Quasi-factual Metaphorical Truth (QFMT)

For the last couple of months I've been exploring the role quasi-factuals expressed as metaphorical truths play in societal stability. I've mainly been looking at social capital and social coherence factors.

• Jordan Peterson's use of quasi-factual phrasing with Cathy Newman
• Popular approaches to metaphorical "truth" via Bret Weinstein, David Sloan Wilson and Jordan Peterson

I come at this from a multi-level cultural evolution lens. I just don't think you can get very far on these questions without multi-level selection.  

Here's the summary of where I am at.

MOTIVATION

Quasi-factual metaphorical truths play a role in societal stability. What this role is, is of course, uncertain. As far as I know, it has been weakly explored. 

But the importance of understanding the "irrational" side of our human nature is growing in importance. The growth of popularist mob mentalities threaten the existential survival/coherence of many western countries. This may come from xenophobic reaction politics. But it may also come from equivalent dynamics expressed by quasi-religious secular progressives.

Understanding the science of the quasi-religious movements that threaten to balkanize society is important. It is also important to understand how far removed from quasi-religious thinking we can push society before it breaks. After all, it is likely religion and formal governance have co-evolved in a lead-pace relationship (Norezayan, 2013).

OVERVIEW

I posit three potential engines capable of starting & driving the evolutionary process for quasi-factual metaphorical truths (QFMT's):

• low cost signalling
• memetic fitness
• orientational cycling between adjacent levels of selection.

These engines produce a space where quasi-factual metaphorical true (QFMT) slogans/moral can emerge. But it is QFMT's role as possible moral lynchpins that is most interesting.

Once these QFMT's represent the framing and interpretational lens of a spandreled moral belief, I suggest they play an evolutionary role in;

• norm detection/enforcement costs, 
• technocratic trap escape, and,
• new landscape exploitation.

This is a "just so" evolutionary approach.  "Just so" approaches are extremely weak. They only bar they pass in one of plausibility. They do not even come close to necessity.  But, part of the reason why I write this blog is to see how far I can take unorthodox ideas...

ANALYSIS

Engines

Memetic Fitness

Ideas that are slightly counter-intuitive are remembered better than those that are highly counter-intuitive or completely intuitive (Norezayan 2013; Harmon-Vukic, 2012; Upal 2012, Atran, 2004).  For example here is an easy overview of things from the classic Mixing Memory blog.

Signalling

In a world of between group competition, the presence of group-oriented altruists matters. But you don't need very many of them for your group to grow. You just need a seed (Wilson, 2015).  Stability of course may require frequent re-injections. This can happen via migration. But you also need a mechanism for self-organization. Altruists who make open signals are very easy to take advantage of. Hidden signals are one of many low cost/risk mechanism for self-organization.

Metaphor and analogy are possible hidden signal mechanisms. For example, why have 1984 and Animal Farm been so successful? Religious parable & fable?

A recent example by Bret Weinstein is an entertaining way to illustrate this. Are whales fish? This actually present a three-level rather than the apparent two-level analysis. It just so happens that two levels have the same answer, albeit for remarkably different reasons.

1. Yes - they are in the ocean and swim
2. No - a whale is a mammal
3. Yes - their phylogenetic ancestor is a fish.

A yes answer won't get you in trouble with a intolerant low-educated mob of fishermen, but it also allows some game play where "sophisticated" people can tease each other out to see if they understand alternative interpretations. Basically you're just signalling for intellectual curiosity and non-conformity.

Orientational Cycling

As the fitness between two adjacent levels of selection becomes more equal, the degree of complexity of the cycling between these levels increases (Okasha, 2006). In practice this means human groups oscillate between tribalization and cosmopolitanism. Here's one example of what this looks like.

Starting & Driving

Slightly counter-intuitive ideas are remembered better than their alternatives. Ideas which allow multiple levels of meaning enable sub-groups to self-organize via low cost/risk signalling. As orientations cycle, memes refine. Surviving memes should have some flexibility in their ability to work for both higher and lower levels of selection (group orientation).  In other words, bifurcation of interpretation is fit solution over long time spans. The non-variant kernel is likely to be something robust for that particular landscape (physical & social). After all, it the meme is not useful, why would it survive?

I don't think any particular order is needed here. Cycling ensures iteration. 

Stable State

What might get produced is a slightly counterintuitive meme. Memetic fitness biases things for slight counter-intuitiveness. Exactly how this counter-intuitiveness looks can, of course, vary. It doesn't have to involve angels or minor miracles.  Other options include purposeful over-generalizations, allegory, and comedic double entendres.

Double meaning is an interesting solution class. It readily accommodates alternating orientations.  

But, for these memes to be fit, they need to convey some truth about the physical and social landscape. In a competition between a meme that is simply suitable for group coherence and a meme that is suitable both for group coherence and for a life lesson, the latter should win. But one does need to investigate a 2x2 matrix of solutions.

High Group Coherence Utility	Only a possible max if Coherence inversely related to Life Utility	Maximally fit
Low Group Coherence Utility	unfit	Only a possible max if Coherence inversely related to Life Utility
	Low Life Lesson Utility	High Life Lesson Utility

The only way you get a mixed solution is if Group Coherence Utility and Life Lesson Utility are interdependent AND inversely related.  A plausible inverse relationship seems hard to imagine.

Selecting For Double Entendres

This is the crux of the case. And, this is where I am going to have to put in a lot more work cleaning things up and simplifying them.  But blogs are about exploration, so here goes...

Entanglement

The first goal is to show how the memes under selection entangle with the group's moral system. This could happen if a meme captures an efficient vision/articulation of the Group Agent's inferred morality. If the meme is an efficient short hand for morality predictions, it should, over time, bias the way other more specific morals are framed. This should increase spandrelling. This becomes more significant as group orientations cycle.

Biasing need not be anything particularly fancy. Basically all you need is a sort of fuzzy meme representing a fuzzy articulation of Group Agent morality. Some degree of coevolution is really all you probably need.  This means the meme is a “good enough” representation of Group Agent morality.  It also means the meme is entangled with the specific moralities which emerge from Group Agent interpretation or rationalization.

Archetypical Core

The second goal is to show how a core archetype sub-meme message/moral lesson emerges. This archetype-moral message is a sub-component of the meme that is time insensitive, of high utility and reflects tensions between adjacent levels of selection/orientation.

Archetypes seem like an efficient way to share inferred Group Agent morality. They are applicable to multiple ages and multiple IQ's. They also seem to be the most mimetically robust (long lasting) class of any slightly counter intuitive. Other meme types gain virility at the cost of longevity.  So over the course of multiple generations of cycling, one would expect archetypes to survive.

But archetypes may survive at a deep level while having more virulent interpretations superimposed on them. These superpositions may be context specific solutions optimized for short and/or mid shelf lives.

Imagine there are three ways of encoding a moral message that exists in tension between two poles between which orientations oscillate. 

Core Only

One option is for the entire message to be fairly invariant. It is broad enough to capture everything. This puts it under extreme tension. Group agents certainly have broad interpretational range due to judgment aggregation intractability. Interpreters can reconcile wildly contradictory actions by inferring some imaginary larger purpose. This maintains allegiance. But it comes at the cost of predictability. You can still predict that the group agent will exert control. But you can’t predict what you should do to align. Nor can you determine which moral judgment frame to apply.

But, the simplest issue is that a single invariant message may also prove too rigid to capture the full range of oscillatory orientations it has to contend with. The generalizations required for a single solution may prove too broad. Or, the things the explanation must exclude cause it to be seen as too narrowly rigid.

