One key insight from cultural evolution is that our behaviour is rarely a function of causal understanding. Cultural evolution explains how our species creates and thrives in a world too complicated for any of us to understand. For at least the last 50,000 years and probably longer, we have lived in a world of accumulated technology, know-how, and ways of thinking that surpass the abilities of even the smartest among us—cumulative culture. Our lack of causal understanding is masked by an illusion of explanatory depth; we assume we understand and have reasonable causal models for our beliefs, behaviours, and technology. That illusion is shattered only when we’re asked to explain specifics. For example, you may have some sense that you understand: (a) how a flushing toilet works, until you’re asked how the water flushes everything away and returns to the same level. . .All of this is to quickly illustrate that the world is not only complicated, but even more complicated than our psychology allows us to believe. Instead, our beliefs and behaviours are shaped by our incentives and by those around us. We prefer to believe things that align with our self-interest and we internalise the beliefs and copy the behaviours of those who are successful or those who others copy. As this process filters beliefs and behaviours over generations, most people acquire the accumulated package of past successes, and so conforming to the majority also becomes a successful strategy. [links omitted]
. . .In the cacophony of opinions on the COVID-19 crisis, how do people deploy their many social learning strategies to decide whom to listen to? How do we identify who has relevant expertise if we’re listening to experts at all? Are the learning strategies themselves learned? What is the role of trust, costly and sincerity displays? And how does a psychology evolved for vicarious information acquisition with little direct access to the truth, nor sufficient causal models, interact with a world in which evidence is easily manufactured and electronically disseminated? How do we decide which fact checkers to trust and how do we know what is and isn’t so?[again, links omitted]
I put it this way: We engage in behaviors and hold beliefs without understanding why we behave the way we behave or why we believe what we believe. This is not a failure of rationality. It is the human condition.
Cultures are preserved because humans are copiers. Cultures differ because we do not all copy the same people. Cultures evolve because copying is imperfect, people innovate, and changes in the competitive environment cause some cultural practices to become extinct and others to survive.
I recommend gorging yourself on Muthukrishna. My first taste was on The Podcast Browser, who also recommends Muthukrishna talking with The Dissenter.
Of the many links in the essay above, I followed one on the topic of innovation, by Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich.
Our societies and social networks act as collective brains. Individuals connected in collective brains, selectively transmitting and learning information, often well outside their conscious awareness, can produce complex designs without the need for a designer—just as natural selection does in genetic evolution. The processes of cumulative cultural evolution result in technologies and techniques that no single individual could recreate in their lifetime, and do not require its beneficiaries to understand how and why they work ([12]; electronic supplementary material, for further discussion). Such cultural adaptations appear functionally well designed to meet local problems, yet they lack a designer.
. . .By our account, IQ is a measure of access to a population’s stock of know-how, techniques, tools, tricks and so on, that improve abilities, skills and ways of thinking important to success in a WEIRD world. IQ tests are useful as a measure of cultural competence, which may require cultural learning (and there may be differences in this), but not as a universal test of ‘intelligence’ as a generalized abstract problem-solving ability. The Flynn effect (for recent meta-analyses, see [141,142]) describes the steady increase in mean IQ since IQ tests were developed, approximately three points per decade. If taken at face value, then the Flynn effect renders large proportions of previous generations barely functional, but by this account, the Flynn effect becomes a measure of increased mean cultural complexity.
It’s a difficult paper to excerpt. Read the whole thing.
The possible reversal of the Flynn Effect made the news a couple of years about and researchers have been debating whether or not it stopped in the 1970s.
The subtests don’t show a Flynn effect in raw intelligence. Information, arithmetic, and vocabulary for instance show barely any improvement.
Let’s look at a really famous example:
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His interviews with peasants in remote areas of the Soviet Union offer some wonderful examples. The dialogues paraphrased run as follows:
White bears and Novaya Zemlya (pp. 108-109):
Q: All bears are white where there is always snow; in Zovaya Zemlya there is always snow; what color are the bears there?
A: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen.
Q: But what do my words imply?
A: If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.
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If the farmer goes to school and has drilled into his head what the “correct” answer is and how he would be rewarded for providing it, would the farmer be more “intelligent”. Would beating the skepticism out of him (I only believe what I’ve seen, I don’t inherently trust authorities who haven’t observed phenomena up close) make him more functional in modern society? Is this Russian farmer not less susceptible to propaganda, conspiracy theories, or false information?
