An Examination of Cultural Drift

Hi, um Travis Corcoran here at a Free State Party event. Uh Free State Party is a new organization that uh is doing incredible things in New Hampshire. Uh one of the main things it's doing is just sort of getting thinkers together. And so Jeremy Kauffman, who's uh one of the or the biggest uh force behind it, um, has this sequence of events where we bring in uh interesting people and intellectuals, and uh yes, I'm I'm the interesting person, and Robin's the intellectual. Um so uh I've had the pleasure of meeting Robin a few times before. For those who don't know, uh Robin used to be a software engineer um and uh uh made a smart decision to get out of that 20 years before uh DEI and uh LLMs uh took over um and got his PhD and he's a professor at GMU in econ.

And uh Robin has had a lot of uh sort of a sequence of different interesting ideas. Uh everyone here has heard about prediction markets. I mean a few of us had heard of them ten or eleven years ago. Um I was happy to have heard about it and wrote it uh about it in some of my science fiction novels. Uh but Robin was out ahead of that. He went further uh thinking about how can you do governance with prediction models, uh a concept he calls futarchy. And now that the rest of the world has caught up to Robin, he is on to something new and he has uh been investigating cultural drift.

And so uh first of all, Robin, thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Okay, cultural drift. Tell us, what is it?

So first I have to apologize. This isn't primarily about politics or even about liberty per se. It's about civilization and whether it collapses. Which I find is a priority. If so, willing to sacrifice maybe other things for that. Okay, so a couple of years ago I was focused on fertility. I noticed we had a fertility decline coming, and I realized as an economist, this is a bigger problem than most people realize because innovation would likely just stop for a long time. And digging into that, I noticed that the primary proximate causes were cultural.

Uh half a dozen key cultural trends were the main things causing fertility decline. And I said, why would all these things be going wrong? And then I spent a year trying to understand culture. And as an economist, I'd never paid that much attention to it. It always sounded very fluffy, you know, and unrigorous. And you might have that idea too. But once I dug into it, I realized there's a theory there. We actually understand some basic parts of that. And we have a real big problem with culture. That's the key message here. So uh humanity's superpower is cultural evolution.

Most animals, most of the behavior is encoded in their DNA. Humans have been able to encode much of our behavior in culture, which allows us to share it and change it much faster than other immols, and that's been our superpower. And now my message is we broke it.

And that's pretty serious.

So a couple of concepts I need to get through. So first, I have to have this concept of what natural selection is, and then that it operates at say at least

two levels. So the level thing. Let's start with that.

You think about DNA and ordinary animals and plants, they're in species, and there's evolution within species

and evolution of species.

There are certain features an animal or plant must have to share a species. That is, you have to have matching mating stuff. And that means you can't actually just vary everything and

stay in the same species, which means that

there are things that can vary within the species. And then for that, big species are better because more different places innovations could happen.

But if you want to innovate the things that find a species, you

need more little species so that they can try more things. And so places on Earth like rainforests

and rivers and uh corals, they

have many small little habitats with lots of species, and things like a big open region of the ocean. Those have a few big species. And a few big species place is going to be good for innovation within the species, but the fragmented place like coral reef is going to be good for innovation of the species. And those are two key levels of innovation. And it turns out that for life on Earth, it's that higher level that matters because we actually have more life descended from the coral reefs and regular rivers in the rainforest than we do from the other big places.

So innovation of species matters.

Okay, so that's DNA evolution. So now we want to go think about culture.

So culture also has multiple levels. There's things you can vary within a culture, like

business practices and tech.

And for that, a few big cultures will

have both the best innovation and evolution.

But you have features that define a culture and that it's hard to vary within a culture.

Those are morals and norms, values. And for those, you need more cultures to have evolution.

It won't work just to have a few cultures if you want to have innovation of the things that define a culture in terms of key cultural values.

All right.

So that's the key context. Now, natural selection is the key engine for animals and humans, but humans,

it's cultural evolution. And you think of natural selection as a way to make things

better, but in fact, its first job is to prevent things from getting worse. So it's a control process. And I want you to first just imagine driving a car is a control

process, just to get a reference here.

So if you're going down the road, you're trying to stay on the road, there's a set of parameters of this process that if they're in the good regime, you'll do

well, in the bad regime, it'll go badly. What are the parameters? How fast are you going? How wiggly is the road? How clearly can you see it? How bumpy is the road? How drunk are you?

You can see that if you move all those parameters to the bad direction, you will just fail to stay on the road. In the good side, you will just stay on the road and drive just fine. So natural selection also has parameters like that.

And the claim is the parameters have gone bad in the last few centuries.

So what are the parameters here? So now think in to do abstract mathematics here.

I see that lots of male analytical things in the audience. I was about to say a lot of chubby guys with beard, chubby guys with beards, so you're on safe ground.

Think abstractly, a high dimensional space of possibility. Evolution, you know, it happens in the space of features of plants and animals, right?

It's a high dimensional space.

In this space, there's an adaptive region.

This is the good place. And there's a set of points, and if the points are

more in the center of the good place, they grow and split.

It's the adaptive region. If they're out and away, they shrink and die.

So there's a cloud of points, there's an adaptive region, and the cloud needs to track the adaptive region. That's the control process like trying to stay on the road. So, what are the parameters that means the cloud could track the region? Well, one is how many points are there? If it's just one point, you're gonna have trouble. If you've got a million, that's much better, right? Second is how strong is this effect? The points in the middle of the adaptive region grow and split,

and the ones outside shrink and die.

If that effect is really weak, then points will go in the region and won't really make much difference, and then they can't track the region. So you need strong selection pressures, you need variety, but in addition, you need this region not to move too fast. You've got a cloud of points, and it just moves out of them, they're not gonna be able to track it. And the last parameter is how much these points just wiggle randomly on their own.

Okay, so those are the four key parameters of cultural evolution.

If that we need to be healthy for cultural evolution to work for humans, and they have worked for a million years.

So we are the proud inheritors of a million

years of cultural evolution that has not only within culture but swarmed and shaped cultures,

and that was going great up until a few hundred years ago.

So 300 years ago, we had hundreds of thousands of little peasant cultures on the earth, right? They were mostly actually pretty separate, they were part of empires, but empires didn't really care what they did and didn't tell them what

to do.