Bifurcation

At the other extreme is complete bifurcation into separate explanations for each pole. This creates issues already discussed with group agents. Are you following one agent or two? How do you predict aligning moral actions? Switching between one orientational pole and another presents way too many easy options for freeloading. We have some people acting altruistically toward the large group while others are acting selfishly toward it. This destroys norm maintenance.

Lynchpin

The middle ground involves a core sub-meme with surface features which function as double entendres. In simpler terms, it is a lynchpin on top of a robust base (core). The core is a time invariant moral. This is likely to be a universal or, as we shall soon see, a universal metaphorical truth.  It likely frames its truth partly in terms of tension between two poles.  It explains things which are invariant to either orientation.  But it is not specific enough to detail everything.

Details are largely flushed out by a contextualized interpretation.  I.e. “Here is what this looks like when you are altruistically oriented to the large group. Here is what this looks like when you are not.”

Efficiencies of Double Entendre Archetypical Core

The third goal is to show why a double entendre with an archetypical core and lynchpin surface for contextual features is optimally fit over long time periods with intra-group and inter-group competition.

Interest & Humour

Humans are drawn to double entendres. Double entendres are both interesting and humerous.  The ability of a simple perspective switch to reveal two different meanings is a universal feature of human jokes. The ability to garner multiple levels of information from a single item means the possible time spent on that item is likely to be higher than other similar items. Humans like optical illusions for much the same way. Marketers use the cognitive engagement of lynchpin phrases for the same effect.

Continuity with Costly Investments

The lynchpin feature also removes issues of change from the group agent and puts them on the individual. You often hear people who switch religions saying it wasn’t God that changed, it was my understanding of him that did. This keeps continuity with costly investments toward a moral Big Brother while enabling thorough reformulation of those very same beliefs. It isn’t the big Brother that changed, it was my erroneous interpretation of him/her that did.

Norm Enforcement Savings

One high cost problem is norm detection and enforcement.  Instead of always confronting sub-groups sometimes it is more efficient to let them self-organize and then confront them. The problem with this strategy is that the cost of delayed confrontation may be high - they may overturn the system.

The easiest solution for this is to give these sub-groups an escape valve. But at this point you have to balance the savings from letting these sub-groups split with the costs of inter-group competition between the parent and splinter.

One way to do this is to allow the split to happen over a lynchpin idea whose alternative interpretation becomes very costly due to the paradigmical shift it imposes on the entire moral system.  This means that almost all moral lessons will have to be recreated. The spandrel like nature of the original moral system makes anything else impractical. Re-interpretation leads to errors which should lead to a weakened splinter compared to its parent. The exception of course is if the landscape occupied by the splinter is different enough from that the parent operates in so as to make the mutation have a chance at higher fitness. This mutation rate would be a population level trait not a group or individual level trait. I think the literature on species level mutation is developed enough to easily support the tail end of this line of reasoning.

Technocratic Escapes

The benefit of this final approach is that it explains how populations can escape technocratic group traps. As large groups mature, they seem to become increasingly technocratic. This gradually moves them from dealing with reality-as-it-is to reality-as-it-is-imagined. In other words, the groups theories and moral lessons don't necessarily keep up to speed with environmental changes

Low Risk Outgroup Interaction

I've already discussed how low cost hidden signaling is important for altruistic self-organization. But it seems impossible to limit this tool to altruists. Hence its function as an escape valve for anti-large group actors. In this sense, the solution space you're looking for is something that enables altruistic self-organization and which will still provide as much net benefit to the group when other sub-group oriented individuals use it.  To my mind, a double entendre lynchpin works perfect here.

Because of the value of immigration and trade, interaction with out-groups provide another potential layer for moral slogan/meme benefit.  If a meme is good for all the things discussed, a meme which is also good at outgroup interaction will outcompete it. Its utility increases with minimal extra burden.

I strongly suspect immigrant utility is a function of social proximity. (Putnam, 2007)  I further suspect social proximity is non-linearly weighted towards major moral values (group meta-truths). There are lots of little things that just don't seem to matter.  A good meme will:

• capture things that matter,
• make things that don’t matter seem inoffensive,
• provide easy in-group signals for which way people are interpreting things.

Out-group interactions in historic societies are often high-risk.  Two ways of lowering the risk are to 

• increase perceived similarity (we play by the same rules)
• project non-threatening behaviours.  

A convenient memetic solution here is to present a moral slogan which has obvious deep moral parallels but non-threatening obvious surface differences. I'd further add that surface differences should be very easy to reject. Counter-factuals work well here.

For instance, "The flying spaghetti monster says be nice to others treating them as yourself." The golden rule is fairly universal (for in-group interaction at least...).  The flying spaghetti monster is an obvious counter-factual that is easy to reject. Which out-group is going to feel threatened or morally castigated by this? You might not share your rejection with the speaker –why risk confrontation- but you are probably evaluating them more on the central tenet of the message rather than on the surface features. Compare that to "Joseph Smith says be nice to others treating them as yourself". This message while of a similar intent is going to rile a lot of Christians. It is a sensitive mark of difference. The foundational message is the same.

Messages that have a quasi-factuality to them enable outsiders to reject them. They are minimally threatening because they can be interpreted as factually untrue whenever needed. It facilitates strawman reasoning.  Thus you can go back to your own group and laugh at how stupid the other guy was. However, the meme piggybacks on this. There is a non-zero chance that one of the friends with whom you’re sharing your ridicule actually thinks the core message is a good idea and that if the lynchpin point is interpreted another way, the whole idea may not be half bad.  This is the point that I made in the Norm Enforcement Savings section, albeit from the out-group rather than in-group lens.

Summary

Three things iterate to produce quasi-factual moral memes

• the memetic fitness of slightly counter-intuitive ideas
• low risk signalling
• orientational cycling.

The co-evolution of moral memes refinement with moral articulation of a group agent produces a entangled moral belief system.  Orientational cycling selects for a meme structure that has a deep archetypical core with a double entendre lynchpin surface. Formulation of the archetypical core is entangled with the larger moral belief system.  

The lynchpin structure is mimetically fit because

• double entendres are interesting (and humorous)
• conserves costly investments
• lowers the cost of norm enforcement and detection
• provides a population-level escape from groups' technocratic traps
• it creates a low risk formulation for out-group moral interaction.

TESTS

Next I will try and see where my train of logic is off.  I'll do this by selecting a couple of major moral slogans and see where things go.  Obviously my picks are going to be biased.  Part of that bias includes selecting versions that are probably most comparable to lynchpin formulation.  For openness, here is my rough list of memes.

Meme 1 - The way minorities are treated is shameful.

Core (Archetype or Metaphorical Truth)

• Minimal
• There is some implicit focus on equality and discrimination, but nothing overt. This does not carry a deep metaphorical message. It simply makes one think about the way minorities are treated and moralizes on that.
• It does not reflect any major tension between two competing world views. It does set up some tension between desired treatment and actual treatment.

Lynchpin

• Yes, it is shameful. They should be treated better. They are not treated the same as others. Many say as much. (progressive interpretation)
• Yes, it is shameful, everyone should be treated the same and not given special treatment (conservative interpretation)

Quasi-factuality

• There is some quasi-factuality due to overgeneralization. Has every minority individual really been treated shamefully? This seems improbable but can be interpreted in a lynchpin way.
• There is also some slight quasi-factuality about the word shameful.  What is meant by that term? It is not well defined and is largely a function of interpretation, especially by minority individuals.  However the lynchpin throws this for a loop depending who does the interpreting.

Signalling

• Most people would agree with this statement. There is moral pressure to do so. You would have to be pretty brave to take the negative approach to this. However, people do. And they self-organize around it.
• Those taking the "conservative" lynchpin interpretation can participate in conversations about this topic without outright lying, but participation would have to be cursory before detection occurred. But they could vociferously support the slogan with no tells whatsoever.

