Humanity becomes more untilitarian with time

[NancyLebovitz]

I would think there’d be evolutionary pressure to focus more and more on having descendants. What’s actually happened so far is that people do more for signalling and fun and limit the number of their children. Is this just a blip, and the Mormons (perhaps with a simplified religion) will inherit the earth?

[XiXiDu]

This idea reminds me of Robin Hansons Dreamtime Sequence:

• This is the Dream Time

• DreamTime

• Layers of Delusion

Given a similar freedom of fertility, most of our distant descendants will also live near a subsistence level. Per-capita wealth has only been rising lately because income has grown faster than population. But if income only doubled every century, in a million years that would be a factor of 10^3000, which seems impossible to achieve with only the 10^70 atoms of our galaxy available by then. Yes we have seen a remarkable demographic transition, wherein richer nations have fewer kids, but we already see contrarian subgroups like Hutterites, Hmongs, or Mormons that grow much faster. So unless strong central controls prevent it, over the long run such groups will easily grow faster than the economy, making per person income drop to near subsistence levels.

So for one there might be physical and economic reasons for this trend to continue but also shows how we shouldn’t confuse this period, which will be considered to be so close (in time) to the big bang that it might as well be part of it, with ages to come. This might simply be a transitional phase from which we can draw no particular conclusion for how things will settle in the long run.

This would be the most lasting legacy of this, our explosively growing dream time, when what was once adaptive behavior with mostly harmless delusions become strange and dreamy unadaptive behavior, before adaptation again reasserted a clear-headed relation between behavior and reality.

[NancyLebovitz]

On the other hand, maybe fully utilitarian humans just aren’t feasible—I don’t think there’s any way to tell at this point.

It would be interesting if fully utilitarian intelligence isn’t possible, that the flexibility required for original thought implies a need for playfulness.

[whpearson]

There is an evolutionary pressure on media to be shiny and distracting.

Being closed to media is not an option, there is lots of useful stuff within the shiny and distracting. If humanity ever figures out a way to be open to media but filter out the shiny and distracting cruft then a subgroup that adopts that technology would do a lot better.

Creating this technology is like trying to create a spam filter but harder. It is one where you don’t have a good way of determining what is shiny and distracting vs useful yourself.

[XiXiDu]

If humanity ever figures out a way to be open to media but filter out the shiny and distracting cruft then a subgroup that adopts that technology would do a lot better.

Better? So subjective! That subgroup would cease to be part of humanity and turn into paperclip maximiser’s. Even worse, such a subgroup might lose the urges that drove humanity to the stars in the first place and collapse into infinite recursion.

This attitude is what always bothers me about LW, it’s too focused on rationality and effectiveness in and of itself. The shiny and distracting is the goal and what is useful is that which helps us to get more shiny and be distracted even more.

[whpearson]

I meant better purely in the sense that they would come to dominate the business/​political/​evolutionary future of the human race. In the sense that saying X is a better baseball player than Y, conveys no moral judgement that playing baseball is a worthwhile thing to do.

[datadataeverywhere]

It’s such a cliché it almost pains me to mention it, but humans seem to be doing a lot of memetic rather genetic evolution nowadays. Mormons spawn more, but how many stay Mormon? Their memetic transformation ends up giving other, less-reproductive segments of society a larger number of descendants in some sense.

[JoshuaZ]

Mormons are very successful as missionaries. According to some estimates, most Mormons today are people not born born. Note also that you only need more than 50% of the population to stay Mormon for this to work, and I’m pretty sure that the fraction leaving the fold is large but much less than that (I’d venture a guess of less than a third leave and likely much lower than that).

A similar example is happening with Orthodox Jews. The charedi(Ultra-Orthodox) have many kids, generally from 6-12 kids per a family. They are in the midst of what they call a “crisis” because kids are leaving the faith. But in practice, only a small fraction (at most 10%, probably a lot less) are leaving. That might have deep sociological and psychological effects, but the overall fraction of the population staying religious is still very high.

[datadataeverywhere]

and I’m pretty sure that the fraction leaving the fold is large but much less than that

I haven’t found numbers myself; I know 9 ex-LDS, all of them born into the LDS church, as well as 3 Mormons who converted into the religion. I personally know no Mormons who were born into their faith. Given this, I have an obvious bias to thinking that Mormons tend to leave their faith, but I have no idea how true it is. I’m not surprised that most Mormons are not born into it, and I’m reasonably sure that currently the percentage of people who are Mormon worldwide is increasing, but I have some faith that that trend will not continue for long. I hope that’s not unfounded optimism.

[Alicorn]

I know a large number of Mormons who were born into the faith and remain there as adults. I have met at least one ex-Mormon, and I don’t think I know any converts, although it might have just failed to come up with some of my more distant acquaintances.

[Emile]

“untilitarian”?

[NancyLebovitz]

Originally it was a typo, but I thought it worked to imply unutilitarian.