Links to Consider, 1/30

Robert Kurzban on the theory of morality; Samuel Hammond on language and civilization; The Financial Times on the Gen Z gender divide on politics; Tove K's theory of society

Robert Kurzban writes,

The moral sense, on this view, is a measurement of whether someone’s behavior matches a proscribed action, motivating a desire for costs to be imposed. It is for choosing sides.

It’s important to note a few aspects of this view.

Most critically, it doesn’t matter what the actions are that get moralized. Third parties are solving a coordination problem, not a public goods problem. As long as we all agree—all coordinate on the actions—then we all get the benefits of being on the same side. That is, we don’t need to pay attention to the consequences, which I hope sounds familiar. Moral judgment isn’t consequentialist because moral judgment isn’t designed to bring about (good) consequences. It’s designed to get everyone on the same side.

This seems a bit extreme. While there are some norms that are arbitrary, my understanding of the anthropology is that there are some moral universals.

But his larger point is interesting, and probably correct. That is, we should look at morality as judgments about what is wrong. We can then argue about the extent to which these judgments are instinctive or socially constructed. I am willing to believe that social construction is very important, but not quite everything.

Samuel Hammond writes,

Civilization thus kicked off with development of the original Large Language Model: formal writing systems. History had begun, thanks not merely to the advent of techniques to record events, but because the connections between events could now be situated in a logical historical progression. Without written language and norms, history would likely never have gotten off the ground, as the purely biological explanations of human sociality (kin-selection and reciprocal altruism) simply don’t scale. A symbolic medium for communication, in contrast, was just the sort of external scaffolding we needed to leverage our fleeting capacity for reason and agency into something greater than the sum of its parts — an example of what philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers call “the extended mind.”

Writing made possible more rapid cultural evolution by improving collective memory. It also enabled large-scale society.

You cannot possibly have missed the Financial Times story on the young gender divide. Alice Evans is on it. So is Aaron Renn, who writes,

From the FT:

In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.

Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.

Outside the west, there are even more stark divisions. In South Korea there is now a yawning chasm between young men and women, and it’s a similar situation in China. In Africa, Tunisia shows the same pattern. Notably, in every country this dramatic split is either exclusive to the younger generation or far more pronounced there than among men and women in their thirties and upwards.

Twitter thread by the reporter John Burn-Murdoch, who wrote the story.

This is having huge impacts, including reducing rates of marriage and births in Korea, whose birth rate has plummeted to become the lowest of any country in the world.

I guess if you won’t marry someone who has different political views, and political views tend to differ by gender, that could be a problem.

There is a long-standing argument about whether men are inherently different from women. I wonder if these young men and women are on opposite sides of that argument. Think about that for a moment.

Tove K writes,

For any civilization to form, males need to find ways to overcome this fundamental conflict. As long as groups of men are regularly split-up by infighting over who should have that woman, men can't form any bigger military units. Ceasing that infighting is very difficult to achieve, since it is against nature. It required some kind of freak event, where a group of men happened to avoid infighting for a while, maybe under an unusually awe-inspiring leader. Those men could conquer their neighbors, initiating a feedback loop. A feedback loop that worked against some of the fundamental principles of human nature.

That way, civilization was formed by men who gradually and tentatively defied their own, and each other's nature.

…female nature wasn't gradually and painfully overcome by cultural evolution. It was just repressed by the culture developed by males. Over time, the repression increased in sophistication. In some places it increased in severity. In other places it decreased in severity. But nowhere females were responsible for setting the rules that repressed and enhanced their own nature, the way males were.

The essay suggests that feminists must get beyond “woman good, man bad” and develop more sophisticated ways to form alliances and constrain human nature.

substacks referenced above:

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Feminism is just an ape alliance

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Weekly Digest: The Gender Political Divide

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The Global Gender Divide?

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How did human civilization get off the ground?

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The evolved functions of morality: From the Haidts to the depths.