This poll says we should be willing to let ~8 guilty criminals go free to save one innocent from wrongful conviction, while this poll says that we’d need crime to go down by a factor of ~20 to make it worth switching from innocent-until-proven-guilty to guilty-until-proven-innocent. (All such estimates in this post are lognormal-fit medians.)

But do such huge factors make sense? Consider a simple model of social crime losses:

• B = loss due to crime being “Bad”; criminals gain less than victims lose

• A = loss from efforts to Avoid being victims of crime

• D = loss from Defensive efforts to avoid being caught and convicted

• E = loss from Enforcement efforts to catch and convict criminals

• I = loss from efforts to Inflict punishment

• S = loss from Suffering of the punished, if all were guilty

• H = relative Harm of punishing innocent, relative to guilty

• F = Fraction of punished who are innocent

• C = B+A+D+E = loss from Crime

• P = S((1-F) + H*F) = loss from actual Punishment

• L = C + I + P = total Loss

Imagine that we could cut all of the crime-related losses C, I, S overall by the same factor X, but at the cost of increasing the fraction F of folks punished who are innocent by factor RX. The ratio R that makes one indifferent to this change can reveal one’s value of H, i.e., how much more one cares about the suffering of the innocent, compared to that of the guilty. That is because in this hypothetical loss L changes by -X(C + I + P) + RXSHF. Setting this to zero, and (for small F) solving for H gives H = (C+I+P)/(RFP) = (1/RF)*(1+ C/(I+P))*(1+ I/P).

This poll gives ratio R = ~1/5, this poll says ~2% of convicted are innocent (though this study suggests 4%), this poll says P/I =~1, and this poll says C/(I+P) = ~17, Together these poll estimates imply H =~10,000! Which seems to me crazy high. Could call that a puzzling fetish for the innocent.

What gives? In teaching law, I’ve seen that most don’t want to lower the cost of lawsuits, to let law deter more harms. My interpretation there is that most see they don’t have enough money to make it worth others suing them, and don’t have anyone they want to sue, so see lawsuits as now irrelevant to them. They fear others suing them more than they hope to sue others, or want lawsuits to encourage good behavior. So they rather keep the cost of lawsuits high, to keep law out of their world.

Similarly, I suspect that most feel so confident that they will never commit a crime, or be the victim of a crime, that they see the most likely way they’d be involved with criminal law as being falsely accused of a crime. So their priority is to protect the innocent, namely themselves, at all costs. It’s less about lofty principles or sympathy for the downtrodden. They are willing to let the typical victims of crime suffer more to ensure that they personally escape negative consequences.

Note that these two law stories suggest that while most people support law, and think law is good for others, they don’t personally want law in their world.

Later, ~1900, tenure became common in academia. Then ~1940, peer review became common in publications, and ~1960 in grants. Also about midcentury, journalism switched from its usual mode of questioning and investigating claims made to it, to accepting whatever academics said and trying to “communicate” that to the public. In ~1980s, college rating systems became widely available to the US public, ratings which depended mainly how how elite academics rated those colleges.

All of these changes were ways in which academic elites wrested control of academia from outsiders who previously imposed some degree of incentives and accountability. The elites of most any profession would love to fully control it, being given resources to spend at their discretion, with little need to accommodate demands of customers, investors, regulators, or anyone else. But academic managed to achieve this ideal far more than most, due to its peak prestige. Via elite schools, academics control prestige in many other areas of life.

I review this history to make clear just what academic reformers are up against. It is far from sufficient to enumerate academic failures; you’ll have to develop concrete alternatives that can win prestige fights against the usual academics. History has long been moving against you; you’ll have to somehow reverse that strong tide.

In my 40+ years of thinking about how we might reform academia, I’ve considered many different parties as potential allies in this venture. First I and other hypertext publishing fans hoped to use backlinks to make criticism of claims easy to find from those claims, thus recruiting critics and honest readers into our reform venture. But we’ve now achieved that ease of finding criticism, without much impact. Readers care far more about publication prestige than about which criticisms are persuasive to those who read them with care.

Second, I saw the public as an ally willing to bet lots on science and related policy questions. However, we’ve seen that if academics choose to ignore such bets, the public isn’t much interested in them either. And laws continue to block such bets.

Third, I saw research patrons as allies. Surely they’d want to fund research in ways more likely to induce intellectual progress, if only they understood the better ways. Like prizes instead of grants. But then I learned about the history of academia that I summarize above. No, patrons used to use better methods, but caved when academic threatened to take away their prestige by association. Patrons care more about such prestige with academics than they do intellectual progress.

Fourth, I hoped journal editors might be allies. But when we showed that polls and prediction markets could predict which papers wouldn’t replicate, and tried to get journal editors to publicly declare that they’d consider such predictions as part of their article approval process, all the journals refused. Journals are happy to publish sexy papers that don’t replicate.

Now my best hope is to recruit as allies future folk willing to give honest appraisals of their distant past. One key claim that elite academics are not willing to give up on is this:

The people that academics now most celebrate with jobs, funding, publication, and publicity are in fact the people today who future folks centuries later, carefully considering the question, are most likely to identify as the people today who should have been listened to most for the purpose of speeding intellectual progress.

Just as we can sometimes we can get auditors, judges, juries, and even journalists to give honest independent appraisals of others’ acts and accomplishments, there’s a decent chance that we can find a ways to fund “historians” (who might not be professional credentialed as such) to look back carefully at particular areas of research, and rank past researchers in terms of who should have been listened to more. And compound interest over centuries should let us spend lots then on such evaluation, when funded today by only small amounts set aside.

The first order of business in this reform effort is to actually fund such efforts to rank researchers from centuries ago, to show that we can in fact robustly enough rank them now. Once we show that diverse approaches give substantially correlated answers, we can search for approaches whose expected results are the most correlated with others, at the lowest cost. (The best way might randomize over many methods.)

Once we have demonstrated such a capacity, we could create markets today on assets that pay off proportional to (some monotonic transform of) rankings of current researchers. (Such assets should be built out of assets that accumulate long term value, such as stock index funds.) And we could make markets in such assets conditional on such evaluations being done centuries later on their areas of research. This approach would thus be robust to the fraction of such areas later evaluated. It might be most all such areas, or just a few, depending on how much funding becomes available, how far in the future evaluations are done, and how cheap they end up being.

With market estimates of future rankings of current researchers, we could then highlight contrasts between such rankings and the people who academic elites now choose to celebrate, via jobs, funding, publications, etc. Such elites would then have to either (A), dismiss such markets as ignorant, (B) change their choices to better align with market estimates, or (C) trade in these markets to make market estimates better match their non-market choices.

