought the only thing we agree on is that we don’t want to be what we used to be. We’re going in on this huge range of variation. And in some sense, World War II was where the world at least found something they agreed on, which was Nazism bad. And much of the modern world since then has been organized around that agreement. You know, racism bad, Nazism bad, sexism bad, and just making analogies to Nazism bad as the core moral framework of the modern world. But the key thing isn’t abstraction per se. It’s the connection between abstraction and the discipline that you have to manage the abstraction. And we have less of that. That is, we saw that abstraction was winning and powerful and celebrated in technological and scientific areas, and then we said “well then we should do similar abstraction innovation in these other areas”, not noticing we didn’t actually have good ways to discipline those.
So the discipline is important here because it reduces your errors of commission with a new abstraction. So the adaptiveness of intelligence is going to depend on that discipline in a very direct way.
Indeed. So a standard story about cultural evolution that you probably know but maybe our listeners don’t know, is that people copying other people’s behavior doesn’t actually work unless you have a way to copy better-than-average behaviors. So a key thing in cultural evolution was the accumulation of heuristics about who to copy. So for example if you wonder “how should I fish”, and you look for models of fishing, if you just picked at random that doesn’t work at all. Our first human heuristic was to pick high status people. High status people on average do everything better. So let’s copy them. And you’ll do a little better copying the high status fishers. But if you have a more specific heuristic, like copy the people who catch more fish, that’s much more effective. So the history of humanity has often been the collection of these heuristics about who to copy about what. And then we didn’t have a set of reliable heuristics about that in the modern era, where we suddenly just made huge changes in economics and technology. We saw “wow that’s really effective”, but we didn’t have a inherited cultural warning that that only works in these areas. And we’re going to pay a very high price to learn that lesson. So a key question is, in what way will the future be more cautious about changes in values? It’s learned that we don’t have good guides for change there.
I don’t think it’s that we’ve moved away from copy high status people. Rather it’s a question of how do we assign status? And hopefully you assign it for something useful and measurable like actually succeeding at catching fish. Hence my remark earlier about the relative status of parents and children. The cultural drift you point to is a question of how do we assign status, and what do we assign it for.
And status going bad is a key way culture can go bad. If you assign status to the wrong things, and everybody copies status, then everybody could be going the wrong way. But when people decide “I’m going to copy the fishing behavior of people catch a lot of fish,” they don’t necessarily think those people are high status in general. But they could be good fishermen. People have this heuristic you respect certain people in certain contexts: they are, say, locally high status.
That counts as status!
But it’s a local status. You won’t take them with you to DC when you go visit the president, but you still learn to fish from them because they’re the best model for fishing.
I wonder if part of the monoculture you’re describing is the globalization of status.
If we ask what happened in the modern world, one of the underlying changes is just the mixing and merging of many small cultures into a larger world. Many things seem to be a consequence of that. So yes, as you mix and merge many smaller cultures, you’re going to now mix and merge their norms, their status markers, and even their status rankings. Now they’re trading with each other, and their languages are converging, and their practices are converging. All this mixing and and travel and talk and trade is a key driver of the modern world converging culturally. It’s just at much higher levels.
I want to emphasize again how nonobvious it is that that would lead to less variation and not more. I’m sure you remember the bright hope of the internet in the early 2000s was we’d get an explosion of cultural variation. And 20 years later, we have just Taylor Swift plus the long tail of also-rans.
Now I do think this urge for shallow multiculturalism as I talked about before hides the convergence from people. Most everybody we know is not that comfortable with thinking themselves as just a generic world elite. They are eager to identify with some subset of the world, economist, etc, fan of this particular thing, and they get a lot of identity value out of these particular subgroups. The point is that doesn’t actually give us the kind of variation that we need for cultural evolution. It’s a very shallow kind of variation that doesn’t touch the deep layers that need to vary.
And the value of having these superficial identity markers is itself a very deep common value.
Right. Fundamentally natural selection is going to need variation in the deep things. And we’ve that’s the key thing we’ve lost. We do have variation on shallow things. Star Trek and Star Wars fans live their lives pretty much the same, but they have this identity in those things. If they meet each other they say, “See, I’m not like everybody else. I’m in this unique community.”