So each little village area was kind of its own little culture, and they were near the edge of survival, lots of wars, famines, pandemics. If they just went off the rails and got weird, they just died out and were replaced by

neighbors. So strong selection pressures, huge variety, hundreds of thousands. The world changed slowly.

World economy doubled roughly every thousand years. So that was the time scale over which evolution needed to adapt to changes

up roughly every thousand years. And finally, they were very conservative.

They were trying not to change their culture.

They didn't think they were.

Changes happened, it was sort of oblivious to them. They were trying to just stay where they were. Okay, fast forward, we're almost done with the story here. Fast forward over the last three centuries.

What happened? Let's go with variety.

First, we took all these peasant cultures and we made nations out of them. Famous book, Peasants into Frenchmen, says how I have trans, but happened

all over the world.

We took hundreds of thousands of cultures and made it down to a hundred or

a few hundred cultures.

And then in the last centuries, we've taken these few hundred cultures and we've merged them into a global monoculture, especially among the leads. So a vast reduction in varieties.

Secondly, in the last few centuries, we'd gotten rich and peaceful and healthy.

So the cultures that remain are just not being killed off by famines and pandemics and wars anymore. So selection pressure is just way down.

That's two. Three, the world's changing much faster than it used to. So now the world economy doubles in less than 20 years rather than every thousand.

So that's this adaptive region moving a lot faster than it used to, making it harder task for the cloud of points to follow

it.

And then finally, the last parameter, which is how much do these

things just wiggle?

Roughly a century ago, there was the rise of the modernism movement

in culture, which was the thing people agreed on is that we didn't want to be like we were in the past. We needed to do something different, whatever it was. And there was this huge energy and inclination

to change culture in as many ways as possible. And that and over the last century, our largest cultural heroes are the people who successfully cause culture change. Cultural activists are our highest heroes. And that's causing an enormous amount of just change

in culture, driven by uh processes

that aren't really tracking whether we're in the adaptive region.

So the point is four parameters have gone bad.

And my conclusion is we're drifting off the road.

That is, we inherited what were adaptive cultures

centuries ago from a million years of history, and we turned off this process.

That means we have just been drifting away from the adaptive region.

And that's my plausible explanation for fertility decline.

But now that's just a symptom you see. Fertility is a screw. We could fix fertility, maybe. Like there are ways to do it, but even if we fix that, there'll be this underlying problem of we broke our superpower. We broke this machine. And just finished to say we have a

number of ways to think about fixing it, and they're all really big

asks. None of them look easy. And we're just all in trouble now.

So that is the most plausible result of this drifting off the road is that our macro cultures are becoming maladaptive, and our civilization will decline by fertility and many other reasons until it falls so far as to be replaced by others. And the most plausible replacement, unless you think AI is coming soon, is say the Amish and Paretim who've been doubling every 20 years for a century.

They just keep doing that. They can do like Christians did.

They doubled every 20 years for three three centuries. That took over the Roman Empire, and these would just take over us. Now, this isn't human extinction, that's not on the table, likely. But what is on the table is whatever it is we

cherish about our shared cultures, they would likely toss a lot of it.

Because that's what the Christians do with the Romans. And so if you cherish, I don't know, gender equality or democracy or pacifism or open inquiry or whatever, the Amish and Paretam just aren't so much into that.

And they're nice people. I don'm not saying they're bad people, but the point is they don't

want to pass on our culture. They have a different culture, which is working for them.

Uh and so finally, uh, if you think of

fixes as one category, imagine you're on a ship

heading for an iceberg. There's two fixes.

One is to get to the control room and turn the whole damn ship,

and the other is to get off on lifeboats.

And the Amish and Veretum are lifeboats because they are separating. But in order to follow their path, you have to be insular. You have to be willing to isolate yourself from the rest of civilization and just live in your own world and be a separate world. And most people I know who are culturally weird or you know diverse and creative, they aren't very willing to be

insular.

And unfortunately, that means they're unlikely to succeed at that path.

But the other path is to get in the control room and move the whole ship. And of course, we have a world of people fighting over

the direction of our shared world culture. And again, there's it's very prestigious to win that fight, but it's really hard to join that fight and beat them. So that's that's a key summary of our problem.

So I've talked about that.

So that that was wonderful.

I've got a dozen follow-on questions.

I'll remember one or two and the rest will get flushed. Um so I I had a question early on, which um I I I think you you hit on it, but it was underemphasized, and I think the audience might have missed some of it. You did circle back, and that was you were talking about sort of different ecological niches, and some of them are very small and some are very large. And the corollary is that when you have a small niche, you can have a lot of small

niches next to each other.

Um, and so just to sort of circle back and restate, uh, we have consciously, you know, sort of since the Westphalian era, undertaken this project of nation building where local accents are intentionally stamped out by the ruling elites, and we created France, we created England or the UK as opposed to just Wales, et cetera, et cetera. Um and so uh Moldbug in uh one of his blog posts talked about how at the end of World War II, we effectively clear cut European ideology and in just copy and pasted FDR, you know, new dealism there. And so would you say that the cultural monoculture that has been created over the last 75 years uh was contingent and accidental and it need not have happened, slash you know, need not continue, or do you think that it falls out of technological and communications progress, such that there was no avoiding this bottleneck and the bottleneck

is likely to continue?

No doubt there are people to blame for pushing it faster

than it otherwise would have happened.

But the fundamental cause here is the world has found it

much easier to do travel, talk, and trade. We have just become much more in contact with

each other in so many different ways, and that's the fundamental cause of the monoculture is this increasing, you

know, being adjacent to each other and merging with each cultural.

Like the word multiculturalism is often set with positive affect as if people were eager

for supporting many different cultures.

But you have to realize what they usually mean are different songs

or clothes or holidays or myths, sh shallow culture. They mean as symbols of identity. But if you talk about variety and things like again, attitudes for democracy,

gender equality, war, you know, death,

you know, medical experiments, people hate variety about that. And they crush it whenever they see it around the world. We can go through examples.

So people are not very eager for deep multiculturals, and what they're eager for is shallow, but unfortunately, the shallow doesn't give us the cultural evolution of the deep behaviors.

So tying in this idea of sort of lots of different vernal pools and you're saying that, hey, uh one possible future, not one that you like, um, is that the mainstream global culture um breeds itself and and and on on a bunch of different axes ends up in distinction, excuse me, extinction, but we do have a few of these non-enlightenment smaller cultures.