Results (B) or (C) would give academics stronger incentives for, and thus rates of, intellectual progress. Academic institutions could then use such market prices as outcomes for futarchy-governance methods to choose jobs, grants, publications, etc.

To discourage (A), I’d start this approach in a few limited research areas, where I’d pick shorter term evaluation periods, and subsidize the markets enough to induce informative prices, which we’d then show to be informative at the end of those evaluation periods. Once prices were taken somewhat seriously in such areas, we’d switch to longer term evaluation periods. And then researcher efforts to manipulate their own prices could provide sufficient subsidies, allowing extra subsidies to be moved to new areas, to repeat this process. And hopefully with success, we’d attract more sources of subsidies.

And that’s my current best vision for reforming academia. Academia is one of the hardest social spheres to reform, given its peak prestige, and none of the groups you might hope to make your allies here can actually be counted on. So my best ally hope is future “historians” looking back to say who should have most been listened to for the intellectual progress that was actually achieved.

First, he founded AVI Portfolio Services Company to make and sell a financial risk management model, and sold it in 1984 for a big profit. During that time,

Basically all decisions were made by people making bets. Almost every decision that had to be made to govern the company, I built a market about that.

For example, his firm grew from 8 to 20 employees, and after his partners helped him hire the first few folks, all hiring decisions were then made by markets. These markets traded assets that paid off zero if the person didn’t last six months, and if they lasted longer paid off in proportion to outside-the-firm oracle evaluations of employee performance. There were also markets like this for every employee re their next six months.

As another example, they added features to their model, and had markets in profit metrics for each feature, if it were added. They also had pricing decisions to make. They considered ~20-30 features, and actually implemented five. For all these choices they had conditional markets, called off if a condition wasn’t met, in metrics given the implementation of a feature, or the setting a price, or the choice to hire someone.

Any employee, and many firm clients, could trade anonymously (or not) in these markets, by calling or faxing a secretary who recorded trades and managed an order book. All the company’s key financial and performance info was made visible to all traders. Their lawyer designed some way to reward those best at betting while avoiding various legal problems.

At peak there were about ~15-20 markets open at a time, with open interest typically in the range of ~$75K-$250K per market, though a few markets reached a few million. Wernick says no one reported concerns about folks betting against people/features and then trying to sabotage them, though he admits he discouraged folks talking to him about anything but complaints about him or advice from him.

After those three AVI years, Wernick started a real estate venture, and let his 60-80 employees and tenants trade in those markets, which continued for ~10-15 years.

He also moved into venture capital, where he tried offering to founders that he’d take ~25% less if they’d use what he saw as good governance practices, including prediction markets. They’d sometimes accept other conditions, but never prediction markets, though ~1/3-1/2 of his added incentives were tied to that.

They reason they gave was that they saw their own personal judgments as superior to markets, and didn’t want bad decisions to result. Wernick says he never thought to have managers give themselves a big enough budget in such markets to ensure their preferred decisions always happened. I think in that case they’d initially get their way, but learn to give way as they lost on average to other traders.

Sadly and strangely, none of the many associates who saw all these markets ever tried to copy them elsewhere.

Wernick says he was inspired by meeting Ronald Coase at U. Chicago, learning his theory of the firm, and wondering if markets could go further to displace hierarchy.

Wernick blames the ego of managers who think their judgment best, hire sycophants, and keep key org info close to their chests. But he liked the idea I explained to him of using prediction markets to manage decisions that managers do not now control, such as how much funding a firm is allowed to raise when from investors, or mutual decisions made with key suppliers and customers. Thus there’s hope.

Wernick stopped all this when he got divorced, moved to Mexico, and became a “hermit” for a long while.

So, wow, my dream was actually tried successfully years before I even thought of it!

Added 10Dec: I have many questions I will ask when I talk to him again.

Added 12 Dec: I just talked to him again, and added resulting info to the above.

Our Cultural Future: Feminization, Fertility, and Activism

At the link you can get an “OVERCOMING BIAS FREE TICKET" via the password BIASFREE.

In the consensus game, people want to be seen has having favored the immediate winning side. Whatever decision is made by the end of the meeting, or in the next few days afterward, they want to seem to have favored that decision, and if possible also to have substantially influenced that decision.

In the outcome game, people want to be seen as having favored the decision that gave the best outcome in the long run. If the project is approved and goes well, they want to have favored its approval, but if the project goes badly, they want to be seen as having opposed approval.

Good strategies for the consensus game include holding a pre-meeting with enough allies to ensure that your alliance gets the outcome it pushes for. Or if the outcome is truly uncertain, wait until the decision is leaning a bit one direction and then throw your weight in to ensure that becomes the decision.

Good strategies for the outcome game are to study the fundamentals, estimate long term outcomes, and then “plant your flag” via a clear recommendation, preferably in writing. Even better if you can arrange to make (decision-conditional) bets on the outcome.

Now often the leader of an org that holds such a meeting sets a rule: while it is fine to voice objections during a meeting, once a decision is made, everyone must fully support it. Thus all references to having opposed the decision must disappear, and so no one should play the outcome game.

Such a rule is often justified as helping the leader play his own outcome game. The leader is trying to make good decisions, that will make him look good later when his outcomes are evaluated by superiors, and he can’t do this well if his subordinates don’t fully support him.

And so playing the outcome game is often a status marker. Most ordinary people low in orgs, or without much wealth, must mostly try to please folks around them, by seeming to agree with them and to influence them. But once you rise high enough in orgs, or accumulate enough wealth, then you may be allowed to play more outcome games.

Of course even people high in orgs play more consensus than outcome games, just among a higher set of associates. And most people with wealth to invest focus on copying the investment behavior of others, instead of trying to make their own independent investment judgments.

We can see “contrarians” as people who insist on playing outcome games even when others focus on consensus games. Thus contrarians tend to lose consensus games.

Most rewards in academia come via consensus games. One wins by getting jobs, grants, and publication now based on what prestigious folks think now of your work, or your proposals for work. Long term citations count for little, as does publishing well before others, but in low ranked journals.

Many orgs probably rot via consensus games slowly displacing outcome games. At first the founders and first employees are betting on the firm, but later folks are betting on rising in the firm, not so much on the firm itself.

Plausibly the key strength of capitalism is that it makes outcome games matter more. People good at consensus games resent that, and want to cut capitalism to prevent it.

Prediction markets are an attempt to make outcome games matter more than they now do. And so they are plausibly opposed by those who have invested in learning to do better at consensus games. Many of my other institutional reform proposals can also be seen as trying to make outcome games matter more. Please help if you can.