So for many people, this “let’s fragment the world into more variety” is in their mind the most emotionally attractive solution to the problem. I think they just like the idea that the world would fragment, but they themselves aren’t very eager to fragment, and that’s the big disconnect.
Yeah because we’re not used to thinking of culture as deep values. We think of it as these superficial things. Like tacos are culture, but if you don’t believe in democracy, that’s a mistake.
The way I would describe it is, when people analyze everything, they anchor their analysis in their own values.
Because what else can you do?
But they’re very reluctant to see that this came from somewhere. And that maybe they should doubt it, and then maybe they should want a process where other people have different values than them, and those other people win sometimes. That’s a hard thing to see. People anchor on their value for democracy as moral truth, and not as a particular gamble made by cultural evolution to have somebody take a particular strategy while somebody else took a different strategy and see which works out best.
And if moral truths are just true, then you don’t have to worry about adaptation.
So of these various solutions, what do you like best?
Gosh. What would I implement if I was a dictator versus what do I judge to be the best prospects in practice?
Where would you where will you throw your personal younger than I am, so you have more years to throw your weight in on something and try to make a go of it, right? So, where would you throw your weight?
I’m not going to say a cult, but let’s start some dynasties. Dynasties with distinctive values and then insular enough to preserve themselves.
Are you married?
Yes. And first kid due in one and a half weeks. Hopefully one of many.
What does your wife think about the dynasty thing or the insular dynasty thing?
I think not opposed.
I think the insularity thing is the big hard thing for most people in our world. I like to read and travel and buy from all around the world. So the idea of like limiting myself to some thousand people, and that being my entire world, seems pretty very limited.
That’s not necessarily necessary. Think of the Jewish diaspora, which has maintained a coherent normative identity separate from everywhere they are. For thousands of years.
But through a substantial insularity from the community around them.
But they did that despite being surrounded by a very different community, and interacting with that community. They’re not insular like “don’t talk to us”. They’re insular in the sense of “we’re doing our thing, but we will trade with you.”
So that’s the question: how much insularity? If you look at the Amish or Haredim today, they aren’t totally insulated. But they are substantially insulated. They have arms length relationships with outsiders, but they limit those in pretty strong and dramatic ways. The example that I’ll come back to is Christians taking over the Roman Empire. They did it by just doubling every 20 years for three centuries. And they were more predominant in cities. And cities tend to have lower rates of survival. So it’s even more impressive to double every 20 years even though you’re in cities. And in cities, of course, you might think they’d have more contact with other people around them, but I guess back then they could be insular enough and stay in cities.
How much of that was horizontal versus vertical transmission? Do you know?
They had a limited set of strategies that did help them grow faster than just DNA, with two parents. One is that they had their daughters marry non-Christians, but convince the non-Christians to raise their children Christian. They also had a habit of saving babies put out for exposure to die. They had a habit of treating people in pandemics in the cities, when other people would run away from them to save their lives, and then those people rightfully would become Christians.
So it’s not just differential fertility.
Differential fertility is probably most of it actually. But these other strategies did help. Even so it’s pretty impressive. But it’s about that insularity. So for anybody thinking of going the cult route here – I like to say if you’re on a ship heading for an iceberg, there’s two options. You get off on a lifeboat, or you get to the helm and turn the ship. Either you join a small community that’s going to break away from the dominant world culture and its influences and somehow find a way to have high fertility in addition to insularity. Or you have to find a way to collectively get some of our groups to redirect itself in a more adaptive direction with one of the three approaches we talked about.
I’ve thought of this some in connection now with parenting norms. You’ve talked about intensive parenting. There will be people who will shame you for not doing certain intensive things in a runaway way. The standards rising and rising with no obvious limit. And I’ve had the thought, what kind of mind survives into of the future under runaway selection for more and more intensive parenting? It’s either going to be highly disagreeable people who say buzz off, or people who are just not attuned to the normal status markers.