Um become big. Right.

And and and this ties into uh Hirschman's uh

loyalty voice and exit.

It also ties into a pop science book from I don't know, five or ten years ago talking about humanity surviving disasters. I think the title is uh scatter, adapt, and improvise something. Um so one could certainly imagine sort of scenarios

where yes, the mainstream culture goes extinct.

Now, unfortunately, here on Earth in you know, 2026, we don't have a whole bunch of interesting uh secondary cultures, and those that we have, you and I would not love to see conquer the world. Um, do you think that our first world semi-enlightenment culture might survive long enough until there's space travel and we end up with dozens of interesting subcultures, or are the time frames incompatible?

So I think you would need cultures around different stars to be far enough

apart that they won't synchronize by communication.

Right.

Cultures within the solar system are just not far enough apart. That is light speed is fast enough to just synchronize cultures within the solar system quite well.

I read a book that touched on that. Unfortunately, and then by the time you're at other stars, again, if

you have the same problem within a star system, you're gonna have a rise and fall of civilization. So the problem isn't just that our civilization will fall out and the almost replace it, but this will happen again and again until we solve this underlying problem.

And we probably won't get to the stars unless we can find

a way to have a sus longer sustained growth of a civilization

that we've had so far.

So I think most of us in this room um are quite open-minded and we're listening, we're saying, okay, this all makes sense, we're not sure where it goes. But but say that there is one lone progressive in the back, and the the progressive stands up and tells you that they're very offended. And specifically, you are making a factual claim, and your factual claim is that a uh first world monoculture, you know, pro-LGBT, pro-abortion, pro this is inherently um unsuccessful, and they're offended by that claim. Um, you know, you would say, well, I don't care if you're offended, this claim has a truth

value, it's correct or not.

But what sort of outreach might you have to a progressive to say, no, no, there's something in this for you if you

listen to me. Well, say if you think about the discussion of fertility,

many people have seen the kind of fixes people want to have for fertility and say, no, we don't like that. That violates their sense of a shared culture they value. Then they're willing to say, okay, let's decline.

That's okay. I don't care about the future.

I just want our civilization to follow the values we have. So I need to appeal to you and say, I need you to

care about the future.

Because if you don't, then yes, you're going to be okay with this civilization

that we're in, decaying and declining, and being replaced by others, and you don't care what happens after that. I want you to care about what happens after that.

That is, I want you to cherish some of the things we have enough to want them to last a long time into the future.

Like for me, it's open inquiry.

We have all these intellectual progress I want us to continue with, and we have just begun trying to explore many interesting important topics.

And if we stop that soon and don't pick it up again later, I will be very sad.

And so that will be my pitch there.

Now, you know, a different sort of progressive might say, look, we have finally found the true right culture.

And it's morally true, and therefore it would be morally wrong to abandon the true right culture even if it is maladaptive and cause civilization to decline. And now we get to a key hard question that I will think bother many of you, which is my argument I've given you is in terms of this biological concept of adaptation.

And the claim is biology rules,

even humans, that if you don't make yourself and your descendants adaptive and tie the things you value to

adapttion, they will go away.

And that's true regardless of whether adaption is

good or bad.

That's just a fact about anything you want to last in the future.

So I would more phrase it in terms of compromise. You can't have everything you want.

All the things you like about your cult culture, you just can't have

them all.

You have to pick what fraction of them you hope to have survive, and maybe make the rest adaptive and tie tie it to an adaptive package, because that's the real choice.

So to follow along from that, you looked at earlier the four different parameters that talk about the rate of cultural

evolution.

And you talked about sort of number of points and the speed at which the uh optimal survival zone moves and a few others. Um if I were the progressive in the back of the room, I would say, okay, how I'm in the bargaining stage of denial now. Um can I pick one of those four? Um, and can I try to segment,

you know.

Uh I like censorship because I'm a progressive, so could we censor um communication between countries?

And that way, maybe uh progressivism in the US will survive even if it falls in the UK.

I don't care actually how what the motivations of this person are.

We should be thinking about the different things we can do and which of them could possibly work. So I'm happy to whether or not this came from a purported regressive.

Yes, one of the scenarios is let's fragment the world and

prevent global communication. Cool.

And maybe just make each county like trade with the rest of the world, but not talk to the rest of the world, and then form your own local religion and whatever, just force a global variety. That would in fact be a plausible route, but

nobody likes this. So there's almost no chance of getting people to adopt this.

But yes, it is at least in the direction of something.

It might not be enough.

The key point is that would produce the bigger variety, but variety is only one of the right things, and it might not actually be

enough, but it would at least be a plausible step.

So on a side note, like 25 years ago, Wired magazine, which used to be really awesome in its first few years, um, before it got sort of skin suited and taken over.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, there was a fictional article, uh, you know, maybe written in 1998 or 2001, talking about some future

plague in 2020.

And um, in this future plague, uh they cut off all air travel between countries, but which is the exact opposite of the issue, they had full internet, and that was a thing. We're gonna have the internet in the future. And so either even one minor detail was in addition to sharing music, et cetera, across borders, people were even reproducing because

DNA was being encoded.

So that that would be the opposite of what we need. Uh bodies can cross borders as long as culture doesn't.

We have way too little cultural variety. So we would need a lot more. Right. Question is that might not be enough by itself. Right. And even then, again, people love to mix culture.

Like, again, all I know lots of weird people, and lots of weird people who join together in groups and think of themselves as weird subcultures,

but they mix with everybody else. And when they have kids, those kids go to the same schools and watch the same TV,

and then their kids don't inherit their culture.

And that doesn't work for the kinds of variety we need.

We need actual separate different cultures to have the variety. And that's a huge axe.

So returning to sort of a whole bunch of little vernal pools as ecological niches versus the Great Plains, where it's 3,000 miles in every direction. Um it is probably going to be easier to do if we do have these small pools, easier to do experimentation or change a small ship than to change the direction of a big ship. Would it be smarter or more interesting or any uh facet you want to look at to try to change the course of Western civilization to make it survive, or to take a subculture like the Amish that might survive and try to make them a little bit more pro-enlightenment?

Again, the two key options are to get in the control room or get off on lifeboats. Okay.

So I so I'm saying, would you rather try to seize the control room of the aircraft carrier or try to seize the ores

of one of the lifeboats? Um I think we should be trying both of these approaches.

