> For well over a century now, our environment has changed quite fast, with the world economy doubling faster than every twenty years. Our greatest heroes have been cultural activists who push for big culture changes mostly unrelated to adaptive pressures, thus causing high rates of cultural drift. Our hundred of thousands of diverse peasant cultures were first crushed into a few hundred national cultures, and then into a single dominant elite world monoculture, vastly reducing variety. And our great health, wealth, and peace have greatly reduced selection pressures; cultures hardly ever die anymore. Differential fertility, which takes centuries to impose its discipline, is our main remaining cultural selection pressure.
This was the cleanest and most cogent top-level explanation of the "cultural drift" problem I've seen yet, kudos.
I think a religious revival (anticipated, for example, by Ross Douthat’s new book) might have the power to kick-start a new and more adaptive culture without waiting for a small fertile sub-group to emerge for whom contact with the broader world doesn’t dampen the inertia.
It seems to me that this is one of the least persuasive arguments you've made in your career. You've had some unpopular theories, but all of them seem to have been convincing, to some degree, to some audience, and most of them have seemed plausible to me. But this one I'm really struggling to understand. Given the frequency with which you have published what seems like the basic premise, I get the sense that you are having trouble connecting with people on this one. Out of curiosity, are there people you feel you've convinced with this argument?
(If it's not clear, I'm asking because I'm genuinely interested in understanding the theory better, not as some kind of rhetorical question.)
Cultural drift seems to apply mostly to values, the collective criteria by which we determine which aspects of life we like and want more of. It's not clear how to think of "maladaptation" within value space. In a biological context, maladaptation is easy to spot, because the criteria for biological evolution is clear - the reproductive success of the species. What's the equivalent criteria by which we are meant to judge cultural evolution? Is it happiness? Well-being? Or is cultural evolution also, ultimately, meant to be judged by biological criteria (population size)? Assuming that we have a perspective from which we can stand outside of values-space from which to judge it seems deeply problematic to me.
You ARE biological. We all are. We can talk about behavior that is adaptive for you or me. And that's what I am talking about. Without adaptive behavior, your lineage soon ceases to exist. So adaptive behavior is a requirement for achieving any other goals you have re your long term lineage.
I think one of the reasons I was struggling to understand your argument is that, for me, culture serves this other, harder-to-define function, it is the space within which we update our coordination protocols - deciding which things we value and how much. So having it referred to, metaphorically, as an engineered thing with a well-defined purpose and clearly demarcated failure states (like an airplane or a car on a highway), throws me for a loop.
Perhaps the best way for me to understand your theory is to see you as saying something along the lines of...
Whatever else culture is doing, it must continue to exist in order to do it, it must not crash the biological species which is its substrate. We can take a systems-theory perspective on culture and say even if its functions are too complex and recursive and uncomputable for us to understand fully, we can confidently say that, like all systems, it can crash out. We don't need to fully understand a system to notice when, in broad strokes, it looks like it might be crashing out in this way.
Maybe I'm overcomplicating things, but this way of paraphrasing your argument (if correct) helps me appreciate it more, and avoids the main problem I was having, which was, basically, that it sounded too much like far-mode musing about distant destinations and not enough like practical near-mode thinking about avoiding rocks.
I still think "drift" isn't the problem (it is often the solution) crashing is.
Re: "Whatever else culture is doing, it must continue to exist in order to do it, it must not crash the biological species which is its substrate."
This argument is often made about parasites. Yet parasites do sometimes drive their host populations extinct. How can that happen? It tends to happen when the parasite can infect individuals from multiple species - and so is not dependent on keeping any particular host species alive.
That is part of the reason why we have to be careful with intelligent machines. They can propagate cuulture much like humans can - but then they are like another species for culture to inhabit - and then the humans become expendable. Cultural propagation no longer depends on the existence of human hosts.
Isn’t the most fundamental cause of the problem essentially that we became one global village (due to “globalization “ of trade,media, etc)? Obviously that had many benefits but also introduced this risk.
Re: "In a biological context, maladaptation is easy to spot, because the criteria for biological evolution is clear - the reproductive success of the species." This idea is actually rejected by most evolutionary biologists. The reason is that there are many adaptations that help individual reproduction at the expense of the species. Sexual selection provides many examples of these - both via male combat (think Irish Elk) and female choice (think birds of paradise).
> What's the equivalent criteria by which we are meant to judge cultural evolution? [...] Or is cultural evolution also, ultimately, meant to be judged by biological criteria (population size)?
Yes, that's how evolution is normally discussed: in a descriptive rather than normative manner which predicts outcomes rather than judges them.
