The problem with Robin Hanson's cultural drift

Robin Hanson has developed an interest in cultural evolution. I've previously blogged about that here. However, I am not sure about some of Robin's claims. He believes that human values are subject to what he calls "cultural drift" - and that we are making too many undirected value changes in a row and so risking going off the rails (adaptively speaking) - resulting in issues like the demographic transition - or the fertility crisis - as we perhaps ought to start calling it.

I wrote up my objections here - and reproduce them in this post:

Why do human values have this problem, while science, math, technology and language do not? That seems fairly simple: science, math, technology and language are places where the interestes of memes and genes are aligned. Whereas values are an area where they are typically different.

It is the common interest of many memes to turn humans into meme spreaders: preachers, teachers and influencers - and to make sure that no DNA-based offspring distract them from this task.

The problem is not anything to do with making too many undirected value changes in a row and then going off the rails. If that was the problem then math, science and technology would have the same issue. It's because human DNA genes now have a powerful opponent. A systematic competitor for reproductive resources.

This is why I am opposed to the "drift" story. It seems like a misdiagnosis of the problem. It makes it harder to solve our problems if we don't have an accurate picture of their causes.

My other objection is to Robin's terminology. I would prefer the term "cultural drift" to be a close synonym of "memetic drift" - the cultural analog of "genetic drift". Robin uses the term differently - claiming that he is using the common meaning of the term "drift" in the dictionary. I think that Robin's somewhat irregular use of terminology likely to cause confusion.

Here is Robin's definition of culture:

But they look more worrisome re the cultural norms and game-theory-equilibria parameters that are hard to change individually, culturally-set features analogous to the harder-to-evolve DNA-set features that define biological species, as compared to DNA-set features that can vary easily within such species. (Biology DNA evolves faster with more smaller species, as that better promotes these more important species-defining features.) I’ll call these features “culture”.

I think a more reasonable term for that is "macro-culture". There's also "micro-culture" - by analogy with "macroeconomics" and "microeconomics".