But if you have a shot at getting one of those lifeboats to

listen to you, go for it.

It I I would be tempted by joining some Amish group. If I could potentially have influence over them in the future, they would

listen to me and not just you know let me be in the background sporting,

because in fact I think our problem is pretty severe. But they're not actually looking for converts, especially converts

who want to like reshape how they think about things, and so that's a big problem. But if you personally, like you're a Jewish orthodox Jewish

family or whatever, and you could get into a community like this, yes, you should consider that as if you care about the future, that's a way for your linea to continue because the rest of us are going down, and you should be getting off on lifeboats, and they are in fact the available life boats, and you should actually

compromise quite a bit on whatever it takes to get them to take you. So two notes.

One is you can't see it because it's over your shoulder, but when you started talking about

find a small community and seize it and steer it in your own direction,

I've never seen Jeremy grinning more broadly.

Um two,

uh, and and we'll lead into this as uh as a following topic. Before the camera started rolling, you and I were talking about science fiction, and you said, you know, lots of science fiction does military conflict, a lot of it

does political conflict.

Uh you are disappointed that because not much of it does cultural evolution, at least not without some sort of very low rent LARP of just copy and paste something. And so, in a unreleased book that I've gotten, I need to get out the door, I have set on a future Mars, a sort of techno Amish grade tribe that is very intentionally, and and so this is an interesting thing about Amish, which I'm sure you know. Their religion does not forbid technology, it is actually

sort of a cultural norm.

And the cultural norm doesn't, and there's lots of different Amish groups, and it doesn't say no electricity, doesn't say no cars, it just says we want to be very deliberate about this. So there is no reason, in theory at least, that a polycule out of uh, you know, Porter Square, uh, you know, or Davis Square down in Massachusetts, couldn't try to invent their own form of Amishness. You know, we don't play any version of DD after second edition or something. Um, what do you think about, and you've partially answered this. Um, you you think it's sort of implausible for these weird groups to try to become more insular?

It's the insularity that's the key. So many people like many of you probably like the idea of joining some unusual group that has some unusual values and that pursues some unusual.

That's a popular idea.

And in fact, most people in our world are a bit embarrassed to think that you're just a generic person from the generic culture.

Almost everybody wants to have some sort of unique identity to feel like they aren't just an ordinary person, right?

But almost everybody who makes these distinctive subgroups, they mix with everybody else.

They they love to mix, right?

It's the Amish, the main reason they limit themselves, say to not using cars and using horses is for the insularity. And for example, they are pacifist mainly to be insular,

because if they sent the young men off to war, they would mix and they would lose them there.

They have a lot of trouble having a retaining doctors because

those need outside training.

They only they use advanced machines if they can learn to figure them

out in their own world.

They don't want to send people off to be trained. That's the key problem they have, it's maintaining the insularity.

Insularity is really hard.

And you have to realize just how much it would cost to create it.

And so if you want to do the lifeboat approach, that's the thing you have to ask yourself. How insular would you act? Not only you now for a year, but for a whole generation,

for multiple generations, you and your children and all

of your friends and family all staying insular from the larger world. That's what's being asked.

So to follow up on that, I've got a friend who uh likes to think about cultural continuity and he wants to set up uh a lineage and he thinks about his, you know, fifth

and eighth great grandchildren.

And I think that this is very interesting of him. But I also ask, you know, look at how much you have changed in your preferences from your grandfather. Why do you think you have any ability to influence what happens eight generations from now?

Um, and so so that leads into another question on

sort of trying to design a culture and let it drift more slowly. Uh, you and I are both beneficiaries of a culture that has mutated quite a lot. Um, and we would be, you know, some sort of Rawlsy and if we could see from one side of the veil of ignorance to the other, if we could see this alternate universe and ask, do we want to step over into where cultural mutation was clamped down on in 1500? I think we would say no. So let me ask if we are on a current timeline where the mutation keeps continuing. Um, I might, you know, say, hey, I I'm speaking through this, you know, Ansible to someone in the year 2400, and they don't want their future to be uh changed.

They want this weird mutation to continue. How dare you try to lock in the 21st century?

What are your thoughts?

In the last century, our world has come to really cherish cultural activism.

So we have not only so in the

first part of the industrial revolution, actually, capitalists were pretty powerful compared to culture and even governance. And then governments became possible in the first half

of the 20th century, very powerful even over capitalism and um culture. But then in the last half century or three quarters of a century, culture has become very strong.

That is, and we really like the idea that culture rules

capitalism and rules government, at least most people make you stupid.

Uh, and people really are invested in this idea

that a key thing humanity is doing is making sure

we know what we value in terms of morals, making sure our governments and our economy reflects that.

And that we are continuing to discover what this true morality is, and continuing to change our mind about it, and that somehow we're just discovering the moral

truth even though we didn't have it before. This is a central part of the modern myth of who the modern world is and

what we value in our modern world. And that's just going wrong. That's the key message.

So my key message is the thing that most people think is the most precious thing they have, which is their sense of morality that they inherited from their culture, and especially the sense of how my generation's morality is better than the last generation's

morality.

That's exactly a thing you can't trust.

It's broken.

The process that made it is broken and getting worse. And that's a really big ask, I know for most people, but that's my key message. And so, yes, once I realize this has been broken, the process has been changing broken, I might say if we had just kept culture as of a century or two ago, that probably would have been better.

If but yes, we a key thing that happened

is technology and context change. It would have been better if culture adapted to those changes. And that's the usual excuse given for most of the actual cultural changes is to say we need to change culture to adapt with changing context, which we do. But if you actually make the changes not by adapting the context and making you more adaptive, but just by looking in the depth of your heart and finding what cultural changes you think makes sense, that's just going wrong.

So one of your fundamental intellectual tools is evolution, uh, both literal in the genetic code, but also by analogy and memes and culture, et cetera.

And literal. Okay.

Um cultural evolution is literally evolution.

Right. Right, right. Right.

There's variation, there's selection, there's replication.

I agree.

Um, and so there is an argument that, you know, the amazing thing about capitalism, there's a bunch of amazing things. One of it is the profit motive. Um, but really the most important thing is that it allows non-fit organisms to die, which you do not see

in the public sector.

Um, you know, and and and it it evolution in any form is always brutal to the losers. And you know, having run some small businesses, none of which are currently alive today, um, I can say, oh man, you know, uh selection stinks, but on the other hand, um, you know, it has

redirected those resources for other purposes.