How do you see possible counterforces? Could decentralized technologies (like blockchain and AI tools) help smaller subcultures fend against monocultural drift, for example? Or could natural selection eventually be replaced by genetic editing and artificial intelligence - not just as tweaks to the parameters but as a partial "end of culture" shift?
> Our hundreds of thousands of diverse peasant cultures were first crushed into a few hundred national cultures, and then into a single dominant elite world monoculture, vastly reducing variety.
I think this trend has already peaked and is starting to reverse. The combination of late-20th-century mass-media and American unipolarity really was what made the entire globe's elite culture so uniform; the retreat of the US from internationalism, the rise of China, the segmentation of the internet into different parts based on regulations and content rules are all contributing to this. And while there was a brief moment where the internet itself was a global culturally centralizing force, filters and algorithmic feeds are starting to make online communities feel geuninely different. I would venture to say the *cultural* differences between X, Bluesky, Reddit feel more significant than the cultural differences between the US, the UK, and Australia.
Good point. But people in different online subcultures still have to live together under the same laws. It's hard to have meaningful cultural variation while you're stuck under one legal code.
For increasing cultural variety by fragmentation, interstellar colonization would be effective, since I doubt a monoculture can sustain itself when even one-way communication time is at least several years. Interstellar colonization may be somewhat far off technologically, but since we're talking about a problem that plays out over centuries, a solution that itself takes centuries seems reasonable to consider.
I find Hanson's reasoning here (and in similar pieces) confusing/confused (might be him or me).
First off, he notes the extremely rapid cultural evolution of the past few hundred years, of which the fertility decline has only taken place in the past two generations in developed countries; my grandparents' generation had a fertility *spike* in response to improved education and living standards, after all.
He then proposes that high fertility cultures like the Amish and haredim will, through sheer linear interpolation, come to dominate the earth through remaining unchanged for three hundred years. He also consistently fails to note that the Amish and, especially, the Haredim are fundamentally parasitic, only capable of existing within the protective cocoon of their host civilisations.
This is also ignoring any technological change over these three hundred years, which is implicitly rejected as unimportant! He gestures at AI and electronic minds, but a wide range of other much less dramatic changes could radically change the direction of travel well before these demographic differences become material.
We are, indeed, at a point of high elite coherence, but I'd argue we were also at that point in the late 19th century, before fragmenting again for a century before reforming after the fall of the soviet union and opening up of China. We may be about to have another fragmentation; this strikes me as classic “end of history” reasoning, accepting the messiness of the past as a given but projecting clean straight lines into the future.
I called it a "straightforward projection of current trends" exactly to note its naiveté. I didn't at all mean to claim it is very likely. Yet it is still more likely than any other specific scenario you could describe. Yes all these trends fluctuate, but over centuries the overall trend toward world cultural integration is pretty unmistakable.
Is that true? The increases in transport and telecommunications technology certainly have made it easier for ideas to spread, but I think the crux of our disagreement (shout if you think differently) is less on extinction/homogenisation rates, but rather on mutation rates.
Romanisation created a fairly homogenous elite culture in Europe, Catholic Europe was fairly homogenous in its political and social outlook until the printing press/Protestantism blew it up, and steamships and telegraph lines went a long way towards creating an elite monoculture until the intellectual ferment of the early 20th century threw everything into disarray again. We haven't been in our current stasis for long!
I get that the projection of trends of high fertility subgroups is a thought experiment, but I'm just not sure how useful that thought experiment is when the only long lasting high fertility subgroups is developed economies are essentially parasitic. Cancer is a high fertility subgroups of cells but it's hardly the future of life, right?
All living things are varying patterns of nucleic acid, and their morphological differences mask the fact that it’s one continuous process of endless transformation. This nucleic acid doesn’t have a fixed end; it simply repeats, evolving like a river flowing without destination.
So what does innovation and culture accomplish that isn’t already achieved by living things everywhere—reproducing ad infinitum? My lineage traces back to fish in the Devonian and shrew-like mammals in the Jurassic. Are we apes a success or a failure in their eyes? Who are their truest living heirs? What would constitute an honorable, successful descendent 200 million years from now?
I'm surprised how much I disagree with this. tl;dr: part of my job is following shifts in sentiment towards various things, and I think you're vastly under-estimating how much our cultural changes are actively and accurately selected for (mostly when beliefs come into contact with cold reality). Some thoughts:
1) Suppose we have 100,000 tribes with 100,000 cultures. As they interact or die off, we should expect these cultures to find local maximas of adaptation, greatly reducing their number. This process should continue over time, especially as communication and travel increase, leading to the situation we're in today with a few dominate cultures.
This seems intuitive. When modern humans look back at older cultures, they find them insane and/or evil. Superstition and cruelty were far more common than they are today.
I think this is what you described? This culling was a good thing: those older cultures were horrible, and the number of much-better cultures is necessarily much fewer than the number of awful ones.
