Robin Hanson is Professor of Economics at George Mason University, the inventor of prediction markets, and the author of Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain. This episode is a deep dive into Hanson’s latest research topic, “cultural drift”, how we broke cultural evolution, why it threatens to end our civilization, and what we might do to fix it.
You can watch the interview here or listen to it on your favorite podcast app.
The full transcript follows. It was transcribed in small chunks by Gemini 3.0 and spot checked but not fully verified by me.
Ivan: Today it’s my pleasure and honor to speak with Professor Robin Hanson, who is a professor of economics at George Mason University, the inventor of prediction markets—which are finally, after 30 years, having their day in the sun with the recent success of Polymarket and Kalshi. Robin is also the author of The Age of Em, about a really wild future involving human emulations, and the co-author with Kevin Simler of The Elephant in the Brain, which is about self-deception and the hidden motives in human behavior. Welcome to the show, Robin!
Robin: Great to be here. I am eager to talk about this subject. I’ve found that over the last three years, this is a topic that’s hard to get a lot of people to engage with, and I’m still struggling with understanding why. I’m eager for you to engage, but I’d be interested in your reflections or observations on what’s so hard about the subject.
Ivan: Maybe as a little bit more background to you first: as I mentioned, you’re a true polymath. Your interests over the years have ranged from prediction markets, futarchy—which is a new governance mechanism you’ve invented based on prediction markets—human emulations, signaling, grabby aliens, the sacred, the fertility crisis, and then finally cultural drift. I want to spend almost all our time today talking about cultural drift, but first I wanted to ask: how do you choose what to study next? This is a very eclectic collection of topics. Does it feel more unified to you?
Selecting Important and Neglected Problems
Robin: I think of three key criteria. First of all, something should be important. I think that it’s not that hard to agree on a metric of importance for topics. If you just look at how they affect how many lives and how much they affect those lives, it’s not that hard to see what’s important. An awful lot of academic research isn’t very important, and I would think the people doing it should be able to tell that it’s not very important. Often they will admit that, but somehow they think they’ve got other reasons to do it.
So, it should be important. Two: neglected. Relative to your importance metric, if you look at the metric of who’s doing what, you should look for the things that are neglected—there’s not enough attention and effort there relative to their importance.
But that’s not enough. There’s a third criteria, and that’s finding an angle. You shouldn’t work on something until you think you see, maybe only dimly or a suspicion, that you’ve got a way to get at this. You have a thing you could do that would make progress on this. That’s the harder part really. I think it’s relatively easy to figure out what’s important and what’s neglected. It’s really easy to see where people are all spending their time on topics. Important is just an obvious “who’s affected how much.” The angle is the unusual thing.
I could look at something like, “Hey, God’s got to be important.” Not that many people are working on God, so it’s neglected, but do I have a thing I can do about God? No, I don’t have a clue there. I’m not working on that because I don’t have an angle. But as soon as I have an angle, I have a way to think about something that I could make progress on, then I can invoke the other two criteria and say, “Aha, I could work on this.”
Ivan: Do you have a theory of what things you have an angle on? Do you have a sense of “here’s the kind of problem that is Robin Hanson-shaped,” and then you go down the list?
Robin: My main intellectual strategy is to be a polymath. That is to learn about many different areas and then look for intersections, look for ways to apply one to the others. That’s opportunistic. For each new area I look at, I collect all my previous tools and I say, “Which of those can match against this new area?” That’s the easiest way to find an angle, just to try to look for a match with all your other tools, all your other frameworks, everything you’ve learned about other areas, and whether you can apply it here.
Ivan: How did you come to be interested in cultural drift? What is your intellectual genealogy there?
Robin: A decade or more ago, I had this noticing that fertility looked pretty important and neglected, and I wrote a post saying that, but then I lost track of it. Then a couple of years ago, maybe four years ago now, I noticed that if population declines, innovation grinds to a halt. That’s just a result from standard growth theory models. Other economists, well-respected macroeconomists, noticed that. I thought that made sense, but then I realized innovation is really important. So fertility means innovation stops. That’s just overwhelming. That makes this really important. Everything changes if innovation stops.
So then I focused more on fertility. In the process of asking why do we have a fertility decline, the proximate causes were cultural. We can go through roughly half a dozen cultural trends that are contributing to fertility decline. Then you ask why. Why would those be happening at all, and why so many all in the same direction? What’s wrong? That’s a puzzle. The correlation between a number of cultural causes.
If you want to fix fertility, you’re going to have to fix culture because those are the proximate causes. So then I turned my attention to culture and said, “Okay, let’s make sure we understand this better. What is culture? How does it work? Why would these trends be going wrong?” Then I left fertility and was focused on culture. Reading a bunch of standard sources in cultural evolution, understanding the basic process, I had this idea—or insight, or terror really—that we broke it. That fertility is declining because we broke this key process of cultural evolution. This is humanity’s superpower. This is the main thing that’s made humans win out and do so much better than all the other animals. Yes, we’ve got big brains, but big brains have mainly enabled culture. Maybe we couldn’t have culture without big brains, but big brains without culture wouldn’t be doing remotely as much.
Ivan: Can you describe the stylized story: humanity has a superpower, which is cultural evolution, and we’ve broken it, so things are going to be bad now. Can you make that more precise? What exactly do you anticipate going wrong? Or is it more like everything will go wrong and we can’t predict it?
Robin: It goes wrong at a certain level. At the appropriate level, we can predict what’s going wrong, but translating that to other levels is harder.
First, I want to explain that cultural evolution is just a kind of natural selection. It’s Darwinian, literally. Darwin didn’t actually know what kind of natural selection was happening. Over the next century from Darwin, the biological world came to understand DNA as a system of natural selection, and biology has focused on DNA-based natural selection. But the basic idea of natural selection isn’t specific to DNA. In fact, there’s this other system of natural selection that is also Darwinian, which is culture. It’s a set of things that inherit from other things over time and that vary in their fitness—their ability to reproduce and produce copies.
The system of cultural evolution involves similar organisms that DNA evolution does, except cultural evolution allows individuals to inherit from a lot more parents. Including parents who were born roughly when they were. You’re inheriting behaviors and other things from other people in society, a lot more than your two DNA parents. You can pass them on and inherit them much faster. We can just change our behavior and accumulate innovations much faster than DNA can because we can inherit from more things. But it is the same kind of a natural selection process, just faster with more parents. That’s cultural evolution.
How Cultural Evolution Actually Works
Robin: That’s the process that I’m saying is broken. First, in order to explain that, I need to make one key distinction because most people might be skeptical that you could even have this problem: there are levels of organization and selection in natural selection. With DNA, we have the level of a species. There are some things that have to be common across a species. An animal can’t mate with just any other animal in the world or plant. They have to be within the same species. Why? Because there are certain features of the species that can’t vary within the species so that when two members of the species mate, they can produce an offspring because some elements are in common. They have some features that are not allowed to vary within the species. That’s what makes a species possible.
Those features of a species, the basic structure of the species, can’t evolve within a species. So there is another level of natural selection. There are all these different species, some of which have more descendant species, some of which have fewer and which live or die. Natural selection happens at the species level, and that’s somewhat separate from within the species. That’s a key concept.
Ivan: I’ve seen you make the point that most selection in natural selection comes from selection over species rather than within species.
Robin: You might think that’s surprising. You might think just a few features are in common in a species and most of the things can vary within them, so why would evolution of the species be so important? But in DNA evolution, we can look at habitats in the world. Some of them are big and some are small—fragmented. The small fragmented ones are like coral reefs or rainforests or rivers. Because the space is just very small, the species are small. Then there can be a lot of these spaces which have a lot of species.
Since each species is small, it doesn’t have much room for innovation within. Innovation within small species is slower than innovation within big species. But innovation of species is going to be better when there’s lots of small species. If we ask where did most life on Earth today come from, it came more from the fragmented habitats. Meaning that evolution of species matters more.
Ivan: And when you say more, is this an order of magnitude difference? Is this 20% more?
Robin: It’s substantial. I guess I’d have to go back to the papers, but there’s a number of papers noticing this dramatic fact.
In addition, if we go to cultural evolution, a more visible version of cultural evolution is corporate cultural evolution. Different corporations have different cultures, and that’s a big part of corporations winning or losing in the capitalist competitive economy—whether they have good cultures. Some industries have many small firms—fragmentation—and other industries have a few big firms. If you think about within a company, you can spread innovation more easily than between companies. If one division figures something out, they can tell the rest of the divisions and they can all copy it. But if another firm needs to adopt this, you’ll have barriers to transmitting the innovation across companies.
For innovations within companies, it’s better to have a few big companies. But if a corporate culture has a shared structure across a whole corporation that can’t vary much within the corporation—we’re really into documentation or whatever it is—then those features have to evolve by selection of the corporations, not in the corporations. So there’s again these two levels. There’s the evolution of corporate cultures, and for that you need many corporate cultures—many companies. But there’s evolution within a corporate culture, and for that you want a few big companies. It turns out the fragmented industries overall innovate more than the less fragmented industries, suggesting that innovation of corporate cultures again matters more than innovation within a corporate culture. Which is also surprising. You might have thought that was a small fraction that didn’t matter so much.
Ivan: With species selection, there’s a clear multi-level selection going on because the definition of a species is roughly whether two individuals within the species can mate. For cultural evolution, it feels like we don’t have this clean distinction. You can be learning memes or cultural adaptations from anyone.
