[ExI] breakout culture (Was: ambition)

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 4:00 AM,  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 20/01/2013 23:57, spike wrote:

snip

>> Why
>> did the Europeans break out and invent stuff, but the native Americans
>> generally did not? How does a society reach equilibrium, or
>> technological stagnation? Can we even imagine reaching some kind of
>> equilibrium now, short of a singularity?

There were places in the Americas where fairly advanced metalworking
was done.  And places where there was a written language.

> I think this is one of the big anthropological, sociological and
> historical questions for our community. We think about this quite a lot
> over at FHI, and usually wish there was an anthropologist in the house.

snip

> I am working on a paper on the Tasmanian technology trap: small
> populations have a hard time maintaining a complex culture. (If you are
> few, then the chance of losing the only guy with a certain skill is
> pretty high)

Too small and the whole population goes extinct.  There were about
4000 Tasmanians.  A similar cut off group of perhaps 700 didn't make
it.  On the other hand, Easter Island may have bottomed out at only
2000.

> This is another factor that no doubt keeps many cultures
> down. They are too few to develop and use certain technologies that
> would allow them to gain the calories needed to grow to a larger group.
> Yet this model mainly works on islands where there is a pretty fixed
> limit: on mainlands it is enough that a single group gets large and
> dense and things will happen. This is one popular explanation of the
> Neolithic revolution, in fact.
>
> So in the end, I suspect that it is really down to ideas, culture and
> memes. Most humans are conformists and happy to keep what they have.
> Those few cultures that go for change are wildly unstable and mostly
> fail. But occasionally, rarely, they form new kinds of dynamical equilibria.

I have been talking about Dr Gregory Clark's ideas and research on
this since late 2007.  List membership has gone through a lot of
change since the topic was last discussed.

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2007-December/039363.html
 For those who don't want to use the link,

Being much influenced by the concepts of evolutionary psychology, I
have tended to discount the idea of humans being much shaped by
recent evolution.  Exceptions have been accumulating, the taming of
wild foxes in as few as 8 generations, and the acquisition of genes
(a number of them!) for adult lactose tolerance in peoples with a
dairy culture.  Yes, you can get serious population average shifts if
the selection pressure is high enough.

Now Dr. Gregory Clark, in one of those huge efforts that lead to
breakthroughs, has produced a study that makes a strong case for
recent  (last few hundred years) and massive changes in population
average psychological traits.  It leaves in place that a huge part of
our psychological traits did indeed come out of the stone age, but
adds to that recent and very strong selection pressures on the
population of settled agriculture societies in the "Malthusian trap."

I came a bit late to this party, Dr. Clark's book _A Farewell to
Alms_ peaked at 17 on Amazon's sales months ago.  My copy has not
come yet so I read this paper off his academic web site.

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf

"Genetically Capitalist? The Malthusian Era, Institutions and the
Formation of Modern Preferences."

There is lots of other material
here:  http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/research.html but
this paper is just stunning because of how much light it shines on a
long list of mysteries.  Such as: Why did the modern world grow out
of a small part of Europe and why did it take so long?  Why are the
Chinese doing so well compared to say Africa?

The upshot of his research was that in the Mathusian era in England
people with the personality characteristics to become well off
economically had at least twice as many surviving children as those
in the lower economic classes--who were not replacing
themselves.  This, of course, led to "downward social mobility,"
where the numerous sons and daughters of the rich tended to be less
well off (on average) than their parents.  But over 20 generations
(1200-1800) it did spread the genes for the personality
characteristics for accumulating wealth through the entire population.

	"In the institutional and technological context of these societies,
a new set of human attributes mattered for the only currency
that mattered in the Malthusian era, which was reproductive
success. In this world literacy and numeracy, which were irrelevant
before, were both helpful for economic success in agrarian
pre-industrial economies. Thus since economic success was
linked to reproductive success, facility with numbers and wordswas
pulled along in its wake. Since patience and hard work found
a new reward in a society with large amounts of capital, patience
and hard work were also favored."

Fascinating work, memes that slot right in to the rest of my
understanding of the world and the people in it.  I very strongly
recommend reading this paper at least.

Keith Henson