(...some kind of...) status: I drafted much of this under the
influence of hypomania, to the extent that I don't feel like it belongs
to me, and I probably won't follow up on it. But maybe other people
will see its value for themselves.
Writing about endless grad school
makes me think of local hubs. The effective altruists discuss this
on the EA Forum.
One thing that the effective altruists don't do (yet, as far as I know)
is try to work with culture. They do some movement building, and that
does get their values out in the world. But they are more focused on
more "tangible" things.
I am personally more interested in culture. I think that's a more
natural thing for a religious person to care about than for a secular
person. Most EAs are secular.
Cultural altruism would try to understand culture deeply, find the
best values, and find effective ways to spread those values. The
spreading of those values would be a good in itself, and downstream
of them, there would often be other goods. For instance, patience
is good in itself, but also produces people who endure and don't
react too much to the present moment, which enables them to make
long-lasting institutions.
There would be secular goods that came out of cultural altruism.
For instance, designing cultures that kept people from choosing
anti-natalism, from apathy with regard to X-risk prevention, or from
wireheading. A very normatively-uncertain EA might not want to
lock in any of their values, thinking that we need a "Long Reflection"
to be very, very sure that we have the right ones. But, if we all
die before we can engage in that, presumably we are pretty sure there
would be no value at that point for anyone to find valuable, or no
valuers to find anything valuable. So we at minimum want to bias
culture away from things like anti-natalism and apathy with regard
to X-risk prevention. And maybe we would think that no rational
Long Reflection would yield wireheading as the best outcome for
humanity, but it could be something that "just happens" to emerge
in our society due to cultural drift. And there are other secular
goods, like caring for animals and the environment, which might be
threatened by cultural evolution and which cultural altruism could
protect. If you're passionate about something now, it makes sense
to try to make sure other people are passionate about it, and will
be in the long run.
[This post is one that I may link outside this blog. For those from
outside, "MSLN" is a natural-theological religious and ethical worldview
that I work to develop.]
There would be religious goods. Speaking for MSLN,
some goods are preventing hardening; increasing
people's love for God; from a more Biblical
perspective, connecting people to the God of the Bible so that they love
him completely. Just like civilization as a whole, the Church can evolve
into better or worse states, from both a secular and a religious or
theistic perspective. (In this paragraph, I've focused on Christianity,
but in principle cultural altruism could be an interesting pursuit for
people from other religions or spiritual traditions.)
Cultural altruism would be a topic. Topics create
scenes of interested people, some of whom come to the
discussion with fundamental disagreements about values. Multiple different
social movements can take up the topic of cultural altruism and thereby
participate in the scene of the topic of cultural altruism.
Disagreement is good to prevent Tower of Babel-like
scenarios, and scenes are good ways to harbor disagreement. An intentionally
self-critical organization might sound like it could be as good as a scene
for avoiding blind spots. Maybe better in that it can intentionally avoid
blind spots, and scenes lack intentionality on some levels. The advantage
of scenes are that they allow individuals to participate but still stand
outside any social ties. Scenes can consist of both organizations and
individuals.
Cultural altruism as a social thing could be viewed in a somewhat
abstract way as having a "Meta" dimension and a "Partisan" dimension. The
Meta dimension consists of the institutions (shared expectations), social
spaces, people, organizations, etc. that work to make it so that cultural
altruism is "one thing" that interrelates. Including something like "we
are all human beings who communicate with each other in one community of
people in order to arrive at some kind of essential unity in our beliefs,
practices and so on". The Partisan dimension consists of the institutions,
social spaces, people, organizations, etc. that are sold out to one
particular view of reality, and which work to remain unconvinced of other
points of view, or even to convert all other points of view to their own.
(Another view of "meta" vs. "partisan", taken from my notes:)
Metans work cooperatively,
politely, prosocially, ideally in a coordinated way, agnostic about
values, agnostic about methods, inclusive, emphasis on coming to know
the truth, opposed to conflict. Partisans are those who want things to
be true, or know them to be true but can't explain them to other people
yet, or care enough about things to be rude, anti- or asocial, disregarding
coordination or consensus, believing in values even if they are unpopular
or go against all people being in one harmonious body, emphasizing the
truth that is already known and which might be denied by other people
in culture war.
One might naively think
that the Meta view is the only valid view, and that it is right for us to
converge on it directly (optimize for unity, or for the smooth operation
of the cultural altruism process, instead of the truth), but it could be
the case that one of the Parties is much more in tune with the reality of
what ought to be than everyone else, and it would be a huge mistake to
turn the Meta view into a Party of its own, suppressing what was actually
the right party.
Most people and organizations end up
somewhere between Meta and Partisan. Both dimensions are needed and
even if we as a culture feel fairly confident and safe in our future /
eventual ethical/religious worldview, we should have the discipline to
be open to finding out that we are wrong, and thus encourage people to form
opposition Parties and to be Partyless critics. Even if we are right,
we should be concerned that we might be wrong. We should always feel
a virtuous kind of fear.
(Why not say "Meta" and "Mesa" or "Liberal" and "Partisan"? I think
that the culture that would say "Meta"/"Mesa" is more in tune with
"Meta" vibes and values, and the culture that would say "Liberal"/"Partisan"
is more in tune with "Partisan" vibes and values.)
A hub would be a favorable place to site the scene of cultural altruism.
In some ways, the Internet is ideal as a hub for that scene (in parallel
to how the EA Forum, or Twitter, or whatever else, can be a low-cost,
asynchronous, global hub). But in-person scenes have their virtues.
For some reason, Silicon Valley, which is made of tech companies, still
finds being physically located in the Bay Area to be essential, rather
than becoming a purely online presence. I think the Internet is good
at providing information on-demand, but is relatively bad at connecting
people to each other, so that they can expand each other's minds or
find each other's values (as lived out) more deeply compelling than they
did before, because of their personal contact. Also, culture is not
just what we read or can watch or listen to on our computers (text,
images, audio, video and whatever else computers are well-suited to
conveying), but also what kind of body language we use, what kinds of
semi-intentional responses we make to what people say in the moment,
the subtle look of fear, deadness, or delight that is "in our eyes",
the kinds of interpersonal bonds we form, physical touch, the way we
move together through environments and so on, which computers are not
as well-suited to conveying. A cultural hub should be
a scene for interested thinkers (or doers) to practice their observation
of culture on other people around them, but also on each other. This
way, they can understand the full meaning of their own beliefs about
which values are good and how to seek those values.
That paragraph raises the possibility of very high quality virtual
reality making the physical location of social hubs irrelevant. I
don't really know how long it will take for a sufficiently high quality
virtual reality to exist, but, maybe it will come about soon, and make
locality less relevant. I think that even if I had a really high quality
VR headset, I would want to take it off because it was a headset, and also
would want to interact with people in my physical environment because,
why not? We could view VR and "regular reality" as both being streams
of experience (something my basically Berkeleian worldview is sympathetic
to) and even in many ways indistinguishable, but I have a "default reality"
which I always can connect to ("regular reality"), and which I always have
around, and which I can't change as easily as my "optional realities"
(VRs). So I'm still localized to some extent. I don't know how that
affects considerations of where to locate a hub. Maybe it mostly affects
what kinds of people I live with. But then, the people I live with and
I could like to live in a place where our near neighbors were a certain
way, and then we could find those near neighbors in some place (region,
city, town, camp, etc.), and then we get a thicker form of locality and
maybe enough to make discussions of physically-located cultural hubs
matter.