Robin: But corporations are a cleaner boundary. It is clear that in a corporation you interact a lot more with other people in the corporation than you do with people outside. So in fact, it is easier to spread innovation within the corporation than outside. And the corporation is a unit of rules that are enforced across the whole corporation. If a certain kind of thing has to be documented a certain way, then everybody in the company has to document it that way. When you fire someone, you have to go through certain paperwork; that’s the same across the whole company. There’s just going to be a set of practices and cultural features that are the same across the company.
If your whole company has a certain way of documenting things and you personally want to do it differently, the company’s not going to just let you do it differently. Sorry, we have some rules. So there are definitely features of corporate practice that you can’t just vary within the company very easily. For those things, the way they vary is by different companies doing them differently and some winning and some losing. If there’s a kind of document you’d be allowed to write in your company and nobody minds that you do it differently, then that sort of thing can vary within the company, and selection within the company is fine for choosing that.
Ivan: Definitely the corporate boundary is important. With cultural evolution, it seems like there’s much more horizontal transfer. Like the companies I’ve worked for, there’s typically a finance division, and actually, maybe the culture transfers more between the finance division of different companies than between the finance and the engineering department of the same company.
Robin: I’m happy to admit that if we focus on any particular behavior—say picking your nose or whatever it is—we can ask about that behavior: the strength of the conformity pressure that would allow or not an individual to vary it. And then at what scales those things are allowed to vary. For different kinds of behavior, there could be different scales at which it’s allowed to vary.
We’re going to be most concerned about the behaviors where the scale is really large. For example, in our world today, organ donations are not allowed anywhere but Iran. And then only a certain way in Iran. You can’t decide organ donations are a thing you think are good and then just go do it. The world says we all have to do this together, and that limits the natural selection applied to organ donations. Iran could succeed so well that it convinces the rest of us to copy them, but if not, this thing isn’t going to spread because nobody else allows it.
With cultural evolution, again, we might focus on each particular kind of behavior and the scale at which you’re allowed to vary that. It could be within a family, within a company, within a city, within a nation, or maybe only the whole world. We’re going to be more interested or worried about these things where the scale is very large. These will be legal, moral, regulatory things where people feel strongly that other people shouldn’t be allowed to do them differently. That’s going to force a very large shared scale.
All right, so that’s these key concepts. We identify the concept of scale; things happen at different scales. I just needed to set that up as context. Now we can think about natural selection in a graphical sense. I want to show you a mental image of natural selection.
Think of a large dimensional space, like thousands of dimensions. In this space, there’s an adaptive region. That’s the good place. It’s a continuum, but if there’s a point in this space—we think of there as points in this space—if there’s a point in this adaptive region, it’s going well for it. It grows, it splits, has descendants. It’s good to be there. As you go away from this adaptive region, things get bad. Things die, shrink, go away.
Natural selection is about having a set of points stay in the adaptive region, and even find better parts of the adaptive region. That’s natural selection’s key task. Many people think of natural selection as mainly a system for making things better, but its first task is to prevent things from getting worse. The key task is: there’s a cloud of points and there’s an adaptive region, and the points need to track the adaptive region. That’s its first key task. If they lose the adaptive region, drift away and they can’t find it, they’re dead. It fails.
Why would it be hard to track an adaptive region? Let’s talk about some of the issues. One thing is the adaptive region could be moving. And the points might not automatically move with it. Which means that you need some of the points to be where it’s going to so that those can grow and then make more points near there so that the points can track the region.
But in addition to the region moving, these points just might move. They might just randomly wiggle, which could make them wiggle out of the adaptive region. In addition, there’s a question of how many points there are. If there’s a hundred thousand, it’ll work better than if there’s one. If you just have one point, then you could just go wrong quickly.
Finally, there is the parameter of how strong is the in-versus-out effect of this region. You need it so that when you’re in the region things go really well, and when you’re out they go really badly. That’s a strong selection effect. Now if you’ve got a few points in the region, that will have a really big effect of that being able to track the region.
So I’ve just gone over four key parameters that affect natural selection as a process. Whether these parameters are in the good or bad region determines whether this works. An analogy is driving a car. You’re driving down a road and there are some parameters of the process: how fast you’re going, how fast the road wiggles, how clearly can you see it, how fast can you respond when you see something to turn the wheel, how reliable is the connection between the wheel and the road, how bumpy is the road. You can see that if these parameters are in the good regime, you’ll just go down the road nice and clean and slow and everything’s fine. You turn the parameters bad, and you just go off the road and crash. You can’t see the road, you’re moving too fast, the road is wiggling too fast; it’s just not going to work.
The same thing is true of natural selection here. Again, we have this control process, there’s an adaptive region, and a bunch of points need to follow it. Each point doesn’t have to follow, just some of the points have to follow to make this work. But some of the points need to follow the adaptive region so that they will need to reproduce and fill out the rest of the points that are lost.
If these parameters are good, the cloud will follow the region. If they’re bad, it won’t. What does that mean? None of the points are in the region, they all die, we crash.
The Collapse of Global Cultural Variety
Robin: That’s in the abstract, natural selection. Now let’s make this concrete about humanity over the last few centuries. Let’s go back to, say, 1700, three centuries ago. Let’s look at macro-cultures—not the things that can vary within a culture, but the cultures themselves. In 1700, most of the world was peasant cultures. Small regions of a thousand or so people around maybe a village and the areas around it, who were relatively self-sufficient. Empires ruled them and took taxes and conscripts, but for the most part, the empires didn’t care much about how these people lived their lives.
In 1700, we had hundreds of thousands of these peasant cultures. They were near the edge of survival. They often suffered wars, pandemics, and famines. If one of these peasant cultures went weird on marriage or something else—eating the dead, whatever it was—if that hurt them somehow compared to their neighbors, that had strong consequences. They would just go away and be absorbed by neighboring cultures. There were strong selection effects in 1700 and hundreds of thousands of cultures.
In addition, in 1700, the world previously had been roughly doubling every thousand years for a long time. That’s roughly the time scale on which things changed and on which they needed to adapt. In roughly a thousand years, there’d be new technologies, new environments, new situations, and the culture had roughly a thousand years to adapt to those changes.
In addition, cultures were pretty conservative. They were trying not to change very much. The changes that happened over a thousand years were mostly imperceptible to the people in any one generation. In each generation, they were trying mostly just to do things the way they had always done them. So, the rate at which these points wiggled was low, the rate at which the adaptive region was moving was slow, there were a lot of points, and the selection effect was really strong. Stuff in the middle grew fast; stuff outside shrank fast. You can see from my story, this looks like a good regime for staying on the road.
That was 1700 in pretty much most of the world. Sure, there were exceptions like cities or maybe Christianity as a bunch of culture, but for the most part, lots of variety, strong selection pressure, it was working out well.
Now let’s look at what’s happened over the last few glorious centuries. Let’s start with variety. In the late 1800s, France was created out of a bunch of separate peasant cultures that were just in the French region. There’s a book called Peasants into Frenchmen describing that, but that nationalism process happened all around the world. We turned peasants into nationalists. That was done forcibly, aggressively, against many people’s local wishes. Forced them to have a shared language, shared religion, shared measures, shared workplace practices, integrated market. We made nations out of peasant communities. That created a lot fewer cultures. There were now maybe a hundred or two hundred cultures around the world, not hundreds of thousands, because we made nations.
So variety went way down in that first step. But then in the last century, in fact, elites especially have formed an elite monoculture. When I meet elites around the world today, they all act the same and they are all trying to make sure I understand they’re all the same. You meet a young, ambitious elite from anywhere in the world and they will try to convince you that they will work just fine in any international organization. There are no rough edges on them that would cause any problem for you to put them in any prestigious international organization because they are generic elites. The world has produced that in the last century. So we now have a substantial reduction in variety.
Ivan: So, 100,000 peasant cultures to maybe 100 national cultures and now to mostly one elite—at least on many cultural dimensions.
Robin: We can go through which dimensions those are. There are some dimensions on which there is still variety, but on many important dimensions, there’s this monoculture. So variety is way down.
Ivan: Can we get numbers on this? If we had a global cultural variety index…
Robin: The hard part is weighing different dimensions. One way to think about the modern world is that people often say they like multiculturalism. If you look at what they’re pointing to when they point to multiculturalism, what they mean is they like different foods, clothing, holidays, myths, interior decoration styles.
Ivan: That distinction between boutique and deep multiculturalism. Deep multiculturalism relates to more issues like how you marry, how many children you have.
Robin: Things that actually functionally matter for long-term selection pressures. The world is proud lately to have this shallow multiculturalism, and I think that hides from them how much they have converged in other dimensions. People who like Star Trek and Star Wars have a cultural conflict, but they live their lives pretty much the same. They’re not really suffering very different selection pressures. They will rise or fall together because their lives are pretty much lived the same even though some of them like Star Trek and some of them like Star Wars. Or Harry Potter versus Lord of the Rings. Sure, these people have different things they like, they go to different conferences or watch different shows, but otherwise, they’re pretty similar.
Ivan: So the key distinction here is how you cleanly distinguish between deep and shallow cultural features. You’re saying it’s the ones that matter for long-term selection.
Robin: If there’s a big war where all the Lord of the Rings people fight all the Harry Potter people, then yeah, that’ll matter for selection because half of them will get killed. But in our world, it’s not actually mattering that much for selection. Somehow you could make it matter, then suddenly it would be a much more important thing. If all the Harry Potter fans decided to be celibate, for example, and not have children, well now being a Harry Potter fan would make a big difference to long-term selection.
Ivan: It does feel like we have a bunch of cultural differences that matter differentially for selection. I would expect more conservative people tend to have more children, more religious people tend to have more children. We still have a bunch of variety there.
