The War Of The Rules

Part 1: The Rise Of The Rules

Thanks Alex for the photo

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. - Helen Keller

Deer eat grass. Squirrels bury nuts. Badgers dig dens. But you don’t see a lot of squirrels building dens, despite possessing some of the physical tools. It’s more or less an impossibility; their behavior is limited to a fairly narrow band dictated by countless years of evolution. For most of human history this must have been true for us as well.

The turning point was the invention of rules. The riverbed is rich for foraging. Use a flat stone to mash food and ease digestion. The biological status quo broke. It had taken genetic evolution a few hundred thousand years to teach a squirrel to bury a nut. It now took a few minutes to teach a human.

The world went from an equilibrium millions of years in the making to a single-species arms race exponential in scale and consequence.

So rules sprang up everywhere. They were linguistic: the phoneme /bɜːd/ signifys bird. Taxonomical too: if you have external gonads you’re a man. And metaphysical: the Gods want a lamb sacrificed.

We might imagine that rules were, as a whole, rational. Sleep on a bed of leaves to stay warm. But this cannot be the case. Early rules functioned as semi-discrete units of cultural evolution. Similar to gene mutation, they often had an underlying arbitrariness throw bird feathers to the East after ritual sacrifice. Or Don’t wear white after labor day. This was a feature. No one yet understood germ theory, nutrition, physics or much of anything. Humanity couldn’t make sensible rules, but it could make a lot of rules and let the harshness of nature find the sensible ones.

And a lot of weird rules in the washing machine of time has yielded some gems. A prominent chronicler of this is Joseph Henrich, and I have borrowed a long (and now famous) quotation from The Secret Of Our Success from Scott’s review.

In the Americas, where manioc was first domesticated, societies who have relied on bitter varieties for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning. In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multiday processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid. Once separated, the liquid is boiled into a beverage, but the fiber and starch must then sit for two more days, when they can then be baked and eaten. Figure 7.1 shows the percentage of cyanogenic content in the liquid, fiber, and starch remaining through each major step in this processing.

Such processing techniques are crucial for living in many parts of Amazonia, where other crops are difficult to cultivate and often unproductive. However, despite their utility, one person would have a difficult time figuring out the detoxification technique. Consider the situation from the point of view of the children and adolescents who are learning the techniques. They would have rarely, if ever, seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because the techniques work. And even if the processing was ineffective, such that cases of goiter (swollen necks) or neurological problems were common, it would still be hard to recognize the link between these chronic health issues and eating manioc. Most people would have eaten manioc for years with no apparent effects. Low cyanogenic varieties are typically boiled, but boiling alone is insufficient to prevent the chronic conditions for bitter varieties. Boiling does, however, remove or reduce the bitter taste and prevent the acute symptoms (e.g., diarrhea, stomach troubles, and vomiting).

So, if one did the common-sense thing and just boiled the high-cyanogenic manioc, everything would seem fine. Since the multistep task of processing manioc is long, arduous, and boring, sticking with it is certainly non-intuitive. Tukanoan women spend about a quarter of their day detoxifying manioc, so this is a costly technique in the short term. Now consider what might result if a self-reliant Tukanoan mother decided to drop any seemingly unnecessary steps from the processing of her bitter manioc. She might critically examine the procedure handed down to her from earlier generations and conclude that the goal of the procedure is to remove the bitter taste. She might then experiment with alternative procedures by dropping some of the more labor-intensive or time-consuming steps. She’d find that with a shorter and much less labor-intensive process, she could remove the bitter taste. Adopting this easier protocol, she would have more time for other activities, like caring for her children. Of course, years or decades later her family would begin to develop the symptoms of chronic cyanide poisoning.

Thus, the unwillingness of this mother to take on faith the practices handed down to her from earlier generations would result in sickness and early death for members of her family. Individual learning does not pay here, and intuitions are misleading. The problem is that the steps in this procedure are causally opaque—an individual cannot readily infer their functions, interrelationships, or importance. The causal opacity of many cultural adaptations had a big impact on our psychology.