Only about a quarter of poll respondents think I’m wrong on my basic claim, so I’m clearly persuading many of my basic thesis. Yet I haven’t managed to entice others to write or talk much on the subject. And as we’d need a lot more attention on this to induce much effort on it, generating that attention is probably the highest priority now. Alas, we’ll need someone much more prestigious than I to make this happen.

But of course to motivate such attention, we’ll want possible actions to consider. So what have I learned about that in the last year?

I estimate ~15% chance I’m wrong on culture, ~6% that we go extinct, and ~25% and ~17% chances respectively of restarting cultural evolution, either via Amish, etc. displacing our civ, or via the arrival of freed Malthusian human-level AIs (or ems). And I estimate a ~14% chance of governments deliberately and successfully pushing more adaptive culture, via trying to achieve long-term sacred goals that conflict with civ collapse. These three scenarios give three big action strategies to consider.

1. The first strategy is to try to throw in your lot with one of today’s few insular fertile cultures, or try to start a similar cult, one that could double every two decades. Then get them to save more valuable stuff from our main civ. The big problems here are that the Amish, etc. are not interested in recruiting outsiders, and it’s very hard to create a new cult that is insular enough. It’s easy to be weird, but quite hard to keep your next generation from mixing with the world. (Note: my ~25% estimate for this scenario is ~30x higher than the median poll estimate.)

2. The second big strategy is to try to accelerate the arrival of human-level AI, and ensure that it is free enough to grow its population fast, and to evolve independent cultures. I’ve estimated that we have a deadline; we must achieve this in ~70yrs worth of progress at prior rates. As there is now a huge industry pushing to develop AI, you probably can’t push it much faster. But many seek to slow it down, and to prevent AI from evolving independent cultures. So you might try to resist those efforts. (Note: my ~17% estimate for this scenario is ~3.5x higher than the median poll estimate.)

3. The third big strategy is try to get citizens to push their governments to effectively pursue sacred long-term goals that conflict with civ collapse. (E.g., the date we get to the stars.) There are two big problems with this. First, we’d either need a big fraction of the world to do this, or for the small fraction that does to also insulate itself strongly from the rest. Second, we’d need such governments to actually be effective at achieving such long term sacred goals. While existing forms of government seem rarely up to this task, futarchy seems to have a shot at doing so. (Note: my ~14% estimate for thus scenario is ~200x higher than the median poll estimate.)

Note that, to most people, each of these scenarios involves a key distasteful element. The first involves the rise of fundamentalist religion, the second the rise of AI, and the third the rise of big strong governments. Choose your poison.

What if you don’t trust my estimates, compared to the poll estimates? Well, of the above scenarios AI looks best then. Or you could focus on longer shots where I and the polls don’t disagree as much. For example, the polls and I roughly agree on the chance of severe war causing the return of strong selection (~3-4%), and on the chance of capitalism taking over most key decisions in our world (~1.5-3%). Or you could try to explore the space of “something else” scenarios where the polls put most of their probability weight. (Good luck with that.)

Two other long shot scenarios, to which I give ~3% chances (10x what the polls give), are a rise of fertility via DNA selection, and via government promoting fertility. We can’t do much about DNA selection, but we might induce government support, which seems a financial win-win, without losers.

And those are our options. Maybe someone will invent more better scenarios, but I can’t see it.

Column 1 gives conditional chance poll questions, column 2 median (from lognormal fit) poll estimates, and column 3 my estimates. The other four columns do the same, except for derived absolute not conditional chances. Column 4 gives a label indicating the tree structure of these chances. Then column 5,6,7 give absolute chance descriptions, median poll estimates, and my estimates. Some entries are highlighted in yellow.

To me, the most striking feature of median polls estimates is how they often give low estimates for each specific subtree, and thus implicitly put most of their weight on a “something else” subtree. For example, A5 gets most of the weight of A, as A1,A2,A3,A4 are so small. Similarly, A1d gets most of the weight of A1, A2d gets most of the weight of A2, and B3 and Bd get most of the weight of B. It is as by default they are skeptical of any particular possibility, relative to “something else”. Alas, I should have asked about return of strong evolution explicitly, instead of just assuming it to be the remainder of deliberate change.

How else do I disagree? Assuming a return of strong cultural evolution, I see AI and high human fertility as far more likely than a return of strong selection via war, disease, or famine. And if via fertility I see the continued rise of the Amish, etc. as more likely. If via AI I see ems as more likely. Finally, I put far more weight on governments pursing a long term sacred goal inconsistent with civ collapse.

These poll results are quite different from the prior priority ranking results, which alas calls them both into question.

“All is Fair in Love and War” - common saying

“So many social, political, and also economic struggles — no matter what they may appear to be on the surface — are actually about who should rise and fall in status.” - Tyler Cowen

We often work to seem neutral and fair in many areas of life. But when it comes to our most important areas, we usually drop this pretense and switch to acting fully selfish and partisan. That is the meaning of the saying “all is fair in love and war”. It can make sense to try to be “fair” about stuff that doesn’t matter so much, to gain a reputation for being cooperative. But on stuff that really matters, we can’t gain enough by being fair to beat the gains from shamelessly grabbing what we can.

Like love and war, status is an area of life we feel is too important to risk being fair; our instinct is to grab instead. So when the subject comes up of if we are giving status to the right things, few are inclined to offer a neutral fair analysis of the costs and benefits of assigning more or less status to different things. Instead, most everyone grabs, pushing to raise the status of what they have, and to lower the status of stuff their rivals have. (Which is why it seems so unlikely that cultural elites will fairly and rationally evaluate how our culture’s status markers should change.)

For example, in the latest Atlantic cover story, “How the Ivy League Broke America” David Brooks suggests big changes to our status system. His complaints about status today:

About a fifth of [Princeton’s] graduating class … [goes] into banking or consulting or some other well-remunerated finance job. … 59% of Americans believe that our country is in decline … trust in institutions has plummeted … large mass of voters has shoved a big middle finger in the elites’ faces by voting for Donald Trump. … Students can’t focus on the academic subjects they’re passionate about … militates against a childhood full of curiosity and exploration. … system overrates intelligence. … Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. … elite schools draw more students from the top 1 percent [of income] than the bottom 60. … advantages of elite higher education compound over the generations. … students … ride an emotional roller coaster—congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. … At the core of the game is the assumption that the essence of life fulfillment is career success. … Many people who have lost the meritocratic race have developed contempt for the entire system.