2) Our number of cultures today appears to be increasing thanks to the Internet increasing the variety of communication. Geographical proximity is no longer a requirement for a culture to form.
As we should expect if the 1) process was successful, most of these new cultures are not good. They're drifting away from local maximas (on certain dimensions). e.g. MAGA (too much gullibility), conspiracy theorists (too little trust in elites), and wokeness (a move away from meritocracy), are all maladaptive.
3) The above is only a problem if there is no selection pressure to correct these errors, but recent history suggests there is.
Wokeness has at least suffered a stroke.
Conspiracy theories have little to no predictive power, and the people that believe in them tend to lose their shirt in public markets (my area of expertise).
Anti-vax will correct as high-r0 diseases like measles spread.
MAGA is a cult of personality so will likely die whenever Trump does. It will also publicly fail to the extent it follows some of its core tenants. Trump probably doesn't even these, so predictions here are hard.
4) Some recent adaptations have been good:
Work-from-home. Researchers had been shouting the benefits of WFH from the rooftops for ages, but it only took off once the pandemic forced it.
Police monitoring. George Floyd and other similar events triggered a massive backlash that peaked in Defund the Police. This was a huge disaster, much worse than Floyd's death. Now that we're largely through all that, I think we've rested on a better equilibrium than pre-Floyd. i.e. trust-in-the-police dimension was too high, and it dropped way too far, but now could be in a better position than 2019.
5) Little communities on the internet routinely experiment with new cultures. Rationalists being a great example. Sometimes these go completely off the rails, but those mistakes tend to be culled (Zizians).
6) None of this helps the fertility problem, which is the elephant in the room. However note recent cultural maladaptations needed public attention and focus to be corrected. Fertility is finally getting that.
7) The wooly mammoth in the room is AI. So far AI is way less biased than humans, and will steer them away from maladaptations like anti-vax, unless prompted not too. However I don't see why this will always be the case. AI may allow people to live in better echo chambers.
> and wokeness (a move away from meritocracy), [is] maladaptive.
In what sense is meritocracy adaptive? Thinking in hereditary terms (which are the only terms in which biological, evolutionary adaptiveness can be thought of) meritocracy that leads to one's own group losing out on positional goods must be weighed against the decrease in quality of life that results from society-wide coordination efforts being managed by less competent individuals.
"Wokeness" is adaptive for a given subpopulation if the benefit of obtaining certain advantageous positional goods by that subpopulation outweighs the cost of a somewhat worse society in general. There is a strong argument to be made that this is in fact the case.
As you say it leads to a somewhat worse society in general? That sounds maladaptive to me. We can think of zillions of schemes that result in advantages for a subgroup at the expense of the group; we never say these are adaptive for the group itself.
If we're comparing wokeness vs. meritocracy, we also need to consider the elite need to adopt wokeness against their own self-interest, and against the self-interest of the group.
You can also argue a strong preference for positional goods is maladaptive.
To the extent you think group differences are caused by genetics, wokeness could prevent genetic engineering. This would be massively maladaptive.
Re: "Differential fertility, which takes centuries to impose its discipline, is our main remaining cultural selection pressure." - The usual understanding of how culture evolves is that it is based on small mobile pieces of information that spread between human minds and compete for attention. These frequently behave rather like viruses or bacteria - in that they reproduce quickly, die quickly and evolve rapidly. "Centuries" does not seem like a relevant timescale.
Re: "A straightforward projection of current trends into the coming centuries plausibly results in the world population and economy soon peaking and then declining, and innovation then grinding to a halt." IMO, this should be subject to the usual disclaimers about how machine intelligence and super intelligence could keep innovation going for a while yet - after peak human.
It feels like you've written this exact post about five times now! It's frustrating to keep reading the same points, and shift through so much repetition to find the small changes you make between takes on this topic. It is like you are writing drafts of a single article
But, if you were to allow an editorialized summary:
Economic growth is the dominant selective pressure on (modern) culture, elite capture of economic growth may cause maladaptive cultural drift.
If that's a fair to you summary, and I'm not misunderstanding your intent (to shine a light on the problem and potential solutions), to then call strategies to disrupt that feedback loop "social darwinism" is really really weird.
Presuming I agree with your argument, there are still intermediate steps between where we are and "golly the only choice we have is a hard swerve towards transhumanism".