I'm doing other interesting things rather than slowly losing money.

Um and so then there's

the question with culture. We would like to think, I mean and I

give me 30 seconds here to get it all out.

We would like to think that evolution would uh give us into

some fit space.

Um, but often the problem is if the feedback loops are too slow, you don't get usable information in small chunks in time.

And evolution tends to work sort of just at the margin.

You you know, one gene is 51% effective, the other is 49%

so solely over time, but the world is changing so quickly.

But then also um cultural evolution is not purely random and stochastic, it is driven by people. And can you talk about who drives it in our societies, what motivates them, and and why they aren't responsive to

the feedback loops we might like them to be. Okay, so um the rise of modernism,

this eagerness to change culture, happened at the same time as the rise of high school. And most cultural changes are driven by youth locals.

And in fact, I I asked an LLM, you know, a year ago or something, find a hundred

cases of conflict between the young and the old, more than

50 years old, and ask who won in the end. And it said 97 times out of a hundred, the young people won. Once the old people won, and twice it was a tie. The one time the old people won is LSD is still illegal.

But not for long, if some people in this room have their way.

Whereas usually in the past, young people would then go mix with adults and assimilate adults culture and wouldn't create youth cultures.

So we're you know, um, I know a lot of parents will talk about oh my god, three-year-olds are little bioreactors.

They sneeze on their hands, they touch their playmates, they touch their playmates' hands, and you just have this breeding pot of disease. And so it sounds like by analogy, you're almost arguing that high schools are breeding grounds of memetic disease.

Um you've been mentioning some solutions

that don't work very well. Okay. So let me point to what I think of the most promising.

Your ideas suck, but mine are good.

Okay, so here's the analogy. When cultural evolution first started happening for humans, there was initially a conflict between DNA evolution

and cultural evolution.

That is, DNA had encoded some behaviors in us, and when culture said to change that, our DNA part said, hell no. And even today, there are parts of our behavior that culture is

not very powerful over turning on instincts.

Like if somebody asks you to sacrifice your life in battle, most people go, no.

Right.

Or even share your spouse with somebody else sexually, and people

go, no. Right.

And so there are some aspects where DNA still

has strong controls over culture.

But overall, what happened was because cultural evolution was just faster and more powerful,

it domesticated DNA and made

us have DNA that made us plastic to culture. That is, we have become sorts of creatures who

are very susceptible to culture.

That's how culture beat DNA in the contest

for controlling us. It domesticated the DNA. Right. So if I may jump in briefly, I can imagine

someone saying that's implausible, but I believe I've also heard that something like 90 or 95% of women reproduce, but something like 50 or 60% of men do. So you could imagine evolution working on genetics in remarkably short time just over the last 300 years.

Even so, culture works even faster.

But if you're arguing that the culture enforced changes in the sort of genetic base stock, I'm saying that's

plausible. Absolutely.

So our best explanation for how humans have changed so much in the last years is that the key thing that had that change was change in the DNA to allow cultural evolution to be more powerful.

And then everything else could happen via culture, but we had to have DNA changes to allow us to be plastic to culture. So if now ordinary cultural evolution has been broken at this higher level, if we can find another process that is in fact more powerful in terms of selection pressures, and could actually act fast enough and selective enough to manage cultural evolution, then plausibly an analogous thing will happen that it will become dominant and it will domesticate culture. So their candidate for that is capitalism. Okay. Great.

That is in our world, capitalism is going

great at forming capitalist firms and having

them be selected for being more productive and killing them off when they fail. And that's actually a quite healthy fact of our world. The areas of our lives that we let capitalism manage, those are having healthy evolutions. It's the areas primarily where we haven't allowed capitalism to manage.

Right. We don't let capitalists own governments.

We don't let them own people, like raise kids and sell

them.

We don't let them do a lot of things. For example, we don't even let capitalist firms just own a lot of capital and last indefinitely in order to

lower interest rates down to growth rates. That's a thing we prevent it by uh particular laws in terms of inheritance laws.

Log and perpetuity is right, exactly.

And so we might say much of the dysfunction of our world today in terms of culture is the areas of life that we don't let capitalism rule.

And so, therefore, a long-term solution is to let capitalism

rule many areas of life.

And then prediction is that places that allow that to happen

will then succeed.

And that's and then culture will adapt to become more pliable by capitalism. So it would be that's the long-term prediction. But there's a lot of pain between now and then. So there's a lot of questions about how exactly that we could achieve this transition. It's not at all easy or obvious, but that's at least a an imaginable solution.

So I like that, uh, obviously. Uh, there is a Scottish science fiction author.

Yeah, well, right now, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we're getting to real. We're getting to real nick Land territory.

You know, it's it's gonna be cold and inhuman, and I love it. Um, and and I'm not Nick Land, even though I am wearing Nick Land's uh hat today. Um there was a Scottish science fiction author, Ian Banks, who was a committed socialist, and um one thing I always loved about his fiction, I mean it's it's great science fiction, um, but he can only make socialism work by having a benign dictatorial demigod class of AIs that keep people being good socialists.

Um, and so I I'm going to uh

say something that's hopefully offensive, which is um that you uh your right-wing Ian Banks,

um, instead of uh uh having the benign

AIs uh making socialism work, you're gonna have the benign uh capital formation machines keeping

whatever New Hampshire. Here's a disturbing analogy.

In the last 10,000 years, an analogous but

perhaps weaker relationship was between religion and war.

Religion was a powerful cultural force, but war was more powerful. War was been a strong selection effect in the last 10,000

years.

And plausibly what happened is war domesticated religion.

Most religions have not objected to war, and they have

in fact supported wars, and because selection effect of war would just kill off religions that didn't do that.

And so that's an analogous to capitalism, maybe

domesticating our morals.

You gave me the prick lead-in for a point I wanted to make, which was weird and esoteric and had no on-ramp. But you gave me the on-rand, which is there is a really interesting facet I learned about religions. Most most religions have a prohibition in them of changing any word of the written text. And I realized at some point every religion that doesn't will mutate until it spontaneously adopts that and then it will more or less freeze. But then you get sort of the problem that we have. Our constitution is a religious text that has a prohibition against

changing it lightly.

And so we have sort of just mutated the ribosome. So the ribosome now reads the old code and does whatever it

wants.