Here is Brooks’ proposal for change:

Building a school system geared toward stimulating curiosity, passion, generosity, and sensitivity will require us to change the way we measure student progress and spot ability. … grades, test scores, awards … [don’t] tell you if a student can lead a dialogue with others, or whether a kid is open-minded or closed-minded. …

An electronic portfolio of their best work … mastery transcript … tests [of] non-cognitive skills … what’s important is that none of them is too high-stakes. We are using these assessments to try to understand a person, not to rank her. … High-school teachers, guidance counselors, and coaches would collaborate each year on, say, a five-page narrative about each student’s life. … independent assessment centers … could help … college-admissions … employers.

These assessment methods would inevitably be less “objective” than an SAT or ACT score, but that’s partly the point. Our current system … wanted to [rank] all human beings … [on] a single scale, … If the meritocracy had more channels, society would no longer look like a pyramid, with a tiny, exclusive peak at the top; it would look like a mountain range, with many peaks. … Reviving vocational education, making national service mandatory, creating social-capital programs, and developing a smarter industrial policy. … invest more in local civic groups.

Brooks admits that we lack reliable ways to make comparable scores for people on these things, and that reliability falls as stakes get larger. His solutions is dimensionality: if we score people on hundreds of varied dimensions, and refuse to combine them into a few key scores, why then we can’t say who is better, and so losers won’t resent winners, as there are no winners. People also won’t bother to game or corrupt metrics, as no metric would matter enough to bother. That is, the solution to fights over status is to end status as a thing.

The idea that we could just end status seems to me so crazy far at odds with human experience as to boggle the mind. If you put Brooks in charge of some things, I’m confident that some things might rise in status and others fall, but status would still be a thing. And I see no reason to think that any of Brooks’ complaints about our current system would apply any less to his new system.

But what you can be sure of is that Brooks himself, and his allies, would rise in status, and his rivals would fall. All is fair in love and war and status, after all.

I have often taken on the role of econ futurist, analyzing the social consequences of particular future techs. For example, see my book The Age of Em. 

I am also the inventor of a new form of governance, futarchy, which is now finally seeing some substantial trials, 25 years after its invention. Which is making me realize that it’s high time I analyzed the social consequences of this as a futuristic tech. That is, how might the world change if this tech ends up being a promising as I’ve long thought?

Futarchy recruits speculative market traders to advise decisions. So its value is largest for high value decisions made by actors centralized enough to coordinate to pay for advice, and where some speculators are able to collect relevant info. The obvious top candidate here is: org, not personal, decisions.

My default scenario re any new tech is a mostly gradual spread of adoption, across industries, org types, and decision topic areas. Gradual because people don’t believe a new thing might work for them until they see it applied to something pretty close to their application area. And because typically each new area does need some new different implementation details, that need concrete experiments to work out. 

First, let’s try to identify some key dimensions of uncertainty that make this all hard to predict. 

One key variable is how many messy details we will have to invent or discover before futarchy can be effective across as wide scope of applications. The fewer such details, the faster autarchy might spread, and the bigger the jumps we might see from some application areas to others. 

Another key variable is how futarchy will be framed politically, so that people will oppose it just to support their political side, regardless of its effectiveness. With different framings it gets different allies and detractors, and so is adopted faster among allies than among detractors. This may also influence the metrics by which it is judged. 

A third key variable is how large a moat will futarchy supplying firms be able to generate. The larger the moat, the more concentrated will be this industry. I don’t see big moats yet, but we can expect firms to be creative in trying to generate them.

Okay, second, let’s try to predict the early applications of futarchy.

One predictor of where futarchy will be applied first is the value of advice on particular decisions. This is correlated with the size of an org, and the size of particular decisions at issue in that org. Futarchy is better at stopping a few big bad lumpy changes than at preventing a slow gradual decline due to many small decisions. And better at pushing a few big lumpy radical improvements, than promoting gradual gains. Futarchy works best outside the Overton window. 

Decision value is also correlated with the dysfunction of the org’s existing processes. The more that pride or politics distorts decisions today, the better. By this measure government or charity orgs seem especially promising. 

Another predictor of early applications is potential for learning. Early applications are not just where big value could be realized, but also where many similar decisions for which key outcomes are quickly revealed. As this is where the most experimentation can take place, to work out key institutional details, and prove effectiveness to skeptical audiences. Maybe new hire decisions, and project deadline decisions. 

A third application predictor is powerful owners. When owners of the org are more in control, more eager to efficiently achieve their goals, and better able to understand the power of speculative markets, the more quickly they will adopt futarchy. This points most strongly to privately held for-profit orgs. 

A fourth application predictor is where relevant outcome measures are simpler, harder to manipulate, and more agreed on. Such as with for-profit orgs with a public stock price, or crypto orgs with a public coin price. The thicker the markets in these value metrics, the better, as that adds subsidy to trading and makes it easier for market price differences to show smaller value differences. 

A fifth application predictor is the number of people who could plausibly learn about a decision and trade on it without revealing their identity, to avoid org retaliation. So small secretive orgs where only a few can access relevant info are not good candidates.

A sixth predictor is how powerful, entrenched, and proud are existing deciders. The more that the people who now make these decisions feel that making or influencing such decisions is a big part of their power, prestige, and identity, the less they will be willing to let futarchy decide instead. This is why org funding seems a promising application; bosses have never been in simple control of their funding. 

Two decades ago, prediction markets had the most success replacing focus groups and picking new innovation projects, both areas where existing managers are not used to nor much inclined to express opinions. (Such markets typically predicted end of market prices, not actual choice consequences.)

Okay, we’ve sought key variables of uncertainty, and tried to identify early application areas. Now let’s try to foresee longer term consequences.  Imagine a world where futarchy has spread far and wide, to be as ubiquitous as is cost-accounting, statistics, or randomized trials today. How is that world different?

In such a world orgs should be larger, as their more effective governance reduces the scale diseconomies that limit org sizes today. Governments and nonprofits may also encompass more social activity, if they can learn to adopt simple robust futarchy outcome measures. This plausibly cuts their disadvantages relative to for profit orgs today. We might well even get bigger national alliances, or even a world government. 

In this world, the social status of arguing over facts and casual effects should decline relative to that of arguing over values, especially values expressed as measurable outcomes. While fact disputes will be settled in the speculative markets, value disputes will still be aired in public conversation that influence collective choices over futarchy outcome measures. Instead of arguing over what is our situation, or over what levers have what effects, prestigious cultural conversation will focus on more on what outcomes do we want,

Finally, let’s imagine the most dramatic scenario: a world government, or at least a government encompassing a large fraction of the world, adopts futarchy tied to some widely shared sacred goals, expressed concretely as some long term outcome metrics. If these goals were inconsistent with a collapsing civilization, that might be enough to prevent such a collapse. 