(I can see physical locality being
a scarcer and more expensive good which is spent to form connections with
people who are more special to us.)
[Maybe the cultural altruists would themselves form a people group
and want to have their own locality. I guess this could cut against
their cosmopolitanism. But, I would guess that cultural altruism,
like being a missionary, is a role that has specific demands, one of
which is both a connection with and alienation from established cultures,
perhaps all established cultures (being a "third culture" person). So
it might make sense for cultural altruists to lend each other support
by identifying with each other and forming more committed bonds.]
We might think of cultural altruism as a basically rational thing.
So, we examine many different cultures, decide -- are persuaded --
which premises to accept as valid, and then apply sound reasoning to
produce an overall view of cultural truth.
I like to think of reason as the interrelationship of all truths. For
me, that is done both rationally and intuitively, and the valid data points
/ pieces of evidence / starting premises for rational/intuitive reason can
both be put into words, and not. We gather some of our intuitive premises
by interacting with other beings who intuit (humans, or even sometimes
animals), absorbing their intuitions intuitively. This may require physical
presence. (Maybe not, maybe 100% of this kind of intuition is transmitted
through sense experience, which sufficiently good VR can effectively
simulate?)
Where would I locate a hub for cultural altruism? Well, I'm not
much of a researcher, so I will make the case for where I currently
live, and if anyone cares about this topic, they can make the cases
for other places and see if any of them seem like clear winners.
Then, if there are any people who want to move to those places,
they can, and help form the hub.
A hub would at minimum have people living close enough to each
other to see each other face to face if they want to. They might
build institutions on top of the hub (startups, art groups,
educational groups, religious groups, scenes,
etc.) if there are enough people and occasion.
A hub should have some way to enter it. For instance, one or
more guest houses (perhaps group houses that are guest houses)
for people who want to visit, or who want to move there but need
to look around for a place to move to.
Perhaps a hub needs some other kind of minimum infrastructure.
A cultural altruism hub would most ideally have a connection to
all cultures, past, present, future, in all parts of the world,
integrating all of these cultures into its own understanding of
what culture should be, and then having an outlet into all the
cultures of the present and future world; connecting people
face to face to accomplish all of the above. Past cultures
accessed through history, archaeology, or other study. Present
cultures through face to face contact and media. Future
cultures through imagination and educated guessing.
Nowhere on Earth could be that ideal place. But, there could
be places that have their advantages in pursuing that ideal, and
which could be more ideal than others, making for natural sites
for hubs.
Cultural altruism hub in San Diego
(This develops into something more like "cultural altruism hub
involving Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, Imperial Valley, Mexicali,
Mexicali Valley".)
San Diego is a sleepy place, but has the amenities of a medium-sized
American city. I have sometimes wished it were a more passionate
place, but what it lacks in passion it makes up for (maybe) in not
having distractions. To me it feels like "nothing is going on".
Silicon Valley is a hub for technology, LA is a hub for movies and
music, New York City is a hub for theater, literature, finance, etc.,
Boston has a lot of universities, Washington, D.C. has the federal
government, Nashville has music. Further, there are places like Portland,
OR, and Austin which are "cool places for young people to go and hang
out in". (For some reason I don't hear about Chicago but it's probably
more exciting than San Diego.)
San Diego (so I read recently) has the largest concentration
of US military servicemembers in the US. I'm not sure exactly what that means,
but the military is big here. That could count as a distraction for
some, or as an opportunity for others, in culturally altruistic work.
I don't feel like most culturally-inclined people are into the military
that much. By contrast, I could see cultural altruists getting caught
up in movies, music, theater, literature, universities, government /
politics, and maybe finance and technology. And certainly in "hanging
out" like in Portland or Austin.
San Diego is a place that to me feels like a sunset, that mixture
of the end of time and endless time that comes at the end of a day.
That might be a very subjective, personal thing, but it makes me feel
far-sighted, and that vibe might be good for cultural altruism, if it
has a longtermist dimension to it.
(Someone from San Diego I used to know said that when he came back
to San Diego to visit, he felt a kind of sadness in San Diego.)
I feel like San Diego is a cultural backwater, and that may be helpful
for people who need to get away from the present moment and think deeply.
To the west is the Pacific Ocean, which I think has a big influence
on San Diego. If you've ever been to the beach and came away with the
feeling that the crashing waves make in you, sort of quieted inside,
that's a thing that influences San Diego whenever people get back from
the beach. The weather is also mild, because of the ocean.
To the east is the mountains and then desert. The mountains are
small and manageable as far as mountains go, so it's not hard to make
it to the desert. There is affordable semi-desert land about an hour
east by car (last I checked a few years ago). (If you need to build
your own retreat center, for instance.) There is a desert influence
over the city because it often enough has warm or hot dry weather,
sometimes hot, dry winds.
While San Diego may be sleepy, there is excitement to the north and
south. Los Angeles is a cultural capital. Tijuana is in another country,
a developing country (although a higher-income one), is Spanish-speaking
instead of English-speaking, and has issues with drug cartels. LA
is about two or three hours away. Tijuana is about 30 min to enter, and
a few hours to return from, plus whatever moving around you have to do
in Mexico.
(According to one site,
the highest average crossing time, when returning from Tijuana is 120 min.
at 8AM. [One sampled day sometime between April and August 2022, not
sure if it's typical.])
Spiritual/religious: San Diego has a reputation as
having a nice vibe. Los Angeles does not have a nice vibe. I don't
know about Tijuana, since I haven't been there in a long time. Nice
vibes connect with nice spirits, for whatever that's worth. San Diego
is a fairly religious place. I think along with LA it's the most
religious major city on the West Coast. I have casually run into Osho
adherents, various kinds of Eastern meditation / martial arts / medicine etc.
practitioners, New Age people, Western Buddhists, one or possibly two
occult people. I visited Oakland a few years ago and found myself casually
running into evidence of a political scene, and I think someone in San Diego
might similarly be impressed by evidence of a East/West religious/spiritual
fusion scene.
While I have run into Muslims and Baha'is in San Diego, they are not as
prominent, and I haven't had much experience with Hindus. I have
never encountered a Sikh in San Diego. There are Mormons and Jehovah's
Witnesses (I put them in this paragraph because some people don't
count them as Christian.) There are two main Jewish neighborhoods
that I know of.
The Christians in San Diego do not strike me as being above-average
in passion or conviction. Whether this reflects more a real spiritual lack
or more the "cultural weather", I don't know. (I'm not sure that
anything in San Diego is above-average in passion or conviction, at
least emotionally -- so if you are going to be passionate or convicted
here, you will go farthest by channeling it through something else,
like focus or persistence.) I tend to think that the world is less
passionate than it should or could be, and this includes San Diego.
(I don't have enough experience with the other religions, to say
in their case.)
San Diego has some cultural resources. Balboa Park is sort of like
our Central Park, with museums and lots of random spaces worked into
it for different activities. It has four fairly large universities,
complete with university libraries (SDSU, UCSD, USD, and CSU San Marcos).
It has the Athenaeum Music
and Arts Library, a private library open to members; membership
not too hard to afford. The public library system is adequate. You
can check out university library books through the public library
system. There are a few used bookstores.
I'm not as much into art or dance, so I don't know how it compares to
other places in that regard. I've heard that it is something like
a decent regional theater city.