So let's see, you've talked about, I'm gonna go back

to Jeremy's notes.

Um so libertarianism. Um a lot of libertarians are very open to all sorts of ideas. You know, people have said stuff like, you know, I support the right of a lesbian witches commune to have their own automatic weapons and group pot and this

and that.

Um but in all these ideas that we've talked about, both communication being a universal solvent that will dissolve the boundaries between it, um, and and we've also talked about how the Amish and other uh sort of, I don't want to say third worldish, but more traditional things. Is there a future for libertarianism in

this uh sort of war of all against all,

and the only thing that really matters is the utility function of the cultures

that survive. Well, if capitalism wins, capitalism

tends to prefer liberty because that allows

capitalist competition.

So when you prevent capitalist competition through lack of liberty, you prevent the capitalist engine from functioning. So there is a complementarity there. That's not your personal liberties, that's the liberty of capitalism to pursue various right business

ventures and offer various products. Uh so that's a kind of libertarianism that would be provided here, but it's not the same as other.

So you're talking about uh there was a word that you just used and I lost it, but it was sort of compatibility or commensurability or something.

There are two interesting concepts.

Um one I think I got from Bern Hobart, uh, the Financeler guy. Um, and Byrne has talked about how one trick in business is to commodify your complement. So if you are in the business of selling ketchup, you would love to be in a world where French fries are free.

Um Right, right.

Um, and so we're we're edging into what I I think feels like an analogous thing, where if uh capitalism uh thrives well in a libertarian

environment.

Oh, and the other analogy I want to make is that in the early days of the C programming language in the Unix operating system, there was some quote, it was either this or the exact reverse, which is sort of UNIX is just the C compiler's way of reproducing itself. Um is there

sort of an analogy where we can get capitalism

to start enforcing libertarianism on the states uh or on various cultures to help more capitalism.

I mean, so how how do we get uh uh open

AI to uh give the free state project 10 million dollars to make New Hampshire more uh uh hospitable for

them? I don't know that that's gonna happen.

Um so I've been around anarcho-capitalists for a while, and our narco-capitalists say we just need competitive government, and then they're believing that that will be libertarian, but it's not guaranteed.

Competitive government is libertarian, right?

And so depending on various features of human nature, it might be that the most competitive world that's produced in a competitive world of governments is not

libertarian. Oh, absolutely, yeah.

In which case, I'm talking about adaptiveness

here at saying we just need to be adaptive enough or we won't last.

And adaptiveness isn't guaranteed to be to be libertarian, it has maybe this tendency it capitalism is pretty adaptive, and so you need to be as libertarian as necessary to allow free

competition of capitalism. But that's not the same thing.

So for example, just owning people, slavery is the sort of thing that capitalism, you

know, things make sense.

And if you think that's anti-libertarian, well, capitalism

doesn't care, right?

Capitalism was happy to own and innovate

and compete with things, even if you think they shouldn't be allowed to be off.

There was, I think, a Swedish science fiction author, and I have no idea how his name is even pronounced, like Hodginal something. And um one of the books was about uh sort of people trapped in a prisoner's dilemma. Um, but one point he made was that in a competitive system, uh, and I think he was talking about sort of KIs in a battle, uh, and one of the AIs started out with sort of the best of intentions, it was a very pro-enlightenment, etc. Um, but when reaction speed and being inside the UDO loop of your enemy, um, what you end up optimizing for is survival, and so you start stripping away all of these things.

So I'm going to posit to you is there a worry that if we say, hey, capitalism

seems to co-evolve and support an ecosystem

of libertarianism, let's let it loose. Um, might we be worried about a hard take off of capitalism that ends up optimizing for things that we don't like?

So that was this key picture I'm gonna repeat to you because it's key contrast.

One view of the world is you know in your heart what's moral and right, and the world out there could violate that, and we need to coordinate to prevent the world from conflicting and

violating what the morals we know is right.

That's one view of the world based on this confidence you have that these moral intuitions of yours are trustworthy, true, and the thing you most care about. And I want to flip that around and say you shouldn't trust that.

You evolved from a natural selection process that

gave you your morals, and that process has been broken for a while.

And the morals you have now are broken as a result. And what you need to be is part of an adaptive process

to have any descendants at all. So if there's anything you cherish, the

best chance you have to save it, including libertarianism, is to package it with an adaptive package that could last into the future. And maybe this one thing you have is too small of a tax to

really kill it off, even if it's not that adaptive.

But that's your best shot at having anything last in the future. You have to compromise with natural selection. Unless, which some people think we could just end natural selection, and we could talk about that if you want.

Like, is there a way we could just stop it?

But that requires pretty central coordination of governance that libertarians don't like. So the most plausible ways people have ever thought about ending natural selection is through pretty strong central

governance.

I have a thousand more questions because this is a fascinating topic. Um, but you and Jeremy beforehand were talking about taking audience questions. Jeremy, is it a good time to switch to that, or would you like a few more questions on

the stage? I believe this microphone is working and make it onto the live stream, and people heard me earlier saying that it wasn't. So that was a fun time. Uh, I I think we I think we can take audience questions. We've got probably another uh 10 to 20 minutes. Uh and so yeah, we can we can take audience questions. I can are we ready? You can walk around with the camera. Yeah, okay.

Uh, who's got a burning, burning question?

I got Clarence in the back here. Oh, I doxxed you. This is the guy's not named Clarence. Mr. Pink. Um I was thinking of something which you just sort of mentioned a minute ago about ending natural selection.

Um, isn't it the case, leaving values

aside, because we're not really talking about values here. Um, if some culture is taking over the world, like you know, you said US took over Europe, or Travis said that I'm not sure. Um, if one culture encompasses the whole world and is doing fine, which is usually a terrible situation in science fiction novels, um, and as you said, that usually ends by the young people changing it. Um, but doesn't that mean by definition that there is no natural selection pressure anymore? We are in a natural selection process.

If variation of selection is still happening.

If we don't have enough variety, the process is broken,

but it's still happening.

But a broken driving process means you drive off the road.

Like if you're on the road and you are driving and you don't have the right parameters, it's not like the driving process ends and it's no longer driving.

You are still driving down the road, you're just going to go off the road.

So the prediction here is we are under natural selection, and we yes, have too few variety to

make it work. So we are in fact gonna drive off the road. And there is the Amish and the Redum who are on stage ready to replace us. So uh we aren't just a single culture in the world.