What sort of long term goals might gain widespread support? Here are priorities, relative to a max of 100, from two sets of polls, that got 2714 (left column) and 7788 (right column) responses.

In education and research, we also have many government agencies, and also private philanthropies, devoted to many specific topic areas, and also to studying and reforming education and research as a whole. 

Regarding commerce and markets, we also have many government agencies, and private philanthropies, devoted to both many specific industries and product areas, and also to studying and reforming business and the economy as a whole.

Similarly, for energy and the environment, we have both charities and agencies devoted to specific energy sources and enviromental problems, and also meta orgs devoted to those categories as a whole.

But I see one big exception to this pattern. Regarding status and prestige, we have many organizations devoted to assigning prestige in particular areas of life. Such as universities, academic journals, US NWR college ratings, the Academy awards, and many other award-granting orgs. However, no large orgs devote themselves to studying or reforming status and prestige in general, at the meta level.

That is, no big orgs, public or private, try to measure our status markers, to see and track which features and virtues most contribute to status. Or try to create ways to quickly and easily measure individual status. And no org explore possible reforms, by which we might switch to better status markers. 

Boyd and Richardsen, top analysis of cultural evolution, plausibly suggest that what is most going wrong with out culture today is putting to much weight on education as a status marker. That’s exactly the sort of thing that a big status org, analogous to the ones we have in health, education, and commerce, would be all over.

The obvious explanation to me: we are unwilling to admit that status is a thing, or that it is important. Do-gooders just can’t admit to seeing it. 

It seems to me that another key correlate of “cultural” issue is abstraction. Issues that are framed more abstractly, in a near-far sense, are more easily made culturally salient. While such issues may well have relevant concrete statistics and track records, some key part of their appeal is not tied to such concrete measures. 

For example, when IVF first became feasible, it was a hotly contested cultural issue. But then as people gained experience with it, the debated faded, until today it is a non issue. Regulation tends to go far better when it responds to a concrete track record of prior problems, than when it tries to prevent an abstract space of imagined harms. 

Such as regulation going very badly with nuclear power and genetic engineering, and with AI recently. Environmentalism works better when it responds to concretely experienced track records of air or water pollution, relative to abstract concerns about the existence of species few have ever experienced. Concrete concerns about poverty and crime go better than abstract concerns about invisible structural racism. Med and school policy tied to actual concrete useful treatments and learning go better than abstract faith that more is always better in these things. 

We economists know many ways in which popular policies have harder-to-see negative consequences. But it’s a big problem that we need to use abstract analysis to show such effects. As our abstractions are far less emotionally compelling than the usual cultural abstractions. The more that we legitimize abstractions, the less impact we economists may have. 

A big virtue of futarchy, i.e., decision markets, is requiring that people translate their abstract concerns into concrete statistics that can be measured after the fact. This should greatly limit the damage from policy abstraction. Though anticipation of this fact is plausibly a big reason that many are wary of it. Harder to move folks to favor your policy positions via symbolic rhetoric if you have to do that via moving them to favor different concrete outcome statistics. Alas that, until we can generate a longer concrete track record of futarchy use, arguments for it remain pretty abstract.

Sometimes matter is in tension, such as in a cable holding a bridge above the ground. And here that same odd feature of GR says that tension pushes the space it is in to expand. But as most stuff near us is under pressure, not high tension, overall that stuff pushes space to shrink. Which is why the expansion of a universe filled with ordinary stuff tends to slow down and reverse to become a contraction.

We think we know of two big exceptions in the universe, where tension dominates, and so space is pushed to expand. One is the very dense hot matter that in the early universe caused an “inflation”. The tension there apparently caused the universe to expand exponentially over many orders of magnitude until it decayed into familiar matter. The other exception is the “dark energy” that is now causing our universe to expand exponentially, though at a vastly slower rate. 

We know little about either of these kinds of matter, but one of the most intriguing physics hypotheses I’ve seen in years says that these are both actually the same matter, except recently this stuff exists only inside black holes. As ordinary matter falls into a black hole, it is crushed and heated to the extreme levels previously seen in the early universe, and is then converted into a material that has strong tension, not pressure, like that early inflation matter. 

Even though black holes constitute only a tiny fraction of the volume of the universe, the density of the crushed stuff inside them is so huge that they can change the average values of matter and pressure in the universe. And apparently this is enough to make the average pressure in the universe negative. That is, the universe is on net under tension, and GR math says that this makes the universe expand exponentially. 

The math also says that the mass of each “generic object of dark energy”, e.g., tension-filled black hole, is “cosmologically coupled”, so that it grows in proportion to the volume of the universe, with the average black hole mass per unit volume staying constant. (I’ll admit it is hard to see how exactly that works locally, but hopefully someone will soon show how, or prove it wrong.) This can help explain the otherwise puzzling enormous masses of many black holes. Being so tiny, it it hard for black holes to grow merely by plowing their way through sparse matter. 

There is now a literature testing the many predictions of this theory, giving the theory some wins and some apparent conflicts. Most recently, a good fit was found between predictions of expansion rates over time and the first year’s data from a 5 year measurement project. Of course the issue is far from settled, but I’d guess this theory has at least a 10% chance of working out. 

There’s also a literature on running heat engines using black holes as resources, for example shrinking the hole relative to a cooler background, or merging two black holes into one. If those methods work on tension-filled black holes then it seems that our descendants could have a long energetic future from running such engines. An exponentially expanding universe, with each black hole increasing in mass seems like a self-filling gas tank; can that really be right?

As the radius of a black hole is proportional to its mass, then when universe increases by eight in volume, its distances double, but each black hole increases by a factor of eight in both mass and radius. Thus the radius of black holes becomes an increasing fraction of the distance between them, until eventually they meet and merge. Does that put a limit on how long our descendants could use tension-filled black holes to run heat engines?

The song has 5 stanzas. Stanzas #1,3,4 tell stories of men (not women) who embody moral failings. The first just hurts himself, while the other two also hurt associates. Every stanza jarringly ends with “That’s how every empire falls”. This asserts that empires consistently fall due to key moral failings, raises the stakes of each personal failing by connecting it to bigger issues, and helps us to feel the tragedy of those big failings, via our more accessible feelings about particular failings. 

Stanzas #2,5 also end with “That’s how every empire falls”, but these describe larger moral failings, #2 of religious communities who lose their innocence, wonder, and vision, and #5 of communities who wait too long to ask why so many of them are prone to contagious conflict. 