Popular art/entertainment wise, if you really want to go out, there's
usually something to do, and major bands usually have a stop here.
The open mic scene used to be fairly strong, before the pandemic,
but I think is not so strong right now. There is one "major league"
team (baseball), and some "minor league" level professional sports.
San Diego may be a real center of craft beer and Southern California-style
Mexican food. There are a decent number of cafes.
There are a number of immigrant communities. I'm guessing mostly
the same as in other US cities. (I've run into Middle Eastern,
East African, other African, some Carribbean, Southeast Asian, East
Asian, Mexican and Central American, other Latin American, Russian,
Pacific Islander, and Indian.) Some of these have noticeable
cultural presences (radio stations, festivals, businesses).
There is an African-American community. I would guess that it
is of average vibrancy and size as compared to other US cities of
the same size. [It is big / vibrant enough to support a weekly print
newspaper (San Diego Voice and
Viewpoint), and another online periodical
(San Diego Monitor
News).]
There are American Indians / Native Americans. There are some
reservations in the back country. [They may sometimes have public
events going on or other ways to interact with them.]
San Diego used to be more conservative than liberal, but it has
been shifting "blue" and strikes me as a basically moderate place.
It shouldn't be too hard to find liberals (in the "vote Democrat"
sense) and conservatives ("vote Republican") as well as moderates
and apolitical people. I don't think San Diego is the best place
to find intellectualized politics (like the kind of people who
care a lot about the distinction between "left" and "liberal" or
between "neoconservative" and "paleoconservative") although I
would guess there are some people one could find here who are
into that.
As mentioned above, there is a large military presence.
San Diego is definitely a car-oriented place. Traffic isn't too
bad (better than LA). It is possible to get around via mass transit
if you have a lot of time on your hands. Walking isn't too bad, if
you have the time, although there are some areas (like I would guess
in most American cities) that were not very well-designed for
pedestrians.
Cost of living is fairly high, (although not as high as in the Bay
Area or New York), so if you were to move here, you would hopefully
find a job with high-enough wages. It's possible to get by on SSI
in San Diego (~$1,000 a month), if you're thrifty (and maybe adventurous).
$20,000 to $25,000 might be a more realistic budget for what you spend
on yourself each year, if you're living a simple but reasonable
lifestyle.
(There are probably things I'm missing.)
Practical summary so far: San Diego combines the amenities of a medium-sized
metro area with a sleepy vibe and a certain distance from where "things
are happening". There are probably other places in the US like it.
Where it might have an advantage on other such places is its access to
Los Angeles and Tijuana. In San Diego, one can look to the farther
future. In LA, to the present or nearer future and to part of the
cultural industry. In Tijuana, a taste of the developing world. This
does strike me as a pretty strong combination, which might make San
Diego a contender for a hub for cultural altruism.
Applications to other cities: Some similar places that stand out
in my mind: Montreal (French, English, sort of close to New York City
(~6 hrs by car), may be easier to immigrate to than US), somewhere in
the Balkans (Orthodox, Catholic, secular, Muslim, somewhere between
developed and developing), somewhere in India (Hindu, different kinds
of Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Muslim, developing world) -- maybe in or near
Mumbai as a parallel to Los Angeles. (San Diego has secular,
Catholic, Protestant, Anglophone, Latin American, developed,
developing.)
Some other major cultures maybe not covered by San Diego plus the above:
Chinese, Japanese, Buddhist, Taoist, African, especially African
tribal, Aborigine, maybe others. It depends on how strong of
representation you want. San Diego has some Chinese, Japanese,
Buddhist, Taoist, African, possibly some African tribal although
maybe not. But not necessarily a really strong presence
of any of those (as far as I've seen casually), compared to other
parts of the world.
(Where Singapore meets Malaysia, there's a significant binational,
developed-developing boundary. According to Wikipedia,
Malaysia is
majority-Muslim, with a significant Buddhist minority (and Christianity,
Hinduism, and Chinese folk religions between 10% and 1%).
Singapore has
a Buddhist plurality, and significant secular, Christian, and Muslim
minorities, (and Taoism and Hinduism between 10% and 1% each). *** It
sounds pretty good for a hub location, except I'm not sure about
freedom of speech / freedom to proselytize which the US is pretty
good at, and I think probably Mexico as well. Cultural altruism
might engage in troublesome speech, or directly pursue, or accidentally
seem to pursue, activities that amount to proselytizing, on some
level. Wikipedia makes it seem that Singapore is okay with
religions "propagating" themselves, and Cru
(Christian evangelical organization) has a public website for their
efforts there. Cultural altruism could certainly have political
and social dimensions and the government of Singapore could conceivably not
like that or suppress that. It
looks like
Malaysia is a secular state that defines its majority population (Malays) as
Muslim, and as recently as 2012 there were
tensions
over fears that Christians might be converting Malays. So Malaysia
might be a riskier place to site a cultural altruism hub. *** However, San
Diego (and to a lesser extent LA) may be biased by its blanket of safety.
A "blanket of riskiness" might be a good influence on the kind of
multidisciplinary thinking and relating that a cultural altruism hub
engages in, to balance out a kind of overly-chill and/or timid SoCal/US
vibe. (Tijuana helps to balance this out, but maybe not as strongly
as other parts of the world.)) I feel like I'm going beyond my intuitions
in recommending Singapore-Malaysia, like I'm not making a serious
suggestion, but that feeling may significantly or entirely come from
my integration into the San Diego / USA / Western habitus that
I'm used to responding to. *** As noted later in this post, Singapore
may be more open to visiting (not requiring visa) than the US or even
Mexico.)
(Indonesia, at least superficially, looks interesting. The national
ideology (pancasila) is about
"unity in diversity", and is sort of secular and sort of religious.
A similar mix of religions as Malaysia. Indonesia has a long history
of religious syncretism, which fits a cultural altruism hub. (I think
Malaysia has this too, but possibly there are differences between
Indonesia and Malaysia that might make one more favorable than the other.)
Indonesia is relatively close to Singapore, but not as close as
Malaysia.)
I'm not sure if there are other ways to see into the future other
than the San Diego way. (Assuming that San Diego is uniquely good at
the "sunset" style of relating to the future, maybe there are other
styles.) If there are, that would be a factor for other cultural
altruism hubs. (The Bay Area is maybe an obvious alternative, or
any other EA/rationalist hubs. Note that San Diego is about a day
away from the Bay Area by car or train, or a relatively short plane
flight away.)
(I'm very used to the vibe I get from San Diego, and it's a bias.
Every place has a vibe, and every vibe is a bias. Maybe the best
approach to balance things out would be to find a cultural center
that feels like a different phase of time, like the beginning of day,
or an ongoing noon-time. Possibly LA or Tijuana feels like an ongoing
noon-time, and balances out San Diego?)
Also, what about rural life? That's
something San Diego is not as good at. Possibly somewhere in
the Balkans or India would be better at that. But rural life is
different in different countries. (Actually, there is a farming
community about 1.5 hours east by car, in the Imperial Valley, and also one
across the border from the Imperial Valley in Baja California.)
Mentioning air travel opens up the possibilities for cities
to connect with distant places. For instance, maybe people in
the Bay Area could fly to Tijuana, and the Bay could be a hub.
