Without commenting on the specifics, I agree with a lot of the gestalt here as a description of how things evolved historically, but I think that’s not really the right lens to understand the problem.
My current best one-sentence understanding: the richer humans get, the more social reality can diverge from physical reality, and therefore the more resources can be captured by parasitic egregores/memes/institutions/ideologies/interest-groups/etc. Physical reality provides constraints and feedback which limit the propagation of such parasites, but wealth makes the constraints less binding and therefore makes the feedback weaker.
The main reason I disagree with both this comment and the OP is that you both have the underlying assumption that we are in a nadir (local nadir?) of connectedness-with-reality, whereas from my read of history I see no evidence of this, and indeed plenty of evidence against.
People used to be confused about all sorts of things, including, but not limited to, the supernatural, the causes of disease, causality itself, the capabilities of women, whether children can have conscious experiences, and so forth.
I think we’ve gotten more reasonable about almost everything, with a few minor exceptions that people seem to like highlighting (I assume in part because they’re so rare).
The past is a foreign place, and mostly not a pleasant one.
I totally buy that peoples’ verbal models aren’t at a local nadir of connectedness-to-reality. The thing which seems increasingly disconnected from reality is more like metis, peoples’ day-to-day behavior and intuitive knowledge, institutional knowledge and skills, personal identity and goals, that sort of thing.
I’m notably not thinking here primarily about examples like e.g. heritability of IQ becoming politicized; that’s a verbal model, and I do think that verbal models have mostly become more reasonable modulo a few exceptions which people highlight.
I used to agree with your understanding but I am now more skeptical. For example, here’s a story that says the opposite:
The poorer humans are, the more vulnerable each human is to the group consensus. People who disagreed with groups could in the past easily be assaulted by mobs, or harassed in a way that led them to literally starvation-level wealth. Nowadays, though, even victims of extreme ‘cancel culture’ don’t face such risks, because society is wealthy enough that you can do things like move to a new city to avoid mobs, or get charities to feed and clothe you even if you lose your job.
Also it’s much harder to design parasitic egregores now than it used to be, because our science is much better and so we know many more facts, which makes it harder for egregores to lie.
I’m not saying my story is true, but it does highlight that the load-bearing question is actually something like “how does the offense-defense balance against parasitic egregores scale with wealth?” Why don’t we live in a world where wealth can buy a society defenses against such egregores?
Or maybe we do live in such a world, and we are just failing to buy those defenses. That seems like a really dumb situation to be in, but I think my post is broadly describing how it might arise.
Why don’t we live in a world where wealth can buy a society defenses against such egregores?
I would point to the non-experts can’t distinguish true from fake experts problem. That does seem to be a central phenomenon which most parasitic egregores exploit. More generally, as wealth becomes more abundant (and therefore lots of constraints become more slack), inability to get grounded feedback becomes a more taut constraint.
That said… do you remember any particular evidence or argument which led you toward the story at top of thread (as opposed to away from your previous understanding)?
Without commenting on the specifics, I agree with a lot of the gestalt here as a description of how things evolved historically, but I think that’s not really the right lens to understand the problem.
My current best one-sentence understanding: the richer humans get, the more social reality can diverge from physical reality, and therefore the more resources can be captured by parasitic egregores/memes/institutions/ideologies/interest-groups/etc. Physical reality provides constraints and feedback which limit the propagation of such parasites, but wealth makes the constraints less binding and therefore makes the feedback weaker.
The main reason I disagree with both this comment and the OP is that you both have the underlying assumption that we are in a nadir (local nadir?) of connectedness-with-reality, whereas from my read of history I see no evidence of this, and indeed plenty of evidence against.
People used to be confused about all sorts of things, including, but not limited to, the supernatural, the causes of disease, causality itself, the capabilities of women, whether children can have conscious experiences, and so forth.
I think we’ve gotten more reasonable about almost everything, with a few minor exceptions that people seem to like highlighting (I assume in part because they’re so rare).
The past is a foreign place, and mostly not a pleasant one.
I totally buy that peoples’ verbal models aren’t at a local nadir of connectedness-to-reality. The thing which seems increasingly disconnected from reality is more like metis, peoples’ day-to-day behavior and intuitive knowledge, institutional knowledge and skills, personal identity and goals, that sort of thing.
I’m notably not thinking here primarily about examples like e.g. heritability of IQ becoming politicized; that’s a verbal model, and I do think that verbal models have mostly become more reasonable modulo a few exceptions which people highlight.
I used to agree with your understanding but I am now more skeptical. For example, here’s a story that says the opposite:
I’m not saying my story is true, but it does highlight that the load-bearing question is actually something like “how does the offense-defense balance against parasitic egregores scale with wealth?” Why don’t we live in a world where wealth can buy a society defenses against such egregores?
Or maybe we do live in such a world, and we are just failing to buy those defenses. That seems like a really dumb situation to be in, but I think my post is broadly describing how it might arise.
I would point to the non-experts can’t distinguish true from fake experts problem. That does seem to be a central phenomenon which most parasitic egregores exploit. More generally, as wealth becomes more abundant (and therefore lots of constraints become more slack), inability to get grounded feedback becomes a more taut constraint.
That said… do you remember any particular evidence or argument which led you toward the story at top of thread (as opposed to away from your previous understanding)?