There are more human beings on earth, living longer and healthier lives than in any time in history. Our biggest problems do not stem from some cultural monoculture but from having too much to eat, while relaxing and enjoying unending pleasurable leisure. If the world is moving toward a cultual monoculture, it is because all the minor differing cultures are freely joining the super-culture that is making everyone rich and happy. Millions do not rush southward from America to join those in Guatemala, Bolivia, Botswana, or the tribal people of Borneo, but many of those people risk their lives coming northward to America to freely join that emerging monoculture. Millions of people independently evaluating their condition and then making the decision to migrate to that culture indicates its rational comparative value. People have always moved toward freedom and prosparity. Your warning that suggests we need to "return to the road of progress" -- when in fact more technological, medical, and artistic progress has been made in our lifetimes than in any three melleniums in human history --- seems irrational and maybe a bit hysterical.
Life is a lot better for people today than it was in the past, yes. And people voluntarily join the global monoculture, yes.
But don't think Hanson is saying the global monoculture is maladaptive because the people in it fair poorly. It's maladaptive because it won't last. The demographic contraction is a key example. World population will peak in a few decades, then the economy will contract, innovation will stop, and there probably won't be a way to reverse it.
Where is the historical precedent for what you suggest? As long as trade continues, prosperity will also. History informs us that it is when production and trade are hindered that culture recedes. Nothing like that is apparent in the near future. And, as an aside, I noted no suggestion by the author to avoid what he imagines is danger.
Production, and in particular innovation, will be hindered when the output of each worker must support not only themselves but multiple retirees. Read Hanson's article "Shrinking economies don't innovate" for more on this.
We've learned a great deal about this problem from genetic algorithms, which made me aware of big an existential threat it is back around 1990. but even then, the political climate made it impossible to discuss. no one even tried. GAs make the problem easily demonstrable, but AFAIK provide no pleasant ways of solving it.
There are many publications, but they aren't talking about society. Just about common problems using genetic algorithms. The most-often talked about is premature convergence. This is a phenomenon in which evolution just stops, entirely, when transportation across your map is easy (eg, any organism can mate with any other organism), because one variant is significantly fitter than the others, and it takes over the entire population quickly, after which point there is no more evolution because that variant is in a local maximum in the landscape. The only ways to prevent it are
1. to increase the mutation rate,
2. to suppress the fit variant, or
3. to reduce matings between variants.
Culturally, this manifests as e.g. the more-than-massive shift in the distribution of the popularity of different musicians after the intro of radio & records, from a pretty flat distribution to a power-law distribution in which the top 10 musical groups might make more money than all the rest combined. It's also seen in the way American movies, music, and t-shirts and blue jeans wiped out local-culture equivalents around much of the world.
The math for this is probably that found by E.O. Wilson & Robert MacArthur in plain-old organic evolutionary biology: the theory of island biogeography (now sometimes called the island theory of biogeography, to imply that it applies everywhere). It concludes empirically that the number of species found on an island is proportional to Area^z, .20 < a < .35. (Variation is probably due mostly to variation in immigration rates.) This means that if you fence off an area of land into 10 mostly-isolated areas, at equilibrium it will have 5 times as many species as it would have without being subdivided. In humans, language and culture are other ways of isolating areas. I'll email you a paper on it.
(I don't know if anyone has shown that premature convergence is accounted for by island biogeography. Genetic algo researchers were surprisingly ignorant of evolutionary theory, and it's lost cachet now.)
Am not sure how relevant this whole topic is, but a major means to combat premature convergence is to change the shape of the fitness landscape. This was widely studied long ago under the name of "neutral networks" - the idea being to deform the fitness landscape so that travel was possible between local optima via those "neutral networks". Adding parasites to the system was one approach. but any means of generating an arms race would likely have a similar effect.
There's Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988). It starts out with:
"Engaged for billions of years in a relentless, spiraling arms race with one another, our genes have finally outsmarted themselves. They have produced a weapon so powerful it will vanquish the losers and winners alike. This device is not the hydrogen bomb - widespread use of nuclear weapons would merely delay the immensely more interesting demise that has been engineered."
Hanson is correct here; Iran and Bangladesh have a sub 2 fertility rate and every other rich or even not-poor Muslim country is rapidly converging to sub replacement. There isn't really an Amish or Haredi equivalent I'm aware of (but those both require host cultures stable and rich enough to effectively subsidize them, so I don't see those lasting long either).
They're still there, no? And Palestinians are equal to Orthodox jews, although I can't find the cite. But it's frequently mentioned in pro Israel media
> For well over a century now, our environment has changed quite fast, with the world economy doubling faster than every twenty years. Our greatest heroes have been cultural activists who push for big culture changes mostly unrelated to adaptive pressures, thus causing high rates of cultural drift. Our hundred of thousands of diverse peasant cultures were first crushed into a few hundred national cultures, and then into a single dominant elite world monoculture, vastly reducing variety. And our great health, wealth, and peace have greatly reduced selection pressures; cultures hardly ever die anymore. Differential fertility, which takes centuries to impose its discipline, is our main remaining cultural selection pressure.