Conclusion

• This meme / moral slogan passes lynchpin considerations. It also passes signalling considerations. 
• It fails on archetypical truth.  It is interesting to note, however that this meme is fairly recent (say since the 70's or 80's) and is unlikely to have experienced many refining orientational changes.

Meme 2 - There is no God but Allah and Mohamed is his Prophet

From Meme 1's analysis, I would expect this one to have more of an archetypical message (it is religious in nature and is fairly old).  I would also expect the lynchpin idea to be fairly stark. Islam has, after all, a rather... severe.. proselytizing history.

Core (Archetype or Metaphorical Truth)

• There is a God. God speaks to people (through prophets)
• There are leaders who have special roles and authority

Lynchpin

• Yes, Allah is the only God and Mohamed is his prophet.
• Yes, there is a God, but Allah is not it and neither is Mohamed a prophet.

Quasi-factuality

• Moderate to ideal
• It is mostly related to over specification.  It is unlikely that Allah is the only God. Non-muslims can certainly think of other examples.
• The very idea of Gods and prophets are classic quasi-factuals (or even a-factuals) that have an optimal level of counter-intuitiveness.

Signalling

• The main signals people can play with here are some general ideas about whether or not there is a God, whether or not the idea of prophets makes sense, and whether or not Mohamed is a specific instance of prophethood.
• There really is no ironic escape to this creed. Rejections, as just mentioned, are fairly straightforward.

Conclusion

• This meme has a fairly typical archetype. It is well developed to support human organization at most any level. Human hierarchies are natural. On its core there is no displayed tension between adjacent levels of selection (orientations). However, the religion itself is very clear on tensions between good and evil.  This creed just doesn't espouse them except through indirect reference to acceptance or rejection of divinity itself.
• The lynchpin is start but fairly weak. It is easy for out-groups to reject any part of this claim. To out-groups it's counter-factuals are easy to reject.  
• In terms of signalling, it enables fairly clear delineations between in-group members who accept or reject its premises. Nuance can be added by including questions of whether there can be other prophets or whether Allah has to be the only God. However these additions require a fairly big risk. There are no double entendres.

Meme 3 - The American Dream: Everyone has opportunity to succeed by hard work, initiative and their own abilities.

Technically the original 1931 formulation was "The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement."

Core (Archetype or Metaphorical Truth)

• America is a meritocracy.  While there will be hurdles, people can overcome them to the fullest extent possible.
• This is a pro-social perspective that encourages industry.  It presents a tension between hurdles and personal industry.

Lynchpin

• Like the Islamic creed, the American Dream's lynchpins involve either full or partial rejection of any of its premises.
• It has an additional lynchpin based upon its outcomes - if someone hasn't succeeded they you can reject them based upon their lack of ability or initiative. Either way, they are not entitled to more.  If someone has succeeded it implies they are both capable and hard working.  In essence, even though it comes across as egalitarian, it facilitates social sorting (while still keeping open the potential of class migration).  This is a fairly strong lynchpin.

Quasi-factuality

• A major quasi-factual is overgeneralization (everyone can).
• Another quasi-factual is under-specification. Are there other things that are required for success? Probably.
• An inferred quasi-factual is whether this dream could be true for someone with debilitating physical disabilities. Is it really true they can succeed? If so in what way? The idea is Utopian and comes across as clearly non-falsifiable. This is quasi-factual.
• There is an ironic sense of both eminent fairness and stifling sorting/judgment. 
• There are no obvious a-factuals to reject.

Signalling

• The main signals come with whether or not people accept the degree of generalization presented.
• Additional signals can come by inserting some irony such as "and by being born rich".

Conclusion

• The meme presents a utopian archetype. It offers incentives for personal motivation. Progress (success) is possible no matter your station. Effort & talent development matter.
• There isn 't a significant direct lynchpin. Lynchpins come from refining degree or adding some ironic elements. However, secondary lynchpins are fairly pronounced. The meme gives people the chance to judge others as either skilled/industrious or stupid/lazy.  It supports most any pre-conception - after all, how do you define success for any individuals natural skill and abilities?
• The quasi-factuals are fairly strong. The whole idea is clearly utopian.

CONCLUSION

In practice meme analysis according to the elements presented is clearly very loose. This is extremely problematic. It makes falsification practically impossible.

The most problematic element was the lynchpin.  Two out of three memes had a noticeable lynchpin. One emerged directly in the meme itself. The other emerged in the application of the meme as a judgment tool.  The other meme's lynchpin only emerged in degree of acceptance or rejection. It is however, interesting to note that the newest most unrefined meme had the most pronounced lynchpin, while the oldest most refined one had the weakest most stark lynchpin.

It would seem possible that the lynchpin idea is quite wrong. However, there is a chance that new moral memes may need more of a lynchpin to survive while older ones which are more entangled in moral belief systems can function as starker delineators with higher rejection costs.

Quasi-factuals mainly involve over-generalizations or over-specifications.

The coding of metaphorical truth also seems to be fairly weak. Additionally it did not directly represent tension between two competing orientational poles.

Post-Colonialism Applied to Anti-Immigrationists

Background

My sister in law is taking a grad course on post-colonial theory.  The analysis of settler - resistor dynamics seem to get stuck in a series of perpetual feed-back loops.  Adjudication seems influenced by intersectional concerns.  I'll admit to having next to no academic knowledge in this field.

The one question that did seem interesting (more for the sake of obscurity than anything else) was a time comparison of when settler - resistor population percentages reach equivalency at various historical periods.  Being interested in understanding why today's society is balkanizing I thought it would be interested to what might come from a fermi-level quantitative analysis of modern immigration levels to North American colonization levels.

This is obviously not done to "justify" anything. These are the types of idle questions numeric minded people who are bored engage in. Occasionally something interesting comes out.  Usually nothing does.  I do reject the sacralization (taboo space) now occurring for such questions.  I do, however, recognize they may be best discussed in academic spaces.  There are lots of ways to erroneously assume way more that can be concluded (which may be very little due to differences in modern and colonial era polity sizes).

Analysis

From 1965 to 2015 (50y interval) on the order of 72 million out of 324 million americans are immigrants.  (Including immigrant descendants…).  This is 20% of the population.  If you just account for foreign born you get 45 million (14%).  I have no idea how accurately this accounts for 11+ million illegal immigration, but I would suspect so.

At what point did European settlers reach 20% of North American population in the following zones

-east of Appalachia and between tundra and Mexico

-east of Rocky Mountains and between tundra and Mexico

-north of Mexico

Pre-contact North America indigenous population may have been on the order of 10 million (2 to 18).  At what point did colonizers reach 2 million?

1770

This is revolutionary war era.

There was also a 40 to 80 percent population decline after contact.  For simplicity I’ll assume a 60% non-rebounding population disaster.  That implies a post contact population of 4 million.  At what point did colonizer reach 0.8 million?

1740

This is the era of the first Great Religious awakening (George Whitfield era)

Let’s make some Fermi-question assumptions about indigenous population distribution and assume 

east of Appalachia and between tundra and Mexico - 30%

east of Rocky Mountains and between tundra and Mexico - 60%

north of Mexico - 100%  (this implies coastal & mountain population of 40%

St. Louis was established in 1764 but only had a population of 925 in 1799.  Ohio European settlement took off after the Revolutionary war (1775-1783), so let’s simplistically assume significant extra-Appalachia expansion to occur 1790.  This will let us concentrate European colonizers to the east-appalachia area prior to this date.