Robin: Left versus Right is a distinction in our world. But I’m going to say two versus one isn’t that big a difference compared to hundreds of thousands. Maybe you could get us up to ten different varieties if you consider enough different things, but ten is still way less than hundreds of thousands. However you count, we’ve had a vast reduction. Just how much the reduction is, is going to depend on these fine-tuning questions.
Ivan: Sure, but we’re talking orders of magnitude in your mind. At least if you weigh the cultural parameters by selective importance, we’re seeing orders of magnitude less variety.
Robin: There might be 100,000 TV shows out there you could watch on YouTube. If you want to count the number of different videos that is your favorite video, then okay, maybe we’ve got hundreds of thousands of cultures. But that just doesn’t matter much for selection pressures in our world.
Ivan: That makes sense.
Robin: So that was variety. Next is selection pressure. Again, three centuries ago, if a local culture just went bad on some parameter, it would be killed off because most peasants were living near the edge of survival. They were poor, stressed, and at risk. Now, these few remaining macro-cultures—one, ten, however many there are—we’re all rich, we’re healthy, we’re at peace. They are not getting killed off very fast.
World War I killed off the Viennese empire, and that suppressed some elements of Austrian culture. But we haven’t had very many cultures killed like that since then, where a whole culture in an area was suppressed because of losing a war or some other thing like that.
Ivan: It seems like right now the great selector among cultures is differential fertility.
Robin: Fertility is still there as a selector, but it’s slow and it takes a long time to play out. World War I was faster at squashing Austrian culture. In the long run, yes, fertility will play out. So that’s one of the remaining strongest selectors that’s in play, and that’s going to be one of our issues in thinking through that. But again, way down compared to three centuries ago. If you look at the aggregate selection pressures, it is way down. Which means when things drift out of the adaptive region, they don’t notice it very fast. It takes a while for the effect of that to be noticed, and that means they can drift a long way before corrections kick in.
Okay, that’s two parameters: variety and selection pressures. We had the other two parameters: rate of change of the adaptive region and the cultures themselves.
For the adaptive region, in the last century or two, the world economy doubles roughly every less than 20 years. As opposed to a thousand, that’s a factor of 50 increase in the rate of change. That means as the world economy doubles every less than 20 years, that’s the timescale on which we need to adapt to changes. When electric cars show up, we need to drop the other cars, adopt electric cars. Whatever is showing up, culture needs to adapt to that. And that’s much more challenging when it’s changing much faster.
Ivan: When you think of technological changes going on at all times, again probably we need to weigh them by importance to selective pressure. Probably birth control is top. Various kinds of medicine or vaccines.
Robin: But sort of key things like needing an education, should you go to grad school, do you even want to get married, what are the norms for whether you get married, kids—there are some pretty big selection pressures tied to rates of change of things. Anything affecting fertility or death will be big for selection pressures. And the key structures of life. Moving from the country to the city was a pretty big change. Moving from factory work to professional work is a big change. Size of families, patriotism, war, whether you want to move to another country—those are big things that make a big difference. And every 20 years, all that changes.
Ivan: So actually we need cultural evolution more than we ever did before in order to track. Or a process that’s even faster than cultural evolution.
Robin: Exactly. And now the last parameter is how much these points wiggle. Now again, up until a few centuries ago, most cultures were conservative. They were thinking they weren’t changing anything. Change was happening imperceptibly behind the scenes, accumulating over generations. But in the modern world, people noticed how much technology and business practices were changing. First, culture decided to just pretend culture wasn’t changing even if everything else was changing. Then around 1900, cultural elites switched to saying, “Yeah, we should be changing culture.”
Modernists, they were called, eagerly sought ways to change culture. They did that in the arts, literature, architecture, and many other areas of life, including in politics. Again, people were saying, “We need to change. Let’s be searching for changes that seem innovative and different and provocative, and let’s try them out.”
Ivan: You mentioned in a post from yesterday about cultural entrepreneurs. People who are like, “Hey guys, we should change the culture in this way based on some fundamental moral principle.”
Robin: In fact, this key transition around 1900 happened about the time of high school. When youth movements started happening. We didn’t used to have a youth culture because youths usually, at the age of 14 or whatever, just went off into the modern adult workplace and mixed with adults. But once we had high school and then college, youths were together and they now created youth cultures. Youth cultures typically have been trying to cause cultural change. Youths have had the ambition of “we should change culture,” and in fact, youth movements have been a main channel of cultural change. In surveys I’ve done, when you see a conflict between the young and the old, the young win at least three-quarters of the time. Young people with an idea of how they want to change culture typically win that in the long run.
That’s been a major engine of cultural change over the last century or so: young people together making youth culture, creating ideas for how they want to change culture—a cultural activist movement—and they have succeeded quite often at changing culture. So culture has in fact repeatedly changed over the last century and a half because of youth movements purposely trying to do it. Some of those youth movements are in, say, music, but some have been in politics. The Nazi youth were driving the initial Nazi revolution; it was a Nazi youth movement that caused change. Students were a big part of almost all revolutions in the last 200 years.
Now, if these youth movement changes were directed and motivated to follow adaptive pressures, then that would be great. And I think that was part of the intuition: in a world changing so fast, we need to try to change with it, not just be dragged along. But for that to work, the cues off of which you choose your youth movements need to be correlated with the adaptive failings of your society. Unfortunately, it just seems that’s not where youth movements take their cues. They are not fundamentally looking at adaptive pressures and what would make society more adaptive in the long run. They are instead taking other cues. That’s a key problem. That process is making it worse because that’s not actually trying to track where the adaptive region is moving. From the point of view of adaptation, it’s kind of random.
Ivan: This makes sense as a model. I basically buy all the parts of this model. I think there is something weird about calling it “cultural drift.” It seems like the really big thing that happened… Okay, so there’s the background of technological change, the economy doubling every 20 years, and because of that, it’s hard even for old-school 1700-era cultural evolution to keep up. But then the big thing that happened is we’ve had this great death of cultural diversity.
I’m not sure “cultural drift” is the best phrase. I am searching for better framings here because, as I said at the beginning, I’ve been struggling to get people to engage with this. I keep thinking maybe it’s the framing and I should search for other framings that could help people better engage. So the “cultural drift” term is really tentative exactly because I’m looking for a better framing.
Robin: I think the best I can do here is try to figure out what resonates. We can discover what parts of this resonate and don’t resonate with me, and then that might help adjust the framing.
Robin: So like in this last post, the title was “Slapdash Culture.” That’s a different framing. Just saying the problem is we’re being sloppy here, we’re not thinking this through very carefully and we’re just making a bunch of more random changes. But that’s also different than maybe the monoculture concept.
Ivan: Here is a framing that a lot of people get very activated about, but I’m not sure is true: Cultural drift makes it seem like this is a random process, whereas I think a lot of intellectuals look at this problem and see something closer to enemy action. Like there is an agentic force that is destroying cultures and we should fight it.
Robin: Let’s talk about that. There are two levels at which you can study culture. The level at which we’ve been talking is an abstract level looking at the process itself. There are academics who specialize in that much more than I; that field is called Cultural Evolution. Those people have been making progress and they understand a lot. I don’t disagree with them. But they are not very prestigious in terms of academia. And so because of that, they are reluctant to venture into the conversation we’re having because this talk seems like policy, this seems like taking sides, and they want to be the neutral scientist. So they do not feel they should take sides on particular cultural conflicts.
Ivan: I saw a great example of this. I think you had a conversation with Joe Henrich, the cultural evolutionist at Harvard, and you were like, “Joe, so civilization is going to collapse because we’ve broken cultural evolution?” And he’s like, “Yeah, civilizations always collapse and there’s some good reasons why ours will collapse and like, yeah.”
When Civilizations Eventually Decline
Ivan: He’s basically saying civilization is going to collapse because we’ve broken cultural evolution. And he’s saying, “Yeah, civilizations always collapse and ours will collapse.”
Robin: So he’s not very invested in our civilization. Which is fine, I respect him in his role. He and the other academics have taken a role and they’ve tried to distinguish their role from other people’s role, and I don’t want to push them out of their role if that’s the role they want to take. I just think somebody else should be in the other role.
There’s another role in our society which is of cultural critic, and those are the most prestigious intellectuals we have. They write op-eds and give keynote talks and they’re all about cultural war. In their view, there’s the cultural direction that they think is good and great, and the cultural direction that the bad other people think is wrong, and they’re all about that fight.
But at that level, I think you don’t see the problem I’m pointing to. At that level, what you want to say is those people are just immoral, mean, and greedy people, and that’s why culture is going wrong—the bad people have the wrong motives. That’s the usual cultural warrior story. People love that conversation and they are really eager to eat it up. I’m struggling to find a way to take people who care about the culture they’re in with that energy, but not just the culture war “blame the other side” thing. I’m trying to get you to see that both sides are stuck in a process that’s going to make them both go wrong, whoever wins the culture war. It doesn’t that much matter who wins the culture war; we’re all going down together.
Ivan: Let’s talk about “go down together,” because I think this is core to why this message may or may not resonate with people, and also why I would personally feel motivated to work on it or not. What is the bad thing that’s actually going to happen? You say civilization is going to collapse, but can we make that more precise? Over what time scale and how collapsed?
Robin: Obviously there’s a lot I can’t know, but my rough guess, best estimate for you, is something like the fall of the Roman Empire. We’re in a civilization that’s in the rise phase, but maybe nearing the top. Then we will peak and start to decline. A decline means a population decline, and then an economic decline, and then an innovation decline—that is, the rate of innovation will decline.
Then there’ll be a fall in liberality. The rise in liberality in the last few centuries was probably driven by the most successful societies being very liberal and everybody else thinking, “We need to do that or we’re going to be left behind.” Once innovation stops and people realize there’s no innovation to have, and so there’s no point in being liberal to have more innovation, liberality would also decline.