Having just lived through a pandemic year where “trusting the science” based largely on appeal to authority has been kind of a disaster, I’d take a dose of the farmers skepticism rather then assuming it means he is dumb.
That example had literally nothing to do with skepticism or accepting the science or whatever. It only illustrates the inability to think abstractly or hypothetically. Not the same thing. Russian peasants less susceptible to propaganda? Ha. Ask one of them what he thinks about Jews.
The Cultural Brain Hypothesis and Social Nihilism
“One key insight from cultural evolution is that our behaviour is rarely a function of causal understanding.”
“A key insight from cultural evolution” is a frame puts the truth/value/wisdom of the proposition in its best light.
Cultural evolution frames the proposition:
1. “behavior is not (typically) a function causal understanding”
The suggestion that the proposition is brought to life by the frame of cultural evolution.
2. “Cultural evolution explains how our species creates and thrives in a world too complicated for any of us to understand.”
Now the reader is invited to dwell on the evolutionary frame, to understand the importance of the frame by picturing the proposition in the frame and noticing it is not alone.
The proposition is in the company of other like phenomena, united in an ongoing effort in which human beings create and thrive in a world too complicated for any individual to understand. If the frame is the foundation of the value of the proposition, is the proposition disabled prior to its framing in cultural evolution? Why can’t the proposition stand on its own two feet?
The cultural evolutionist says: If I can demonstrate that human beings do not build up rational beliefs in accord with a robust causal model, it will follow that human beings think they are building up a network of rational beliefs about their workaday world, but in fact spend their lives building up a pile of tosh.
Cultural evolution frames a dystopian social landscape wherein everyday people lie to themselves and others all the waking day, to survive in an environment far too cognitively advanced for human intelligence.
The Left is straying wildly from the evolved wisdom inherent in our culture and customs and have adopted systems of what I call, “privileged beliefs.”
Take, for example, the postmodern non sequitur: There are an infinite number of ways in which to interpret a text (which is true), and no interpretation is better than another (false). Imagine a manual explaining how to defuse a bomb. While it’s true that there are an infinite number of ways in which to interpret the text, there is only one that will keep you alive.
We can indulge the claim that one interpretation is as good as another only if someone else defuses our bombs for us. In other words, postmodern thought is a belief system born of the privilege of not having to perform countless humdrum tasks that are needed for bare survival.
Privileged beliefs come at no cost as long as the benighted masses – the “little people” who stubbornly insist that logic and reason are universally useful and are not just tools of white oppression, and who bitterly cling to the construct that two and two are four – collect the garbage, keep the lights on, produce and transport food, restock grocery store shelves, and ensure that clean water flows through city mains.
But should any of these privileged beliefs escape their ivory towers and become commonplace, the Leftist intelligentsia will quickly relearn the value of all those old truths they now disdain.
“Take, for example, the postmodern non sequitur: There are an infinite number of ways in which to interpret a text (which is true), and no interpretation is better than another (false).”
Who believes this? I dont mean cite some adjunct professor who taught one semester at Evergreen. Is there anyone on any left leaning persons fantasy team that believes theres no right way to diffise a bomb?
*defuse* obvsly!
If you don’t like that example, how about people who believe (or claim to believe) that 2+2=5 or that math is racist?
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/02/why-math-is-racist.php
https://theprint.in/opinion/how-mathematics-can-be-an-anti-racist-feminist-enterprise/359842/
I quickly read the whole Print piece. Did you? Nowhere in there does it say anything about 2+2=5.
No doubt Powerline will tell me, if I wanted to give them a click, some dingbat somewhere said 2+2=5.
The links were supporting the idea that math is racist and sexist. But here’s a couple on the 2+2=5 meme:
https://www.westernjournal.com/wokeness-comes-mathematics-academics-saying-225/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a33547137/why-some-people-think-2-plus-2-equals-5/
Or, if you don’t like any of those examples, how about the far-left’s “defund the police” demand? If ever there was a privileged belief that was it. Most people in poor neighborhoods want more police protection not less.
I’m curious what Arnold thinks of Carl Jung. Seems like a lot of the cultural theories Arnold is drawn to have their roots in a Jungian perspective. I did a quick search and didn’t get any hits on “Jung” for this blog.
Earliest thinker I know of who pointed this out was Ibn Khaldun (14th century). Aristotle and others pointed out that man is a social/political animal, but Ibn Khaldun emphasized that we don’t only seek society – and the division of labor and knowledge it involves – we can’t survive without it.
(Though there are rare exceptions of people who have lots of knowledge and skills. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/)