This was the cleanest and most cogent top-level explanation of the "cultural drift" problem I've seen yet, kudos.
I think a religious revival (anticipated, for example, by Ross Douthat’s new book) might have the power to kick-start a new and more adaptive culture without waiting for a small fertile sub-group to emerge for whom contact with the broader world doesn’t dampen the inertia.
It seems to me that this is one of the least persuasive arguments you've made in your career. You've had some unpopular theories, but all of them seem to have been convincing, to some degree, to some audience, and most of them have seemed plausible to me. But this one I'm really struggling to understand. Given the frequency with which you have published what seems like the basic premise, I get the sense that you are having trouble connecting with people on this one. Out of curiosity, are there people you feel you've convinced with this argument?
(If it's not clear, I'm asking because I'm genuinely interested in understanding the theory better, not as some kind of rhetorical question.)
Yes, I've convinced many. But still looking for better framings to reach wider audiences. Why not say what you find unpersuasive?
Cultural drift seems to apply mostly to values, the collective criteria by which we determine which aspects of life we like and want more of. It's not clear how to think of "maladaptation" within value space. In a biological context, maladaptation is easy to spot, because the criteria for biological evolution is clear - the reproductive success of the species. What's the equivalent criteria by which we are meant to judge cultural evolution? Is it happiness? Well-being? Or is cultural evolution also, ultimately, meant to be judged by biological criteria (population size)? Assuming that we have a perspective from which we can stand outside of values-space from which to judge it seems deeply problematic to me.
That's one of my main points of confusion.
You ARE biological. We all are. We can talk about behavior that is adaptive for you or me. And that's what I am talking about. Without adaptive behavior, your lineage soon ceases to exist. So adaptive behavior is a requirement for achieving any other goals you have re your long term lineage.
Ok, that helps. So low birth rates is the main issue, and the other problems (lack of innovation, economic contraction) are all downstream from that?
Fertility is far from the only adaptive behavior, but lack of it when more is feasible is a pretty clear sign behavior is maladaptive.
I think one of the reasons I was struggling to understand your argument is that, for me, culture serves this other, harder-to-define function, it is the space within which we update our coordination protocols - deciding which things we value and how much. So having it referred to, metaphorically, as an engineered thing with a well-defined purpose and clearly demarcated failure states (like an airplane or a car on a highway), throws me for a loop.
Perhaps the best way for me to understand your theory is to see you as saying something along the lines of...
Whatever else culture is doing, it must continue to exist in order to do it, it must not crash the biological species which is its substrate. We can take a systems-theory perspective on culture and say even if its functions are too complex and recursive and uncomputable for us to understand fully, we can confidently say that, like all systems, it can crash out. We don't need to fully understand a system to notice when, in broad strokes, it looks like it might be crashing out in this way.
Maybe I'm overcomplicating things, but this way of paraphrasing your argument (if correct) helps me appreciate it more, and avoids the main problem I was having, which was, basically, that it sounded too much like far-mode musing about distant destinations and not enough like practical near-mode thinking about avoiding rocks.
I still think "drift" isn't the problem (it is often the solution) crashing is.
(I'm mostly a humanities guy, btw)
When driving, drifting out of your lane without limit reliably leads to crashing.
Re: "Whatever else culture is doing, it must continue to exist in order to do it, it must not crash the biological species which is its substrate."
This argument is often made about parasites. Yet parasites do sometimes drive their host populations extinct. How can that happen? It tends to happen when the parasite can infect individuals from multiple species - and so is not dependent on keeping any particular host species alive.
That is part of the reason why we have to be careful with intelligent machines. They can propagate cuulture much like humans can - but then they are like another species for culture to inhabit - and then the humans become expendable. Cultural propagation no longer depends on the existence of human hosts.
Isn’t the most fundamental cause of the problem essentially that we became one global village (due to “globalization “ of trade,media, etc)? Obviously that had many benefits but also introduced this risk.
That is one of the four key parameters. Not clear which are more important.
Re: "In a biological context, maladaptation is easy to spot, because the criteria for biological evolution is clear - the reproductive success of the species." This idea is actually rejected by most evolutionary biologists. The reason is that there are many adaptations that help individual reproduction at the expense of the species. Sexual selection provides many examples of these - both via male combat (think Irish Elk) and female choice (think birds of paradise).
> What's the equivalent criteria by which we are meant to judge cultural evolution? [...] Or is cultural evolution also, ultimately, meant to be judged by biological criteria (population size)?
Yes, that's how evolution is normally discussed: in a descriptive rather than normative manner which predicts outcomes rather than judges them.
I, for one, am persuaded by the argument.
