The odds of good cultural solutions

I like equations. And I find myself drawn to them. Even if they don't bring predictive power, they at least help to clarify your assumptions. But before I can go there, I need to dig deeper into some of the points I made in my last post. It was there that I outlined how three processes (observation, solution-testing, and habituation), embedded in human biology of demography and learning, set the tempo for cultural change. It is my view that any theory of cultural change that does not have a sense of tempo is difficult to take seriously.

The language I'm going to use is the language of probabilities, and I'm going to keep it very fuzzy. For example, it's much safer (and humbler) to say that if X happens then the odds of Y happening will increase to some extent, than it is to say that if X becomes 10% more common, then Y will become 25% more common. Another example: if more people were to play golf, holes-in-one would become more numerous. Another: if people my age learned more mental models from different people living different kinds of lives, then we will be more likely to advance solid solutions for new problems. All very fuzzy.

At this point, I'm in a hypothesis generation mode. I can't even be sure that any of what I'll talk about here can ever be adequately quantified. So it's smarter to keep the discussion qualitative instead of quantitative.

Thankfully, the language of probability is satisfyingly time-oriented. If I say that the odds of something happening within the next year are much lower than the odds of that exact same thing happening within the next 20 years, then I'm already assigning a sense of time. So if we think a certain process increases the odds of something happening, all else being equal, then we can often assume that it will also likely happen sooner.

There are limits to this approach. Fuzzy qualitative thinking can do little if anything when we need to evaluate the relative strengths of different causes. I won't be able to say much in those situations ... but that's ok ... I can still game it out.

So, the bulleted list in the last post, you'll see that I place a lot of emphasis on the conflict between generations in guiding the learning of each new generation. Basically, I assume that the old tend to become locked in, both economically and politically, based on the lessons they learned when they were young, while figuring out how to solve their own novel cultural problems. The old offer context to the solution-seeking activities of the next generation, providing insight from past experiences, and setting the foundational mental models that the young will build on. The old might also try to restrain the young in order to hold onto the advantages they accrued when they were young (which is why we must die). The young, in contrast, have not established themselves yet, and see "making their nut" as a thing of the future, not a thing of the past. Their tolerance for loss is much greater, because there is much less to lose. And so they become the novelty-seeking force within the group, as well as the old of the future. The generational aspect is what gives cultural change a sense of time. One side naturally wishes to conserve an acquired situational advantage, while the next, lacking that advantage, seeks to create ones of their own from solutions to new problems. This happens on time scales of a single generation. What I'd like to do here is start to piece together how that works.

The first part is around the question, what sets the odds of a group being able to generate good cultural solutions? Below are the factors that I think are critical, each posed as a question. If the answer is "lots" or "high," instead of "little" or "low," then I would assume that the quality of cultural solutions will be higher (note I'm not saying anything yet about whether the solution is adequate ... that depends on the nature of the problem, too, and we haven't gotten to that, yet):

• How well do humans understand the problems that they face (e.g., invading outside groups, pollution from upriver, loss of fisheries, global warming, poor quality schools, malnutrition, novel pandemics)?
• How many years do human beings spend learning? (I.e., how many years do human beings spend rapidly acquiring mental models?)
• How fast can humans acquire mental models during those formative years?
• How many and diverse are the mental models that humans are exposed to during those formative years? In other words, how well are those novel mental models communicated into a group's membership?
• What is the quality of dialog between and within the generations around novel solutions?

The more positively you answer these questions, the more likely it is that good cultural solutions will emerge.

There is another factor that I haven't included yet, which is the extent to which the solution benefits everybody, or just some people (possibly at everyone else's expense). This gets to questions of property (of any kind). Very thorny, definitely political, and both the engine of positive change and a bringer of destruction, property is the ultimate non-solvable, problematic necessity in human culture, and the one that we sweat the most blood over. For now I'm going to leave it out, and assume that the groups we're talking about here are generating locally beneficial cultural solutions that benefit everyone locally. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto:

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths."

Yet, as Frank Zappa said, "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff." Well said. But who's to say who's right? For now we'll leave the question of how value accrues and is concentrated for a later discussion.

Back to the bullets. If we assume, just for now, that the years spent learning and the rate at which humans can learn is fixed, then we see that good solutions will emerge when (1) we understand the problems we face, (2) we expose ourselves throughout our lives to as many kinds of cultural solutions as possible, even unrelated ones (and if we can't personally pull from useful mental models, then we are in close proximity to someone who can), and (3) we are in good communication with our group, both within and across generations. This can be written as a sort of qualitative equation, where if any one of these factors increases in amount or quality, then we can expect that the odds of good solutions emerging will increase.

In the next post, I'll add time to the mix.