It's important that cultures disappear

To me the situation proposed in the article sounds like something out of a dystopian novel.

Furthermore, how would you pick one culture to standardize upon? English is only the de facto language of the world because of forced colonialization by the British, and USD is the de facto currency of international transactions only because of the excessive economic and military power that the US wields.

As someone whose native language is not English, I am very happy that English has become the standard language. Not because English is particularly good, but because it is A standard.

Most people did not agree on it, but were pushed towards it due to economic dominance. Non-native speakers may still resent their disadvantage and would not call it an "agreement".

The idea of a single global culture is a pretty dark path, historically speaking. It is a utopian concept that assumes there is a path that can be followed in order to pursue a more perfect mankind. It stems from the belief that ambiguity and difference are negative forces, to be eliminated instead of embraced.

I think the argument is that the darker historical paths were 'simulation' where 'emulation' would be a better model. The difference (from what I could tell) being that the underlying mechanism of cultural change are copied, instead of just the effects. It could be argued that this is already taking place - the massive reach of the internet is expanding so that more people are being influenced by the same information streams. Internet culture makes the assumption, predictably, that internet culture is good/best. But what if that isn't true? What about those who don't fit into the 'internet' cultural norms?

The author talks of of making subjective judgements about the optimal performance of certain cultures. That's a bit problematic. What about the cultures that are not "optimal performers"? What is optimal? Those who work the most hours? Those who laugh the most? Those who have the least number of fistfights? Those with the greatest GDP?

Edit: here's a version of his argument from that book which he published in the New York Times in 2006.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01cosmopolitan.ht...

Out of this homogenized mass will emerge innovation, supposedly. I suppose it will have to, just to beat the stupefying boredom. Of course, it will be frowned upon. "Just what the heck do you think you're doing there with that innovation of yours? You wouldn't happen to be trying to start a new kind of geographically-identifiable behavior around your invention? Dare I say... culture? You know that is forbidden!"

By the way, English is the most spoken language? Not really; it's probably the most badly abused language, for the purposes of global trade. You have to look at other measures, like for how many is it their mother language. In how many places is new English-language literature being produced (not only business documents like purchase orders). A halfway meaningful count might be: how many moms sing English lullabies to their children.

You know, in most places, people guard their language and culture very jealously. The use of another language by a few people who have jobs with international ties doesn't constitute any evidence that their region is converting to another culture.

According to the Gospel of Bayes, evidence can only be used to update pre-existing beliefs. If we consider any individual issue, no matter what beliefs we start with, sufficient evidence will move all of us toward a similar endpoint. So for example as infants we likely start with some pretty weird hypothetical ideas, and by a roughly Bayesian process move toward common notions like object permanence.

Since it is provable that Bayesian updating is the only way of knowing that is consistent, there is no magic short-cut to optimal answers, which means that a population with diverse starting points is in general going to have a few members that reach optimality fairly promptly while the rest of us are still flailing around.

If we view cultures as systems for solving problems, this implies that cultural diversity will tend to get us to better solutions to those problems sooner than homogeneity. Nor will the same culture always be the fastest to currently optimal solution: the recent upsurge in interest in Buddhist psychology is an example of a culture that achieved a pretty good understanding of the mind quite a long time ago.

By giving us a framework in which to understand the value of cultural diversity--including linguistic diversity--while at the same time placing the universality of Bayes' Rule at the centre of the knowing subject's experience, Bayesianism allows us to resolve the tension in Enlightenment humanism between a) valuing the unique and diverse forms of human expression, culture, language, etc and b) insisting there are universal principles that unite all humanity.

While he holds up 3 other cultures as being closest to optimum without explanation, he also suggests that they could benefit from elements of another. This naturally leads to a more evolutionary way where differentiation allows exploration of many elements which can then be adopted by others once they're identified as "good" whatever that means.

The world that is advocated here is pure dynamic quality, with nothing to latch onto and preserve static quality.

"Goodness" and "Badness" only exist in retrospect, diversity is needed for survival. Global optimal state doesn't exists.

When people strive for global optimal state, most of the time they are actually looking to create a more legible system. That is, a mechanical system over an organic one. But just because you understand more about how a system works doesn't make it "better".

Competition and contrast between cultures is what enables us to improve. The world wants to copy Silicon Valley, but during its inception it was (and to some extent, it still is) a highly iconoclastic culture.

We can not engineer an ideal society by picking and choosing aspects of different cultures, homogenizing them, and implementing it globally. It will be imperfect -- and we will have no way to improve.

  In order for humanity to truly achieve an optimal culture [...]"

Edit: It was humbling how Asimov put it in the Foundation saga. In just a few thousands years, memory of Earth had been lost.

Firstly, a quick fact-checking: depends on how you do your survey, English might not be the most used spoken language in the world, and in some cases, not even close. There are somewhere potentially around 1-1.2 billions Mandarin speakers. And if I'm not mistaken, there are around 800-1billions English speakers in the world.

I'd also like to note that your main thesis is a hypothesis at best, and definitely not an "important truth". Not yet, as of today anyway.

Culture existed for a reason. It was not entirely historical accident that the Eastern and Western culture was different (I believe it's partly due to the farming method at the start of agriculture). With that in mind, it's only possible to have a mono culture if the living situation everywhere on Earth is the same. And until we can actually do terraforming, I don't see it happening. (After terraforming? I'd rather not guess). Remember the picture of the worldmap that note half of the world is living in a circle [0]? Even something as simple as most of South-East Asia living in cities would make a drastic different culture than sub-urban America.

I've been thinking about culture and social norms, my conclusion was that they exist as a way to make dealing with other human easier: we human if left alone all have different preferences in too many things. And if as a group, everyone has to guess how everyone else want things to be done, it just take too much effort. That's also why I think when the group is small enough, or if it's a 1-on-1 situation, social norms don't mean much.

Since human ourselves is extremely unlikely to suddenly become homogeneous (5000 years from now, if we a group of human randomly, half of them will probably still put the toilet paper roll differently than the other half), it's more likely that there will be even more culture than the past, not less. If once culture were limited by physical distance, that won't be an issue in the future.

It's more likely than not I'm similar to thinking and belief of other HN-ers than my fellow countrymen - and likewise for other HN-ers.

Finally, efficiency isn't the only goal to be optimized for human/ society. I'm not even sure if that's the main goal or not. Likewise for happiness - we're not all utilitarian, are we?

[0]: http://io9.com/more-than-half-of-the-worlds-population-lives...