Well, I still think the fundamental choice is this lifeboat or ship thing. There are the groups like the Amish or Haredim who are breaking off and insular enough that they’re growing, and they’ll just win. And then there’s the rest of us who will just decline and become a smaller influence in the world. And unless we reform in some way, we’ll just be replaced by these now small groups who are growing. I see that as a pretty sharp distinction here. I don’t see a lot of intermediate groups. If Israel, say, has a bit over replacement fertility, then you might think it’s more of an intermediate case. It’s not so much like the Haredim, but it’s not so much like the rest of us. But I see relatively little in that intermediate range. So, it seems to me like it’s mainly: take a big chunk of our world and reform it substantially, or abandon. And both approaches seem really hard.
And if there is no intermediate, that’s bad news for anybody trying to hedge their bets.
And it’s pretty stark in terms of the future. One question is, say you work on some technology or something. You should ask yourself how much this could survive a deep downturn. If it can’t, there’s much less point to work on it in terms of influencing the long-term future. It might just be lost and have to be rediscovered later. So if you want to influence the future, you need to focus on innovations that could survive a deep downturn.
For example, the Amish are actually happy to use technology as long as they can learn it at home. They don’t want to send their young people off to college, or trade school, or the military. They need to keep people home, but they’re happy to use whatever technology they can bring in and figure out how to use at home. So that might be a standard to consider.
Which raises the question, how much insularity? Could you get away with just a strong cultural orientation to be skeptical of the broader world’s norms, to raise children to see themselves as separate from the world?
We’ve actually had a lot of attempts at cults and communes over the last centuries. And the number of them that have succeeded at becoming insular fertile groups is really quite small.
Well, a lot of cults are specifically antinatal.
Indeed. But even those that are somewhat pro-natal, they still largely failed. Even, say, the Amish didn’t start on their growth tear until a bit over a century ago. They existed for centuries before that without much growth. And the same for the Orthodox Jews. They were not growing very fast until after World War II in Israel. They’ve started to grow quite fast and in some other parts of the world. But that’s also a relatively recent switch.
Is the reason for that because of higher fertility, or lower infant mortality, or what?
I don’t know that we know, but it would be worth figuring out. Certainly for like 1800s US, the whole country was growing pretty fast. So it might be that the Amish weren’t growing much faster than the rest. And then the pull away from the rest was in the 20th century when others were becoming more modern and they didn’t. But certainly I’m sure medicine, having more kids survive, certainly must have helped.
One thing that occurs to me that would support your your claim of a lack of an intermediate option would be the collapse of Mormon fertility. That was an intermediate case.
I think that’s an even stronger lesson for decentralization. A key fact about the Amish and Haredim is they are quite decentralized. Each group of 50 to 100 people is completely self-governing, and gets to set all their own rules and make up new rules. And that means some of them have been more friendly to technology or merging with culture. And then some of those fail, but the collection of them is more robust because they have a variety. What happened to the Mormons is they had a centralized church decision to merge more into the shared US culture. And only a tiny fraction of Mormon deviants were not buying into that shared church strategy. This was 1920s or 30s, maybe even before then. I don’t actually know, but I know people who would know. But there was this conflict between the Mormons and the rest of the US. And the rest of the US was pretty hostile to the Mormons. And they felt that embattlement, and decided to compromise, to say “let’s like integrate better with the US.” And they succeeded at that, and that’s why Mormon fertility is 20 years behind the rest of the US, but falling in the same trajectory.
That history of hostility then raises the question, how insular could an upstart group potentially even be if the surrounding culture is aggressive?
Well, the Amish have succeeded somewhat remarkably.
But they’ve been kind of grandfathered in because they’ve been here from almost the beginning, right?
I don’t know if it’s the grandfathering that’s really making it work. The Haredim are also being pretty accepted in Israel. It is a key question how some small groups managed to maintain the goodwill of outsiders enough to be allowed to be different. We know of many other cults in the US that were not very loved or respected, and the Amish have succeeded, and even the Orthodox Jews have succeeded more in maintaining enough outside respect that they are given enough autonomy to, say, have their own high schools, or opt out of social security, other pretty big accommodations for their differences. I would be much more worried about human extinction if in fact we were more eager to squash these deviants, because they’re quite small compared to the rest of the world now. So if the rest of the world got it in their head that these deviants must be crushed, they would be crushed. But then there would not be high fertility groups to grow.