I just looked up flights [sometime between April and August 2022]
from LA to Tijuana and they were about $65. San Francisco to
Tijuana look to be about $150. That's one way. But taking the
San Diego Trolley to the San Ysidro crossing could be as low as
$2.50, at the very most possible $6. The time cost of going to
the airport and waiting for a flight, and actually flying (from
LA or SF) is probably comparable to taking mass transit to the
border, or possibly greater. Obviously San Diego is at a
disadvantage to LAX (and SFO) for most other international
destinations.
Driving from LA to Tijuana might be somewhat competitive. Gas
and maintenance costs for the car would make it more expensive than
SD mass transit, and the time cost could be a bit more. Mass transit
from Mid City San Diego to the San Ysidro Port of Entry is somewhere
around 1.5 to 2 hours (but starting downtown or further south can be less).
Driving from what looks on the map like central LA (downtown?) is
about 2.5 hours. Driving from Mid City San Diego is about 0.5 hours
(and again, could be less if you live further south in San Diego
County).
Crossing back into the US takes a few hours, depending on time
of day or whatever affects the number of people trying to cross.
This is true for all overland travel, but maybe isn't as true for
air travel? That might reduce some of San Diego's advantage.
Maybe a better way to implement the San Diego hub would be to
have people living in LA and Tijuana as well. Cultural altruists
could live in non-hub places and be "correspondents" online to
share information about their local cultures, or could come to
a hub to share their experiences in person.
One major caveat with hubs is that they are provincial /
can over-represent what is near to them. There's that famous
picture of the
US as seen by a New Yorker. I know more about New York than I
have a reason to because it is a cultural hub where writers like to
set things. (I have never been there myself.) I suspect that there
is something parallel going on with the Bay, London, Oxford/Cambridge,
etc. (EA or rationalist hubs) and that this will affect how they
shape the future.
The Internet is sort of like the perfect hub (except that it
isn't face to face). It contains subhubs which can be just as
provincial as a city.
I think hubs are very attractive if you're trying to build your
own culture or community somewhat apart from the world. But,
cultural altruism both would want to do some of that, and also be
very aware of what is going on in (ideally) all the cultures of
the world. So over-centralizing would be counterproductive. So,
as much as San Diego (or other places) may have natural advantages
allowing for convenient hub-building, they need "correspondents"
to correct the tendency toward bias built into that convenience,
and maybe cultural altruism hubs don't need to be as big as those
for EA (or even less so as big as Hollywood or Silicon Valley).
Instead, it's better to have many correspondents.
One kind of correspondent is the "wandering correspondent"
or the outsider. These people go to different cultures and don't
belong to any of them. Cultural altruism might ought to cultivate
or preserve a sense of otherness within its sameness, or outsiderness
even if it can have belonging.
A place like Tijuana is useful to a San Diegan because it could
give the San Diegan some of the sensitivities for how a developing
country works. They might gain a list of hypotheses to ask of any
developing country situation. But, these would only be questions,
and would have to be answered by the specific reality of whatever
other developing country a San Diegan was thinking about.
Cultural altruism would attempt to influence the cultures of the
world, and the best way to do that would be vulnerably, with the
cultures affecting the cultural altruists back. (Try to reduce
power as broken relationship.)
What if people from the developing world want to participate
in the cultural altruism hub? It's difficult for them to immigrate to
most or all developed nations, but maybe not so difficult to immigrate
to Mexico (would have to check on this[*]). If so, they could live in
Tijuana, and while they might not be able to cross the border,
cultural altruists in San Diego could meet them in person relatively
easily by themselves crossing. The San Ysidro crossing (westernmost
between San Diego and Tijuana) is one of the busiest international
border crossing points in the world, so that gives an idea that many
people live that kind of lifestyle. (A failure mode of having developing
world people move to Tijuana would be that over time, they would lose
touch with their home countries and become more Mexican, or even more
American. So maybe this would make more sense for developing world
people who aren't relied on as the only sources of information about
their home cultures.)
[* This Quora link makes it sound like, with
an income, it's not hard to legally immigrate to Mexico, and I have a hard time
imagining it could be easier to legally immigrate to the US. I tried
figuring out this Quora link about Canada, for reference,
and am left with the rough sense that it's easier than the US, but harder
than Mexico. Tourist visas for US and Mexico both last 180 days, which
is good enough for a lot of people. (Tijuanans who want to visit San Diego
could do so, although it would be more of a process than for San Diegans to
visit Tijuana.) ... ... I came across this post by Luke Eure about how Kenyan visas to go to US don't get
processed due to staffing shortages / lack of interview slots at
th US embassy in Nairobi. This suggests that there is a difference between
de facto and de jure openness to visiting. I'm not sure
one way or the other whether Mexico is really de facto more
willing/able to process visas than the US. Immigration to US (rather than
visiting) does still seem to be significantly harder than to Mexico de jure,
to the point that I still guess that it's easier de facto to
move to Mexico even if Mexico has some difficulty processing people.
But maybe there could be more research done here. Eure's post mentions
that Singapore was a workable destination for people from Kenya wanting
to visit an EA event. Singapore apparently doesn't require a visa.]
Are there good places in Baja California for futuristic thinking,
for developing world people who want to do that? (Places that are
relatively safe, peaceful, and/or disconnected from the present
moment.) There is open land in Baja California, and cost of
developing it is (I would assume) more reasonable than in the US,
so maybe a kind of retreat could be built there. Or maybe existing
developments can be bought or rented. A quick search engine check
gives a result saying non-Mexicans can buy land in
Mexico (even near the border or ocean), but it's a little more
complicated (according to this 2021 page:
https://wise.com/us/blog/buy-property-in-mexico).
Are the geographical characters of Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana
and the Imperial Valley going to stay the same in the long run?
It isn't completely clear.
San Diego will probably always be a
relatively pleasant place to live, but water shortages may make it
a more expensive place to live (same with Los Angeles). San Diego
will probably always be a sleepy place to live (relative to such
national/global capitals as LA, Bay Area, Washington, D.C. and New
York City), and I don't see the military leaving (a nice natural
harbor).
Los Angeles may be a less culturally important city,
because the film industry may weaken. As it becomes easier to
make decent-looking low budget films, and to the extent that
Hollywood films are poorly-written, it may become the case that
low budget filmmakers increasingly make better films than Hollywood,
more profitable relative to initial investment, and even ones that
are more popular. Low budget filmmakers don't need to be as
connected to networks of finance. But, it's true that they would
need a pool of acting and production talent, which may naturally
centralize in hubs, and LA will remain one. But it might not
have to be as much "the center" of US filmmaking.
(Filmmakers, and their equivalents in theater, for that matter,
could model themselves on bands. They practice for the love of it,
and work together over the years. This way, directors don't have
to find a bunch of new actors for each project. Some
"photorealistic" filmmaking or theater requires faces that "look
right", but more "theatrical" or "minimalist" filmmaking or theater, not
so much. So that could remove some of the need for a hub. Do
people want to watch the latter kind of movies that much?
(Sounds like some kind of art film.) Maybe not for now, but
culture is likely to go somewhere, and people get tired of
whatever's mainstream sometimes.)
I'm not completely sure why there needs to be, or will be in
the long run, a music industry, because music can be made by
hobbyists that sounds pretty good, and they don't need any more
personnel than the members of the band. But, I can see that
if you want to make a lot of money in music, you need support
staff, which you have to find somewhere. And also scenes are
always good for the development of music, and scenes and hubs
are very similar, often the same thing. So I think LA will
probably remain a hub for music, but maybe not "the" center
of music on the West Coast. On the other hand, LA is the
second-most-populous metro area in the US, and my default
assumption is that that will stay about the same in the future.
