Thomas Carlyle famously warned against stuff that is “a good tool to have as a slave, but a bad master to be ruled by." Consider applying this warning to culture.  Culture is humanity’s superpower; it is what makes humans so much more capable than other animals. When we know what outcomes we want, but not how to get them, culture helps us find and copy associates better at getting those outcomes, and then collectively improve our abilities.  For example, if we want to catch fish, then we can see who is best at fishing, and copy how they fish. As we all keep doing that, we all get bet ..read more

I am addicted to ‘viewquakes’, insights which dramatically change my world view. (More) To my shame, I missed Tyler’s review of the 2018 book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. I often get asked what are good books to read, and who are contemporary intellectual heroes, and now I have good answers: this book and its author Cecilia Heyes.  For a very long time, few who studied human history and behavior thought it very relevant that humans evolved from other animals. Decades ago, it was a revelation to me to discover the new but still minority view of evolutionary psyc ..read more

Nick Bostrom’s new tome … has a great cover with a number of interesting questions and a subtitle that hints that it might address the meaning of life in a future where AI and robots can do everything. But alas, after much build up and anticipation, he leaves that question unanswered, with an abrupt oops, out of time on page 427. … He tries to address meaty topics like, what keeps life interesting?  What is our purpose and meaning when the struggle is gone?  Can fulfillment get full? But in each case, the pedagogy is more of a survey of all possible answers versus the much more diff ..read more

A new paper looks at 40 questions from the World Values Survey from 1981 to 2022 (n = 406,185) for the 76 nations that did this survey more than once. Overall these values diverged over these four decades. The strongest factor from a factor analysis explained 65% of variation, and was strongly linked (b = 0.76) to Welzel’s “emancipative vs. obedient” [EO] dimension (“restrict the freedom of the individual from the group”), and less so (b = 0.26) to Welzel’s “sacred vs. secular” [SS] dimension. The value divergence rate correlated with EO, but not SS. The 7 items with the highest divergence sc ..read more

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