So at what year did the colonizer population reach 20% of the east-Appalachia indigenous population?

30% of 4 million = 1.2 million

20% of 1.2 million - 0.24 million.

Colonizer population reached this by about 1700. 

At what year did the colonizer population reach 20% of the east of Rocky Mountains and between tundra and Mexico indigenous population level?

60% of 4 million = 2.4 million

20% of 2.4 million = 0.48 million

Colonizer population reached this by about 1730.  

This is just before the first Great Religious awakening (George Whitfield era)

Conclusion

The European colonizer population east of Appalachia reached current immigrant penetration percentages by about 1700.  Thus an extremely simplistic and crude estimate suggests current immigration colonizer dynamics to match that in 1700 North America.  This is just after the Salem witch trial era.

The European colonizer population east of Rocky Mountains and between tundra and Mexico reached 20% of the indigenous population by about 1730.

Implications

This particular post-colonial inspired analysis suggests that American’s who consider themselves wholly tied to North American heritage may feel population dynamic tensions similar to early 1700’s native populations.  Of course this comparison has little true comparison since modern immigrants are not engaged in purposeful genocide of native populations.  Nonetheless this might suggest that post-colonial theories may provide some insight in understanding the mindset of far-right anti-immigrationists.

Caveats
Assimilation rates of modern immigrants should significantly effect these numbers.  Probably at least 3/4 of immigrants assimilate nearly completely.  Thus the modern "immigration" rates probably need to get reduced by a factor of 4 or so.

Polity size probably really affects things too.  Many indigenous groups were at Chiefdom sized polities.

As already mentioned, observations of genocide significantly affect any match up.

I suspect the "I hate whites" open border cosmopolitans also affects things.  I imagine this demographic might make up about 20% of the current population.  In terms of settler resister framing, this group would be an out-group from the resistors. They would likely be considered colonizers / settlers.  There may be some multiplicative effect for "allegiance changer" dynamics, but who knows.  Thus there may be a factor of 0.4 (two 20%'s) effect.

So you really can't take anything here as a true comparison.  That is after, all, why it is a thought experiment....

Factor of 10
Lets take some of those caveats, and assume the colonial settler impact is a factor of 10x bigger than modern immigrants (I would guess an order of magnitude of a 100x would be more likely).

For an east of Appalachia estimate, I looked for settler population of 0.24 million.  If we look for 10x less, we're after a settler population of 24 thousand,  That would have occurred at about 1640.  That seems more reasonable.   That would have been during the height of the French Iroquois wars where the nascent kingdom sized Iroquois nation started to finally hit back, and the various European colonists started to unify as confederacies.

References

Illegal immigrant numbers

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/modern-immigration-wave-brings-59-million-to-u-s-driving-population-growth-and-change-through-2065/

Immigrant numbers

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/modern-immigration-wave-brings-59-million-to-u-s-driving-population-growth-and-change-through-2065/

Indigenous population numbers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas

Colonizer population numbers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States#Historical_population

North America Timeline (extremely simplistic)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_pre%E2%80%93United_States_history#1700%E2%80%931759

Whale - Two Classes of Fishies

The last couple of weeks I've been working on the question of quasi-factuals' role in societal coherence.

A couple of relevant papers I've been working through are:

• Mercier, H. (2017). How gullible are we? A review of the evidence from psychology and social science. Review of General Psychology, 21(2), 103-122.

• Gigerenzer, G. (2004).  Fast and Frugal Heuristics: The Tools of Bounded Rationality. In D. Koehler & N. Harvey (Eds.). Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 62-88).

•  Spearer, et. al (2010). Epistemic Vigilance.  Mind & Language, 25, 359-293.=

• Kessler, Pisor, Navarret. (2014).  Negatively-Biased Credulity and the Cultural Evolution of Beliefs. PlosOne.

• Toby, Cosmoses, Price, (2006).  Cognitive Adaptations for n-person Exchange: The Evolutionary Roots of Organizational Behaviour.  MDE Magae Decis Econ.

But, its been tough trying to figure out the ground for quasi-factuality.  Standard interpretations are that quasi-factuality

• is a, sometimes costly, in-group signal
• is a simple over-extension of belief (getting puss out of a wound is good, so blood letting should be good too)
• is a spandrel mixed up in larger world views

But this weekend I suspect I un-intentially stumbled on something that makes more sense for me.

BACKGROUND

Bret Weinstein has a little linguistic game: Are whales fish?  The easy answer for many is no.  They are mammals.  The pragmatic answer some give is yes, they are in the water.  The obtuse answer is yes, because of a common phylogenetic ancestor.  Thus if the answer is "yes", you don't know if the person is being simple or opaquely erudite.

Here was the original tweet

In the land SJWs: there is only power. Defending an SJW-targeted-person is a serious violation. Doesn't matter if they're right. "Right" and "wrong" are tools of oppression. Errors don't occur. If you're cornered, you're wrong, by definition.

Only a witch would defend a witch

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) February 10, 2018

At first blush this seems like a simple twitter rhetoric. There is no escape from being a witch. So you can either assume the simple "fish" interpretation, or you can assume something more adroit.  Obviously lots of people missed this.

But there's always a chance you're falling into the same trap.  Hence when I got the following response, was I being trolled, or was this a simplistic fish?

the next time you consider asking a woman on Twitter if she "caught the irony", prior to explaining humor to her like a child, please instead make a cup of tea and go do something else.

thanks ☕️

— lady and a tramp (@ladysonder) February 11, 2018

Simple vindictiveness (simple fish) or higher irony (phylogenetic fish)?  There are definitely two ways to take it.  She was trolling for me the obviousness of Bret's original irony, or she was truly a bit opaque.  How do you signal which?  Well you keep playing the higher irony hand which makes each iteration a bit more likely to generate cues.

And the next reply was, unfortunately, were the cues ended and the fish was caught (which unfortunately prevented a rather witty reply from me about catching someone in a rhetorical line or evolving a discussion)

IMPLICATIONS

Its always sad to anti-sociality instead of erudition, this did make me wonder about a little discussed point of counter-factuality.

To what extent have quasi-factuals stabilized as a way to signal potential sub-groupings whose broadcasting otherwise might get people into trouble?

The big issue here revolves around the role migration plays to maintain necessary altruism levels within a group.  As Nowak and other have shown, you need a certain level of immigration to prevent altruistic collapse.  Altruists also need to be able to sub-organize.

Now when you tie this idea into the increasingly popular perspectives on "metaphorical truth", you get an interesting solution space.  A fairly significant class of quasi-factuals have enough flexibility to code "metaphorical" truths.  Thus while laity may take them fairly literally, the presentation of the quasi-factual has enough nuance to signal the extent to which someone sees something more fundamental and probably pro-social in it.

CONCLUSION

So do quasi-factuals enable whale fish dynamics?  

Right now I would say yes. They allow sub-group signalling.  They provide space for the evolution of "metaphorical" truth even within the lay population. They are memetically fit due to slight counter-intuitiveness.  They also facilitate engagement with out-groups.

If you've ever engaged in inter-faith dialogue, one technique is to provide people with an "easy out" for what you are talking about.  Often this is as simple as  "of course, X and Y think this doesn't work, and they may be right, but...".  Quasi-factuals enable the same thing. Out-groups can easily reject what you are talking about.  They just need to zone in on an a-factual element.  They can even ridicule that amongst themselves. However later ridiculing is sort of like carrying spores home to throw in the fire. Some won't burn.

So, I am very grateful to twitter vindictiveness for teaching me something I wouldn't have picked up anywhere else.

