Im not sure when cultural norms have ever adapted to novel and speculative future scenarios. They usually consist of solutions to reoccurring problems in the groups’s past + adaptations to current circumstance. Has a culture ever done this?
Yes, but it's the underlying point of the exercise, no? You are worried about the future in light of trends related to fertility.....the only examples I can think of of societies addressing novel future scenarios involve gov't policy more than culture (excluding institutional culture). So I was questioning how / if culture can do this. Also wondering about the notion of 'drift', seeing that low fertility is adaptive for individuals / slices of society nowadays, as opposed to being a random change.
Most of these status markers boil down to: We assign high status to people (and organizations, and cultures) that we deem to have a high degree of agency.
Wealth, success, health, beauty, strength, intelligence, charisma, influence, power, personality – all are predictors of how much agency a person has over their situation and the people around them. Hence their status implications; we want to align with and emulate those with high agency. The harder a signal is to fake, the more credence it has.
All of this seems orthogonal to your concept of cultural adaptiveness. Agency is a component of adaptability (or rather, a complete lack of agency makes it hard to adapt), but in itself agency doesn't guarantee useful adaptation: One can simply be pointed in the wrong direction.
Do you have a working definition of "cultural adaptiveness"? Clearly "at least replacement-level fertility" is a component, but I'm curious if you have a more general definition.
You've used that excuse before, but there is no "standard concept, nothing special" for adaptiveness. There are so many different ways to measure or quantify adaptiveness. It's fundamentally a vague concept.
Talk to an evolutionary biologist and they'll say evolution is a red queen's race. It doesn't necessarily work towards any particular progress. You can't rank the participants, all of whom are constantly dying and branching into descendant species and changing into other forms in response to other species changing into other forms.
Certainly some cultures survive and others die. But no culture survives forever. In fact, no culture survives unchanged for long; 1960s US culture is dead now, replaced by 1970s US culture and 1980s US culture. Every modern generation has a different culture from the one before. So maybe really you mean to speak about cultural *elements* rather than cultures as a whole. But is it longevity that matters for these cultural elements, or size of population that has the elements, or economic force that has the elements, or what? Maybe some weighted function of population and duration and economic force - how are you going to weight that?
If you ultimately want humans to colonize space - as you've said before sometimes - then *that's* your adaptiveness criterion; what cultural elements are most likely to lead humans to do that? That would be very different from your regressive conservative outlook, and wouldn't have much to do with the cultural elements that worked for primitive hunter-gatherers. It would involve, first and foremost, high levels of science funding which would have to be done by a central government due to the long-term nature of the potential payoff.
The term "adaptive" is undefined. You can't say "this is more adaptive than that" if you can't at least give a clear, empirically measurable definition of "adaptive." Twice I've seen you say that "adaptive" is just "the usual notion" - but there is no clear "usual notion" of "adaptive"! It's a very ambiguous term. Evolution does not progress towards a pinnacle that allows us to apply rankings; it often goes in circles.
And I suspect also that you're conflating the success of the culture with the number of children of people living in the culture. Those aren't the same thing. A culture can spread even when the people who originated it don't leave descendants. For example, the Shakers and other revivalist movements that required celibacy were more successful and long-lasting than comparable revivalist movements of the time that allowed sex.
I would like to see this explored much deeper! I've been speculating about the influence of status-seeking and status display within institutions and elite social circles.
It seems to be a persistent feature of this milieu, which retards the ability of the group to react rationally to new information or the priorities and values of other classes. If you belong to a group that believes that its members are always right (not just correct, but morally right) and you fear dissension from that group, how do you register constructive criticism or a differing perspective? Answer: you don't. You persist in error and you manage the cognitive dissonance that results from encountering the harm done by your group's program and values in the world. As time goes on the distress grows, and so does the group rigidity.
I can't see how this ends, others than a wholesale loss of power (and status)... or a traumatic psychological epiphany.
Millions of people have had to choose their intuitions/beliefs OR their social status and career prospects. A few chose the former (you can find some of them on Substack). The vast majority stayed with the herd, where they remain today.
Im not sure when cultural norms have ever adapted to novel and speculative future scenarios. They usually consist of solutions to reoccurring problems in the groups’s past + adaptations to current circumstance. Has a culture ever done this?
This post says nothing about 'novel and speculative future scenarios.'