So maybe it would be the biggest music hub on the West Coast,
just because of that.
It's not clear what effect AI will have on music. (In this
paragraph, I'm thinking of "prosaic", "narrow", or "tool" AI,
a kind of "laminar" progression from what we have now.) Could
really sophisticated AI make unimaginably good synthetic music
that no humans will be able to surpass, putting all human
musicians out of work? If so, would music have to be expensive?
It could be even cheaper than it is now. Is cheap music as
enjoyable as expensive music? I would say, no. Really expensive
music might make you feel regret for having paid so much, but
really cheap music is something you can gorge yourself on to the
point that you have "heard it all" and find none of it special. We
already have way more cheap recorded music than we really need, and
maybe it's just me, but I'm not that into music anymore. But, I
would be interested in being in a band. Or maybe hearing my friends
play their music. Maybe AI will just kill off the professional /
industrial version of music by being so ridiculously good at
that. Still, if I had to pick a place to find musicians on the
West Coast, LA is still where I would expect to find the most.
(Maybe a lot of this paragraph also applies to the movie
industry.)
Mexico will probably become less of a developing country
over time (approach "developedness", whatever that is), and
Tijuana will generally reflect that. I don't know how long
that process of development may take. There may come a day
when another city becomes a more favorable place to site a
developed/developing boundary hub. Probably if Mexico is
not "developing" anymore, a lot of other countries may not
be either, that currently are, and the "developing nation"
dimension to culture may be less important than, say, the
Mexican, Ghanaian, Indonesian, Pakistani, etc. dimensions,
or the "non-Western" dimensions. A big unknown for me
is how immigration will work in the future, so if Mexico
is currently a (relatively) good place for developing
country people to immigrate to relative to immigrating
to the US (something I would guess is true as of now),
I don't know how much of an advantage that will be in
the future.
The Imperial Valley may remain a farming community,
but that depends on the availability of water. And that
depends on whether California cities become serious about
developing alternatives to Sierra snowpack, groundwater,
and the Colorado River. Things like (even more) conservation,
recycled water, or desalination. A cultural altruism hub,
for its own sake, might lobby Southern California cities
to free up water for the Imperial Valley, so that there
would still be a rural community to study. I least expect
that the Imperial Valley farming commmunity will be what
it is in 100 years, compared to the other three population
centers considered for this hub, but I don't think it has
to go away.
[From a casual look at Calexico Chronicle
headlines on Twitter,
it looks like the Imperial Valley may be or want to be a
lithium mining area. Also, it produces solar power.]
This all is thinking in terms of "business as usual"
future. But the future may not be "business as usual".
There are some extreme futures that make the project of a
cultural altruism hub irrelevant or impractical. If AGI
kills all humans, for instance. If for some reason
civilization collapses to the point that no one can afford
to centralize in one area to do this kind of work, then the
hub would be impractical, although cultural altruism probably
would remain very important, just as religion (traditional
cultural altruism?) has been very important throughout human
history.
But, there are civilizational declines or "soft collapses"
in which the project might still be viable and relevant, and
similarly the future in which AGI is dominant may not rule
out things like locality, geography, and human culture.
Here is a scenario in which that may be the case:
If AGI doesn't kill us all, it's probably because it will have
been deliberately aligned with human interests. One way to do
that is to make it fundamentally attuned to the will of specific
humans who are in control of them. To me, as a non-AI expert,
this sounds kind of simple to implement. Another way is to
make an AI that pursues some kind of "human values", independent
of any individual or group of individuals controlling it.
This sound, to me, a non-AI expert, harder to implement.
One problem is that we don't know which values to give the AI,
and once we do, it might not be trivial to implement them in
a way that the AI can understand. (Trying to train it for
a bunch of different things instead of just one.)
But, a solution that at least to me at first glance simplifies
this is something like optimizing the AGI to maximize / safeguard
more or less "one simple thing", our agency.
Basically, the AGI tries to be a libertarian one. The AGI may
prevent us from doing things like kill each other (which eliminates
the victim's agency) or enslave each other, but it may leave us
free to have to figure out whether to pursue a variety of values
that don't threaten agency, as we see fit.
A secular person may say "well, that's the 'end of history' as
far as I'm concerned", but some might not. For me, as a religious
person, there is a huge amount of "history" left, which is, are
people seeking God, enough and in the right way? Deliberate
thinking about culture, and altruistically altering it, sound
basically as relevant as ever. An agency-seeking AGI might
allow for a kind of spiritual X-risk (something which causes
a large amount of people to die the
"second death").
Returning to a secular perspective, we might ask if this AGI
would be "a human agency-seeking entity for all time,
which could never change", or would it be something that humans
could alter if they wanted to? Is it in the definition of
"agency-seeking" to allow humans to alter the AI? Maybe, but
to the extent of making it not be agency-seeking anymore? I
don't think that agency-seeking can't limit the agency of people
to make it not be agency-seeking anymore. However, the transition
to AGI is going to be done, not in a "frictionless vacuum", but
in the political world we live in, and it does seem odd that
a group of technocrats can decide to force their
agency-maximization-of-all-people on all people for maybe all time,
even if it is a radically libertarian thing, because that in itself
is an abrogation of their agency. Also, the political world is
significantly captured by interest groups. Also, it is a conservative
(keep things the same) and traditional (extend precedent) kind of
world (keep institutions going rather than starting replacements). So I
could easily see the actual agency-maximizing AGI being trained to
respect human political will. Maybe it wouldn't maximize the
agency of individuals, but rather political bodies.
If that's the case, then politics remains relevant, maybe
"for all time", and human cultural drift becomes a powerful factor
in determining what the AGI ends up doing, far into the future.
It might become the case that human political and cultural
problems become the major, or only, bottleneck for altruism.
I mentioned locality and geography above. Technological development
may make it so that humans don't have to live in any particular place.
Or so much of our lives will be lived online that the local world won't
have much, if any, relevance to culture. Then, the hubs will be
online. (I wonder what analogies there might be to siting a local hub
when thinking about "siting" an online hub. Are there strategically
valuable ways to draw people together, maybe? Are there hubs that
are, more, or less, adjacent to other ones? How does adjacency in
a more or less purely social space work, as compared to geographical
adjacencies? Maybe something to look at in another post.)
But it could be a long time before that happens. We might choose
not to adopt all of that technology. If we do, technology adoption
is not instantaneous, and is slowed by social factors. Some of us,
or many of us, might deliberately reject living our lives entirely
online. It's true that AGI would be individually far more intelligent
than everyone else on Earth, but the amount of "compute" in all the
people on Earth might exceed that in AGI sufficiently that the AGI
would need us to make a lot of decisions for it, and so we would
still work, and we might need to be physically close to whatever
processes happen at a specific location. We might be physically
constrained on how much compute we can devote to AI, or we might
simply decide not to give AI all the compute we possibly could,
because we preferred to work, and for that matter, preferred
locality and geography in themselves.
I think we are used to
technological-adoption gradients inherited from a past of scarcity
and competition, but there are enough people who are non-adopters
of technology or late adopters, who simply wouldn't care about
making the world more efficient, and would deliberately reject
technological change if they weren't made to by survival constraints.
