Culture-Oriented History - by Robin Hanson

I’ve been traveling a lot for six weeks; one more week to go, then I’ll stay home for a while. In that time, I’ve given many talks, including two on cultural drift (to be posted soon), a topic I’ve continued to read and think lots about. I feel a bit out of practice writing now, and I’m struggling with how to tell you about all the changes in my thinking. I guess the biggest thing I want to say now is that the cultural drift thesis seems rich with implications for history and current affairs. But these implications may be a lot of work to tease out, and I fear I’m likely not very well qualified to this work. However, let me at least outline the task here. Good historians generally try to explain what has happened to humans in time, using all the promising social models and abstractions they can find. Instead of focusing on explaining the details of individual lives, they naturally prefer to focus on explaining large scale patterns of behaviors, only considering individual details in a

I’ve been traveling a lot for six weeks; one more week to go, then I’ll stay home for a while. In that time, I’ve given many talks, including two on cultural drift (to be posted soon), a topic I’ve continued to read and think lots about. I feel a bit out of practice writing now, and I’m struggling with how to tell you about all the changes in my thinking. I guess the biggest thing I want to say now is that the cultural drift thesis seems rich with implications for history and current affairs. But these implications may be a lot of work to tease out, and I fear I’m likely not very well qualifie