Yes, but it's the underlying point of the exercise, no? You are worried about the future in light of trends related to fertility.....the only examples I can think of of societies addressing novel future scenarios involve gov't policy more than culture (excluding institutional culture). So I was questioning how / if culture can do this. Also wondering about the notion of 'drift', seeing that low fertility is adaptive for individuals / slices of society nowadays, as opposed to being a random change.
Most of these status markers boil down to: We assign high status to people (and organizations, and cultures) that we deem to have a high degree of agency.
Wealth, success, health, beauty, strength, intelligence, charisma, influence, power, personality – all are predictors of how much agency a person has over their situation and the people around them. Hence their status implications; we want to align with and emulate those with high agency. The harder a signal is to fake, the more credence it has.
All of this seems orthogonal to your concept of cultural adaptiveness. Agency is a component of adaptability (or rather, a complete lack of agency makes it hard to adapt), but in itself agency doesn't guarantee useful adaptation: One can simply be pointed in the wrong direction.
Do you have a working definition of "cultural adaptiveness"? Clearly "at least replacement-level fertility" is a component, but I'm curious if you have a more general definition.
I'm using the standard concept, nothing special.
You've used that excuse before, but there is no "standard concept, nothing special" for adaptiveness. There are so many different ways to measure or quantify adaptiveness. It's fundamentally a vague concept.
Talk to an evolutionary biologist and they'll say evolution is a red queen's race. It doesn't necessarily work towards any particular progress. You can't rank the participants, all of whom are constantly dying and branching into descendant species and changing into other forms in response to other species changing into other forms.
Certainly some cultures survive and others die. But no culture survives forever. In fact, no culture survives unchanged for long; 1960s US culture is dead now, replaced by 1970s US culture and 1980s US culture. Every modern generation has a different culture from the one before. So maybe really you mean to speak about cultural *elements* rather than cultures as a whole. But is it longevity that matters for these cultural elements, or size of population that has the elements, or economic force that has the elements, or what? Maybe some weighted function of population and duration and economic force - how are you going to weight that?
If you ultimately want humans to colonize space - as you've said before sometimes - then *that's* your adaptiveness criterion; what cultural elements are most likely to lead humans to do that? That would be very different from your regressive conservative outlook, and wouldn't have much to do with the cultural elements that worked for primitive hunter-gatherers. It would involve, first and foremost, high levels of science funding which would have to be done by a central government due to the long-term nature of the potential payoff.
Where's the validation for these rankings?
The term "adaptive" is undefined. You can't say "this is more adaptive than that" if you can't at least give a clear, empirically measurable definition of "adaptive." Twice I've seen you say that "adaptive" is just "the usual notion" - but there is no clear "usual notion" of "adaptive"! It's a very ambiguous term. Evolution does not progress towards a pinnacle that allows us to apply rankings; it often goes in circles.
And I suspect also that you're conflating the success of the culture with the number of children of people living in the culture. Those aren't the same thing. A culture can spread even when the people who originated it don't leave descendants. For example, the Shakers and other revivalist movements that required celibacy were more successful and long-lasting than comparable revivalist movements of the time that allowed sex.
I would like to see this explored much deeper! I've been speculating about the influence of status-seeking and status display within institutions and elite social circles.
It seems to be a persistent feature of this milieu, which retards the ability of the group to react rationally to new information or the priorities and values of other classes. If you belong to a group that believes that its members are always right (not just correct, but morally right) and you fear dissension from that group, how do you register constructive criticism or a differing perspective? Answer: you don't. You persist in error and you manage the cognitive dissonance that results from encountering the harm done by your group's program and values in the world. As time goes on the distress grows, and so does the group rigidity.
I can't see how this ends, others than a wholesale loss of power (and status)... or a traumatic psychological epiphany.
Millions of people have had to choose their intuitions/beliefs OR their social status and career prospects. A few chose the former (you can find some of them on Substack). The vast majority stayed with the herd, where they remain today.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/its-not-real
What is the author's definition of "adaptive" in an adaptive status marker?
Adaptive in the sense of being able to rise to the top compared with humble beginnings of its parent?
Or: being able to withstand occasional bio/social catastrophies like Hamlet's slings and arrows?
Or: something similar to the immonologic binary between innate and acquired immunity?
Also: is a adaptive status marker largely genetically inherited or conferred by growing up in the right family if adopted?