MichaelA🔸 comments on Notes on Henrich’s “The WEIRDest People in the World” (2020)

[MichaelA🔸]

Here’s a google doc comment I wrote expanding on my reasoning related to key takeaway 1, i.e. that “The book made me a bit less concerned about unrecoverable collapse and unrecoverable dystopia (i.e., the two types of existential catastrophe other than extinction, in Toby Ord’s breakdown)”.

This comment was in the context of what implications Henrich’s argument might have for whether impartiality in the moral sense will be more common among future agents, as one sub-question of whether the long-term future will be good or bad in expectation. (Caveats: The comment is definitely going beyond just what Henrich explicitly says, and it’s also possible it’s based on some misremembering on my part.)

I think Henrich does show that some cultures have higher levels of things like “impartiality” than others (though he doesn’t talk about precisely that), in particular higher levels of universalism. But we already know that most people don’t have very impartial values, including within Western cultures. So I don’t think this is really a surprising update from Henrich that pushes against how likely future agents are to be impartial—we already knew that most people aren’t very impartial, and Henrich just tells us that again.

But then Henrich also says that some clusters of values and norms contributed to greater economic and scientific progress in some places, and allowed those places to become dominant, and then the values have started to spread elsewhere as well via imitation etc. And that cluster of values and norms includes the impartiality-like stuff. So Henrich actually implies those things have higher “fitness” in the cultural evolutionary sense.

So I think Henrich should mostly update us from “some people are more impartial, but most aren’t, and we don’t know why, so who knows what the future brings” to “some people are more impartial, but most aren’t, but the former seems to have to do with things that are more culturally fit and thus may typically multiply themselves, ‘conquer’ other things, and/​or be imitated, so we have weak reason to believe the future will have more of that.”