Group Agents & the Stupid Ad Hominem Signal Argument

Pascal Boyer has a good article trying to understand the evolutionary purpose of over-the top mischaracterizations of political foes.  The case study is the infamous Jordan Peterson Cathy Newman debate.  One of the specific points is the now classic meme "so you're saying people should live like lobsters"?

Why is there an intentional engagement with a political foe via the most patently stupid interpretation of an idea that is possible?  The suggested answer is coalitional signalling.  But of course, as Boyer says, this just begs the question of why such signalling works or how it is adaptive.


Group Agents
Perhaps group agent theory formalizes the theoretical framework a bit.  Pettit & List suggest group agents emerge (quasi-real Big Brothers) when there is

• an agent who has representational states that depict how things are in the environment
• an agent who has motivational states that specify how it requires things to be in the environment
• the capacity to process representational and motivational states to change the environment.

This of course requires feedback from the group to the individual (the group is able to bias the individual) and a judgement aggregation function.  

For a group agent to be stable (or more technically to have robust group rationality), you need holistic supervenience (group attitudes are determined by individual attitudes) and "robust group rationality" (individual attitudes are determined by the group).  Basically there needs to complete two-way feedback between the group and individuals.

In practice individuals vary from the group.  Variance may be significant or insignificant.  Of a long duration or fleeting.  What seems to matter most is that there is enough bias from the group to the individual that the individual conforms their behaviour to a group agent's inferred expectation.  The more variance is clawed back, the more "real" a group agent appears.

Highly moral groups have more significant biasing effects than do weakly moral or transactional groups.

Conclusion

The general reaction to Boyer's proposition that apparently stupid and patently political ad hominem attacks are a coalition signal seem to make perfect sense.  It is one of many components and signals for group robustness.  I'd even be tempted to say it is a signal that a group is adaptive precisely because it can afford to be counter or quasi-factual.

But, to go deeper, I'd suggest the Group Agent lens adds additional depth about what is happening with the group.

Patently stupid ad hominem ruts signal that there really isn't another way to view the issue being discussed.  While it is certainly theoretically possible, it is not practically possible.  This really sets group boundaries.  A between-group competition landscape is set.  But more than this, these artificial quasi or counter factual boundaries reflect a moralized group landscape.  Moralized group landscapes facilitate the emergence of group agents / quasi-real big brothers.

Hence what the Newman dynamic probably shows is that her group is getting to the point where deviance away from group morality is likely to be so pernicious that one is even tempted to deny that the sky is blue.  While its tempting to think of this as a proximate expression of adaptive group dynamics, I suspect it is more precise to say it serves as a way to energize or reflect the emergence of a moral big brother / moral group agent.

So, what you are really seeing is a concrete example of how religious-land quasi-real group agents/moral big brothers emerge.

Trump & the Reagan Air Traffic Controller Moment

This is some wild speculation, but I think the way Trump has set up the Mueller counter pressure creates some potentially interesting paths.  Here's one.

It is probable that fighting between the White House and the FBI will continue.  Trump is likely to get a special counsel to investigate his enemies, and Mueller is unlikely to be pressured into dropping anything.

Trump's attacks and the dysfunction in Washington will continue to erode Intelligence service morale. Who wants to work in a place where you have to take sides, but will be lynched when you do so. Infighting is never good, and I don't think there is much of a question that the intelligence services have become as polarized as the US as a whole.

So what would Trump do?  Imagine the resignations keep coming in, and the media and DNC as full of blind vengeful hubris as they have always been start to push memes about Trump's destruction of these institutions.  This is an easy sell, especially if some more heads roll.

But, now here comes the Reagan moment (the person Trump emulates completely).  Imagine Trump gets up and says 'Our intelligence services have become too big, too unwieldily, and the good intentions of those on the ground floor have been able to be turned into weapons by their political heads.  Many of you have felt that my firing of Mueller is a step too far.  For those that think so, I am happy to accept your resignations."

Stupid right......   However, here is the logic of this potential path.  Trump takes the opposition's weapon, a few people leaving the FBI, and the Mueller (or equivalent) purge and redirects it into an obvious trap for the opposition to walk into.  How can the DNC not take the opposite position.  This splits their base. You will end up with a lot of ANTIFA's calling for stronger intelligence services just because of deranged spite.  Some won't and this will cause lots of infighting over the "sell outs".

But what does it get Trump? He gets a smaller FBI, NSA, etc. How do you weaken the powers of these departments? Organizationally you shrink their budget and manpower.  This is a beautiful potential move. Trump gets to be perceived as shrinking the government and government control by harnessing the backlash of his Russiagate counter-move.

Most people would never in a million years play it this way, but I suspect it fits right into Trump's "Wicked Problem Playbook".

Is it likely - no, but it is probably possible.

Basics of Equation Based Population Simulations

The other day I did a fairly informal workshop / sharing session on equation based gene-culture models.  This was mainly for high school social studies teachers and biology teachers who wanted some exposure to one side of quantitative genetic/cultural evolution techniques.  It was quite fun, and I was really surprised at the turnout.  I had expected 0 or 1 and ended up with a fairly large crowd compared to average session sizes.

A twitter acquaintance asked for some basic resources on the topic, so, with a bit of filler background,  and no formal digging for standard texts on the topic....


BACKGROUND
There are a couple of different ways to do population simulations.  One way is agent /actor based simulations.  Think "Sim City".  The original was, of course, The Game of Life.  I remember playing that back on our apple II+ as a kid. NetLogo is a modern tool. Sometimes the Santa Fe institute or @ComplexExplorer have MOOC's on the topic. I hear Coursera has some basics too.

The basic idea is to code a cell with some "properties" or rules for how it will interact with neighbours. This gave rise to Schelling's classic 1971 simulation of housing segregation. There's a nice looking explanation and front end controlled simulation here.  You can find raw data files here.


Another approach is to use equations to simulation macro-variables. In practice, this usually means playing around with recursively formatted excel spreadsheets and then doing some simple calculus.  This lets you show where the equilibriums are, and, presumably keeps the "riffraff" from publishing work in this area without sufficient mathematical background to have "trust-worthy-enough" insights. Plus, it just makes the stuff look smart enough to warrant journal space...

The equation based approach doesn't let you get too complicated. But, for better and worse, you tend to stay on top of what is happening.


INTRODUCTION
For population stuff, I would probably start with a fairly simple equation based approach.  Here is my excel sheet based on how D.S. Wilson explains the averaging fallacy in gene's eye vs. multi-level selection.

The basic idea is to set up a group where altruists contribute to everyone's benefit at their own expense. Does altruism grow or decay? What fitness costs are needed for populations to grow without bound, to peak then decline, and to crash from the get-go.  Wilson's point was to show how altruists can decrease in frequency in two groups yet be increasing in overall frequency in the population as a whole.  In economics this is known as Simpson's paradox.

This is where I started my session - forcing people to try and enter in some formulas into a spreadsheet, before I had to bail them all out with an already completed example (I guess people aren't as familiar with excel as I had thought....).

In my session this led to some discussion.

• How the simulation gets us looking for hard evidence about balance points.  What is the real "cost" range of altruism?  What is the real "benefit" to a group of altruist's contributions?
• Do we just need altruists at the start of a group, or do we need them all the time?
• Do you need migration to sustain self-selectable altruistic (sub-)groups? What level of migration is needed? (i.e. Takano, 2015, Nowak 2004)

Naturally this leads into questions about how altruism levels stabilize or increase in populations.  I related this to the idea of polity size evolution.  Basically Gobekli 10kya in Turkey gives us our first nice data point about polity evolution in relation to religion and chiefdom sized civil society. Religion played an important role.  