Are there any other groups in the US who are who have gotten similar concessions like exemption from social security?
There’s the Mennonites and the Hutterites and groups like those.
Pretty similar. Anabaptist adjacent. So it seems it would be very difficult to have a new group become similarly insular.
I’ve been pursuing this topic for a couple of years and finding it hard to engage people, and as a result, trying to search in the space of framings of the topic find ways more to engage people. So I’m very interested in your opinion, seeing as you’re more sympathetic than most, how exactly this issue could be presented to engage a wider range of people. I feel like if more people just saw the problem then I could maybe more focus on narrower aspects of it. But given that so few people see it, my priority has to be to just get them to see the problem at all. One question is, should it be allied with some current political faction, or seen as neutrally scientific, independent of those factions? That’s often a way that people get engaged by things, is for their faction to support it, but then that puts off the other side.
Maybe this is a tactical error, but based on my values – which we may interrogate, where did those come from? – because I’ve been socialized into academic norms, I hope it doesn’t become partisan or politicized. The big practical question is, positive or negative. Do we want to be apocalyptic, or is it like reach for the stars type thing? Clearly the apocalyptic works, based on the climate change movement.
It can. Although many people have said that I’m sort of a downer, and they would like more of an upbeat message. I do have these upbeat possibilities for solutions, but they’re long shots. I should mention that we talked about number go up governance. There’s a number of these approaches where a way a group could pursue a goal like these together is, they could pick a number, and they could tell their leaders, make number go up. And I see three ways to do this at least. The simplest one is firing them if number goes down, and rehiring them if number goes up. That requires that the populace actually care about the number enough to do this, and that you’re actually keeping track of it as opposed to giving lip service to it.
A second more direct approach is, you make a financial contract where you pay them in proportion to the number, and then when number goes up they get paid a lot. Now it’s less about when you hire or fire them, and more about how hard they work when they’re in the role to try to make number go up.
The third approach is my decision markets approach using conditional prediction markets, where you let the market decide in key decisions based on number given yes or number given no for a proposal, depending on which number is higher, you do that thing for a policy. This third approach I think is my invention, but it has the advantage of letting more people feel involved rather than just picking a number. As we said, one of the things people probably don’t like about the mere unleashing capitalism approach is the people who talk a lot aren’t in charge of that. So the more that we would pick together some sacred goal like a million people living in space, then people could feel like they had picked that, and we together had picked that, and we have more agency about it. Anybody could trade in these markets who wanted to, and then people could also feel more involved there. So the question is, how important is it for any of these solutions that people feel a way to be involved more directly in it?
If we’re thinking about fertility collapse as the a negative result that we’re trying to counteract here, that would itself militate toward a more positive, inspirational approach. I’ve seen evidence that the biggest fertility booms are when there is a frontier, and when the frontier closes, things settle down. So what is our next frontier? Space could be it. Space is inspiring. It’s a frontier to colonize. I don’t have a better idea than that. I talk to my students, and they’re following all the SpaceX news, like when they catch the thing with the needle. That’s exciting, right?
Indeed. Many people, even myself, look at that and say, “But why should it be exciting?” Because space is just lots of empty space. But that’s a way in which anything that’s inspiring is vulnerable to skepticism. If you look at it and demand the universe to explain why it’s inspiring, the inspiration is elusive.
You can dissolve anything that way. And this is one of the concrete norms that have drifted in a direction that I think is very harmful, is a general skepticism of human agency, which seems to come from in large part the environmental movement. When humans do things, that’s bad. There are these crazy people sometimes that talk like, “colonize the moon? Oh that’s colonialism that’s bad.” Like who’s on the moon that we’re worried about? But that’s a that’s an impulse that people have because the skepticism of agency is so deeply ingrained in a lot of people now. And that’s something that needs to be broken through.