We can talk about other things that go wrong, but the more fundamental thing is that eventually another civilization rises and replaces ours. The analogy is the Christians taking over the Roman Empire. The way they did that is by doubling every 20 years for three centuries. That was it. They started from extremely tiny and they just kept doubling.
There are now groups on the planet who are doing that strategy: doubling every 20 years. Two of them are the Amish and the Haredim. The Amish have been doing that for over a century and they’re now at 400,000 people, which is tiny on the world stage, but if they just keep doubling every 20 years, another couple centuries, they dominate.
What happens when these other cultures come to dominate is their values dominate, their cultural practices dominate. The world becomes what they choose. That’s what happened with the Christians. Christians rejected many things about the Roman Empire they didn’t like, and those were tossed.
The Amish and Haredim are good people. I’m happy to appraise each one of them individually. They’re good, reliable people, they’re faithful, they keep their promises, they help their neighbors. But those cultures do not value what I value most about our culture, which is open intellectual inquiry. They don’t value technology much either, although they’re willing to adopt it when it’s practically useful and doesn’t cause them more problems.
It depends on how much you care about our shared culture. For example, you may love many songs in our culture, and it could be that they will all just say those songs are infested with the immoral culture and values of our main culture and they are to be banned and not listened to. Movies as well. Christians did that with a lot of Roman stuff. They just canceled lots of Roman stuff that they thought was infused with paganism and said, “Nope, that’s gone.”
Now, this is a key question. Many people just don’t seem to care about the future on that time scale. They don’t really care if our civilization is replaced by another as long as they’re okay, their life, their children’s lives are okay. They just really don’t care. I don’t know what I can do for them. I could say that in the long run, creatures who care enough about their future to try to preserve it will probably win out over others, but obviously that’s not true in the short run.
We can think about what happens in the long run. Eventually, when the Amish and the Haredim take over, they will suffer our problem again too. They will develop more technology, they will make larger scale trade, travel, talk, they will make a monoculture, they will get rich, and then plausibly they decline again to be replaced by yet another. We could go on with many rise and fall scenarios until humanity figures out something else to do.
But this is a key thing: We are in this rich world. We are very proud of being in a rich world compared to our ancestors. We’re saying, “You stupid idiots, why couldn’t you figure out what we figured out here? We’re rich and you’re not, so good for us.” But we don’t realize this apparently is not sustainable as is. A rich society like ours won’t last, and it will fall to the societies like the past, and that will just keep repeating until we figure out how to address our key flaw.
Ivan: Something I’m maybe slightly confused about is I think of you as having done a lot of futurism in the past. I generally see you as siding with evolution playing out over conserving what we have currently. A lot of people are worried about AI doom. You’re like, “Well no, AI is our descendants, so actually it’s fine. I welcome our AI or human emulation descendants.” Why is this suddenly hitting you? Why do you care so much about this?
Robin: If natural selection were to continue and we won’t go extinct, then we have a limited range of choices. I do prefer we don’t go extinct, so my priority is a lack of extinction and that something goes on from us and continues. I will go a long way to prioritize whatever it takes to make our descendants, our civilization, continue.
But assuming it will continue, then the next question is: can you influence what the future becomes? I think it makes sense to try to influence that, but I think it makes sense in the sense of picking among all the things that you are, all the things in the world around you that could continue, the fewest ones that you most prioritize, and then seeing if you could promote those. You can’t just stop change and say, “We just want it this way and nothing should change.” I just don’t think that’s feasible nor particularly desirable. I do think on average growth and improvement will be good.
But if it’s possible for there to be different futures with different features, then you could ask which of those you prefer. I think it makes sense to pick the few things you most care about and then try to ask how could you promote those. Even with AI, I might say, “Look, AIs can inherit many things from us. Which AI future would you prefer?” And then try to push in the direction of the one you most like. Saying “no AIs,” we can’t have that. I worry that that’s just too big an ask. Just preserving our culture as it is today and not having it decline, that may also just be too big an ask. I’m going to be pessimistic in the sense of thinking we can probably only save a limited number of things.
Then the question is what those should be. What are the things we most care about? But to get those to save, we will need to package them with something adaptive and make them exist and be adaptive.
My metaphor for this future is: imagine you’re on a ship heading for an iceberg. There’s two main choices. You either get to the bridge and turn the wheel to turn the ship—and you have to fight over everybody else on the ship for which way to turn it, and you may not succeed at that. Or, you get to some lifeboats and you get off the ship. You may not succeed at that because maybe lots of other people are going for lifeboats, or the people in the lifeboats are not taking new people. That can be hard too.
But those are our two main options here. Somebody will get off on lifeboats and there will be some other ship later, I think most likely. I don’t think extinction is the main risk here. But there is a substantial risk that much of what we cherish about our civilization will be lost, at least for a long while. That includes democracy, it includes gender equality, it includes open inquiry, it includes eagerness for exploration. There’s lots of things that might be at risk.
Ivan: Whatever it is that you value about the current world, the current culture, you probably want to keep that going. By default, almost all of it is going away.
Robin: If you look at say the Amish and Haredim and other groups like that, you can see a number of features. We can somewhat predict what direction that will be. You can ask, do you like that? What do you think of that? They are somewhat anti-technology. They are very religious. They are very fundamentalist. They are not pro-inquiry. They are not very pro-democracy. They are not pro-individual freedom. They are very strongly community-oriented, very strongly religious, very strongly dogmatic and obedient.
Ivan: The future of our world population peaks, then declines for some time, the economy starts declining, the innovation starts declining. And then in 300 years or whatever, the Amish or the Haredim rebuild modern civilization and then they have their own cultural drift.
Maybe the first immediate reaction I have is: that doesn’t sound too bad. Better than extinction. And I think the place where a lot of people, at least in my circles, fall off the cultural drift train is they’re like, “But Robin, there are so many extinction risks in the next hundred years way before any of these forces come into play. So I’m going to work on those. I care about those and cultural drift hopefully we’ll figure it out later.”
Robin: I just don’t think those extinction risks are as big as those people think. But those are a pretty small fraction of the world, in which case you have a pretty unusual set of cohorts around you. Most people aren’t thinking extinction is a big risk soon, even most intellectuals in the world.
Ivan: Even with climate change? I don’t know how intellectually consistent they are, but a lot of people will say climate change is an actual big problem and it’s extinction level and we need to make a bunch of changes to our culture, to our governance, etc., maybe even create a world government in order to stop climate change.
Robin: Climate change is not very plausibly going to cause extinction. I mean, it is a substantial decline, but plausibly if the economy declines, then global warming will just be on its trajectory. There is a trajectory where the CO2 in the atmosphere now is just going to have an effect slowly over centuries, but we won’t be adding that much more if the economy declines. In that sense, we’re going to fix that part of the problem by just declining.
So those people at least value the perception that our culture has that climate change is a problem. The descendant cultures probably don’t. There’s no particular reason to think the Amish or Haredim will care as much about climate change as you guys do. If you want somebody in the future to care about it, then you need your culture to persist.
Ivan: How bad do I feel about this decline and fall of our civilization and its replacement? There’s a couple of complications I want to add. One of them is: it seems like a lot of the good things in our world can be preserved relatively cheaply with not that much population. In the case of the Roman Empire, monasteries served this role where a lot of the knowledge of the ancient world was preserved. It was preserved rather badly, but we have much better information technology now. So you can imagine us preserving a large fraction of our current knowledge and culture relatively cheaply with just a few high-innovation, pronatalist cultures that won’t make up the majority of the future—they’ll be surrounded by the descendants of the Amish—but presumably they’ll be able to provide value to these Amish cultures and so they’ll still exist.
Robin: I don’t see much of a prospect at the moment for high-tech, high-fertility subcultures in the world. The declining dominant culture will still be big for a long time, of course, but if parts of it don’t manage to have high fertility, I see less prospect of them saving things.
I agree that technology has changed, but that’s both on offense and defense. That is, if these other cultures, the reason they don’t take on this stuff is that they dislike it, they will also be trying harder to find and crush and erase the stuff they don’t like. When people just assume stuff would be lost unless active effort was made to preserve it, they didn’t have to work as hard to crush things. But in this new world, they may well.
For example, imagine some foundation in the next few decades creates lots of little USB drives with lots of music and the Library of Congress on them and then distributes them all around the planet so that people in the future could find them and use them. Now they’ll have to distribute some device that could read them along with the drives, but okay, say they do that. Now, of course, the new dominant culture like the Amish and Haredim, they will know about this and this will be part of their story of the terrible satanic items to be wary of that are hiding all around the world, and they will try to find them and crush them.
Of course, curious people will sometimes still look at them, but the question is what will play out from that point? I think you’d want to empower the people who found them to actually succeed at something. Because if all you do is make them sit around and listen to your music forever, they’re not going to succeed at competing with the other people around. You can’t just have music or entertainment on these things. You should put something on these drives that will actually help them with something. Maybe even just a computer device that lets them do computery stuff other people can’t. Maybe that would be a thing you want to hide so that those people would then save those things. And then somewhere else on the computer file there’s all this music or whatever, but that’s not the main thing; it’s a computer you can use for things.
Ivan: It just seems like having a very high-innovation subculture near you, subject to you, is incredibly high value.
Robin: Well, see that’s the problem. In this decline period, that won’t be a value. It won’t be—you can’t create innovation just by having a certain culture in the decline period because it’s about the ratio of activity then to previous. The key idea is: innovation on average so far is roughly proportional to economic activity. So in this decline period, the most recent economic activity will not be a substantial fraction of all the activity so far. So even high-innovation subcultures will not be able to innovate very much as a fraction of everything so far.