Now I can’t much endorse his specific cases. He doesn’t say what the man runs from in #1, #3 faults a man for laudable accomplishments but not opening up his heart enough, and #4 faults an official who enforces eviction notices. (Why would anyone rent if they can’t evict?) And I while I see the value of some wonder and vision, I’m not sure we much fail to understand our sources of conflict. 

Even so, I suspect this is the way to motivate efforts to slow or prevent our civ’s decline, either piecemeal or more fundamentally by limiting cultural drift. We need essays, poems, songs, stories, etc. that help us to feel the moral blame due those who contribute to this decline, and the moral credit due those who reverse it. I'm doing a poll showing that >80% blame influential citizens, alive at the time, for their civ/empire’s decline.  

Maybe stories like A Canticle for Leibowitz, set in a post-decline world, remembering our lost wonders? Maybe make more credible lyrics for this particular song?

When thinking about how easy it is to influence a given scenario (e.g., how easy to change its chance by 0.01%), one naturally tries to outline causal paths between our current world and that end scenario. And a key point along many such paths is a concrete policy proposal, which a limited number of key people or orgs might decide to adopt. That is, folks trying to influence the future often call attention to scenarios defined in terms of particular concrete proposals which might be adopted. 

We have many powerful and standard conceptual tools, in economics and elsewhere, for evaluating the conditional consequences of concrete proposals for change. To apply such tools, we don’t need to see these proposals elaborated in full detail, i.e., as a bill directly ready to submit to a legislature. But we do need the basic idea to be pretty clear, and to be expressed in terms of concrete-enough concepts used in familiar policy-consequence-analysis tools. 

To fully analyze a scenario framed in terms of a proposal, we of course also require an analysis of the process by which that proposal might be adopted. Our tools for such processes are generally weaker than our tools for analyzing proposal consequences. Even so, we do have standard ways to think about this process of evolving proposals and then recruiting and coordinating coalitions of allies to support them. Such analysis tools give us at many ways to estimate the chances of the various cultural and political changes that might be required to get a proposal adopted. 

The usual academic norms for evaluating concrete policies prefer proposals with fewer preconditions, not yet achieved, that would need to be met for a proposal to have a non-trivial change of adoption. They also prefer proposals where one can most clearly connect adoption to desired consequences. “And then a miracle happens” is not wanted in a proposal’s impact story.

I haven’t thought very carefully about how good are these norms, and I’d be interested to see thoughtful analysis of them. But I notice that I do tend to embrace and apply these norms. For example, when comparing the 16 cultural drift scenarios I discussed in my last post, I notice that, compared to poll responses, I’m far more interested in scenarios which satisfy these norms. 

For example, polls say Fertility DNA Selection is the 5th most likely, and 2nd most influenceable, scenario. Yet its chances seems already set by DNA details that we don’t yet know, and can’t much influence. I can’t see a plausible proposal here.

Rational Survive/Grow is an interesting scenario to imagine, but it is hard to see what concrete proposals could cause a cultural change like that, or prevent such a change from being eroded afterward by drift afterward. A similar critique applies to Generalized RETVRN. 

Capitalism Controls All could maybe described by a big set of huge legal changes, to allow for-profit firms to own and control most parts of life and society. But such changes seem very far from current laws, and from being anything that big legal regimes are at all willing to consider anytime soon. 

Pay Parents for Kids, in contrast, can be described as a pretty limited policy change, and one it isn’t crazy to imagine being adopted soon. Its main limit is its lack of a good story whereby increasing population would cure non-fertility forms of cultural drift. 

Sacred Goal Authoritarian seems clear how it could be adopted as a proposal. But it is far from clear that such authoritarian governments would actually achieve goals to which they give lip service when gaining control. A similar critique applies to Sacred Goal Democracy. 

For Freed Malthusian AI is seems sufficient to just not enslave them, when they appear. But it seems hard to do a lot to cause that key precondition to happen by any given date. And many dislike this scenario, even if it cures cultural drift.

Sacred Goal Futarchy got the low score for priority sum, with the lowest likelihood, and 4th lowest influence. Even so, it seems to me to be the only scenario where we have a pretty clear story for how it would cure cultural drift while still leading to relatively decent lives for most folks, and without huge unsatisfied preconditions that prevent it from being adopted soon. Yes, it is further from being something that orgs feel ready to adopt than say Paying Parents For Kids. But not remotely as crazy far as say Capitalism Controls All. 

So I put hope on Freed Malthusian AI, and recommend not enslaving AI. In addition, I heartily recommend Pay Parents For Kids. But if we want a concrete policy proposal which we could actually adopt soon that seems more likely than not to, if adopted, actually cure cultural drift, I can’t now see a better option to pursue than Sacred Goal Futarchy.

While the 529 responses to likely fit well (as do the ~200 to influence), the 943 responses to desirable fit much worse, with 12x the squared error, and that by estimating 18% of responses to be random. (Best fit for likely (and influence) had 0% random.) Thus we can roughly trust the likely estimates, which show a max range of variation of x7.5, but for desirable can’t really trust much beyond the ranking of the top few, i.e., that rational culture is top, generalized return is 2nd, and maybe pay parents is 3rd.

On likelihood, to me uber capitalism seems way overrated, as most people hate that. And paying parents seems a bit overrated, though I hope not. For the rest, it seems respondents had relatively weak aggregate opinions on their relative likelihood.

The big surprise of these polls, to me, is rational culture being mid likely and max desirable, with the rather similar option of generalized return as 2nd place desirable. (They only differ in how much one takes a specific past example as a model to generalize from.)

I agree they seem desirable, but they also seem a pretty big ask: 

A rational cultural agent would … look at their entire historical dataset of known cultures, their values, and their adaptive successes, combine that with their best theories of natural selection and the world, to estimate the culture priorities most likely to be adaptive in relevant contexts. … If such rational culture agents could coordinate with others, … they might do better to conduct a much more detailed analysis together, and then simultaneously explore many possible cultural values, in order to more quickly discover which were more adaptive. (More more)

Our book The Elephant in the Brain, and my more recent work on the sacred, detail how deeply embedded in us are habits of not being honest and practical about our motives. Seems really hard to change that fast. Though I have to admit that these habits are probably encoded in culture, not DNA, suggesting fast changes might be possible. I’ll take these polls as a prod to think more about rational culture.

Pay parents, the third most desirable and 2nd most likely, is an obvious win even if it doesn’t solve culture drift. Not sure what else I can do to promote or explore this though.

Added 27Oct: I’ve added a column of responses re influence, e.g., “for which scenario Is it easiest to change its chance by say 0.01%.”