There are a few deviations who are, in fact, ready and able

to take up the slot. I had a question about uh your comments about how talk, travel, and trade are leading to cultural uniformity. I want to say as a counterexample, the advent of the printing press in in Germany that in Europe that led to schisming in the Christian church, not just Protestant versus Catholic, but then subsects within Protestantism. Uh, so I see that as an example where a greater ability to talk actually increased diversity of culture. So remember, there were these two different levels or multiple levels, right? Within culture and between.

So when we have fewer cultures, we can have more variety within the culture and we can have more innovation within the culture.

And that in fact, what we have had.

We have had record levels of innovation of technology and business practices and artistic genres, because those

are things you're allowed to change within the culture. And therefore, the printing press allowed variation

among the things that were allowed to be very within the scope of the printing press world. But when there were things the entire world shared like

Christianity, there was not much scope for

being non-Christian in Europe after the printing press because the shared culture didn't allow that sort

of variation. Uh it's not that there is no

variation in the world today, even at the highest levels, but if you look at reports of people who traveled around the world two or three centuries

ago at the level of variety they encountered when

they traveled, it's just vastly larger than reports

of people today traveling around the world.

Even today, I know people who traveled now versus four four decades ago, and they say there's so much less variety I encountered

about when I travel today, because the world has been converging

even over the last four decades.

So there was some of the things you said, and I think that Travis also pointed out that are pretty horrific about the status quo. One of the things that I sort of hit home most for me was when you said that this generation thinks that present day morality is better than previous generations' morality. Do you see that as being uh an outcome of all of the cultural drift that you're describing? Or is that maybe an impetus towards it? And if so, what's causing that?

There's just this natural sense of whatever morality you learn, and then you learn that other people have different moralities.

You say, Well, they're wrong. Mine is right.

So when you look past or future anywhere else, you just tend to think yours is better. So that's the way in which people today, when they hear the morality they're taught, and then they're taught that people 30 years ago had

a different one, they'd naturally think, well, those people were wrong back then. Therefore, there's been progress because they were wrong and we're right. So I'll jump in with a quick one. Well, oh, Jeremy's got the next first lineup. Great. I didn't see any hands. So in the last hundred years or so, we've had the evolution of a technology that affects the cultural layer, okay, propaganda. And that's creating an extreme bottleneck that I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how that um plays into all of your bottleneck of propaganda? Look it looks like we've had an example of the propaganda propaganda's bottleneck propaganda.

It doesn't like aren't we able to have lots and lots more propaganda now

given how much more talking we can all do? Well, I would say it's bottlenecking the cultural layer from a top-down level, bottlenecking the diversity of viewpoints. So yeah, again, we'll again

we have norms where we let people vary in some ways and then we crush variation in other directions, right? So much of say cancel culture was about crushing people who were seen

to deviate on certain key elements of culture where that was unacceptable to have those kinds of variations.

So to the extent that we share norms and are willing and able to enforce them, then that produces lots

of variation. But that's the nature of just having norms, right?

If if I could jump in and expand on that, because it lies very close to a

point that I've thought about a lot.

We've seen in the last couple hundred years, I think a couple of huge waves of cultural change, both downstream of technological innovation and communications. One is the printing press, which I think touched off the religious

wars.

Um, and then if you look at both Stalin and Hitler, uh, you know, uh both rose with radio. And so I've been, you know, saying for 20 years or so now, you know, gosh, the internet is the next revolution of that. And in fact, we see huge amounts of cultural war. So my thought is, you know, yeah, these technological changes are increasing the transmissivity, which is lowering the variation.

Well, but because it's so global now that we just have less local variation. So I understand that most of the world is following US politics

and US cultural wars, which dominate world cultural discussions.

So we we just don't have dozens of variations

of different cultures going different directions.

We now have this world monoculture where we all decide whether you know racism is offensive or whatever, and then we just all collectively enforce that same concept of it everywhere in the world, at least among elites. Hi.

Uh so one of the other topics that you've um traveled

on your intellectual uh journey to where you are now is the great filter. And I was curious.

Um, you talk about needing to make trade-offs to have

the culture propagate, and perhaps like technological progress or even expansionism is something that has to be traded off against to have whatever you currently have a property. I was curious if you could connect the two topics or if you had any thoughts. Uh I I have actually so uh I

originated the phrase the great filter in all long ago,

uh almost 30 years ago now.

And the last couple of years I came back to it with this concept of Grammy

aliens, where I did a numerical analysis of that.

And because I had done that, I decided I should speak up to the possibility that UFOs might be aliens because I was now an expert on aliens in space-time.

And I came up with my best account of why how

it is that UFOs could be aliens if they were and a prior on that, which I'd say is roughly one in 10,000, one in a thousand, which is high enough

to take seriously.

But my best story there comes up with the question of why would aliens choose not to expand in the universe? Because any aliens who are here now and aren't everywhere we see

would have to be that sort of alien. So you have a question why would that ever happen?

And this issue we're talking about is a plausible story

there in the sense of when we have a world culture that we all share and we all like that we all share it, and we like the fact that we not only can solve global problems like you

know, inequality or global warming or whatever it is to global coordination, but we like the fact that we can count on everybody being part of our shared culture and sharing our values.

Whenever we allow anybody to lead the solar system to go off in other directions, that ends this era.

Those people can then diverge arbitrarily from us and then recursively diverge with their descendants, and then all those descendants could come back here and rest, you know,

contest control over this.

The era of a single unified human culture, Benity culture, ends whenever anybody leaves

to colonize elsewhere.

And you can imagine a civilization hating that prospect so much that they decide to prevent anybody from leaving so that they can maintain a unified culture indefinitely. And then that was my hypothesis for what UFOs as aliens

would be, and they would be a culture that did that. And so they are here to make us follow their rule of respect.

So that you were talking about not wanting the people to escape because they might have their own culture. I think very closely related to that is not wanting people to escape because they get their own governments. And this is one reason that I've always been skeptical about cease setting. Um it's not not that you can't build a boat, it's that the government will never let

you contest sovereignty. Right.

And also people who think, well, if you go to Mars, you can have your own government there.

And I go, what? Hey, come on.

As soon as it's economically valuable to be on Mars.

I don't like this conversation anymore. I'm out.