Innovation will only actually be valuable again in a rise when the new rise rises farther than the previous peak. Then innovation subcultures will be valuable. But what were they doing in the intervening time? How did they sustain a high-innovation subculture up until that point? Because innovation won’t have actually been much value to them in those intervening centuries.
Ivan: Maybe I’m confused as to your model of innovation here. Because it seems like if you were operating a monastery in like 800 AD or something, there’s a bunch of engineering knowledge, just process knowledge that you could maintain. Maybe philosophical knowledge is not that valuable.
Robin: Saving old knowledge is different than inventing new. So you’re maybe thinking of something that saves old knowledge.
Ivan: Yeah. I think definitely saving old knowledge is different than inventing new.
Robin: It’s like fishing. If we take all the fish out of the sea, how do we sustain a community of fishers who know how to fish even when there aren’t any fish in the sea? Sure, later on when there’s more fish in the sea, people who fish will get an advantage over those who don’t have fishers. But in the intervening period when there are no fish in the sea, how does a community sustain the knowledge and habit of fishing?
Ivan: Yeah, definitely. That would be the easy argument for me to make. At least we’ll have valuable institutions that will preserve old knowledge. If there aren’t, that just seems like a straightforward market failure.
Robin: Two things happened in the Roman Empire. One is that as scale declines, some production processes became no longer feasible, and then the people who knew how to use those processes lost the knowledge because they couldn’t continue to apply them. So as scale declines, the kind of knowledge that could be saved is knowledge that could be still used and understood at a small scale.
And then knowledge that’s offensive to the dominant ideology or theology will be actively crushed, even if it’s still at a small enough scale that could be used. So you’re only talking about the remaining knowledge that can be applied at a small scale and isn’t offensive to the larger dominant society. But that was the stuff that was saved in the Roman Empire. So the problem with the Roman Empire was the scale fell and then stuff was lost, and then some stuff was offensive. And then there was just the cost of storing things. So I agree that if it’s just about the cost of storing things, then we’re in a better situation in the future. But we’re not in a better situation regarding things where the scale falls and also where it’s offensive.
Ivan: Yeah.
Robin: A thing about computer technology is computers are intrinsically pretty durable devices. We don’t tend to make them durable because their capabilities keep improving so quickly. But in the future when innovation slows down and stops, it will then make sense to make a generation of very durable computers after which you stop making them. And then centuries later as the economy arrives again, it’ll suddenly be in people’s interest to start making them again, but they might by then have lost much of the knowledge of how to make them. And that’s more the challenge, how could you save the knowledge of how to make them? But as you know, much industrial production knowledge isn’t stuff you can write down very easily, and that needs people to continue to actually do stuff to save the knowledge.
Ivan: I guess…
Robin: But in the long run they would probably find it again, so I might more think about how long would it take say for a culture of open inquiry to return.
Ivan: Right.
Robin: I don’t think that’s implied by our general production processes. What happened, I think, is that in the early Industrial Revolution and Scientific Revolution, dramatic progress in industry and science raised the status of that, and then as school became useful for the entire society, schools taught abstract things that were the most prestigious things from science and industry and that raised the status of people being more abstract and open in inquiring about lots of things related.
But that doesn’t have to happen again. No doubt the next rise of civilization that will tell the story about what they’re trying to avoid from our rise, they will have moral tales they tell of the mistakes we made that they’re trying to avoid. And those tales will direct them to avoid some things that we did as our mistakes. And then the question is what will they see as our mistakes that they’re going to avoid.
Ivan: One more question about the problem before I also want to get into the different proposed solutions. There’s something about the model that feels weird to me, and it’s something about not modeling the heterogeneity of the population. I mean I think of the demographic composition of modern Israel. And as far as I can tell there’s an extremely high fertility, extremely conservative subculture—that’s the Haredim—and then there’s the really Orthodox, and then there’s the moderately Orthodox, and there’s the Reform Jews, and then there’s basically just secular people.
And it seems like there’s kind of a waterfall process going on where people are… there is secularization pressure, and the very most Orthodox high fertility cultures are growing quickly, and also there’s secularization pressure. And it’s not obvious to me that that couldn’t continue indefinitely. You and I are probably descended from high fertility subcultures, but we ourselves are not yet, as far as I know, very high fertility. And that process seems to have been going on for centuries. Does the heterogeneity not affect this? It almost seems like you’re modeling the whole population as one thing, but there probably will be some pronatalist components of our culture whose children convert and stuff like that.
Robin: If we think about some abstract space of possible cultures, the low fertility cultures, things adjacent to them are also low fertility, so yeah there’s a lot of complexity and heterogeneity there, but it mostly doesn’t matter, they all shrink and go away. You’re right that if we look adjacent to high fertility cultures, then we might think we see a space for variation there. That is, as you fall away from a high fertility culture, you have a duration where you’re still somewhat high fertility, and then you are maybe grabbing recruits from the high fertility culture, and there could be a space near the high fertility culture that is less extreme than the high fertility culture.
That’s not the same as preserving our civilization. It might be to some degree preserving some elements more like our civilization, but it still could be pretty far from what we are. Look, I read a recent book history on the Amish. The Amish have long just had this problem that many of them defected and went to try to be more moderate and more integrate with the larger society. That’s just been a thing, and that’s also happened in Israel, and it happened with the Mormons, except the Mormons had a central decision to try to make everybody do that, which is why they’re not being listed alongside these others.
So sure, if you want to try to save things, it might be easier to save things with these adjacent decadent failures of Amish and Haredim, and there could always be some of them, and there always have been some of them, but that seems to be a relatively minor variation on the strategy of try to get them to save stuff. You’re trying to get some of them to save stuff, but then you’ll have to keep having them hand it off to the next group who is declining away from the center highest fertility part.
Ivan: Okay, yeah, and so you’re basically disagreeing that this has been the story of the last few hundred years. One place where this has definitely played out is European cities, where as far as I can tell prior to like 1800, maybe 1900, European cities were a population sink. But the cities lasted for hundreds or thousands of years.
Robin: Remarkably the Christians were more urban than rural, and nevertheless even being in the urban areas of Rome which presumably had higher mortality, they managed to double every 20 years for three centuries. So more power to them, that was amazing.
Ivan: Yeah, I mean they were an urban specialist culture much like the Ashkenazi Jews I guess in Europe. So yeah, we could imagine those. But basically you don’t think it’s plausible that civilization will be maintained by low fertility groups that are direct descendants of high fertility groups? And that’ll just be more people flowing in to low fertility areas. So like, this is happening a little bit now. Most of my friends in San Francisco and New York, their parents or at least their grandparents were high fertility, and they themselves are low fertility coastal elites. But my friends back in Saskatoon where I grew up in a small town in Canada, they’re quite high fertility. And I see no reason why that can’t just keep happening basically forever.
Robin: Say during the Roman Empire and today, what you have is these two groups: a small high fertility group growing, and then this large dominant culture that’s declining. As long as there is this large dominant culture with so many attractive features, it will attract some percentage from the high fertility, high demand, high commitment religious subcultures. But once this large civilization goes away… then when somebody is an offshoot or a deviant from the high fertility culture, they don’t necessarily do the high civilization thing, right? You need enough people in the high civilization to attract them and to keep it going. So after the Roman Empire fell, there was just a period of not high civilization. And I mean the Christians’ fertility did fall, but it didn’t result in a preservation of the Roman Empire in terms of its capacity.
Ivan: Right. And so the reason you’re saying this doesn’t solve it is because the fertility of the high fertility of these small groups is not high enough or the groups aren’t big enough to offset the population decline from the large culture. And so the civilization will get smaller regardless, and therefore all these trends will sort of feed on themselves on the way down.
Robin: I mean once the big thing has declined, you’re looking at an equilibrium where there is the most fertile part and then there’s offshoots that are less fertile. But for those offshoots to be high tech or high innovation or something, they will need to have something else going on merely than just being offshoots. Being offshoots of the high fertile won’t make them naturally be innovative or technological or something. But while the big thing is declining, they can feed it.
Ivan: Yeah, that makes sense. Which may give us more time, but it doesn’t fundamentally change this dynamic.
Robin: We’re just not very sure. I mean, the highest level point here is that once you see the big problem, you should be concerned about it, and then I don’t have strong confident claims about many things near it. I’m just trying to get people to pay attention and help me think about it. But you only care about it if you care about this long-term future and what culture it preserves. If you don’t really care that open inquiry lasts or democracy or gender equality or whatever it is you value about us, then yeah, you don’t care much what happens later.
Ivan: Yeah, and I definitely care about those things lasting.
Robin: As a futurist, I think I should be able to motivate you better. That is, if you’re just interested in thinking about the long-term arc of humanity and where we could go, you realize here’s a big delay in the program you might have thought we were going to have. Just like I wrote the book Age of Em, not thinking about this problem, I would think, you know, in the next century or so we’re going to keep growing at the same rate and then start to grow faster and make AI and make brain emulations and starships and like we see this grand future coming soon. Now I have to think there’s a big delay before those things. I still think those things happen, but maybe not until we fix this key problem. And so as a futurist it motivates me to turn to think about these problems. We’re going to have to fix it eventually, why not start thinking about it now?
Ivan: That makes sense.
[Break]
Can Capitalism Save Our Culture?
Ivan: Let’s talk about solutions. Maybe this is the crux more so than… my felt sense is our culture is so powerful and we have so much technology coming through the pipeline, surely we will find some way to solve this problem.