That can be substantially explained in part by your story that we pick some principles and just keep going with them. Like once we decided that you could be doing too much to the jungle, then you decide that you could be doing too much to everything, and then maybe doing anything is too much. Just continuing on with the logic of some very simple initial stance. But that’s what the modern world does a lot of. Like I said, people have values, and they don’t really know what they are because they’re kind of inconsistent and kind of vague. But people get a handle on something and then they just keep going in that direction as best they can, because that that’s apparently very inspiring to them. You have these hero stories of the environmental movement, or fighting Nazism, or whatever it is, you want to be one of those heroes, you have to find in your mind the next version of it to be the hero about.
That reminds me, the other solution I was going to propose on a broad cultural level is a sense that moral values are irreducible to each other. That there’s more than one moral value, and if we try to reduce everything to one – like the effective altruists say everything follows from “suffering is bad” – and you get a lot of pathologies from that, no matter what your ultimate bad or ultimate good is, if there’s one of them. You’ve talked about like inconsistencies in our moral stories. But some of these are functional. We don’t want to take this value and run as far as we can with it. We want to have brakes on this process. That could be other values and just being okay with that. I remember there was a remark by Boris Johnson a little while ago who said “I appreciate old Roman religion, because you had these values embodied by different gods that you could pit against each other.” I thought that was a very interesting remark.
I have a podcast co-host, Agnes Callard, who’s been focused lately on what she calls the unicontext. As peasants, most of our norms and values were implicit in the structures around us and in our shared habits. We didn’t even need to be very explicit about them or put them in words. And as we merged different peasant communities, we had to now be more explicit and more abstract about our norms and values. So a big modern trend has been trying to produce abstract descriptions of our shared norms and values so that we could enforce them. Peasants who lived in a detailed world that was so in sync with each other that they could obviously see a deviation that was disapproved and pointed out and do something, they didn’t have to put in some abstract legal language what it was wrong with it. But we need to do that more. So that’s been driving a rising abstraction in our values. And, she says, a rising focus on negativity, because we often agree more about negatives than positives.
And what is abstraction? Abstraction is making something independent of context.
Dropping details, yes. The more that we have a few values, if they’re in conflict or just not specified, now we have trouble saying what we agree on about the choices to make. That’s the pressure for finding some way to make these measurable, comparable, so that we can settle their conflict, and then we can agree on our norms and values. But as you say that has problems when you pick just one of them that isn’t in fact everything that matters. But if you’re going to pick one value, adaptation is pretty close to the one that would work.
So with adaptation as a value, what bullets would we have to bite there, or is that does that imply a rich enough set of concrete actions? Maybe that’s enough.
The key problem is that adaptation isn’t very observable. You have to do a lot of inference between behavior and adaptation. So it doesn’t really function as norms or laws. We can’t have a law saying “don’t do maladaptive things”, because we’re just not going to be able to settle that. But we can do it for governance more in the way I described, in terms of having an asset whose price is the thing that drives governance. But certainly if you look at say the story of the Nazis, the claim is they were eagerly trying to win evolutionary competition by military actions, and that going to war with people is a natural result of trying to be a social Darwinist.
And that’s not actually Darwinianly very effective.
Certainly it wasn’t very effective for Hitler. That was actually a pretty losing strategy for the Germans. But as I said, Skinner’s book was titled Beyond Freedom and Dignity. And you do have to admit once you have this one value of adaptation, it might conflict. That’s going to happen for any other value you have. You have to admit that there are circumstances where you may have to compromise on these other things you treasure. Especially under uncertainty.
That’s probably where the rub comes in, is if there’s uncertainty as to what is indeed adaptive and then that bowls over other things that we might value. We could very easily make consequential mistakes, as you point out the Germany did.
Indeed. Well, we’ve had a relatively long conversation here. I’m conscious of the fact that when people look at the length of the video, that might discourage them from starting because it’s too long. That’s a common heuristic for many podcast hosts until they get this big audience who loves everything they do, even if they go for four hours. There are some people like that, but not most of them. This has been a really fun conversation. I respect and I hope we can talk again sometime.
For sure, I appreciate you having me on. It’s great to talk to somebody who sees the problem.
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