In this post I want to suggest an explanation for two sets of related puzzles. The first puzzle is why protestors go out of their way to do illegal things, and especially things that force police to remove and detain them using direct physical contact. Sure, it makes sense for pr … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander on Wednesday: I’ve spent fifteen years not responding to [Hanson’s medicine] argument, because I worry it would be harsh and annoying to use my platform to beat up on one contrarian who nobody else listens to. But I recently learned Bryan Caplan also takes this se … | Continue reading
Thomas Carlyle famously warned against stuff that is “a good tool to have as a slave, but a bad master to be ruled by." Consider applying this warning to culture. Culture is humanity’s superpower; it is what makes humans so much more capable than other animals. When we know what … | Continue reading
Simple action stories depict conflict with an outsider villain/monster. In fighting that monster, the hero often gets help from their usual social allies, such as friends, family, and local authorities. In a more “modern” story, however, the villain may be a friend, parent, boss, … | Continue reading
I am addicted to ‘viewquakes’, insights which dramatically change my world view. (More) To my shame, I missed Tyler’s review of the 2018 book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. I often get asked what are good books to read, and who are my contemporary intellec … | Continue reading
Nick Bostrom’s new tome comes out today, and what can I say — it has a great cover with a number of interesting questions and a subtitle that hints that it might address the meaning of life in a future where AI and robots can do everything. But alas, after much build up and antic … | Continue reading
A new paper looks at 40 questions from the World Values Survey from 1981 to 2022 (n = 406,185) for the 76 nations that did this survey more than once. Overall these values diverged over these four decades. The strongest factor from a factor analysis explained 65% of variation, an … | Continue reading
Why do we fear being lied to? Because we don’t like others manipulating our beliefs. But our fear of being misled by false news pales by comparison to our fear of suffering total “mind-control”, such as depicted in the films | Continue reading
In the last two days I read Richerson & Boyd (2004) Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, by two of the founders of modern cultural evolution theory. It is very good. (I’ve also been reading their classic 1985 book | Continue reading
In 2008, The Times Literary Supplement included [CP Snow’s 1959] The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution in its list of the 100 books that most influenced Western public discourse since the Second World War. ( | Continue reading
I haven’t been posting so much lately, as I’ve reading & thinking a lot about culture; hope to say lots more soon. In my readings, I’ve been frustrated by the quite different ways the word “culture” gets used. It gets used differently in cultural evolution science, in corporate c … | Continue reading
In standard decision theory, an agent makes a choice in each of a large number of possible choice situations. If these choices satisfy some plausible rationality axioms, they can be represented by utility and belief functions over a set of possible states of the world. As the age … | Continue reading
My beloved colleague Bryan Caplan’s books almost never disappoint. So even though I haven’t seen it yet, I can heartily recommend his new book Build Baby Build, which he calls “the most fascinating book on housing regulation ever written”. He also says “it would be a | Continue reading
A shallow “multiculturalism” tolerates and even celebrates diverse cultural markers, such as clothes, food, music, myths, art, furniture, accents, holidays, and dieties. But it is usually also far less tolerant of diverse cultural | Continue reading
There is a big literature on the ages at which intellectuals peak in life. The rate of publishing papers peaks about tenure time. Physical sciences peak earlier than social sciences. And per paper, each one has an | Continue reading
In the ancient world, people tended to see rival nations as ruled by illicit tyrants, while their nation was ruled justly by a king. Two centuries ago when religion was first declining, many predicted that crime would greatly increase as a result. It was mainly fear of God, they … | Continue reading
An organization has: more than one person, some resources, and a process for making decisions about them. An org owned and controlled by a single person need not declare a purpose, as that owner will use it to achieve their usual complex personal ends. But other orgs tend to decl … | Continue reading
Hanging at non-academic conferences lately, I’ve noticed how their cultures differs from my familiar academic cultures. For example, in a “pitch culture”, speakers focus on showing energy, prestige, charisma, social support, and momentum, and try to induce enthu … | Continue reading
Compared to untenured but tenure-track academic faculty (most of who will later get tenure), tenured professors put in less effort, are less focused on doing big-win projects, and are less willing to change locations, research sub-fields, or classes taught. They publish less, and … | Continue reading
Sometimes people start out poor, and end up rich. Sometimes this is because they create real net value for the world, and sometimes this is because they gambled, where their wins came from others’ losses. But to the people involved, this difference may not be noticeable. Wh … | Continue reading
Prediction markets are financial markets, but compared to typical financial markets they are intended more to aggregate info than to hedge risks. Thus we can use our general understanding of financial markets to understand prediction markets, and can also try to apply whatever we … | Continue reading
Cities today are mostly rooms in (home/office/store) units in buildings separated by roads. Besides roads, cities provide city services like power, water, sewage, and telecom. Buildings channel these services to units and add more like lights, air/heat, security, and elevators. U … | Continue reading
Brink Lindsey and I recorded the above conversation on fertility, wherein we agreed on a lot. Afterward, Brink wrote on two “points of difference”. First, Lindsey doubts fertility is a cause, not consequence, | Continue reading