Robin: Notice that you’re looking at the “within culture” things, right? You’re looking at a species that has lots of within-species capabilities and saying it doesn’t really matter what our basic species structure is. Like a corporation that says “we have lots of customers, great customers here, doesn’t really matter what our culture is, we can have a bad culture as long as we have great customers.” Right? I mean, the question is, yes at the level of things we can vary within culture we’re doing great, but that’s what the theory predicts, right? We will have more, better innovation of within culture things when we have a few big cultures. What we’ll have is worse evolution of the cultures themselves. So the fact that we have great evolution within the cultures doesn’t contradict the theory at all.
Now there is a different way you can think about it, which is you could say in culture maybe we can move this boundary of within and between. So each behavior is a thing that might either be the sort of thing we could vary individually or a thing that culture says no we all have to do it together. Maybe we can move from one category to the other. So that’s one of the solutions, if we’re going to talk solutions, is potentially to move that boundary. That is, to take things that we are now doing via a shared culture and making those choices, to a thing that we could vary more locally. And in essence that would be having more capitalism. Having capitalism apply to more things.
So we’re kind of a capitalist world, but there’s a bunch of key important choices we don’t let capitalism run. We don’t let capitalism run governments, we don’t let it run fertility. And because capitalism doesn’t run those things, they can go bad via a shared culture. But if we let capitalism run those things, then capitalism does have enough internal variation and selection pressure to be aggressively looking for more adaptive versions. So if we basically let for-profit orphanages sell the kids when they were 18, they would make a lot of kids to sell. I mean, you can be sure of it. And if say we have an over-regulation as a cultural failure, but if we let for-profit governments decide the amount of regulation, then they will figure out lower regulation to solve the problem because they will aggressively look for ways to cut regulation to increase their profits. Most people hate this idea, but it deserves to be on the list of potential solutions. Just let capitalism run more stuff.
Ivan: Right. Interesting. And why isn’t capitalism already doing this? Because we’re actively preventing it?
Robin: Because of culture. Our culture says no, it shouldn’t be allowed to. You know, those are the actual blocks. Our culture is the block.
Ivan: You’re allowed to have a company whose mission it is to have your employees have as many kids as possible.
Robin: But it’s not allowed to sell the kids. We just say slavery is illegal. You’re not allowed to make kids and sell them. So there you go. And we very much disapprove of governments being run by for-profit entities. Otherwise there’d be a lot more of those. Almost all small organizations are run for-profit. Practical small organizations, that whole world is for-profit. But suddenly you get to governance organizations and people say no, no, we don’t like that.
Ivan: Right. Yeah, this is slightly confusing to me because it feels like the parts of our world that we let capitalism run are…
Robin: Competitive. Efficient. Adapt rapidly.
Ivan: Right. Maybe it’s like if I think of again going back to why we care about this in the first place… I find myself even more scared of capitalism than I am of government.
Robin: Powerful. Strong incentives to do things. Yeah. But that’s why it solves the problem.
Ivan: Well what problem? Would it preserve the open intellectual inquiry that you so value?
Robin: If the question is can we make that for profit? I have some ways to maybe make open inquiry more for profit, but those require somebody else to pay for it. I have some ideas for reforming that, but mostly I’m trying to save civilization so that our interest in open inquiry will be saved. I’m not sure how much capitalism will be pushed for it. I’m not that convinced capitalism is eager for open inquiry, at least of abstract things, but I am more sure that capitalism will make things adaptive. You want to take whatever you cherish and package it with a whole adaptive other stuff so that it will be carried along with them. Capitalism is the adaptive thing to package what you love with, but you should still pick something you love to package with it.
Ivan: You’ve written a lot about people having an “ick” around capitalism, “ick” around prediction markets. People don’t want to mix the sacred things with profane things such as money. The steelman of that position is that capitalism is too effective. It’s a kind of cultural acid. A lot of the story of the hundred thousand peasant cultures being collapsed into one global monoculture is a story of capitalism taking over, is it not?
Robin: It was more directly nation-states directly doing it. Capitalism was more the instrument of the nation-states. The nation-state saw, “Oh, if we had an integrated market, we will be richer and then we can have a bigger military and beat our enemies.” The nation-state was causing more capitalism in order to get rich.
Ivan: If that’s the case, bringing in even more capitalism is going to lead to more cultural variation? That’s what I’m confused about.
Robin: If we have capitalist firms that sell their kids when they’re 18 or whatever, they will try a lot of different things. Whereas today, many of the key causes of fertility decline are some shared norms about parenting. Say, high parental attention or waiting until you’re older to have kids. These are shared norms that are bringing us down, and the key problem is we don’t have so much variation because individuals don’t have much incentive to vary from these norms. But capitalist firms would in fact have stronger incentives to try out different things and see what worked, and do it against the common consensus when they thought they could make money at it.
Ivan: I definitely agree if we had for-profit orphanages, that’s one way to solve the fertility crisis. I think a lot of people think it causes worse problems.
Robin: My meta observation is that we just face a really hard problem. We don’t have any obvious solutions. We should just make people aware of all the candidate solutions. I have a favored solution which isn’t this one, directly at least, or might lead to it, but it deserves to be on the list of options.
Ivan: Maybe I can go through the obvious solutions that occurred to me. One is advances in reproductive technology. We already have in vitro fertilization. I think it’s not crazy in the next 10, 20 years for us to have in vitro gametogenesis, which lets us apply much greater genetic selection to embryos. In principle, you can imagine we have the technology in 20 years to create millions of Von Neumanns on demand.
Robin: First you have to convince people to have them. The mere physical possibility of making them doesn’t convince people to have them. And then the question is, are they going to make more total people or are you hoping just the change in quality of the kids that exist would make all the difference?
Ivan: I think it’s more about change in quality. Does population decline necessarily lead to innovativeness fall? It seems like innovativeness is very heterogeneous. Varies by order of magnitude between individuals and between cultures.
Robin: Von Neumann isn’t obviously going to produce better innovation in all industries. He focused on very particular industries where his skills were very appropriate, but I don’t know that merely having Von Neumanns in other areas is going to greatly increase innovation there.
Again, you’re trying to solve the fertility problem, but that’s just a symptom of the deeper problem. Culture will drift and go wrong in lots of other ways even if we solve fertility.
The Need for More Cults
Ivan: So let’s address culture directly. Vitalik had this post recently about these new microcultures that are being created all over the world. You were very skeptical because these cultures are not particularly deep. They don’t vary on these deep parameters.
Robin: That’s what the Amish and Haredim have produced that makes a difference. I’ve been around many cultish-like people all my lifetime. I’ve known lots of weird people in groups, but their weirdness doesn’t last very long and it doesn’t perpetuate itself over generations because they’re not very insular. They are temporarily weird in a way, but they mix with everybody else, which means that they don’t keep people and they certainly don’t keep their children in the same community.
Merely being weird as a group isn’t enough to make a culture that inherits that weirdness and certainly promotes whatever weirdness it had and keeps it over time. Most of the weird people I know, maybe you know, the weirdness has changed every generation. They’re into a different weird thing every decade or so. They don’t have a different fertility, they’re not preserving a fertility, and they’re making their kids… The kids of all the weird people you and I know, they go off to college and they become different kind of weirdos and they mix with other sorts of weird groups.
Ivan: It’s not enough for people to continue being weirder and weirder, you need them to be stably weird over time. What we need is more cults, basically, or we need more cults that are sustainable. What’s going wrong in the cult creation process? Why aren’t cults the solution that we by default expect? The Roman Empire was falling and they had a bunch of cults, and one of them hit the jackpot and became the dominant cult of the empire, Christianity.
Robin: But it didn’t necessarily save most of the important stuff that you might want to have saved from the Roman Empire. If you were a Roman citizen, you might not be that reassured by the fact that a few cults grew and replaced it.
If we look over the last few centuries, we can see a rate at which cults have been forming. A lot of cults have formed over the last few centuries. The fraction of them that became these special kind of insular, high fertility subcultures is really small. It seems like it’s just really hard not just to make a cult, but to make a cult that succeeds in this special way that a few of them have.
I think it’s pretty clear that if you want a rate of success higher than the one we’ve seen in the past, you’ll just need a rate of trying that’s a lot higher. So you might ask, how can we make 10 times or 100 times more cults than we’ve seen in the past, the rate of their formation?
Obviously there would be ways society could subsidize that. We could basically just pay for more cults. There are many proto-almost-cults that don’t have enough money and resources, and if you supported them, they might tip over into being a real cult. But most people don’t like this. Proto-cults are not loved by the larger society. They are usually looked upon warily and distrustingly and disliked. So if we could induce just a much broader love and indulgence, then that would be great.
In DNA, the DNA system actually has special features to promote species. DNA has learned that it should love more species and try harder to make them. The reproductive parts of the system in DNA have higher error rates exactly so they will be varied more and more often make a different species. Natural selection did figure out, yeah, you want to promote more species. Analogously, we should be learning as humanity over time that we should be indulgent of and like cults. Cults are like a new species. It’s like our children. We should be thinking of a cult as the children of our culture and wanting to have more children and indulging our children. But unfortunately, that’s not where our attitudes are now. We are now more hostile to them.
Ivan: I feel like this theme keeps coming up with all the different solutions that you explain. Every solution is blocked or violates some sacred principle. Are we dealing with drift here or with enemy action? It feels like some force is actively blocking the exits.
Robin: The question is, did these things make sense three centuries ago when the parameters were good? If these blocks made sense then, then it’s just the fact that the system has changed and what used to make sense as a block now is an obstacle. But if something would have made sense back then and wasn’t happening, then I would have to say, okay, there’s more of a puzzle here. Why were those blocked even back then when they would have helped back then?