How do you see possible counterforces? Could decentralized technologies (like blockchain and AI tools) help smaller subcultures fend against monocultural drift, for example? Or could natural selection eventually be replaced by genetic editing and artificial intelligence - not just as tweaks to the parameters but as a partial "end of culture" shift?
I'll write more soon on the end of culture.
> Our hundreds of thousands of diverse peasant cultures were first crushed into a few hundred national cultures, and then into a single dominant elite world monoculture, vastly reducing variety.
I think this trend has already peaked and is starting to reverse. The combination of late-20th-century mass-media and American unipolarity really was what made the entire globe's elite culture so uniform; the retreat of the US from internationalism, the rise of China, the segmentation of the internet into different parts based on regulations and content rules are all contributing to this. And while there was a brief moment where the internet itself was a global culturally centralizing force, filters and algorithmic feeds are starting to make online communities feel geuninely different. I would venture to say the *cultural* differences between X, Bluesky, Reddit feel more significant than the cultural differences between the US, the UK, and Australia.
Recent differences are much more shallow than long ago differences. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/libertarianism-as-deep-multiculturalism
Good point. But people in different online subcultures still have to live together under the same laws. It's hard to have meaningful cultural variation while you're stuck under one legal code.
For increasing cultural variety by fragmentation, interstellar colonization would be effective, since I doubt a monoculture can sustain itself when even one-way communication time is at least several years. Interstellar colonization may be somewhat far off technologically, but since we're talking about a problem that plays out over centuries, a solution that itself takes centuries seems reasonable to consider.
Without healthy cultural evolution within each star system, it will drift locally to maladaption.
I find Hanson's reasoning here (and in similar pieces) confusing/confused (might be him or me).
First off, he notes the extremely rapid cultural evolution of the past few hundred years, of which the fertility decline has only taken place in the past two generations in developed countries; my grandparents' generation had a fertility *spike* in response to improved education and living standards, after all.
He then proposes that high fertility cultures like the Amish and haredim will, through sheer linear interpolation, come to dominate the earth through remaining unchanged for three hundred years. He also consistently fails to note that the Amish and, especially, the Haredim are fundamentally parasitic, only capable of existing within the protective cocoon of their host civilisations.
This is also ignoring any technological change over these three hundred years, which is implicitly rejected as unimportant! He gestures at AI and electronic minds, but a wide range of other much less dramatic changes could radically change the direction of travel well before these demographic differences become material.
We are, indeed, at a point of high elite coherence, but I'd argue we were also at that point in the late 19th century, before fragmenting again for a century before reforming after the fall of the soviet union and opening up of China. We may be about to have another fragmentation; this strikes me as classic “end of history” reasoning, accepting the messiness of the past as a given but projecting clean straight lines into the future.
I called it a "straightforward projection of current trends" exactly to note its naiveté. I didn't at all mean to claim it is very likely. Yet it is still more likely than any other specific scenario you could describe. Yes all these trends fluctuate, but over centuries the overall trend toward world cultural integration is pretty unmistakable.
Is that true? The increases in transport and telecommunications technology certainly have made it easier for ideas to spread, but I think the crux of our disagreement (shout if you think differently) is less on extinction/homogenisation rates, but rather on mutation rates.
Romanisation created a fairly homogenous elite culture in Europe, Catholic Europe was fairly homogenous in its political and social outlook until the printing press/Protestantism blew it up, and steamships and telegraph lines went a long way towards creating an elite monoculture until the intellectual ferment of the early 20th century threw everything into disarray again. We haven't been in our current stasis for long!
I get that the projection of trends of high fertility subgroups is a thought experiment, but I'm just not sure how useful that thought experiment is when the only long lasting high fertility subgroups is developed economies are essentially parasitic. Cancer is a high fertility subgroups of cells but it's hardly the future of life, right?
All living things are varying patterns of nucleic acid, and their morphological differences mask the fact that it’s one continuous process of endless transformation. This nucleic acid doesn’t have a fixed end; it simply repeats, evolving like a river flowing without destination.
So what does innovation and culture accomplish that isn’t already achieved by living things everywhere—reproducing ad infinitum? My lineage traces back to fish in the Devonian and shrew-like mammals in the Jurassic. Are we apes a success or a failure in their eyes? Who are their truest living heirs? What would constitute an honorable, successful descendent 200 million years from now?
I'm surprised how much I disagree with this. tl;dr: part of my job is following shifts in sentiment towards various things, and I think you're vastly under-estimating how much our cultural changes are actively and accurately selected for (mostly when beliefs come into contact with cold reality). Some thoughts:
1) Suppose we have 100,000 tribes with 100,000 cultures. As they interact or die off, we should expect these cultures to find local maximas of adaptation, greatly reducing their number. This process should continue over time, especially as communication and travel increase, leading to the situation we're in today with a few dominate cultures.