When I look at the "S-curve of technology adoption", I am pretty
certain that the people represented by the leftmost and rightmost
parts of the graph really care about a given technology, whether
opposed to it or in favor of it, but the middle part, I think, is
more into what is socially acceptable or convenient, and could
align just as well with the left or the right of the graph. So,
as "technology" (taken as a reified whole) provides for people
more, they need less loyalty to it as a value (because values
ask for more of people, and the people don't need as much more from
technology which would give flesh to their value of it) [they don't
need any more "technology" so they don't have to consciously
value it], and could align more with whatever other values there
are, without necessarily ceasing to adopt all of the technology
that supports that indifference to "technology".
--
Another thought: simulating different lifestyles. This should
have some effect on culture. Tijuana gives an unsimulated developing
country city. Imperial Valley an unsimulated American rural area.
Similarly with San Diego and LA. But what about trying to survive
off the land? That should do something to a culture. In the US,
people generally don't have to survive off the land. But there are
areas where it's more practical (or called-for) to do so. (There
may be areas outside the US that are favorable for this pursuit.) If
you can afford to buy a large-enough plot of land, you can site a
community there that tries to live in a primitive, self-sustaining way.
Probably best if it's socially isolated (more of a "correspondent"
place).
--
Mexicali. I didn't know very much about Mexicali before beginning this
post. But, it is a fairly large city (~600,000 people), located just
south of the US/Mexico border near the Imperial Valley. It has a
manufacturing sector. Maybe the cultures of manufacturing sectors or
industrial cities are different in some way than those of other cities or
rural areas? It sounds plausible. (LA has its ports, which are another
industrial influence.)
--
Possible Northeast US hub. I don't know that area very well, but
looking on Google Maps it looks like Wilmington, DE is maybe an
interesting site for a hub, because it's on the train lines to
Washington, D.C. and New York, roughly equidistant. Access to two
different elite cultures. Also not far from Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania, with Amish and other agriculture. A different rural
America from Imperial Valley. It looks like it's not far from some
bays, which might have interesting cultures. Maybe not far from
some Southern culture (Maryland or Virginia).
Would it make sense to have this Northeast hub as well as a Southwest hub?
If so, why not another one centered in Indianapolis (Chicago and Midwestern
and Southern cultures). Or in the Seattle-Vancouver area? Detroit and
Toronto? If there are too many hubs, it weakens the centralization benefit
of hubs. I'm not sure exactly how to limit things. One could ask "is
there any way to have correspondents in New York, Washington, LA, etc.
rather than siting a hub to try to capture those attractive locations?"
If I were most concerned with accurately understanding and affecting
the US, I would certainly want something like the Indianapolis hub. But,
maybe I would rather focus on global concerns. If the Southwest hub
allows for better access to the Global South (via Tijuana), then that
makes it advantageous for understanding and affecting the world. Likewise,
the Northeast hub, by connecting to Washington and New York, connects to
power structures (power cultures) that affect the whole world, so it is
of that level of strategic value. In fact, if I were a Southerner or
Midwesterner concerned about the under-representation of Southern or
Midwestern values in the future, I might want to mainly try to send
correspondents to the Southwest or Northeast, so that they would be
part of that conversation directly, rather than trying to create a
parallel culture of cultural altruism, to reduce cultural "shear".
In comparing the Northeast with the Southwest, I think one advantage
of the Southwest is that Tijuana has a lower cost of living than San
Diego, LA, New York, Washington, or (I'm assuming) anywhere in between
New York and Washington.[*] So, if someone from the Southern US wants to send
a representative to a cultural altruism hub, and they have a limited
budget, they could fund more people in Tijuana than they could in the
Northeast. As US citizens, those sent people could cross the border
and access San Diego and LA. There would be the usual inconvenience
of crossing, but it would be a lot more affordable than flying to the
Southwest (or even the Northeast) on a regular basis, and possibly less
time-consuming. I would assume that many people in the Northeast have
enough money that they could fund people in San Diego or LA (or Tijuana),
if they want to be represented there.
([*]: Tijuana's cost of living is close to half that of
San Diego. The other hub cities mentioned (LA, New York, Washington,
Bay Area) are about as expensive or more expensive than San Diego. (All this
as of April 2022). *** *** All of those numbers came from Expatistan, but
then I experienced a glitch on that site (I think) which calls it into question
somewhat. So then I checked out World
Cost of Living Calculator, which said that Tijuana's cost of living was
more like a third that of San Diego. SD's relationship to LA, NY, DC, and the
Bay seemed comparable to Expatistan. So I guess the numbers on Tijuana are
probably somewhat fuzzy. *** Now I should see if I can find another
cost of living site to see how it compares. worlddata.info says that cost of living in
Mexico is one half of that of the US. San Diego and Tijuana could plausibly
both be at the more expensive ends of their respective countries, so maybe
that makes the Expatistan number sound good. *** Numbeo comes up with
130k MXN in San Diego for a 50k MXN lifestyle in Tijuana (in Tijuana, spend
about 38% of what you do in San Diego) *** I'm going to quit at this point
and say that Tijuana is somewhere between a third and a half as expensive
as San Diego, and, also remember that "your mileage may vary".)
(If you want to legally immigrate to Mexico, you have to have a savings
balance and/or monthly income above a certain amount. According to
Mexperience.com,
the monthly income required comes out to ~30,000 USD or ~55,000 USD per year
to become a permanent resident, depending on whether you apply within
Mexico, or at a consulate in another country, respectively (temporary
residency is less). I'm not sure why there's so much of a difference.
I would guess that you have to apply for residency at a consulate when
you first go, but if you are already living in Mexico and to extend your
temporary residency or upgrade to permanent residency, maybe you can
apply in Mexico and get lower rates. *** This required income reduces
the cost-effectiveness of living in Tijuana, especially at the $55,000
a year price point, but on the other hand, as noted elsewhere
in this post, you can stay up to 180 days in Mexico as a tourist, and that
would give you the full benefit of the low cost of living compared to the
US. People who want to fund developing world people in Tijuana may have
to pay them more, but maybe that's good (attracts a certain kind of talent
/ allows the people they hire to send back remittances or something like
that). I was going to write "a better kind of talent", but people who
aren't motivated as much by money have something valuable just in that
and offering more money will decrease the proportion of that kind of
people in a culture. *** Before you can get a permanent resident visa,
you need to hold a temporary resident visa for 4 years (according to
Where the Road Forks).
These don't have as high an income requirement, as mentioned above
(specifically ~$33,000 at a consulate and ~$18,000 in Mexico, according
to Mexperience.com). So that makes it more affordable to start to
settle in Tijuana. *** One thing I missed on Mexperience.com earlier
was that to add on dependent spouses or minors is about $900 (consulate) /
$500 (in Mexico) per person of required income per month. *** Another
point from Mexperience.com is that you can use a savings balance instead
of a monthly income. ~$45,000 / ~$25,000 for temporary residency,
~$180,000 / ~$100,000 for permanent residency, dependent spouse and minor
~$900 / ~$500.)
I think practically what I would do is advertise
the attractive features (and potential downsides) of different areas
or ways of approaching cultural altruism hubs, all the considerations
given in this post, and let individuals decide where to relocate. The
advantages and disadvantages decide, more than any one individual. It's
better for these hubs to be scenes, and scenes involve decentralized
decision-making.
--
What would be the minimum size of a viable cultural altruism hub?