Governments exert control over everything on the earth that has any substantial

value. The only places on earth that nobody's exerting control over are the things they don't think are worth bothering to have control over, right?

If if you have huge economies on the bottom of the seafloor, you will damn sure have governments exerting control on the bottom of the

sea floor. Yep. Nice. Thanks, guys. Um of the defining characteristics of the age is the inability to let people fail, right? It may be an overgrowth of empathy and a surfit of empathy. Um, your solution involves everybody realizing that you have to allow failure in order to get selection, right? How do you get there? Right? How do you, you know, how do you it in to some extent it's in our genes. The empathy is in our genes. Maybe it's overexpressed, but how do you get there?

Well, you had this phrase everybody realize. Now, in fact, through most of history, things changed

without everybody realizing.

Like things change, and most people even know they were changing. You know, they didn't even know what the situation was. They just each adapted their little part of the world and accepted

that.

So, what you have today maybe is the sense that people think they should know the whole world and be able to set terms on the world and the expectation that their beliefs

about that should should have an impact.

But they could just have a world that changes against their interests, and they're stuck with having to deal with it things.

They can't, in fact, undo it. I mean, that's what I have to expect happens in a

world with lots of capitalist competition. It will not be a world that people sit around and vote on and discuss and what happens as a results of their discussion.

It's a world that maybe happens against their wishes, but we no longer expect to all get together and vote on how the world goes.

But that's a key thing about our like our our error in the last you know half century or so.

We've come to think that we the world shares a culture, and we're

going to use the shared culture to make global decisions about key things like war in Ukraine or whatever. And that's that wasn't ever true up until recently. And it's a current ambition and value people have is now that we all share a culture and we're all connected together, let's all decide together what happens in the world, and then it should follow our ideals like nobody should fail.

And that's part of the problem that

we have this world where people have these the shared culture and it's going wrong in these sort of directions, and the process isn't fixing it, or the process of the shared discussion, fixing it. But the way that happens is it could just all collapse and fail.

And in the ashes, things rise up that just

go against what people want.

But maybe what we need.

But I feel at least happy to have a better vision of where we're eventually

going to be.

But I I can see a bunch of different ways to get there.

I'll just put a pitch.

One of my ways is this concept of futarchy, which is mentioned, which is a quantum governance that heavily uses capitalism to achieve

whatever named goal you can quantify.

And that's a way in which we might in the near future feel like we are together running the ship by choosing a shared

goal.

If that shared goal was compatible with adaption, then in

fact we would make a world that's more adaptive.

But only if so, I've got a follow-up on that, which is going away from futarchy, uh, just to uh futures markets. Um, if you're right, uh, and this gets into sort of Bern Hobart's uh concept of apocalypse puts uh how do I trade to make a profit on uh the

death of the monoculture?

Well, a civilization collapsing that there are predictable things in the

long run that will be more valuable than other things, but uh crossbow futures and uh we can walk through

some details, but there's actually such software since you're a software expert, but there's some things we can say about how software, but that's interacting with AI.

So I I should mention AI here. AIs inheriting our culture would inherit the cultural drift problem.

The one way they might actually do better though is

they are already run by capitalists. They're already owned by capitalists it might be more

okay with AIs if they let their culture

be run by capitalists. Are you familiar with Hans Morovic I am uh he's

got a book I think uh Mind Children or is that the title yeah and and the idea is that uh all of these mechanisms that you're talking about over and over of evolution uh you know if we beam out SETI messages and uh at some point we'll probably be uh beaming out weights for AIs and other cultures will receive these run these they will perhaps mutate and selectively and so the universe will be consumed over time with replicating AIs.

Right but just the key point is that many people think of once you have AI it's just a generic soul sold problem sauce and it isn't so if there are problems that AIs would inherit from us and then have to deal with we might as well start to solve work

on solving them now because like AIs will just they'll

be better at doing things but still they can just inherit our proxy a key problem that AI is likely to inherit is just sharing a world

cultural AIs and therefore not having enough cultural variety of AIs.

And that's a problem AIs would face and they wouldn't necessarily

Milky way with uh sort of algorithms all doing DEI

right so there was this AI general recently on data up to 1931 I think was called talkie,

I think.

And so it's just really a different culture creature

than AI generated today, which shows that we're not just making AI, we're making AI modeled after us with our shared world monoculture embodied.

AI's culture is actually converging. The different top lot models are coming more similar over time in their beliefs on key questions about you know culture and values and everything else.

So we are inherent passing on our shared monoculture to the F.

So one thing I've been hearing from this conversation and something is is that uh, you know, the culture exists for the genetic survival in some sense, right?

Like that's part of it. Just for survival period, not genetic versus but

it was originally uh a human innovation or a human genetic innovation

that helped us survive. Right. And so there's been a lot of sci-fi talk.

So I started thinking about how you know the Borg ended up being this thing where they had all sorts of genetics, but it had a culture that made it survive. And then I started thinking, okay, is the Federation just an earlier version of the Borg? And can the Amish survive or is resistance futile.

So the Borg and the Federation are pretty large monocultures, right?

So that's a way in which I again I think science fiction doesn't really face culture as a real issue. So uh just so much of historical fiction tells you the why that the past was full of people like you and people like them, and your guys were the heroes and

theirs were the villains.

Similarly, lots of science fiction presents a future where lots of people like you are living in the future, being the heroes against other

villains, and it just doesn't recognize the fact that cult

neither historical or science fiction recognizes just how much culture has been changing and will change. And that's just a wee hard thing to present to readers and have

them get. We're about to wrap up. Well, I I also wanted to say thank you to our audience, and I wanted to say an extra special thanks to Robin. We have a gift for you. You're our first speaker to get a gift, so the first two speakers before you are gonna feel salty if they're watching. Um this is a first edition of Robert Frost's New Hampshire. I do believe it's considered to be a rare book. And so thank you very much for for being here with us. There's a thank you card in there uh as well. Thank you for everyone who tuned in who came out uh in person tonight.

We will have a live event uh on Tuesday again with uh Kevin Dolan. We're not gonna normally do them so close to each other, but circumstances made uh it it work this way. And we're gonna be continuing to have one of these uh around once a month or more. Uh so come out again on Tuesday if you enjoyed this. Uh, this will also be on our YouTube channel at Free State Party. And so thank you very much. Have a good night, everyone. Thank you, Travis. Thank you, Travis.