On the radio yesterday, I heard the soulful song That’s How Every Empire Falls, written by RB Morris sometime before 2005, and performed at various times by Morris, John Prine, and Marianne Faithfull. | Continue reading
I think often about the non-immediate future, and wonder how to best allocate effort to make that future better. And the first steps in this process are often to identify interesting classes of scenarios, and then estimate their desirability, chances, and ease of influence. | Continue reading
Over the last day, I did two sets of polls comparing 16 cultural drift scenarios (detailed here) re their likelihood and desirability. Responses were unusually noisy, and desires had an especially large model fit errors. Here are best fit priorities (relative to 100 max), sorted … | Continue reading
Many intellectuals, and intellectual wannabes, would, if pressed accept that UFOs seem sufficiently puzzling to justify more careful study. | Continue reading
Vehicles like cars, planes, and boats generally need a) an engine to push them forward, b) steering to direct their motions, and c) a driver to manage both. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
Many have noticed a key time coincidence. | Continue reading
Like most humans ever, I love my culture. | Continue reading
Babies are naturally pretty selfish, lazy, and present-oriented. | Continue reading
Academics use many different methods of inquiry. | Continue reading
Education reformers find it harder to change classes for younger students, as later classes depend on earlier classes, and still later classes depend on those. | Continue reading
We all have many kinds of features. | Continue reading
Imagine you can choose between a million projects, each of which you rank by two criteria: practicality and inspiration. | Continue reading
I’m a bit puzzled by how changing culture can change our deep values. | Continue reading
How do cultures change, especially re keys value-laden norms? | Continue reading
Imagine passengers on a plane, who somehow don’t know they are on an automated plane. | Continue reading
Two weeks from now is the 15th anniversary of one of my most popular essays, “This is the Dreamtime”. | Continue reading
Modernism, in the fine arts, [is] a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression … felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention. | Continue reading
Experts are the people who know and do the most on particular valuable topics, while elites are the people of highest status … we … tend to accept many important actions only if they are taken by elites, who do it in a sufficiently elite style. | Continue reading
Next Wednesday, 6:30p ET, I’ll talk with Katherine Dee about cultural drift at Interintellect. Subscribers to this blog can join this event for free by: | Continue reading
For millennia, thinkers have spent a lot of effort figuring out how an ideal “rational” agent would reason and act. | Continue reading
To the ancients, a “liberal” was educated, generous, tolerant, high- and open-minded, and above petty concerns. | Continue reading
If you recall, our grabby aliens analysis tries to explain 3 key datums: a) we don’t see any huge alien civs in our sky b) we have arrived at a very early date in the universe, and c) there is only ~1Gyr left for life on Earth. | Continue reading
Many kinds of things could have happened in history. | Continue reading
As a professor of economics, I feel obligated to publicly declare what I see as the biggest error that we economists promote to the world, using our authority as experts on economics. | Continue reading
Last weekend I attended Bryan Caplan’s annual board game weekend CaplaCon, as I have since it started in ‘07. | Continue reading
Unless something big changes, world population will start to fall in a few decades, after which it will most likely rise again due to insular fertile subcultures like the Amish. | Continue reading
Long ago in physics I learned of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Then in computer science I learned of Computer Professionals For Social Responsibility. Each struggled to gain respect. Later I saw how economists treat policy. In all these areas, I saw most “scientists” taking … | Continue reading
Ending a bit over a year ago, I spent a year studying the sacred, landing on an extended version of Durkheim’s story: groups bind together by uniquely seeing certain things outside themselves as special. | Continue reading
Due to low cultural variety and weak selection pressures, our dominant world culture seems to be drifting into maladaptive dysfunction. | Continue reading
I’ve been on a culture kick the last few months, and I know many of you don’t get it, as I didn’t until recently. | Continue reading
I started to write on prediction markets, which I think called “idea futures”, about 34 years ago. | Continue reading
Richard Hanania: | Continue reading
Our world is full of fights and contests, thought many are not explicitly labeled as such. | Continue reading
Attending an event on cryonics this last weekend tempts me to revisit the topic. And given the crazy tiny number of folks who have signed up for it (~4K), compared to the vast numbers of people (e.g., ~30% of | Continue reading
This Friday at 4p ET I’ll give a Zoom talk, open to all, on Cultural Drift. I’ll leave lots of time for discussion. | Continue reading
Jul 18, Concepts of Culture Jul 14, Cultural Drift Of Digital Minds Jul 12, Nature, Culture, Or Law? Jul 9, Neo Social Darwinism Jul 6, History of Social Darwinism Jun 30, Culture-Oriented History Jun 6, | Continue reading
A big obstacle to studying “culture” is this: the word is associated with a usually large number of distinct but related concepts. Here are five concepts directly associated with the word “culture”. | Continue reading
I invite those who’ve paid to subscribe to this blog to talk to me tomorrow afternoon 4-5:30p ET on zoom about culture. I’ll put a link to the zoom room here an hour before the event. | Continue reading
Cultural evolution is humanity’s superpower. But we may have broken it. Compared to centuries ago, the world’s cultures now have much higher internal drift rates, much weaker selection pressures, and much less variety. Not re tech, but re norms, status markers, and other culture … | Continue reading
To get your child potty trained, I see three approaches: Nature - Leave toilets around, let kid see you using them, and figure it out for themselves Culture - Emphasize how much your respect toilet users, and look down on others | Continue reading
A recent AER paper used data on what 20,000 college freshman in 2012 thought they would earn upon graduation, on what they actually earned in 2017, on stats of the sort that finance firms could easily get on these students in 2012, and private estimates by these students, as fres … | Continue reading
As the quotes in my recent post suggest, when intellectuals came to believe that life, and most everything we value. was structured by a competitive struggle for existence, many then tried to apply this theory to their personal and collective choices. They wondered how to best pa … | Continue reading
Pondering human evolutionary dynamics, I wondered what people want to pass on to their future. So I collected 32 options and did 24 polls asking “what do you most try to promote/grow with your actions”. From 2932 | Continue reading
As prep for my next post, let me fill you in on some history. First, the Wikipedia entry on “Social Darwinism”: Social Darwinism is … various pseudoscientific theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittes … | Continue reading
I’ve been traveling a lot for six weeks; one more week to go, then I’ll stay home for a while. In that time, I’ve given many talks, including two on cultural drift (to be posted soon), a topic I’ve continued to read and think lots about. I feel a bit out of practice writing now, … | Continue reading
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor … may be the most well-regarded philosopher in the English-speaking world … [He] has stalked … a “naturalist” view of humanity which assimilates our minds and morals to a purely materialist and empirical program of study. We are not atoms in a … | Continue reading
The prototypical legal “jury” consists of twelve random and anonymous citizens who are to passively hear ruling-relevant info while isolated from outside influences, talk together in person for a few hours to a few days, and then issue a binary ruling regarding which they have no … | Continue reading