We used this as a jumping point to discuss in-group out-group competition. What is necessary to get groups co-operating rather than competing? You can have trade. You can also have momentary parties where people suspend the application of some of their morals onto other groups.  "Relax, lets drink and not worry they didn't do the prayer right...". Will you eventually need rules to figure out what to do when Fred gets drunk and hits Alfonse from another tribe?  Maybe a religious festival has certain rules that aren't quite the same as what we would normally do at home when a foreign trader did the same thing?

At this point you probably need an intro primer on Multil-Level Selection.  Wilson's New Scientist article is good.  The evolution institute also has lots of resources.  Don't buy into the geneticist's hype about how bad MLS is. The discussion is mainly technical ontology about whether evanescent human groups are stable enough to be considered biologically real, and what approach is most parsimonious.  Okasha has the best book mediating the battle.

INTERMEDIATE

At this point you probably want to see some concrete work on models.  Richerson, Cordes, Boyd have a tonne of articles you can find.  

The Naturalistic Approach to the Theory of the Firm is the start of a short series of related articles that provides a good starting point.  Here is my messy excel sheet recreating their work.  Play around with leader (entrepreneur) reach and some of the other variables.  

• Can you get a steady state population without a collapse? 
• What conditions are need for unbounded growth?
• Where is the transition where leader effects are taken over by peer effects?
• How does this relate to ideas about altruism we've just looked at?
• What happens if you combine two groups together at different points in their growth curves?
• Does adding levels of hierarchy to increase leader bias reach make much of a difference?

From this field, one of the big conclusions is that large group sizes are only enabled by loosening moral norms. You need to allow corruption and freeloading.  You get a bigger group with strengthens your position with between-group competition.  But, the dynamics which enable this, pretty much guarantee your society will implode.  This is why you get the idea that there are long periods of back-and forth between polity sizes before the conditions necessary for an evolutionary transition (coordination, conflict minimization, extreme dependency) are expressed in enough of the population to enable a solution which increases stability at a larger group size.

ADVANCED

If you start getting really advanced you will stumble upon Cavalli-Sfroza's groundbreaking book on Cultural Transmission.  Lots of people cite this book, but I doubt many have actually read all of it, and even fewer have reproduced many of the equation based simulations they outline.  I'm one of them. Recreating all their sheets is slow work.  For obvious reasons, the Boyd McElreath book is much more popular and much more accessible.

Quasi-factuality & Action Poetry

I have to say, I was quite impressed with the juxtaposition of academic discourse with gotcha journalism in the Jordan Peterson - Cathy Newman BBC Channel 4 Interview this week.

James Lindsay "live" tweet reaction to it got me thinking more about how well Peterson captures, cult like, the disaffection of modern men.  The first 5 minutes or so cover the content.  The eventual trump of rational academic discourse over accusatory social justice sin ensures this disaffected population will continue to rally around this new thought leader.  How many ideologically abused asperger / autistic boys are going to watch this and see Peterson as the ideal of what they would like to be?  A lot.  He is their image.  His turbulent early life captures what many of them have and will go through.

That notwithstanding, the most interesting point to me is the use of quasi-factuality and action poetry (Perkins 2003).  At the start, Peterson presents some obviously broad generalizations and erratically witches between individual level discussions and population level percentages.  There is a definite looseness here.  The practical effect of which is to provide just enough uncertainty and unbelievability so as to be fairly memorable.

Counters at this point of the conversation are the most salient. Listeners are either going to fully dismiss him as a loon (or lobster) or more fully embrace him.

Peterson's style is very much this way.  He takes a strong, seemingly outlandish position, and doesn't back down. He embraces the absurdity of things to an extent not many other pop-scientists do. I suspect this is his appeal. He continually sets up quasi-factuals and makes them seem as sensible as possible.  This is a very unique rhetorical space I've often seen used by popular religious preachers and high-end salesmen.  But, it becomes very interesting when backed by sufficient academic chomps and deliberate admissions about potential data over-extensions. It is a beautiful rhetorical space.

I also think it highlights the very real role quasi-factuality plays in motivation, group formation, group sustenance and discourse.

If you don't see what I mean, look at 3:00 at his use of the word "power"  at 3:25.

"Women want, deeply, men who are competent and powerful.  And I don't mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others.  That isn't power that is just corruption.  Power is competence. And, why in the world would you not want a competent partner?"

Classic quasi-factualism.  Religion has perfected this type of night language.  Peterson has as well. It works well for a reason.  (It also ticks off some rationalism for probably much the same reason...)

Religion & Societal Stability

Branches of the new atheist movement have matured enough to precipitate out some useful frames for the role of religion and quasi-religion with respect to societal stability.

The recent dialogue between Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro represents one easy to access avenue into this space.  The Rubin report debate between Dennis Prager and Michael Shermer is probably another (although I haven't watched that and probably won't - religion atheism debates tend to really bore me).  An older Harris - Weinstein conversation represents a bit more nuanced view of religion-as-a-useful-myth (30min onward).

Rates of Change

Most sane people know that you don't need religion to be moral and pro-social.  But it is also pretty obvious that large groups need commonly accepted moral norms (to the right degree of looseness) in order to cohere.  Here's my perspective summarizing where these debates settle. In general, I reference Atran's In God's we Trust for a good-enough summary of the major factors necessary for morally based group coherence.



Creativity's Muse
I must admit, I hadn't seen a formal presentation of this idea until Eric Weinstein's conversation with Sam Harris (from about 38:00 on...  It really hits it at about the hour mark).  Eric's idea (which certainly isn't unique) is that faith or the embrace of non-factual but mentally stimulating beliefs increases the ease with which people can probe beyond the confines of current knowledge and assumptions.  This frame is very similar to Stuart Kauffman's "Reinventing the Sacred".

The key is that you need to be able to switch into and out of these belief sets as needed.  You can't be a 24/7 conspiracy theorists, nor can you be a 24/7 hyper-rationalist.  Innovation requires the spark of creativity and fluidity that hyper-rationalism is poorly suited to provide.

If you are not a genius creative type though, much of the argument is likely to go over your head.  If, on the other hand you are used to tackling wicked, boundary breaking questions, his ideas are fairly reflective of how things actually go.

Harris rejoinder is that hyper-rationality can be just as much a muse as religion, albeit without all the necessary supernatural and a-factual baggage.  A slippery slope argument is employed in this regard (can you imagine a religion similar to yours, but with 1 less counter-factual.  Would it be less of a muse?).

While it is likely that hyper-hyepr-rationalism can function as a muse at the individual level, it is uncertainly to what extent this is true at the population level.  Will pervasive cold hard rationalism inspire the same levels of creativity as pervasive quasi-factualism (however it may be embodied)?  At a population level analysis, I think the answer is doubtful.

This doesn't mean we are at the right level of societal quasi-factualism.  We may need more or less for optimal creativity.  However, question of levels can't be adjudicated theoretically.  There is way too much going.  You have both short and long term feedback that makes everything wickedly complex or perhaps even chaotic.




Micro-morality to Macro-morality
Micro-macro morality aggregation is where Prager and Shermer apparently disagreed.  Prager assumes you need a fairly embodied Big Brother (real or quasi-real supernatural agent) to generate enough cohesive force at the societal level. Shermer obviously disagrees.  He seems to feel individual moralities (micro-morality) can scale up just fine into the societal level (macro-morality).  The assumption is that humans have enough in common to ensure we have a basic level of agreement upon what is right and wrong.  Sufficiently strong rule of law and rationality can make up the difference.

My Conclusion
I think Shermer has the better argument here.  But I think there are some caveats.

