On the other hand, I think the evolutionary heuristic casts doubt on the value of many other proposals for improving rationality. Many such proposals seem like things that, if they worked, humans could have evolved to do already. So why haven’t we?
Most such things would have had to evolve by cultural evolution. Organic evolution makes our hardware, cultural evolution makes our software. Rationality is mostly software—evolution can’t program such things in at the hardware level very easily.
Cultural evolution has only just got started. Education is still showing good progress—as manifested in the Flynn effect. Our rationality software isn’t up to speed yet—partly because is hasn’t had enough time to culturally evolve its adaptations yet.
I think that this is an application of the changing circumstances argument to culture. For most of human history the challenges faced by cultures were along the lines of “How can we keep 90% of the population working hard at agriculture?” “How can we have a military ready to mobilize against threats?” “How can we maintain cultural unity with no printing press or mass media?” and “How can we prevent criminality within our culture?”
Individual rationality does not necessarily solve these problems in a pre-industrial society better than blind duty, conformity and superstitious dread. It’s been less than 200 years since these problems stopped being the most pressing concerns, so it’s not surprising that our culture hasn’t evolved to create rational individuals.
It’s been suggested that the Flynn effect is mostly a matter of people learning a kind of abstract reasoning that’s useful in the modern world, but wasn’t so useful previously.
There’s also a broader point to be made about why evolution would’ve built humans to be able to benefit from better software in the first place, that involves the cognitive niche hypothesis. Hmmm… I may need to do a post on the cognitive niche hypothesis at some point.
There’s also a broader point to be made about why evolution would’ve built humans to be able to benefit from better software in the first place, that involves the cognitive niche hypothesis.
Slow-reproducing organisms often use rapidly-reproducing symbiotes to help them adapt to local environments.
Ah, that’s a good way to put it. But it should lead us to question the value of “software” improvements that aren’t about being better-adapted to the local environment.
Most such things would have had to evolve by cultural evolution. Organic evolution makes our hardware, cultural evolution makes our software. Rationality is mostly software—evolution can’t program such things in at the hardware level very easily.
Cultural evolution has only just got started. Education is still showing good progress—as manifested in the Flynn effect. Our rationality software isn’t up to speed yet—partly because is hasn’t had enough time to culturally evolve its adaptations yet.
I think that this is an application of the changing circumstances argument to culture. For most of human history the challenges faced by cultures were along the lines of “How can we keep 90% of the population working hard at agriculture?” “How can we have a military ready to mobilize against threats?” “How can we maintain cultural unity with no printing press or mass media?” and “How can we prevent criminality within our culture?”
Individual rationality does not necessarily solve these problems in a pre-industrial society better than blind duty, conformity and superstitious dread. It’s been less than 200 years since these problems stopped being the most pressing concerns, so it’s not surprising that our culture hasn’t evolved to create rational individuals.
I thought a lot of that was accounted for by nutrition and other health factors — vaccination and decline in lead exposure come to mind.
Cultural evolution is also an answer to
It’s been suggested that the Flynn effect is mostly a matter of people learning a kind of abstract reasoning that’s useful in the modern world, but wasn’t so useful previously.
There’s also a broader point to be made about why evolution would’ve built humans to be able to benefit from better software in the first place, that involves the cognitive niche hypothesis. Hmmm… I may need to do a post on the cognitive niche hypothesis at some point.
I think we understand why humans are built like that. Slow-reproducing organisms often use rapidly-reproducing symbiotes to help them adapt to local environments. Humans using cultural symbionts to adapt to local regions of space-time is a special case of this general principle.
Instead of the cognitive niche, the cultural niche seems more relevant to humans.
Ah, that’s a good way to put it. But it should lead us to question the value of “software” improvements that aren’t about being better-adapted to the local environment.