Our Big Oops

Somewhat ironic that this is on the front page of HN next to this article about recovering lost languages from old tapes: https://theconversation.com/how-were-recovering-priceless-au...

Whether cultures die depends on what you consider a culture. But languages are often regarded as an important pillar of culture, and that article mentions a language that died within the last 40 years. And that's far from the only one. More languages are dying all the time.

Similarly, small "cultures" are disappearing constantly: local hobbyist groups of various kinds, craft traditions, all sort of things. You can argue that these are only cultural practices and not "whole cultures", but when enough of these things die, the culture has effectively died. It may die in a ship-of-Theseus way where it slowly morphs into something else, but still when that happens, there can come a point at which what the original culture was is lost. That process definitely continues to happen, and probably is accelerating in the present day.

Take one trip to some nations in Africa, and you'll quickly discover there are indeed, thousands of peasant cultures undergoing, um, "selection pressures". Usually at the expense of one another. Even happens in places where we think, on the surface, one of the global culture holds sway. There are Indians out there, for instance, who might say, "Sure you may be Muslim, but you'd best be not just Muslim, but Medthavese, for my daughter."

There's likely one global culture for the author because they don't observe the others. Like many people they overlook, or don't bother observing at all, critical details. Out in the world, however, it's the details that do you in. That's doubly true on evolution's timescale.

> "Together these trends suggest that today the “cultural” features of our behaviors [. . .] may have long been drifting into maladaptation. This seems most plausible regarding fertility, but also seems believable re increasing mental illness and drug addiction, legal over-complexity, over-regulation of commerce, over-spending on education and medicine, and many other problematic social trends."

He's obviously right. But there's either:

(1) No obvious solution. WRT fertility, nobody really knows what might work -- everything that has been tried thus far, e.g. in S.Korea and Hungary, has failed.

(2) No way there from here. It's all very well and good to say that the status of education should be reduced, or that the medical profession should be opened up, but it's very difficult to do this by decree -- and anybody who tries is up against entrenched "special interests."

In some cases #1 and #2 are, in a way, the same thing. The next step to take on fertility probably involves massive cash bonuses to parents, which a large fraction of the voter-base in democratic states is not going to be happy about. (Which gives China an advantage if they decide to get serious about this.)

I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks we’re over-spending on education is not a serious person.