[ExI] breakout culture (Was: ambition)

[Anders Sandberg]

On 22/01/2013 01:05, Keith Henson wrote:
> There were places in the Americas where fairly advanced metalworking 
> was done. And places where there was a written language. 
But clearly metalworking and written language are not alone enough to 
trigger a technological revolution, or even anything like the classical 
Greek renaissance.

I have long wondered about the size of the minimum group able to create 
an industrial revolution. We know it happened in England with around 7 
million people, so that puts an upper limit to it. But most of these 
people were not directly involved (except as background consumers and 
producers, which are needed to some extent to get economies of scale).

>> 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.

I am running minimum viable population models right now, and around 2000 
is probably necessary for indefinite survival. It all depends on 
mortality/fertility of course, and that is hard to estimate historically 
(which is how I have managed to rope in my archeologist - we are 
investigating the osteological paradox of how fluctuating demographics 
affects the archaeological finds).

It is worth remembering that there is an observation selection effect: 
in places where people died out a new population could move in and have 
another go, leaving us with some populations with unexpectedly (if one 
does not take this into account) small founder populations.


> 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."

The problem with the model is that while it seems to work for England, 
it ought to work for a lot of other places too. We should be seeing 
these selection effects in nearly any society like that, and they should 
have shown up much earlier in places where the selection situation 
became similar earlier.


> "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."

So we should expect to have seen this in China millennia earlier, right?

It is still an interesting idea. We are probably selecting for a lot of 
unexpected things through the way we set up our societies.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University