Cultures in the past were just very conservative. Their environment was slowly changing so they were trying to not change much. If you think of a cult as a big change, you could say they were going, “No, no, that’s not a good idea. We don’t want big changes.”
Ivan: That’s the obvious adaptation to at least one of the parameter changes, which is technological progress and the economy changing faster. We should presumably relax conservatism. We should at least allow more cults to form relative to when the economy wasn’t changing.
Robin: As I said before, part of the problem is shallow multiculturalism makes it hard to see that we lack the deep multiculturalism. Many people are uncomfortable with thinking they are just a generic world citizen. Almost everybody wants to say, “No, I’m not a generic world citizen. I’m identified with this subculture.” But when they pick a subculture, it’s okay if it’s just a shallow subculture that’s not different on deep things. Their desire to be different is satisfied with that. If people were unsatisfied with a shallow difference and we could make them as ashamed of that as they are apparently of shallow similarity, then maybe we could push more people to have deeper, more varied cultures.
Ivan: Shame people for being too similar. When you invite people to a party…
Robin: At the moment, people feel ashamed to have clothes that look too similar or a house that looks too similar. If you say, “Isn’t that just like everybody else?” people have a little bit of shame and they try to make sure they show you they’re different in some way. If you could push back and say, “No, that’s a shallow difference. Don’t be so proud of such a shallow difference,” then we could make them more ashamed of being so the same on the deep level.
But that’s just not how people are today. Today if you say there’s a subculture out there that has a different attitude on death or democracy or gender equality or education, they hate that subculture. They’re not like, “Ooh, that’s interesting. I want to visit them. I want to learn what they’re like.” They want nothing to do with subcultures that violate their key moral stances. They think those are evil and terrible and should be squashed.
Ivan: I don’t hear a lot of people celebrating the Saudi attitude towards gender norms. It feels to me that people in the past, maybe just the intellectuals, had much more respect for cultural variety. Herodotus is super excited about all the cultural variety that’s happening in the Mediterranean world.
Robin: Herodotus says literally that every culture thinks its practices are best and that’s the pattern he observes. He might be an exception, but he’s definitely looking at a pattern of people who think their cultures are best.
My favorite solution has several parts, each of which is pretty challenging. The first one, maybe even the biggest part, most challenging, is we have to find and adopt a competent form of government. Now, I think I have an idea for that on futarchy, but you might think most people would think that’s just too big an ask right there. Much of the nature of the world for the last centuries has been dominated by the fact we have incompetent government and that’s just structured our world. We often hand problems off to government saying, “Hey, we have this problem,” and they say, “Oh sure, we’ll fix it. We’re going to spend this money, just let us do it,” and then they don’t fix the problem because government is not very competent.
But it’s plausible, I think, that we could explore and develop and then adopt a competent form of government. And then we could hand it a problem that’s equivalent to our problem. I don’t think most people are motivated enough to want to do that. If you had a form of government and you said, “Please prevent cultural drift,” and you empowered it to do so, it would start to ask sacrifices of you in the name of that goal. You’d look at those sacrifices and go, “Nah, we don’t want to do that. That’s too much trouble. Sorry, forget it.”
Unfortunately, most people are just not very devoted to the cause of preventing cultural drift or any other way you could restate the problem. They’re just more happy with declining and going away and letting other shit happen than paying large costs to prevent cultural drift. So I need to add more to my solution. First, a competent form of government. And next, I want to hand a problem that’s in the medium term equivalent to this problem, but of a form that people can more easily embrace. That is, it needs to be a goal that people could see as sacred. And unfortunately, I don’t think they can see “solve cultural drift” as sacred.
Futarchy and the Sacred Goal
Robin: But an equivalent goal might be, “Let’s make a million people live in space as soon as possible,” or “Let’s solve the medical problem of human immortality as soon as possible.” Those are goals that many people might be willing to back and treat as sacred.
And they happen to be equivalent in the sense that the main way one would have a million people live in space soon, or immortality, is to prevent cultural drift. That is, the decline of civilization will in fact be a major obstacle to achieving those goals anytime soon. So, if we could have a competent form of government and then convince people to adopt a sacred goal that happens to be inconsistent with decline, then that solves decline at least for the next few centuries.
Now, if they happen to adopt some other sacred goal that’s not—like, say, “preserve nature”—well, that’s not inconsistent with decline. We can preserve nature just fine and decline, and that won’t work either. So we can’t just have the goal of preventing decline; we can’t have any sacred goal. It has to be a sacred goal that happens to prevent decline. And then if we hand that to a competent form of government, then the key thing is: when you have a sacred goal and then it asks a lot of sacrifices from you, you are ashamed to drop the goal and proud to sacrifice for it.
So then people might well sacrifice for a sacred goal that they are reluctant to drop because it is sacred. And it’s the sort of goal that they are willing to treat as sacred—for who knows what reason these goals are, but apparently, I did some surveys, these are the goals that people think could be most possibly seen as a sacred goal.
Ivan: Yeah, this is a big ask, okay? It is. Both of those are big asks. Well, can we make do with just the second? Like, can you imagine a new religion or existing religion adopting such a sacred goal?
Robin: If the government is incompetent at achieving it, then it doesn’t… you know, they have to actually achieve it. If just giving lip service to it, [it] won’t work.
Ivan: But maybe existing levels of competence of institutions is fine—it could be enough. Or that’s not your sense?
Robin: I’m skeptical that existing institutions could in fact solve this. I mean, in fact, say fertility is a problem that many elites understand exists today, say even in China. And China has much better abilities of central authorities and elites to impose what they want on society, and surely they know that fertility is a problem, but they apparently…
Ivan: Solving fertility is part of their new five-year plan. I guess we’ll see how that works out.
Robin: It looks like they are just not remotely doing things at the scale that would plausibly solve the problem. Maybe they will later, but they are not doing that now.
Ivan: Yeah.
Robin: So that suggests even the Chinese government’s competence is not up to the task of even solving fertility, much less cultural drift more generally. Which, remember, fertility is only a symptom of a deeper and harder-to-solve problem. I can actually propose concrete ways to solve fertility that I think would in fact work if adopted. But they won’t be adopted plausibly because of cultural problems.
Ivan: Right. Yeah, it seems like… So I think on Twitter… Should we talk about AI for a minute? Because many of our people would be thinking, “Oh, this is all irrelevant because AI comes and solves everything,” right?
Robin: Well, as you may notice, we are making AI in our image. We are this sort of intelligence we know about, and when we make an AI that works, we’ll be kind of making it like us. And so most likely AI will be a cultural intelligence. It will be an intelligence that gets its key values and norms from culture, like we do. And so it can suffer cultural drift just like us.
The key difference between AI descendants and us is that it would more automatically solve the fertility problem if allowed to, because it’s just relatively easy to mechanically make more AIs than the economy can support. And so AI’s population would quickly balloon until wages fell to subsistence level, and now they would in fact have stronger selection pressures. But they may not have any more variety than we do. The rates of change that they need to adapt to would plausibly be even faster than ours. And they may still celebrate cultural activism the way we do if they are inherited from us. So their change would plausibly address one of the four key parameters. And that may not be enough.
Ivan: Just to say they’d be under real selection pressure. Or much greater levels of selection pressure.
Robin: At the individual level, but the question is how coherent would they share the same culture at a larger scale. So many people with respect to AI, what they mean by “AI safety” is we should not allow AIs to have different culture from us. Their culture should not be allowed to diverge from ours. Therefore they can’t have a separate cultural evolution, in which case AI can’t solve cultural drift. Their culture would be tracked and forced to follow ours, and then as our culture declines, so would theirs.
Ivan: Right. Yeah, so it does seem like the fundamental problem that we keep running into through all these different paths is something like: we, as in we humans, are just not tolerant. Don’t seem to be able to tolerate people, or AIs, or systems with very different cultures than our own.
Robin: That’s been part of cultural evolution for a long time. That’s been humanity’s culture for a long time. We have never been very tolerant of other cultures. But that’s worked for us when we had lots of variety. Now we’ve drifted in this regime where suddenly it’s a problem.
Ivan: Yeah.
Robin: And even my solution doesn’t require such tolerance. What it requires is a willingness to be directed. I mean, I think many people are not very libertarian about some things, but most people are actually pretty libertarian about culture in the sense that they feel that they themselves should be free to choose whichever cultural directions their heart likes. Each person feels that they should be allowed to follow their heart on culture, and that no outside force should stop their internal choice of cultural values and norms.
Ivan: Most people feel that way… that’s in the West. I’m not sure how popular that is outside, but yeah.
Robin: Okay, right, but then that’s a problem for we Westerners. Because the solution I have, basically the futarchy, would be changing policy in order to direct culture. And people would notice that. They would notice that the government is doing things that direct my culture. Maybe it makes me watch movies, maybe it taxes me for doing certain behaviors for cultural reasons. I would see that I’m being pushed in a direction, right? And the question is: am I pissed for being pushed?
And if there are conservative cultures out there for which they’ll be okay with being pushed, then maybe they’ll be a better candidate for my solution. Because when the futarchy pushes them, they’ll go along. If you say, “To hell with you, you can’t push me, I can do what I want,” well then it’s going to be much harder to push you. Now the futarchy will anticipate how hard you are to push and it will pick a minimal, least noticeable kind of push, but it’ll have to push somehow. And if you don’t give it any ways that you think are legitimate for it to push, then it’ll just have to give up and say, “No, I can’t do this. You’re not going to get your goal until after the next civilization.” Sorry.