These are my blog posts on fertility, in reverse chronological order: Jan 21: Are We A Tower of Babel? Amish-like who repopulate Earth my see our civ as like a Tower of Babel. This helps us see what they might retain from us. | Continue reading
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had bri … | Continue reading
Imagine a billionaire kidnapped a random person and said: Here is a camera, banana, bicycle, sundress, and porcupine; you have one day to make a funny video using them all. I’ll upload it to YouTube, and if it gets “enough” views in the first day, I’ll giv … | Continue reading
Tomorrow, Friday, Jan 19, at 3:30-5:30p ET, I’ll hold a zoom discussion available only to paid subscribers of this Substack. We will talk about whatever you folks want to talk about. I’ll put a link … | Continue reading
Here are five ways we might fail to address falling fertility. First, many say the future more than a few years ahead is just impossible to predict, and so there’s no point in thinking about it. This is proved by a long list of examples of past predictions that didn’t … | Continue reading
We could make our only law and norm be just “do the right thing”. (Or, maybe, the most economically efficient thing.) Then when someone was accused of acting badly, the relevant judge or jury would consider if their actions were unusually bad, all things considered. B … | Continue reading
A stereotypical “illiberal” society is culturally and socially static and conservative, tightly bound internally, and suspicious of outsiders. Each is run by a coalition of elites who maintain strong discretionary control over key areas: government, law, commerce, rel … | Continue reading
My podcast co-host Agnes Callard points us to a striking phenomenon: social miracles: Sometimes you want something from someone, but you cannot see how they could possibly give it to you, because there appears to be a conceptual incoherence—something close to a contradictio … | Continue reading
A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop! - William F. Buckley Jr. We now have a good guess for how our civilization will decline and then be displaced in the next few centuries. And a plausible explanation for this decline is that we let our world … | Continue reading
What is “culture”? Here is Wikipedia: Culture is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups. R … | Continue reading
The rate at which we find new innovations is roughly proportional to the size of the world economy. Our economy thus grows exponentially, and has done so for a very long time. (Since 1980, it has doubled on average every 24 years. Since 1961 that is 20 years.) However, this innov … | Continue reading
Large literatures discuss our widespread human emphasis on first-impressions, and the difficulties faced by late-bloomers (who do well later after poor first impressions). These tendencies are typically described as biases, though many seem them as heuristics to save on judgement … | Continue reading
Our brains are organized in substantial part by levels of abstraction. Brain layers go from those connected directly to outside, to layers that attend to fine details of both inferences and plans, to layers that attend to larger scale aggregates and distant sparsely-described thi … | Continue reading
We haven’t heard so much about cancel culture in MSM lately, but I assure you it is still going strong. And I think it will get much stronger if Trump is elected US president next year; they’ve backed off a bit while Biden is president. So let’s analyze the issu … | Continue reading
In a democracy, voters pick which candidates become government officials. In this context, we usually admire those whose efforts help voters to become better informed, and to vote more altruistically. After all, we generally praise altruism. And we see how much harm could from ig … | Continue reading
Over that last two years, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the sacred. First I collected a list of things that people say correlate with our treating things as sacred, and then I looked for general theories that could explain why humans might have a behavioral … | Continue reading
In the human world before civilization, there were moral norms, but not law. In that world, people were taught how they should ideally enforce moral rules. If B harms A in violation of local moral norms, and if A confronting B gives an inadequate response, then A should tell near … | Continue reading
Recently I talked at an event for an investment fund that specializes in startups run by high school and college age kids. They told me that they prefer these to be STEM-type startups, as kids with other-type startup ideas tend more often to be crooks. | Continue reading
Many have argued that as our fertility problem is caused by cultural changes, we must solve it via cultural actions, such as by gossip, religion, praising, shunning, telling stories, making art, and living exemplary lives. Thus simple changes in tax policy, and other money relate … | Continue reading
Years ago, I spent a big chunk of my intellectual career studying the rationality of disagreement, mostly via math modeling, but also some lab experiments. My main conclusion was that, for the purpose of accurate beliefs, it seems both desirable and feasible for people to not kno … | Continue reading
When the US and USSR came out victorious at the end of WWII, the world recalibrated its respect. That is, many correctly inferred that this win contained info about winner and loser abilities. Observers not only raised their overall estimates of abilities and virtues of the winne … | Continue reading
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (Bible) “83% of 5-year-olds think that Santa Claus is real, … ‘Children’s belief in Santa starts when they’re … | Continue reading
In his new book Little Book of Aliens, astrophysicist Adam Frank says that we now know almost nothing about aliens, but we will soon learn much more: Fermi saw that if technologically advanced, star-faring civilizations really were common, they should already be everywhere, inclu … | Continue reading
Software is eating the world. … All of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale. … Software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-power … | Continue reading
One of humanity’s key superpowers is our cultural plasticity: we change our species by each as kids copying the adults around us. Such humans can consistently be well aware that humans at other times and places are quite different, as long as we see each such cultural versi … | Continue reading