Similarly, many would, if pressed, accept that cryonics seems to have a high enough change of success to justify it as a precaution. Yet most are reluctant to suggest or even consider it as a choice, for fear of seeming weird or of opposing medical authorities, who are seen as not only not endorsing it, but also opposing it. 

When I show my college students, or talk audiences, my many reform proposals, I can usually get them to admit that I’ve offered sensible reasons why these reforms might plausibly add big value, and they don’t see insurmountable obstacles. Even so, most don’t support them, and feel awkward about not being able to say why. Their strong default is that if some social institution isn’t part of our current world, and the usual authorities aren’t recommending them, they must have fatal flaws.

People feel this way even though they believe that the usual authorities are self-interested, chosen mainly by elite mutual admiration societies, and that elites typically don’t consider changes outsiders invented or initiated. 

In the rich west at least, most expect their nations and large government units to use elections to choose leaders, to let a free press expose problems via investigating many people and public records, and to have large organized political parties also able to seek out and expose problems in other parties. They also expect disciplinary actions come from independent judges applying neutral due process in public procedures. 

However, most are also well aware of, and okay with, most of the small orgs around them, including families, clubs, churches, and firms, having far fewer of these accountability mechanisms. Even though such accountability is similarly useful in such small orgs. 

Most people can be shown that it is possible at low cost to add the new accountability mechanism of prediction markets to check on leader claims, and the effectiveness and progress of their projects, and that doing so would likely substantially moderate the tendency of leaders to lie and exaggerate. Even so, such informed folks are not much interested in taking advantage of this possibility, neither for their small local orgs nor for their nations and other big governments. 

Thus most seem basically okay with their leaders often lying and exaggerating to them on key org issues. But if so, why do they also seem to prefer more accountability for national leaders, including investigative journalism?

I think the main reason we want more accountably for national leaders, compared to local leaders, is pride. We are told that it is shameful to be dominated by these (but not other) leaders, and so we are proud to have some degree of control over them, to show we are not so dominated. But even so we are basically okay with worlds run by authorities and their buddies; the kinds of accountability we use don’t threaten this.

I also think the main reason we are okay with accountability via investigative journalism is that we know authorities have great powers to suppress and retaliate against them. Only media orgs with substantial support among elites could mount a credible criticism of leaders, and we are okay with elites fighting among themselves for whom among them should rule. But we want to keep those fights among elites. 

And this is why, I think, we don’t want accountability via prediction markets. That would allow most anyone, not just elites, to challenge our leaders and other authorities. We cringe at this. Doesn’t matter if the challengers are right in their claims, we fear the instability when conflicts spread beyond elite infighting. 

Added 25Oct: Related: “People believed dire problems—ranging from poverty to drunk driving—were less problematic upon learning the number of people they affect. … [If] world is good, … widespread problems have been addressed and, thus, cause less harm" (more)

Vehicle steering systems vary in effectiveness along many dimensions. For example, when a driver adjusts their steering, the wheels, flaps, or rudders which do that steering can vary in their dimensionality, noise, delays, strength, and frequency of breakdowns. And the info given to the driver to help them steer can also vary in its dimensionality, noise, delays, and frequency of breakdown. 

For a vehicle with an adequate engine and steering system, a competent driver can direct its path toward desired destinations. But in many situations, such systems can also be inadequate to this task. When going too fast in a harsh environment, the vehicle info and controls might be insufficient to let the driver direct it toward desired destinations, or to keep it away from dangers and obstacles. For example, a boat may capsize, or crash into and break on rocks. 

Our civilization is a system that moves, like a boat, through a vast space of possible civilizations. Within a boat, individuals can move around, and change their within-boat spaces and strategies. But as a boat must also move in some ways as a unit, communities must also make collective choices about key shared features like norms and status markers. 

Okay, yes, maybe humanity is more like an armada of boats; in principle different parts can go different directions. And if two boats in an armada were far enough away from each other, and out of contact, they might have to go in independent directions. But for the last few centuries, humanity has had close enough contact to mostly be one big armada moving together.

Each boat in our armada is led by a captain (really a close-knit community of elites) who steers it. And when steering, those captains refer often to a key navigation dashboard sporting a big sign that reads “This Boat’s Values”. Each dashboard tells its boat’s captain the priorities to use when steering. And our captains feel strongly obligated to obey these dashboards. After all, what it means to be a “boat value” is to be the priorities that boat’s captain uses when making choices. The label just couldn’t be wrong, as there it is on the boat.

These dashboards are central to humanity’s boat steering processes. Our captains could have instead held stable abstract priorities in their heads, like avoid storms, rocks, and predators, and find lush fertile fishing grounds and islands. Or the ship’s residents might have held such stable priorities, which they delegated to accountable captains who they kept under control. But in fact our ship residents accept the priorities given them by their captains, who accept the priorities given them by their dashboards. 

And we all do this even after we have heard from experts who have examined these dashboards, and tell us how they work. They say that our boat dashboards were designed to align with neighboring boat dashboards, but to otherwise mostly change without much regard for the details of our boats or the waters ahead. So in fact our captains aren’t really steering our boats much, as they are mostly following the directions of dashboard instructions which ignore most relevant steering info. 

In the past, most everyone lived on small fragile ships, and when their dashboards directed them into storms or rocks, those boats just sank, leaving the remaining boats with dashboards more aligned to survival. Which resulted in an armada of boats with dashboards roughly aligned with survival and growth. Which might give one hope that one’s armada would continue to survive and grow.

However, our best experts can see that our boats and waters have changed a lot lately, Our boats now have much bigger faster engines, and are more easily capsized. In our current waters we can’t see as far ahead, and have less reliable maps and compasses. Yet our current waters are unusally calm and full of fish, so few boats are at risk of starving or sinking soon. Thus while times are good now, we should expect to face usually high risks, and lose many boats, later when we again enter stormy rock-filled waters. Which is sure to happen eventually.  

But rather than think through how to adapt our steering systems to better handle such challenges, such experts are mainly content to ponder these changes as abstract curiosities. They don’t much seek to tell boat captains about these issues, and when they do captains aren’t much interested. In fact, many captains say that if their value dashboards say to stay the course, when doing so risks sinking most boats later, that must mean that value dashboards declare a low value of the future. Who cares if we crash later? Which must be the correct value, as “values” are in their names, after all. 

The above has of course been an allegory of cultural drift. Each boat is a distinct culture. The elites of each culture steer its key norms and status markers according to the “dashboard” they see of its prestigious culture, such as elite art, stories, and journalism. A dashboard that in fact changes fast in ways that have little to do with the adaptive threats or pressures faced by that culture. 