This seems intuitive. When modern humans look back at older cultures, they find them insane and/or evil. Superstition and cruelty were far more common than they are today.
I think this is what you described? This culling was a good thing: those older cultures were horrible, and the number of much-better cultures is necessarily much fewer than the number of awful ones.
2) Our number of cultures today appears to be increasing thanks to the Internet increasing the variety of communication. Geographical proximity is no longer a requirement for a culture to form.
As we should expect if the 1) process was successful, most of these new cultures are not good. They're drifting away from local maximas (on certain dimensions). e.g. MAGA (too much gullibility), conspiracy theorists (too little trust in elites), and wokeness (a move away from meritocracy), are all maladaptive.
3) The above is only a problem if there is no selection pressure to correct these errors, but recent history suggests there is.
Wokeness has at least suffered a stroke.
Conspiracy theories have little to no predictive power, and the people that believe in them tend to lose their shirt in public markets (my area of expertise).
Anti-vax will correct as high-r0 diseases like measles spread.
MAGA is a cult of personality so will likely die whenever Trump does. It will also publicly fail to the extent it follows some of its core tenants. Trump probably doesn't even these, so predictions here are hard.
4) Some recent adaptations have been good:
Work-from-home. Researchers had been shouting the benefits of WFH from the rooftops for ages, but it only took off once the pandemic forced it.
Police monitoring. George Floyd and other similar events triggered a massive backlash that peaked in Defund the Police. This was a huge disaster, much worse than Floyd's death. Now that we're largely through all that, I think we've rested on a better equilibrium than pre-Floyd. i.e. trust-in-the-police dimension was too high, and it dropped way too far, but now could be in a better position than 2019.
5) Little communities on the internet routinely experiment with new cultures. Rationalists being a great example. Sometimes these go completely off the rails, but those mistakes tend to be culled (Zizians).
6) None of this helps the fertility problem, which is the elephant in the room. However note recent cultural maladaptations needed public attention and focus to be corrected. Fertility is finally getting that.
7) The wooly mammoth in the room is AI. So far AI is way less biased than humans, and will steer them away from maladaptations like anti-vax, unless prompted not too. However I don't see why this will always be the case. AI may allow people to live in better echo chambers.
> and wokeness (a move away from meritocracy), [is] maladaptive.
In what sense is meritocracy adaptive? Thinking in hereditary terms (which are the only terms in which biological, evolutionary adaptiveness can be thought of) meritocracy that leads to one's own group losing out on positional goods must be weighed against the decrease in quality of life that results from society-wide coordination efforts being managed by less competent individuals.
"Wokeness" is adaptive for a given subpopulation if the benefit of obtaining certain advantageous positional goods by that subpopulation outweighs the cost of a somewhat worse society in general. There is a strong argument to be made that this is in fact the case.
As you say it leads to a somewhat worse society in general? That sounds maladaptive to me. We can think of zillions of schemes that result in advantages for a subgroup at the expense of the group; we never say these are adaptive for the group itself.
If we're comparing wokeness vs. meritocracy, we also need to consider the elite need to adopt wokeness against their own self-interest, and against the self-interest of the group.
You can also argue a strong preference for positional goods is maladaptive.
To the extent you think group differences are caused by genetics, wokeness could prevent genetic engineering. This would be massively maladaptive.
Re: "Differential fertility, which takes centuries to impose its discipline, is our main remaining cultural selection pressure." - The usual understanding of how culture evolves is that it is based on small mobile pieces of information that spread between human minds and compete for attention. These frequently behave rather like viruses or bacteria - in that they reproduce quickly, die quickly and evolve rapidly. "Centuries" does not seem like a relevant timescale.
Re: "A straightforward projection of current trends into the coming centuries plausibly results in the world population and economy soon peaking and then declining, and innovation then grinding to a halt." IMO, this should be subject to the usual disclaimers about how machine intelligence and super intelligence could keep innovation going for a while yet - after peak human.
It feels like you've written this exact post about five times now! It's frustrating to keep reading the same points, and shift through so much repetition to find the small changes you make between takes on this topic. It is like you are writing drafts of a single article
This is an easy publication to critique.
But, if you were to allow an editorialized summary:
Economic growth is the dominant selective pressure on (modern) culture, elite capture of economic growth may cause maladaptive cultural drift.
If that's a fair to you summary, and I'm not misunderstanding your intent (to shine a light on the problem and potential solutions), to then call strategies to disrupt that feedback loop "social darwinism" is really really weird.
Presuming I agree with your argument, there are still intermediate steps between where we are and "golly the only choice we have is a hard swerve towards transhumanism".