Using the California hub as an example, we could say that LA needs
to have a population living in it full-time in order to tap
into the movie and music scene (L), there needs to be a population
who travel to LA from San Diego sometimes (SL), a population who travel
to Tijuana sometimes (ST), and a population who live in San Diego full-time
(S). Populations SL, ST, and S could be the same, if all the people in
San Diego want to keep up with both LA and Tijuana.
I would say that's the minimum set-up, although maybe we could switch
L for T (instead of people living in LA, people living in Tijuana, for a
minimum hub). [Later: I'm not sure why you even need L or T for the bare
minimum hub.] How many people does it take to make a viable hub? My
subjective guess is that probably all the roles need to be filled or the
hub won't work. The total number (L + S) also needs to be above a certain
amount or the scene is likely to spontaneously fade out. What is the
minimum viable value of L + S? If I consult my gut, I would say that under
15 is more likely to fade out than to grow spontaneously, 15 to 30 is maybe
equally likely to fade out as to grow spontaneously, 30 to 100 is more
likely to grow spontaneously than to fade out spontaneously, and
increasingly so the more you get above 100. (Everything is finite, so at
some point above 100 it would stop growing spontaneously, but I don't know
what value to pick for that.)
(This is an area where people with more experience with community building
would know better.)
A more cohesive and motivated group can keep from fading out longer at
lower population sizes. Also this group would get the best returns on
the hub structure, by integrating everyone's experiences more deeply.
A scene should eventually involve people who are not integrated or
only casually motivated, but at first, to seed something like this, it
might be good to have people who are more connected and motivated.
However, there is a danger of becoming insular that way. (A "cult"
that's too hard to join.) Probably it is best to just have more
people seeding it, if you can afford to.
--
Could there be some connection to reducing tensions between governments
in the long term, through cultural altruism and cultural altruism hubs?
Right now (as of drafting this section, 9 May 2022), there is a war
going on in Ukraine which could be seen as the clash of civilizations.
Russia might have an extra incentive in fighting the US, because they
don't like liberal culture, and liberal dominance. The US thinks that
Putin is an abuser of human (liberal) rights. What if the US and
Russia could talk about what is so good and bad about liberalism,
and come to an agreement to mitigate the harms of liberalism, or
illiberalism, as the case may be, and then not look at each other
as evil? They really are evil, both of them, at least when they do
the bad things that come along with liberalism / illiberalism. They
are right to be concerned about each other and their reaching for
power. But they could come to see each other as, though never the
same, at least functionally safe for each other and their own people.
Now, the trick is, what exactly am I referring to (de re) when
I said "the US" and "Russia" in that last paragraph? Am I talking
about Biden and Putin? Biden is "here today, gone tomorrow", given
that at most he'll be in office 8 years. And the US government is
not nearly so coherent as to be something any one person is totally
in control of. Putin may be more representative of "Russia", in
terms of him being able to decide to go to war in Ukraine based on
his personal feelings. But even assuming Putin has total power in
Russia, Putin came from somewhere, has history, was taught things,
and had to convince people around him to do what he wants, has to
understand the gradients of Russian psychology, and that psychology
comes from somewhere, has history, has been taught things.
Because I don't know that much about politics and government,
I will try to be vague and broad and say "elite culture" is the
main determinant of "the US" and "Russia". Exactly who goes in
"the elite", I don't know. But, wherever leaders come from in
a country, and whatever scenes they have to pass through on their
way to power, that's elite culture (a broad definition). Whatever
the elite culture experiences, however they interpret that
experience, however they were educated, however they relate to
each other interpersonally, what their collective traumas were,
even perhaps whatever food and music they like, etc. has some
bearing on how politics and government work in a given culture,
and thus what kinds of decisions are made by entities we can
call "Washington", "Moscow", or "Beijing".
The US has a lot of soft power. How is it so powerful? One
possibility is that it, without realizing it, hitched its wagon
to hedonism and preference satisfaction, the gradients of humans
getting what they naturally want, "freely". (This view
somewhat descends from How The West
Was Won by Scott Alexander.) So rock music is "liberation",
is the destruction of tradition, is "be a generic human with
drives who likes to feel". Western rock and pop went around the
world. When you are liberated, you are a liberal and you like
the US, perhaps. But what are you liberated from? And when
you get what you feel like, maybe what you feel like is enslaving
you.
The US is a country founded on pleasing its people -- which
is great in the short run (for a few centuries, maybe), but
worrisome if you think that there's something worth fighting for
besides humans' natural hedonism and preference satisfaction.
People tend to find something fishy or weird with wireheading, but
why? It's just hedonism and preference satisfaction taken to
a logical extreme. Maybe we have some intuitive sense that
there's something more to value than just hedonism and preference
satisfaction, and the thought of wireheading is weird and
extreme enough that we can see in enough relief how it could
be bad. Things like pretty sunsets and not having to wait in
line at the grocery store too long just seem like "living
the good life". But wireheading takes the whole "get what you
want and feel good" idea too far.
But I think in American culture, or, in my California left/liberal
world, wireheading is one of the few things that maybe we would
think is "too far". Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History thought
(sorry I can't cite which page) that California was the most
"post-historical" part of the world. [Internet Archive's PDF copy
has on p. 319 "in the most post-historical part of the United States, California" -- most post-historical part of the US, not of the world.] Maybe that
means, the place most accepting of "the good life of getting what you
want and feeling good", where everything is chill and everything is okay.
I feel like sometimes, here in California, we are drifting toward
being "post-consciousness", that on many levels we will cease to
be human beings, lacking personal histories, and will be unable
to comprehend many emotional realities, and cease to care, a kind
of depersonalized "beautiful nihilism".
The rest of the world, or parts of the rest of the world, looking
at that, are horrified. The reaction that we still have to wireheading,
they have to "America". America is just wireheading that hasn't
finished getting there. They don't want to be America, and they
are horrified that we are able to use our soft power to addict them,
"liberate" them, and depersonalize them, so that we go down the
same drain with America, all a homogenized soup of pleasure and
emptiness.
How much of the rest of the world really thinks this? I don't
know, but supposedly it's the kind of thing that goes into "Russian
propaganda against the West", which I assume does convince some
people and probably does have some connection with how Russian
elite culture actually thinks.
The thing about soft power is that it is powered by gradients
of human nature, and thus the rock bands in America and Britain
need have no idea what they are doing, what their influence is
having to undermine traditional cultures. The basic idea of
rock is all it takes to get loose and get copied. Whenever
someone goes to try to make it in Hollywood, they tend to have
little or no intention to prop up US soft power. They just
want to make money or be famous, or pursue their art, and
Americans just want to feel good, or uplifted, or whatever
they get out of movies. Americans can be very insular,
and for some weird reason the rest of the world is obsessed
with America and can't take their eyes off us. And we just
go about producing powerful entertainments that please us
and satisfy our preferences. But then they get out in the
world and influence the world.
So that means that the US hardly thinks about what it's
doing culturally, it just does it. And so we are in a position
where "power is a broken relationship" -- we are powerful
because we don't understand what we're doing. We don't
hear back from the people we are talking to. They are
obsessed with us, but we are not obsessed with them. So
we are not shaped by them. We are the conversation, and
they are listening. They can go our way, but we won't
and seemingly can't go theirs. We are the way of the future,
and the future will inevitably come. And we are the culture
of inevitability, which is seemingly the most successful
culture, the one which supplants all other cultures.
I am both pessimistic and optimistic about culture.