• You need to ensure immigration is sufficiently low. Without this, you are likely to introduce enough new people possessing enough un-maleable cultural factors to swamp a given society's social contracts.  As we're seeing in Sweden, a strong rule of law may not be sufficient to prevent societal bifurcation.  Heavy handed pressure to see different morality purely in terms of criminal rather than existential threats don't appear to work all that well. You quickly develop strongly adaptive sub-groups. Societal decoherence results.
•  I don't think there are any good reasons why micro-morality scales up into macro-morality. You can have a bunch of individuals who are pro-social to each other, but live in a group that is very anti-social to other groups. This is the essence of human evolutionary history. Shermer makes no case against the rise of competing sub-groups. As any complexity theorist can tell you, this is the crux of such logic. External pressure largely determine the degree of complexity faced by the system. Lots of existential pressure, like severe between group competition, challenges the adaptiveness of the large group, biasing the formation and momentum associated with the formation of sub-groups.  Thus, over short or stable periods, Shermer's argument rings true. Over long or unstable periods, Shermer's argument becomes more error prone.
• You need lots of interaction and migration within your group in order to keep micro-moralities from tribalizing.  How much is totally unknown.  However, human tendencies for tribalization, especially during severe selection pressures, is pretty high.

Degree of (Utopian) Transformation

This is a point that Harris has hit on a lot.  My interpretation of his view is that he assumes much of our basic biology can be over ridden. While this is certainly possible.  It is equally as possible that it can't.  Future prediction here is uncertain.  All we can really say is we can probably do more than some people think and less than some people hope.

A bayesian analysis suggests progress occurs by having small groups of people try and fail.  Over time, the slight directional arrow humans have toward pro-sociality will result in increasingly stable transitions to higher levels of selection.  But large sized levels do not imply rationality must win over religion.  Look at the size of the Muslim world.  

Maybe belief systems have a size or diversity cap?  However, once you start allowing for substantial transformation toward hyper-rationality and the rule of law you also have to allow for it toward religious unification.  If we can cohere toward hyper-rationalism, why can't we cohere toward Islam?

My Conclusion

I'm utterly unconvinced by transformative change arguments. I've spent lots of time debunking their over-extension in education.  This doesn't mean transformation can't happen. It just means it can't be relied upon in civil discourse without a great deal of compensating pluralistic humility.  Unfortunately pluralistic humility and utopian zealotry rarely go hand in hand.  My conclusion - let people try everything under the sun. Just be very careful about how zealously they evangelize things.

Rates of Change

I think this line of thinking really sums up the entire Religion vs Secularism debate on social stability.  If you know the academic and scientific underpinnings of the issues, this is really all that is left to grapple over.  How much can we throttle or accelerate potential gene-cultural transformation rates while maintaining sufficient societal stability? And, secondarily, how far down the secular-rational road can things go before they destabilize? This latter point is mainly conjecture. No one really knows.  While postulating can be fun and can help elucidate hidden issues, the answer is, we really don't know.  Thus the only really question is the rate/scope of change issue.

The micro-macro morality question is well subsumed in terms of a rate of change question.  Can everyone appeal to their own individually deduced morality? Or do we need some "useful fictions" (like the rule of law really isn't capricious)?  That is a scope question.  A scope question necessarily implies a rate change issue. Can we move to 20% saturation right now, then to a 1% rate of change there after?

Most of the religious folk take the perspective that society, in general, is well cohered by letting pro-social pluralistically oriented religion run its course.  In stable countries, traditional religion is obviously no longer needed as a social glue.  Contrary to what some strident atheists may think, religion, even that which is based on sacred texts, has a decent rate of moral change.  Scriptures tend to moderate change rates, but not eliminate it. Successful world religions tend to have mechanisms to allow for re-interpretaion and revelation.  For instance, many Christians now believe Old Testament injunctions have been fully supplanted by New Testament ones. Religions are dynamic, albeit on generational rather than yearly time scales.

And so, the question is really how much loss of religious like dynamics can a society, under certain between-group competition stresses handle in terms of net gene-culture characteristics and social structures.

My Conclusion

Here is where I differ from Harris, Schermer and others.  I think we have good reason to believe characteristics associated with adaptive group formation and competition are very deep and robust.  We're not dealing with simple culture level factors.  I think how religiously many "nones" now treat politics is a testament to this.  I'd also cite the time lengths required for polity evolution.  How long did it take for Kingdom sized states to solidify?  For the idea of a Nation state to solidify?  We have  a few thousand years for the former and at least a few hundred years for the latter.  

Now religion may be very different from polity size issues.  Data from Norezayan and others who argue for alternating leading and pacing between religious evolution and state evolution probably suggest the two are tightly coupled.  Have they now decoupled? I see no arguments why they have nor why they should. In fact, people like me are tempted to see the rise of secular moral groups as just another iteration of religious innovation.  All that really has been done is to supplant overt supernatural Big Brother embodiment with concrete rule of law and an ephemeral humanistic-based Big Brother.  The degree of embodiment has changed.  And, while that is significant for some, it certainly isn't for me.  To me, cosmopolitan humanism and social justice are just new versions of aspiring world "religions".

Thus the rate of change question really boils down to how quickly can we and should we weaken the factors which resonate to produce adaptive moral based groups?  Again, I'd suggest a homeostasis view here is probably wisest.  If you toss out supernaturalism you need to compensate by strengthening another necessary factor for adaptive group stability.  As the external environment settles down, maybe you can weaken gene-culture sensitivities toward the necessary strength adaptive groups need to muster for between-group strength.  But, I would caution, between-group considerations are very deep seated propensities which probably evolve more on genetic rather than cultural time scales.

SUMMARY

I fully support groups pushing the value of non-religious based morality.  While many of these movements may very well be naively dogmatic, naively utopian and even naively religious, society can probably handle most anything which emerges from self-selected movements.  It is very likely that these forays pushing increased levels of rationality will result in, well, more rational less xenophobic, less conflict oriented societies.

What I do worry about though, is naive evangelization of these positions by those with way too much hubris and little to no connection to moral pluralism.  Even then, it is only state sponsorship or full media mono-cultural propagandizing that worries me.  This is because once a critical size is reached, there are going to be a lot of people who think their new moral discovery is the next best thing since sliced bread or the perfect Marxist recipe.  

My humble suggestion is to keep re-inforcing the value of and our connection to true pluralism.  Superficial phenotype diversity, in my mind, really takes aways from this.  It gives the illusion of diversity without much if any true moral-level pluralism.  It is sort of like living on candy and assuming calories are all you need....

Playing along with Sam Harris - part 3

Here is my final part.  Again, I wish Weinstein had spoken more.  I find myself agreeing with most every point of his.  I have a feeling such agreement may tend to similarly strong religious roots.  It tends to ground one to pluralism.  I think today's new atheists, social justice warriors and hyper-rationalists are at risk of "losing the reasons for pluralism"

PART 3

59:40 - 1:03:00 We do not need free will for reason to work.

I’d agree with this point.  Ben seems to not quite get it.  I suspect Ben is trying to say if we only rely on reason then we lose morality.  Sam would say this is true, but the morality which survives this is rational morality. This would probably be some form of consequentialism.

I think we should agree with Sam here, but suggest that this framing does not guarantee that moral-rationalism will win.  If I wasn’t in an actual debate, I would readily accept his premise, suggest that people’s gene-cultural traits are not yet sufficient for this to work out, but agree that it is a reasonable utopian position and that some people who are ready for such a move should definitely make it.

