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Cultural knowledge (evolved rules for operating in an environment) depreciates as the environment changes. Today's world changes so fast that our cultural infrastructure has been depreciated to almost zero, which causes many social ills.https://twitter.com/patrissimo/status/1021929025252425728 …
The costs of having no old adapted rules to follow are most easily born by the cognitive elite, who have the time & ability to sort through @tferriss, @lifehacker, etc. for new rules. The masses can't do this, and so suffer deeply. Religion contains vast, deep wisdom, but...
Our ancient playbooks from wise desert nomads have no simple rules for avoiding opioid addiction, staying thin in a world where poison is labeled as food, navigating a totally screwed up dating environment. And the poor can't improvise life rules from scratch.
Hence rapid environmental change raises the bar needed to live a good life (from "just follow the old rules" to "comb through the last decade of self-help to find the new rules"). This makes life harder for those who already struggle the most. Brutal.
Meanwhile, the leverage available to those who can adapt has never been greater. Hence, massive inequality.
This is why I cheer for groups like @nofap, @orderofman, and @jordanbpeterson, who are crafting modern rule sets for mass appeal. (Like a cultural food stamp program).
In summary: The cultural knowledge deficit is yet another hidden liability in our infrastructure, caused by our environment of rapid change, and which harms the most vulnerable. (Adapted from an unreleased essay on "Modernity, Maladaptation, and Inequality.")
What are the norms of friendship in a world of free video calls and social updates via FB? What is the honorable way to date in our environment of historically unique dating norms and gender roles? What documented rule set answers those questions for me?
Not no answers, but the answers are debatable and new. It is not obvious to a person of median IQ exactly how to translate old principles to new technologies. Heck, optimal answers are often not derivable a priori from principles - they must be discovered by memetic evolution.
In some areas, yes, top quintile intelligence + having learned first principles well = good answers. (Diet, for example - which deeply harms avg. American). In other areas (use of social media) it takes a community of experimenters & time to derive new answers.
Our culture consists of more than a dwindling collection of pre-Enlightenment rules of thumb. It also contains deep, new ideas. Ideas about freedom, individuality, and progress, along with practical skills like the ability to use Google, calendars, and calculators.
Definitely, but those ideas are much more weakly evolved because they have not been subject to centuries of memetic competition. Hence, they are less effective, and it's harder to find the good ones.
Our branch of Western culture has been around three centuries at least. Not only that, but the criticism and selective pressure we have learned to apply in that time vastly exceeds those of the previous fifty centuries.
‘The good ones’ may be good replicators, but bad ideas.
@DavidDeutschOxf distinguishes between:
1. Rational memes - survive by being better than rivals at surviving criticism.
2. Anti-rational memes - survive by disabling creativity, preventing one from thinking of rivals.
Love this thread. Seeing a lot of the old religious ideas repackaged by self help dudes, Peterson etc, but that’s good bc they work. How to stabilise on a standard set of what works & make it available to the masses is a tough question.
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