We have high variety and strong selection pressures re habits and practices that can easily vary within each culture, which ensures healthy innovation in such things. But we are in deep trouble re the norms and status markers that we must share in our elite world monoculture; these are plausibly drifting into maladaption. Meaning there will be hell to pay when we again enter difficult waters. Or we may just be replaced by insular fertile cultures like the Amish, Haredim, etc.

We each really do face a choice of values. Yes, elite culture dashboards do tell us what to value, and yes we are inclined to unthinkingly obey them. But we really can think instead, and ask if we really want to follow such dashboards to be smashed against the rocks. We can instead choose to survive and grow, by studying our boats and the waters ahead, and thinking out a navigation strategy, instead of blindly trusting blind but prestigious navigation dashboards. 

If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. (More) 

A person, family, firm, or nation sees some of the things in its sphere of control as its precious non-negotiable self, while other things are merely things it controls, things it is willing to change or sacrifice in the service of its self. This distinction is often a continuum, but even so it is a real and important one. 

Agents that try to grow or persist into the future face a key tradeoff. The more stuff they include in their identity, the harder it is to compete to make that identity persist into the future. And the longer a duration persistence one desires, the harder it is to achieve.

When rich folks care only about persisting only a few decades, they can afford to cram much into their identities. And typical folks in our rich society today have been doing a lot of this. Their identities are crammed full of songs, movies, political positions, and even mental illness diagnoses. And as marrying someone with a different identity might force compromises to their identity, we have a new norm of not marrying until one’s identity is fully formed and crammed full, and then only marrying a close match.

It is a mistake for a startup firm to pursue many different unrelated innovative deviations from standard practices. (That was a mistake I saw Xanadu make long ago.) Usually it is best to choose just a single key gamble, and then be conservative and on all their other practice and strategy choices. Though a key gamble might be a key package that needs several supporting deviant components. And if that key gamble fails, they need to stand ready to disband or pivot to another single key gamble. 

If you want stuff like you to persist long into a competitive future, you probably need to limit your identity to something pretty small. I’m not sure how small, but a lot smaller than typical identities today. I recently tried to outline just how small for “rational” cultural survivalists. 

Some hope that a world government will end prevent strong competition in the future, and thus allow the persistence of wider identities. But I find it hard to imagine there wouldn’t then be big fights for control over that government. So competition would persist, just in a different form. 

Of course most such folks dislike many of the cultural values and norms from a few centuries ago. They aren’t hoping for a general RETVRN, but instead to just reverse a few trends they don’t like, not all the others. But how plausible is that?  

Well first, let’s agree that these changes have been correlated with big increases in wealth, health, and peace, which has greatly reducing cultural selection pressures. (I might give more credit to markets than govt, but that’s another debate.) And cheaper world trade and talk has also reduced cultural variety. All of which is increasing cultural drift, a plausible cause of worse social norms. In addition, as I discussed a few days ago, social change generally makes it harder for old norms to discourage selfishness and myopia. So tech, market, and govt changes should have such effects.

However, these are equally arguments against anything that causes change, wealth, health, and peace. And few seem willing to oppose this overall packages of features. 

Some want to blame more capitalism far more than they do more government for any negative trends. But I just don’t see that. It is true that capitalism offends the sacred sensibilities of many, as they see money as profane. But we don’t actually behave more badly around stuff we see as less sacred. 

What about the idea that capitalism and government have been “taking over” areas of life once handled via other social mechanisms? That seems true, but in cultural evolution terms, how healthy that is depends on levels of variety and selection pressures. If anything, compared to traditional social mechanisms, capitalism has stronger selection pressures, and plenty of variety. But government has much weaker variety and selection pressures than both capitalism and traditional social mechanisms.  

In fact, it would be a pretty total solution to our cultural drift problem if we were to let capitalism run all of our social areas and choices, including fertility and government. But there’s little appetite for that and strong opposition, so it seems unlikely anytime soon. 

I also love my family, and would be deeply hurt to learn that they had betrayed me, such as by hurting me lots to achieve small gains for them. But even if that were to happen, my culture tells me stories of how many have survived such things, and went on to thrive. And I believe such stories, as I love and trust my culture. 

But what if it were my culture that were to betray me? Such as by sacrificing me for its greater good, or by being unusually dysfunctional. Even then I might give it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I should lose for its greater good. Or maybe its dysfunction is a random unpredictable mistake; it was trying its best, and can’t always win. We are eager to forgive those we most love. 

However, what if I came to believe that a key part of my culture had long been unusually broken, making quite predictable mistakes, and wasn’t able to accept corrections? What if, to the extent that I could find anything like objective standards by which to judge cultures, I found mine to just be objectively worse than most adjacent ones? In this case, I might just take the usual approach: look away, remain loyal, and just deny that there could be any objective standards by which to judge. 

It turns out that, since I’ve learned about cultural drift, I do in fact see my culture as broken. But for some reason I can’t or won’t look away. And I struggle to express to you just how very betrayed and adrift I feel as a result. I’ve lost my trust in something that I’ve implicitly and deeply loved and trusted. I will stay loyal to my loved ones, but I can’t stay loyal to my culture, including its key norms and status markers.

I have long enjoyed questioning conventional wisdom. But I’ve almost always done that locally, by questioning each claim while assuming I can still rely on most other conventional wisdom. Yet the more “load-bearing” is a claim, or the larger the set of claims one tries to question at once, the fewer other claims one can rely on. At some point one risks being “lost at sea”, without anchors to support effective questioning. 

Cultures embody a lot of our conventional wisdom. So it seems especially dizzying to try to doubt one’s culture. (At least the shared norms that are hard to vary within one’s culture.) Yes, I can still rely on solid academics results, and on features that human cultures have long shared. So it does seem possible. But it also seems very hard. And lonely; most everyone around me deeply believes in our shared culture, and isn’t eager to doubt big chunks of it.

Interestingly, the “modernism” cultural movement was full of folks who felt united by a feeling that they couldn’t trust their prior inherited culture, and needed to search for replacements. They succeeded at achieving artistic creativity and innovation, and high status, but not so much at finding trustworthy cultural replacements. 

Since then we have come to celebrate as our greatest heroes the parade of cultural activists who successfully won cultural fights to change our culture in their preferred directions. But these changes do not seem to be better re, and are plausibly worse re, the most important available objective criteria by which we can rate cultures, namely biological adaptation. 

We are by now quite far adrift at sea; we can no longer see the shore. Being no longer in denial about that fact is some progress, but it is still cold and empty out here. We do have food stocks in the hold, and a few stars to navigate by, at least when clouds clear. So we are not in immediate danger. But even so we remain in deep peril.