My main problem with moral-rationalism  (hyper-rationalism) is that I don’t think a complete divorcement between biology and reason is ever possible without all the trappings that go along with utopianism.  Should we act hyper-rational in order to increase the chances of it sticking for future generations? I guess my problem is that I don’t see much of a way around the freeloader (self-interest) problem in hyper-rationalism.  The only way to escape this is to excise it from our biology so that it is not even probable.  As MacIntyre suggests, even the tiniest bit of self-interest corrupts.  I would suggest Harris’ argument is subject to this flaw.  I would further suggest that it would take a VERY LONG time to remove even the vestiges of self-interest.  Otherwise, they are likely to crop up.  I’m also not sure that even the best laid systems could suppress these tendencies.  Any system which could suppress such emergent tendencies would, scare me.  I don’t think rationalism is nearly as perfect an escape here as hyper-rationalists assume.  

There is the very real chance that an imperfect system is more optimal than a perfect system.  Theoretically this doesn’t seem to make sense, but I think may just be due to some major naivete  on our part.  After all, remember when we thought optimizing assembly lines could be done by optimizing each machine?  Then we discovered that having some looseness in the line and just having each robot stay aware of its neighbours increased actual output more than any of the best theories?  I suspect we’re in the same boat here.  Harris is an engineer, and a socially utopian one.  I’m a pragmatist.  

Eventually the two may become indistinguishable, but I think there are many thousands or hundred of thousands of years of evolution required to get to that point.  I also very much worry about the journey.  Sometimes becoming the type of person who can resist the allure of anti-social traits is more important than having a system that prevents the possibility of selecting anti-social traits.  The latter really scares me.  I suspect it is the reason hyper-rationalism also scares many others.  It has a theoretical solution that is hard to argue against, but a practical implementation that is downright stalinesque.

For example, Mormon theology is very clear on this point.  And while I don’t think Harris is advocating for a structural solution that controls the expression of “anti-social” behaviours, his system does not address the practicalities of how to get past this in an imperfect world.  His only apparent solution is to trust on hyper-rationalism’s long game.  To me this is very naive.

1:05:00 to 1:07:00 I really like Eric’s presentation here

1:08:40 Reason is the only thing that scales and allows us to have conversations that will lead to agreement.

This is a really good point.  Again I would suggest its achilles heel is that it assumes we need hyper-precision.  It also assumes that we can not tolerate any room for people to be different.  I think that is a fundamentally bad idea.

As a larger group we need the ability for people to be wrong.  That entails some very real cost to the group.  But it also opens up the door to more efficient discoveries of things that are truly novel.  For an analogy, think to our body’s reaction to background radiation.  We certainly could have a mutation rate that is much lower.  We don’t.  Why?  The cost of mutation is offset by the advantage of an occasionally successful mutation.  Is rationalism the master or pragmatics?  Hyper rationalism seems to have a unique ability for group think that is even more insidious than the religious systems you are critiquing.  They may have factual errors and group think.  But they don’t seem to be so susceptible to the human dynamic problems that jump out at me with hyper-rationalism.  Ironically enough, they are as naively faith-based as your dogmas.

1:12:00  Weinstein - There is some sort of conserved prototypical religion that each of our religions are some instantiation of. You still have something that needs to connect with this.  That’s why all three of us are living in some kind of tension between reason and that other thing.  That other thing is hard to talk about in the language of reason.

1:12:53 The departure from reason is pretending something that is great evidence actually isn’t.  You can triangulate on any tradition to find points you disagree with.  [inferred assumption that the only thing that is left is rationalism]

I think the inferred point here is the most interesting.  Is pure, probably watered down, rationalism all that remains?  Or are there elements of quasi-factualism and moral “spaghettis” that remain?  

We need to get there first to find out.  Assuming hyper-rationalism is what will remain seems to be an overextension of logic.  Perhaps it is a good over-extension.  Perhaps it plays out as a bad one.  I just don’t think we have the knowledge necessary to make any definitive comment and so I think a pluralistic approach must be accepted.  Anything else is false hubris.

But as you say, this doesn’t prevent us from critiquing certain traditions as likely ineffective or actually problematic.  It prevents us, however, from guaranteeing that they are.  Then the question becomes what should one do if a system is bad for most people and only good for a few?  Are we justified in pressuring for its removal?  

I think moral appeals here are just a really bad idea.  Hence the stalin references.  Group based appeals are fine.  We don’t like nation X, therefore if they are doing something bad to us, we can wipe them out.  I would rather have that level of national appeal than some phone moral rationalism that lets us see those actions as eugenically moral rather than the nation state actions which are probably more easy to be viewed as greedy nationalism. One deludes us less than the other and hence is less likely to get carried away in self-deluded religious zealotry.  We have not reigned in those tendencies nearly enough for me to trust them.

1:17:10 Every possible facet of your well being is improved by [factual reality] appeals to reason

I think this is demonstrably wrong (e.g. people who have faith in an afterlife have less stress and are reportedly more happy).  However on a long-time scale it can be hard to argue against.  But I’m not sure if that is because the argument is sound, or if you just provides a utopian-like excuse to remove any and all skeletons from the system you propose.  In reality, they will still be there, but you get to deny them on utopian long-range grounds.

1:20:00  Weinstein - We get into truth-mania, a place where we don’t realize we always trade off against truth [say gender pronouns which don’t correspond to biological sex]

I think that is a very good point.  At some point we hope the degree of required trade offs will lessen.  Hence we hope objectivity can survive the hyper-sensitivities of social justice wars.

The question seems to be, will this happen more with hyper-rationalist religion or with pluralism?  I’d lay my bets on changing us.  On each person becoming more pluralistic than on finding the “right system”.  I think hyper-rationalism sets itself up to be yet another “right system”.

1:20: 50 Is lying to yourself the only way to get the meaning, truth and grace that you want?

I think it can often be the most efficient.  Like you say, Harris, the issue is how much it entraps you.  What recourses do you have to escape it?  Christian religion has repentance, atonement and being born again.  Hyper-rationalism has rational appeals or logic tests.  Is my worldview coherent?  Where is it illogical and unfit?

I just would again suggest that overly optimized solutions aren’t always the most optimal when one takes a larger systems view.  So scale becomes a question.  Do you take a narrow frame, an infinitely broad frame or something in the middle.  I see something in the middle as the solution.  I interpret you as saying the infinitely larger view is the solution.

1:21:00 If you find meaning in something that no one else does, then that is craziness.  [if the bush only burns for you]

I would say that is often the way humans advance.  I see nothing wrong in letting madness have a space because it frees us up from our own limited confines.  Too much is bad.  Too little is bad.  What is the right amount?  And what scale are we using to judge this.  It is better to be loose here than too tight.

1:21:30 Weinstein - it is important to stay in touch with madness to guard against it.

I fully agree.  Risk aversion is hugely problematic.  Maintaining contact with something slightly beyond our grasp is key to optimize creativity, both at the group level and at the individual level.

1:22:20 But that is a happy spiral which is not the same thing as delusion or sustained delusion.

But you can only judge that based upon the outcome.  You can only bias your chances of escaping from it.  I don’t think anything with full guarantees here really will fully work.  Or rather I might say, anything with full guarantees here is likely to be systemically unstable.  I think you really do have to risk it all in order to find greatness.  I think that is a very religious lesson.

1:24:20 I think the only way to play the language game is to have the object of adoration to be appropriate [something that works and scales]

That is a really good point.  I just don’t think we are at that point of human organization where such unification is necessary.  We can certainly bias ourselves in that direction.  I would say rationalism (scientific method and objectivity) is indeed a good direction.  We just have to be wise in how we get there, not overstate the final destination, nor assume that it is guaranteed to be a clean and pure as a rationalized logical philosophy may need it to be, nor should we give up on the fact that ugly and counter-productive pluralism may be the ideal place to stop.

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