In this conversation, we chat with Robin Hanson about his thesis on cultural drift, exploring the implications of the global monoculture and reduced selection pressures on the long-term future of humanity. We think through the mechanisms for and potential solutions to cultural drift, such as deep multiculturalism, human-level AI, adaptive transcendent narratives, prediction markets (futarchy) and more.
It occurs to me that cultural drift is an idea generated from an autistic’s typical-mind fallacy. For us, it’s obvious that our values derive our norms, which we then adhere strongly to. But the typical person often has inconsistent values and norms and will change their behavior according to the (social) circumstance. One of Robin’s suggestions is to increase cultural diversity through production of cults, with the assumption that individuals not strongly segregated outside mainstream society will quickly assimilate into it. It’s true that they assimilate, but not necessarily by adapting liberal values and wholeheartedly accepting it’s norms, but merely accepting it’s few and incredibly permissive norms without even necessarily relating them to their own values. This implies there are actually many latent cultures within liberalism which are ready to emerge in the case that selection pressures return. As an example, you can consider what would happen if you separated highly connected components from the global social graph into isolated islands: the cultural drift thesis implies that after several years the resulting societies would be indistinguishable, but this seems very unlikely to me (and actually, would probably be different even if you just used random sampling to generate the groups). On the other hand, you can consider Japan, which is famous for having many cults, probably emerging exactly because strong adherence to norms is a key tenant within Japanese culture. Nevertheless, you’ll probably find that the cultural distance between two members of different cults within Japan is less than that between the median Japanese versus the median Indian, Ontarian, or GMU Professor.
Rationalists will literally bring back child slavery rather than return to religion.
I notice that in listing the various norms that have been global imposed, even Hanson didn't dare mention the big one, namely the ban on slavery.
I have some disagreements with Hanson's analysis on this one. Might publish a detailed response soon.
PS: Check your links, halve of them redirect to the same article.
It occurs to me that cultural drift is an idea generated from an autistic’s typical-mind fallacy. For us, it’s obvious that our values derive our norms, which we then adhere strongly to. But the typical person often has inconsistent values and norms and will change their behavior according to the (social) circumstance. One of Robin’s suggestions is to increase cultural diversity through production of cults, with the assumption that individuals not strongly segregated outside mainstream society will quickly assimilate into it. It’s true that they assimilate, but not necessarily by adapting liberal values and wholeheartedly accepting it’s norms, but merely accepting it’s few and incredibly permissive norms without even necessarily relating them to their own values. This implies there are actually many latent cultures within liberalism which are ready to emerge in the case that selection pressures return. As an example, you can consider what would happen if you separated highly connected components from the global social graph into isolated islands: the cultural drift thesis implies that after several years the resulting societies would be indistinguishable, but this seems very unlikely to me (and actually, would probably be different even if you just used random sampling to generate the groups). On the other hand, you can consider Japan, which is famous for having many cults, probably emerging exactly because strong adherence to norms is a key tenant within Japanese culture. Nevertheless, you’ll probably find that the cultural distance between two members of different cults within Japan is less than that between the median Japanese versus the median Indian, Ontarian, or GMU Professor.