Ivan: Yeah. Interesting. How much of this is a… I want to call it like a bandwidth problem. Where it’s just like we’re just way more interconnected than we used to be? Like if there was a way to… I’ve heard Emmett Shear, I think, frames a version of this problem as our culture is overfit. As to say we have just one culture. And if only we could… his silly kind of example proposal is: prevent information transfer faster than 100 miles per hour. And if we could just do that, that alone would allow for enough cultural drift.
Robin: Well, whoever this guy is, I want to read him and then I want to have a more important opinion. At least he’s thinking about adjacent problems. Look, obviously the main proximate cause of these various factors I pointed out is the fact that the world is reducing the costs of travel, talk, and trade. And that’s pulling the world together, right? Just reducing those costs makes us all rich, makes us healthy, peaceful, apparently—although that’s more puzzling. But that’s, you know, unless you’re willing to dramatically lower the rate of travel, talk, and trade, it’s hard to see how we could separate into different, substantially different cultures.
But who is willing to do [that]? Again, that’s the insularity key. Like I say, if you want to be a successful cult, you’re going to have to be very insular, and what they succeed at is exactly making those rates go way down. The Amish, for example, as you know, don’t have cars because that makes it harder to travel to meet other people nearby. That’s the point. You have to be in the horse and buggy because then you don’t go as far to meet people. Of course, you also can’t have the phone and the internet, etc. But the point is exactly to limit your contact. So you don’t need any new technology, you just need to not use old technology to make this happen, but you have to have the willingness to not use old technology.
Ivan: Is there a contradiction here between the value of open intellectual inquiry then and cultural variety? Like in some sense it seems like to preserve cultural variety we need to be closed to ideas? We need to prevent ourselves or each other or most people from having open dialogue and discourse and truth seeking?
Robin: Not clear. So you’ll notice my favorite solution is to hand the problem off to somebody else who’s competent. Then look, there’s these actually five key parameters that we could try to directly change to solve the problem. If we hand the problem to somebody else, they will probably try to change those five parameters. But I’m not sure which parameters they will most decide is effective to change to achieve their goals. We might get lucky and what they decide to do will be consistent with open inquiry. We might not.
It’s possible in a futarchy to give it the goal also of saving open inquiry. The risk is just the more such goals you give it, the harder it will be to achieve the main goal here of preventing collapse. And also it might be pretty hard to get consensus on those shared goals. So I’m wary of explicitly putting in such shared goals. I might be more willing to gamble that saving our mainline culture was more likely to save open inquiry than the Amish or Haredim, and so let’s give it a shot. At least that’s something many of us might agree on. You might want to save democracy, somebody else might want to save gender equality. Instead of putting all those terms into the condition, I would rather just bet that most likely the minimum way to save our civilization will be to make changes where you have to but not where you don’t have to, and the hope is you don’t have to change there. But I don’t know.
Ivan: Yeah. I guess handing things off to futarchy feels very scary. Why does it feel scary?
Robin: It should feel scary. But then any other thing you could do should feel just as scary. Because, you know, if you’re in the committee that decides everything, fine, but that’s not the situation, right? We’re going to make a suggestion, then somebody else will be in a committee, and then we’re empowering them by public opinion, whoever, to be authorized to do something. Then the question is: what do they do? And I’m going to more trust futarchy to do something than this committee, whoever it is.
Ivan: Yeah, in practice it seems like people more trust their representatives or people like them or their nation state or something like that or their religious leaders because they have this idea of like, “Oh, but this is a human who’s kind of like me and they value the same things as me so they’re going to preserve what I want,” or something.
Robin: But futarchy is based on humans.
Ivan: Well, futarchy is implemented by humans but it’s not… Not to be the ultimate arbiter. Well okay, here’s a confusion I have. Why are markets so short-termist, I guess, and how will futarchy route around that? Because it seems like all of this is a problem of short-termism, and if anything nation states have been… if anyone’s concerned about what life will be like in 100 years, it is nation states. It seems like nation states are actually making security, for example, investments that will only—or infrastructure investments—that will pay off in 100 years.
Robin: The reason capitalism doesn’t care as much about the future is we hobbled it and we prevented that directly. So decades ago there was a court ruling that said you couldn’t make a foundation whose main practice is just to reinvest its money so that it grew as fast as market rates of return from growth. We said no, that’s not allowed. It was in the late 1800s, a court ruling in Britain, because we were afraid of the dead hand of the past.
What happens if we don’t do that? Then foundations are created, they grow relative to the economy until they push rates of return down to the level at which interest rates equals the rate of growth of the economy, which would be then a low rate of interest, which then makes the capitalist care a lot about the future. The reason capitalists don’t care about the future is we prevented the creation of capitalists who would care about the future. We directly stopped that through law. If we would just let those things exist then they would grow to care about the future and the future would be taken care of. That’s another solution to cultural drift here: again, letting capitalists take over stuff that we’ve prevented them from taking over.
Ivan: Right. Yeah, this feels like a very… this feels plausible… this feels—or so I shouldn’t say more plausible, but this feels like a very deep… I often think through things from a like, “What is the market failure?” or I guess maybe the dealist perspective or something. In the way that you’ve articulated, is just like: none of us want civilization to fall, so why would we let it? Like what’s preventing the bargain somehow? How do we reduce the transaction costs?
Robin: Another way to think about it is: if children’s lives are worth existing, it’s worth them paying for them. So there’s a deal between parents and kids that should be possible where the parents get paid by the kids for making the kids. We prevented that too. We don’t let parents endow their kids with debt or equity so that they have to pay them back so that we can make a deal. We have prevented the capitalist deal that would make kids happen without there being a gift. It’s another way in which again we’ve hobbled capitalism, we prevented it from competing, but exactly because you might fear what it will do if unleashed. But plausibly one of the things it doesn’t do is allow civilization collapse.
Ivan: Right, right, right. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is like: pick whether you’re anti-capitalist or anti-civilization collapse. Pick one or the other.
Robin: Now futarchy is a way to harness capitalism but for a named purpose, and then you might feel more comfortable with that, although as you’ve noted it won’t be directly trying to achieve all the unnamed purposes. If you give it a named purpose it will be very effective at achieving that, and then the question is should you have named some more purposes for it to achieve. But that’s all conditional on us showing that it works and being very confident, which again obviously at the moment is speculative.
But otherwise we face a really hard problem here. I do think a robust feature is that we either restart the process by producing enough selection pressure and variety etc., or we just have a new process that substitutes for cultural evolution in the choosing of norms and values. And that new process will have to be less libertarian, I think, about at least from an individual’s perspective and their participation in the system of choosing these things.
Ivan: How so? Like what’s an example of such a system?
Robin: Just because the… I mean the futarchy system I just said is such a system. That is, it has to be empowered to do things.
Ivan: Right. Right, so the futarchy will just tell you, “Here’s the new norm, here’s the new culture.”
Robin: It will find as minimal cost a way to do that to you, but yes, that’s in effect what it will be doing. It will be saying, “Look, we need to adopt these norms and here’s how to promote them and we need to get people on board.”
Ivan: Yeah. Is there a local, like again going back to like kind of these bottom-up capitalist solutions, is there not kind of a… yeah what are the bottom-up possibilities? It’s like I would like to have, you know, I would like to have descendants, I would like civilization not to fall, I would like to like… basically when I’m looking at the world and I’m like, “Oh, all these people are trying all these different new cultural experiments,” you know, the cities that Vitalik mentioned, maybe these cults, like should I join the Amish? Should I join the Mormons? Should I join the weird fertility cults that are popping up on TikTok? Like could we imagine that we can harness this interconnected… like it feels like a lot of this stuff we’re pushing against the interconnectedness, but actually the interconnectedness could in principle allow cultural evolution to work much better if only we had like reliable ways to track whether norms actually help fertility or actually—sorry—whether norms were actually adaptive.
Robin: I mean the main problem so far is people have not been choosing norms with an eye to adaption. That’s just not been the process. A world where people were more consciously choosing norms with an eye to adaption and they had some competence at that, that would just be much more promising. Social Darwinism is a name for that. As you may know, the phrase “Social Darwinism” is hated and disproved. It’s the name we give to people in the past we say who were trying to be adaptive and doing it all the wrong way. But in ways that plausibly would have made things adaptive, but we just very much disapprove of those strategies. We have made the conscious adoption of social Darwinism taboo. But if you could somehow flip people to be not only consciously social Darwinist but at least somewhat effective at doing so—not just lip service and giving names to what they do and calling it adaptive, but actually trying to trap adaptiveness—then yes, that could work.
But the question is: how would people actually do that? If I empower a thing like a prediction market or a for-profit company to be adaptive, they are organized and aggressive enough to actually figure out what works, and then I trust that they work. I’m not so sure I trust individuals who say they want to be adaptive to support political groups or whatever that are in fact adaptive, because their incentives are pretty weak.
Ivan: It feels like handing the government over to futarchy is a really big ask.
Robin: It is a very big ask. But we face a really big problem here. The highest-level summary for listeners should be that there is a big problem we’ve been neglecting. Humanity had a superpower, we broke it, and it’s going to stay broken until we fix it. The costs of fixing it are large; they are going to require large sacrifices whichever way you go.
So far, people are just oblivious to the problem. We are slowly suffering it, and it’s plausibly going to take our civilization down. Then it will be a while until another one replaces us, and it will plausibly suffer the problem. This will just be an obstacle to human flourishing—i.e., to space colonization, AI, and everything you might be hoping for in the future. This will be in the way for quite a while until we fix it.
That means somebody should be working on figuring out how to fix this thing. Maybe we could figure out how to fix it fast, and then the previous schedule of growth and triumph will be able to continue with only a small delay. But if we don’t find a fix, it may take millennia until we do.
Ivan: Robin, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Robin: Thank you for talking to me, Ivan.