There are more human beings on earth, living longer and healthier lives than in any time in history. Our biggest problems do not stem from some cultural monoculture but from having too much to eat, while relaxing and enjoying unending pleasurable leisure. If the world is moving toward a cultual monoculture, it is because all the minor differing cultures are freely joining the super-culture that is making everyone rich and happy. Millions do not rush southward from America to join those in Guatemala, Bolivia, Botswana, or the tribal people of Borneo, but many of those people risk their lives coming northward to America to freely join that emerging monoculture. Millions of people independently evaluating their condition and then making the decision to migrate to that culture indicates its rational comparative value. People have always moved toward freedom and prosparity. Your warning that suggests we need to "return to the road of progress" -- when in fact more technological, medical, and artistic progress has been made in our lifetimes than in any three melleniums in human history --- seems irrational and maybe a bit hysterical.
Life is a lot better for people today than it was in the past, yes. And people voluntarily join the global monoculture, yes.
But don't think Hanson is saying the global monoculture is maladaptive because the people in it fair poorly. It's maladaptive because it won't last. The demographic contraction is a key example. World population will peak in a few decades, then the economy will contract, innovation will stop, and there probably won't be a way to reverse it.
Where is the historical precedent for what you suggest? As long as trade continues, prosperity will also. History informs us that it is when production and trade are hindered that culture recedes. Nothing like that is apparent in the near future. And, as an aside, I noted no suggestion by the author to avoid what he imagines is danger.
Production, and in particular innovation, will be hindered when the output of each worker must support not only themselves but multiple retirees. Read Hanson's article "Shrinking economies don't innovate" for more on this.
We've learned a great deal about this problem from genetic algorithms, which made me aware of big an existential threat it is back around 1990. but even then, the political climate made it impossible to discuss. no one even tried. GAs make the problem easily demonstrable, but AFAIK provide no pleasant ways of solving it.
Are there publications from back then to read on the topic?
There are many publications, but they aren't talking about society. Just about common problems using genetic algorithms. The most-often talked about is premature convergence. This is a phenomenon in which evolution just stops, entirely, when transportation across your map is easy (eg, any organism can mate with any other organism), because one variant is significantly fitter than the others, and it takes over the entire population quickly, after which point there is no more evolution because that variant is in a local maximum in the landscape. The only ways to prevent it are
1. to increase the mutation rate,
2. to suppress the fit variant, or
3. to reduce matings between variants.
Culturally, this manifests as e.g. the more-than-massive shift in the distribution of the popularity of different musicians after the intro of radio & records, from a pretty flat distribution to a power-law distribution in which the top 10 musical groups might make more money than all the rest combined. It's also seen in the way American movies, music, and t-shirts and blue jeans wiped out local-culture equivalents around much of the world.
The math for this is probably that found by E.O. Wilson & Robert MacArthur in plain-old organic evolutionary biology: the theory of island biogeography (now sometimes called the island theory of biogeography, to imply that it applies everywhere). It concludes empirically that the number of species found on an island is proportional to Area^z, .20 < a < .35. (Variation is probably due mostly to variation in immigration rates.) This means that if you fence off an area of land into 10 mostly-isolated areas, at equilibrium it will have 5 times as many species as it would have without being subdivided. In humans, language and culture are other ways of isolating areas. I'll email you a paper on it.
(I don't know if anyone has shown that premature convergence is accounted for by island biogeography. Genetic algo researchers were surprisingly ignorant of evolutionary theory, and it's lost cachet now.)
Am not sure how relevant this whole topic is, but a major means to combat premature convergence is to change the shape of the fitness landscape. This was widely studied long ago under the name of "neutral networks" - the idea being to deform the fitness landscape so that travel was possible between local optima via those "neutral networks". Adding parasites to the system was one approach. but any means of generating an arms race would likely have a similar effect.
There's Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988). It starts out with:
"Engaged for billions of years in a relentless, spiraling arms race with one another, our genes have finally outsmarted themselves. They have produced a weapon so powerful it will vanquish the losers and winners alike. This device is not the hydrogen bomb - widespread use of nuclear weapons would merely delay the immensely more interesting demise that has been engineered."
Aren't religious Muslims doubling too?
I don't know of an insular religious subculture of Muslims that keeps doubling every twenty years even when they get rich. Does anyone?
Hanson is correct here; Iran and Bangladesh have a sub 2 fertility rate and every other rich or even not-poor Muslim country is rapidly converging to sub replacement. There isn't really an Amish or Haredi equivalent I'm aware of (but those both require host cultures stable and rich enough to effectively subsidize them, so I don't see those lasting long either).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate?wprov=sfla1
What about ISIS?
Did they even last one generation?
They're still there, no? And Palestinians are equal to Orthodox jews, although I can't find the cite. But it's frequently mentioned in pro Israel media