Great post! Like MichaelA, I’d be really interested in something systematic on the reversal of century-long trends in history.
With respect to the ‘outside view’ approach, I wondered what you would make of the rejoinder that actually over the very long autocracy is the outlier—provided that we include hunter-gatherers?
On the view I take to be associated with Christopher Boehm’s work, ancestral foragers are believed to have exhibited the fierce resistane to political hierarchy characteristic of mobile foragers in the ethnographic record, relying on consensus-seeking as a means of collective decision-making. In some sense, this could be taken to indicate that human beings have lived without autocracy and with something that could be described as vaguely democratic throughout virtually all of its history. Boehm writes: “before twelve thousand years ago, humans basically were egalitarian. They lived in what might be called societies of equals, with minimal political centralization and no social classes. Everyone participated in group decisions, and outside the family there were no dominators” (Hierarchy in the Forest pp. 3-4)
Obviously, you can make the rejoinder that the relevant reference class should be ‘states’ and so shouldn’t include acephalous hunter-gatherer bands, but by the same logic I take it someone could claim that the reference class should be narrowed further to ‘industrialised states’ when we make our outside view forecast about how long democracy will be popular. The difficulty of fixing the appropriate reference class here seems to me to raise doubts about how much epistemic value can be derived from base rates and seems to require predictions to be based more firmly in the sorts of causal questions that are focal later in your post: understanding why hunter-gatherer bands are egalitarian, agrarian states aren’t, and industrialized economies have tended to be.
I just came across a paper that argued that pre-historic hunter-gatherers likely on average lived in less egalitarian societies than previously thought (though there was substantial variation).
Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands composed mostly of kin. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and propose an alternative, the diverse histories model, to replace it. We outline the limitations of using recent foragers as models of Late Pleistocene societies and the considerable social variation among foragers commonly considered small-scale, mobile, and egalitarian. We review ethnographic and archaeological findings covering 34 world regions showing that non-agricultural peoples often live in groups that are more sedentary, unequal, large, politically stratified, and capable of large-scale cooperation and resource management than is normally assumed. These characteristics are not restricted to extant Holocene hunter-gatherers but, as suggested by archaeological findings from 27 Middle Stone Age sites, likely characterized societies throughout the Late Pleistocene(until c. 130 ka), if not earlier. These findings have implications for how we understand human psychological adaptations and the broad trajectory of human history.
Conversely, there’s a hypothesis that the Indus Valley Civilization was more egalitarian, unlike other Bronze Age civilizations in the Near East and China that were hierarchical. See: this Twitter thread (also by Manvir Singh) and this article (by Patrick Wyman).
I think there are (almost?) always multiple reference classes, outside views, or base rates one could use, and that one (almost?) always has to get at least a bit inside-view-y when deciding how much weight to give each (or just which to include vs exclude). This also leads me to strongly prefer the term “an outside view”; I think “the outside view” implies we’re facing a simpler situation than we’re ever actually facing.
(I definitely do think considering outside views is very useful, though!)
Some relevant posts on this issue, in descending order of relevance:
Great post! Like MichaelA, I’d be really interested in something systematic on the reversal of century-long trends in history.
With respect to the ‘outside view’ approach, I wondered what you would make of the rejoinder that actually over the very long autocracy is the outlier—provided that we include hunter-gatherers?
On the view I take to be associated with Christopher Boehm’s work, ancestral foragers are believed to have exhibited the fierce resistane to political hierarchy characteristic of mobile foragers in the ethnographic record, relying on consensus-seeking as a means of collective decision-making. In some sense, this could be taken to indicate that human beings have lived without autocracy and with something that could be described as vaguely democratic throughout virtually all of its history. Boehm writes: “before twelve thousand years ago, humans basically were egalitarian. They lived in what might be called societies of equals, with minimal political centralization and no social classes. Everyone participated in group decisions, and outside the family there were no dominators” (Hierarchy in the Forest pp. 3-4)
Obviously, you can make the rejoinder that the relevant reference class should be ‘states’ and so shouldn’t include acephalous hunter-gatherer bands, but by the same logic I take it someone could claim that the reference class should be narrowed further to ‘industrialised states’ when we make our outside view forecast about how long democracy will be popular. The difficulty of fixing the appropriate reference class here seems to me to raise doubts about how much epistemic value can be derived from base rates and seems to require predictions to be based more firmly in the sorts of causal questions that are focal later in your post: understanding why hunter-gatherer bands are egalitarian, agrarian states aren’t, and industrialized economies have tended to be.
That’s an interesting consideration.
I just came across a paper that argued that pre-historic hunter-gatherers likely on average lived in less egalitarian societies than previously thought (though there was substantial variation).
See also this Twitter thread and this Aeon article. I don’t know what the consensus of the field is, however.
Conversely, there’s a hypothesis that the Indus Valley Civilization was more egalitarian, unlike other Bronze Age civilizations in the Near East and China that were hierarchical. See: this Twitter thread (also by Manvir Singh) and this article (by Patrick Wyman).
Interesting comment.
I think there are (almost?) always multiple reference classes, outside views, or base rates one could use, and that one (almost?) always has to get at least a bit inside-view-y when deciding how much weight to give each (or just which to include vs exclude). This also leads me to strongly prefer the term “an outside view”; I think “the outside view” implies we’re facing a simpler situation than we’re ever actually facing.
(I definitely do think considering outside views is very useful, though!)
Some relevant posts on this issue, in descending order of relevance:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SxpNpaiTnZcyZwBGL/multitudinous-outside-views
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iyRpsScBa6y4rduEt/model-combination-and-adjustment
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SBbwzovWbghLJixPn/what-are-some-low-information-priors-that-you-find