I think we are headed down the drain, and in some respects
I have sympathies with traditional cultures in their
rejection of liberalism. But I am optimistic because
I don't think we have to keep going down the drain, and
we can stop doing that, if we listen to all the people
in the world, so that they can teach us their values.
One risk of "cultural altruism", especially in hubs, is
that it might gather together cultures and then be a blender
that homogenizes all of them. I don't know if this
homogenization is entirely avoidable, and perhaps in
some ways could be good (maybe there are values that
all humans should have). But, while hubs are risky that
way, they do provide the opportunity for non-American/non-Western
cultures to try to talk back to the seats of soft power.
Russia (/ "Moscow") or China (/ "Beijing") could try to
influence popular and elite cultures in the US by sending
"cultural missionaries" to try to explain to Hollywood,
Silicon Valley, Washington, and New York what is so dangerous
about liberal power and liberal drift, why exactly Communism
or the Russian soul is better in alignment with the true good
values than liberalism, and why liberal power, soft and hard,
is a dangerous and irresponsible thing, is a bunch of rich
Westerners who affect the rest of the world, and the future,
in ways they don't understand -- people who don't know what
they're doing.
Being a missionary is a two-way street, and liberal influence
would make its way back to Moscow and Beijing, but from their
perspective, at least it's a two-way street and not what, it
seems, is closer to a one-way street where America -- or human
drives -- speak without being willing and/or able to hear.
People who are good at talking win when there's a norm of
"we do things by talking". When people become unable to talk,
they resort to violence. When liberalism is, effectively
and where it counts, unable or unwilling to hear what the
traditional or illiberal wish they could say -- then they will
resort to violence at some point, to express what they can't say.
But if we really let people try to change our culture, and
we don't shut them out (or shut them up), then they do not
have to use violence to get their way, and there could be
fewer tensions internationally. Cultural altruism and
cultural altruism hubs could be access points for non-Western
entities to try to speak to Western culture, thus reducing
their need to be violent. What if "Moscow", "Beijing", and
"Washington" (and all other synecdoches like those) could
trust each other? If the whole cultures of each city could
trust the cultures of others? Maybe this is partially or
wholly attainable.
--
Well, thinking optimistically, getting national governments
involved in this could be a good thing. But, consider China's
Confucius Institutes, which have been accused of being propaganda
arms of the Chinese government. Chinese culture should have
a seat at any table of global culture. But should the Chinese
government? The Chinese government has its own "biological"
interests (protecting its own survival, furthering its own
power for power's own sake). These are not necessarily aligned
with finding the truth of the best cultural values. It is good
to have governments at the table -- they are part of culture.
But governments have a unique ability to overrepresent themselves
because they have so much money and power.
Any decentralized hub can be accessed by anyone -- that's
part of the virtue of it. It might be possible to use something
like ostracism against the Chinese government (or the US government).
But a clever government could co-opt / bribe, or infiltrate other
cultural units. Maybe this is unlikely enough to happen that it
can be dealt with ad hoc if and when it does happen. Like, effective
altruism could have been infiltrated by government agencies, and,
as it grows, it becomes an even bigger target for that. But maybe
it won't happen.
If it does happen with effective altruism, and at worst-case
it takes the life or soul of EA away (either of which is death),
then we could look back on EA's life and remember with honor the
many things it did accomplish, especially the useful thoughts it
created, in its lifetime when it was really itself. Those thoughts
can help a successor movement get off the ground more easily,
I would think. So, with a "cultural altruism" movement, a lot
of the good it could do would be when it was relatively small and
quiet. Cultural altruism goes beyond any one movement, just
as effective altruism goes beyond the current effective altruism
movement. So even if one movement got infiltrated, and lost its
soul and thus was not trustworthy or trust-producing anymore,
a new movement which had a truth-seeking soul could emerge,
be credible, become known as credible, and carry the torch
of the cultural altruism topic. Perhaps the scene could carry
on throughout the transition. The topic is eternal and the
scene is perhaps very long-lasting, even if movements, or even
nations, come and go.
A cultural altruism hub would attract both "soldiers" and
"scouts". Scouts would be looking for the truth and would be
representative agents of people who value the truth but don't have
the resources to sort through all the different perspectives.
Soldiers would be trying to convince scouts of things, or convince
each other of things. For a hub to work, scouts would have to put forth
as much effort as soldiers, and exert a kind of influence over
the culture. (This is basically the tension between "meta"
and "partisan" interests as mentioned above.) Scouts would be
able to exert soft power by not taking seriously distortionary
effects of soldiers' lawyerly advocacy. They would also be advocates
for good communication norms.
I would expect there to potentially be a kind of an arms race,
where national governments like the US, Russia, and China, sent in
people and tried to develop more sophisticated arguments and cultural
artifacts, to favor purely national-political interests, in the guise of
promoting national-cultural interests. And the "metans" or "scouts",
and regular people in the scene (including less-assiduous, -competitive,
and/or -resourced "soldiers"), would learn to filter out such
propaganda.
The scouts, or any "scout/soldier hybrids", might work to improve
the arguments of the underresourced. For instance, if a member of
an Amazonian tribe were debating a Roman Catholic, the Catholic would
have Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, maybe Aristotle, plus hundreds or
thousands of past and present professional Catholic theologians to
use for her defense. The Amazonian tribe member might have what he
remembered of what his extended family taught him. He might have
a big problem finding flaws in her arguments, just because over the
centuries, the Catholics have heard many counterarguments to their
views and have come up with responses. But that doesn't mean that
Catholicism is right and the Amazonian tribe is wrong. It could
just mean that the tribe never had the worldly resources to come up
with a really robust and sophisticated defense of itself. This is
where cultural altruists, trying to be scouts, but using soldier
moves, could try to strengthen the Amazonian case.
--
So San Diego is conveniently across the border from a
(somewhat dangerous) Mexican city that's somewhat easier
to immigrate to than the US, and to the north of San Diego,
there's Los Angeles, a center of the film and music industries.
To the east of San Diego there is a rural area in the
Imperial Valley and south of that there is a rural area
and an industrial and urban area in the Mexicali Valley.
Silicon Valley is a day's drive away from San Diego.
[Also the San Joaquin Valley is about a day
away, for a perhaps different rural environment.]
Washington, D.C. and New York are not too far from
each other, and somewhere in between could also be
a hub. We see a route by which non-American/non-Western
thinking can get access to the elite culture of the
most powerful country on earth, by way of San Diego.
[A route whereby the northeast and southwest work
together.]
There need to be other hubs, or "correspondents",
to gather influence from all different parts of the
world.
I keep nervously wondering if I've written something
that is biased in favor of Southern California because
I live here, but I think that the principles in this post should
be helpful in deciding whatever place a hub should be located,
if there is a better place.
--
Added note:
I was reading in National Geographic (December 2002, "The
Hawaiians", by Paul Theroux), and came across this quote (p. 16):
--Watching the sail bellying in the wind, Skipper Bertelsmann
said to me, "This canoe represents family. It's about sharing --
history, values, culture, kuleana [responsibilities],
kōkua [help]. Sailing a long distance,
the canoe becomes our island. We have to learn to live and work
together in harmony. These are values that are translated to land.
On land, think 'canoe.'"--
Traditional Polynesian sailing, makes people into a different kind
of person on land or at sea -- perhaps a distinctively Hawaiian person.
It may be necessary to do something like that to understand Hawaiian
values. Cultural altruists may have to physically live as a certain
people group, with the people, to understand.
