Why do we fear being lied to? Because we don’t like others manipulating our beliefs. But our fear of being misled by false news pales by comparison to our fear of suffering total “mind-control”, such as depicted in the films Manchurian Candidate or Ghost in the Shell. And the part of our minds we most fear losing control of is: our deep values.  After all, damage to our memories, abilities, beliefs, or heuristic priorities might be repaired via further experience and thought. But if our deep values change, we won’t want to change them back. This is why mind designers have long presumed th ..read more

In the last two days I read Richerson & Boyd (2004) Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, by two of the founders of modern cultural evolution theory. It is very good. (I’ve also been reading their classic 1985 book Culture and the Evolutionary Process.) Several datums worth noting: Popular preteen girls of the working or lower middle class are usually the most important leaders of language evolution in American cities. … In one study… subjects were asked their opinions on "student activism" in one of three scenarios: after hearing the opinion of somebody identified ..read more

In 2008, The Times Literary Supplement included [CP Snow’s 1959] The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution in its list of the 100 books that most influenced Western public discourse since the Second World War. (More)  Yet its main part is only 30 short pages, and this is its main content:  Intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. … literary intellectuals … scientists.  … Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes hostility and dislike … Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boas ..read more

I haven’t been posting so much lately, as I’ve reading & thinking a lot about culture; hope to say lots more soon. In my readings, I’ve been frustrated by the quite different ways the word “culture” gets used. It gets used differently in cultural evolution science, in corporate culture consulting, in travel and marketing talk, in museum and art talk, and in the “culture” sections of newspapers and magazines. So I’ve tried to work out an account here to explain these differences. The main difference I see is between inside and outside culture talk. Outside talk tries to be objective, talkin ..read more

In standard decision theory, an agent makes a choice in each of a large number of possible choice situations. If these choices satisfy some plausible rationality axioms, they can be represented by real-valued utility and belief functions over a set of possible states of the world. As the agent learns info, their beliefs update according to Bayes rule, but their utilities do not change. There are noisy versions of this, where agents make limited mistakes re this standard, and standard game theory is built on top of all this. Humans who find these rationality axioms plausible aspire to beco ..read more

My beloved colleague Bryan Caplan’s books almost never disappoint. So even though I haven’t seen it yet, I can heartily recommend his new book Build Baby Build, which he calls “the most fascinating book on housing regulation ever written”. He also says “it would be a huge favor to me if you would take the extra step of pre-ordering right away.” And why not do such a favor for such an interesting, and nice, guy ..read more

A shallow “multiculturalism” tolerates and even celebrates diverse cultural markers, such as clothes, food, music, myths, art, furniture, accents, holidays, and dieties. But it is usually also far less tolerant of diverse cultural values, such as re war, sex, race, fertility, marriage, work, children, nature, death, medicine, school, etc. It seeks a “mutual understanding” that that we are (or should be) all really the same once we get past our different markers.  In contrast, a deep “multiculturalism” accepts and even celebrates the co-existence of many cultures with diverse deeply-diverg ..read more

There is a big literature on the ages at which intellectuals peak in life. The rate of publishing papers peaks about tenure time. Physical sciences peak earlier than social sciences. And per paper, each one has an equal chance to be a person’s best paper, regardless of at what age it was written.  Being a polymath, I’ve posted lots on the topic of polymaths over the years. Seen as a production rather than a consumption strategy, polymathing is mainly looking for and building on connections one finds between distant intellectual areas. And while I haven’t seen data to confirm it, my person ..read more

In the ancient world, people tended to see rival nations as ruled by illicit tyrants, while their nation was ruled justly by a king.  Two centuries ago when religion was first declining, many predicted that crime would greatly increase as a result. It was mainly fear of God, they said, that kept most from committing crime. But then crime came down. Centuries ago, there was widespread skepticism about joint stock companies, as it was presumed that firm managers would usually steal firm assets. It took centuries to convince skeptics. Many still presume that firms naturally enslave employees ..read more

An organization has: more than one person, some resources, and a process for making decisions about them. An org owned and controlled by a single person need not declare a purpose, as that owner will use it to achieve their usual complex personal ends. But other orgs tend to declare official purposes, to coordinate their leaders, members, employees, investors, donors, partners, suppliers, and customers.  Of course orgs often fail to induce org leaders to fully pursue declared purposes, with leaders to some degree instead pursuing their complex personal ends. This is more possible when pur ..read more