Wait. Maybe I’m wrong about manioc processing. Perhaps it’s actually rather easy to individually figure out the detoxification steps for manioc? Fortunately, history has provided a test case. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese transported manioc from South America to West Africa for the first time. They did not, however, transport the age-old indigenous processing protocols or the underlying commitment to using those techniques. Because it is easy to plant and provides high yields in infertile or drought-prone areas, manioc spread rapidly across Africa and became a staple food for many populations. The processing techniques, however, were not readily or consistently regenerated. Even after hundreds of years, chronic cyanide poisoning remains a serious health problem in Africa. Detailed studies of local preparation techniques show that high levels of cyanide often remain and that many individuals carry low levels of cyanide in their blood or urine, which haven’t yet manifested in symptoms. In some places, there’s no processing at all, or sometimes the processing actually increases the cyanogenic content. On the positive side, some African groups have in fact culturally evolved effective processing techniques, but these techniques are spreading only slowly.

We moderns know what toxicity is. We know that substances like manioc contain smaller discrete substances like molecules. We know what chemistry is. We understand digestion is a chemical process that yields byproducts.

But the first person to process manioc didn’t. They could not have been operating strictly rationally. It must have taken many small manioc-eating kinship groups preparing and eating manioc in lots of strange ways over a long period of time before ‘rational’ manioc preparation emerged.

That is, our prior intuitions about the causal relationship between rules and knowledge is: Knowledge → Rule. But in many ways this is incorrect. Arbitrary rules created for food preparation led to abundance of healthy calories, which led to population density, which led to specialization, which eventually led to scientific investigation of the rules themselves. That is, much of the causative direction is Rule → Knowledge.

This explains why adherence to rules has vastly outpaced paradigms of rule efficacy. Ie, take a look at any rule-set that isn’t your own (eg, non-Western.) There’s a plethora of strongly held arbitrary and nonscientific beliefs.

If we agree that historically Rules → Knowledge is a common paradigm, what about current society? Consider the barriers a contemporary PhD student at a top college has evaluating a simple rule like carrots are healthy. Despite mass spectrometers, math, statistics, writing systems, medicine, et cetera, their evaluation will struggle to surpass the mundane observation healthy people eat carrots. Of course, healthy people might sacrifice birds as well.

The further we go back in history, the greater this effect. How long has the West possessed the science, or even the philosophy, to evaluate Manioc preparation? There’s another test case here: the Spanish stopped nixtamalizing corn upon conquering the New World. Tens of thousands of people died over many generations. It wasn’t until the turn the of 20th century that the link to corn consumption was made, and another decade or so until the link to nixtamalization (and niacin) understood.

The core elements of culture - what clothes men should wear, how to hold and treat a baby, how to prepare manioc, what foods to eat (and which are taboo) the million small mundane rules and the 10 sacred commandments - all must be arbitrary and inscrutable. If human societies relied on having a solid understanding of rules before adhering to them then human progress would never have exploded in the first place.

Or, put another way, the societies that strongly followed arbitrary rules won. And we’re their descendants.

Part II: The Rise Of Ideologies

Reverence for the rules is likely an ingrained human trait. All of us follow and enforce rules we don’t fully understand. But some of us are more pious than others. This is often arbitrary and rule specific, but if we imagine it possible that there’s some general temperament here, then we can label the two extremes.

Those who are particularly devout have instincts to conserve rules. They should be particularly disgusted by breaks from the cultural norm.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the liberals, which comes from the Latin liberalis, which roughly means ‘free men,’ ie, free from rules. 

These ideologies both add value. The easiest way to show this may be with food. We all love and respect traditional cooking - our grandmother’s lasagna, authentic Chinese food, garden vegetables. Traditional methods require an abnormally high adherence to arbitrary rules (why not use fertilizer? Why hand-cut vegetables and not a slapchop?) but they set standards for flavor, texture, nutrition and efficiency.

Consider Neapolitan pizza, which trusted sources have told me is the best pizza in the world. It is regulated by the Associazone Verace Pizze Napoletana, and a 21 page pdf (not including appendices!) dictates rigid and arbitrary regulations. This is as conservative as it gets. This pizza has pedigree, you can present it to even the snootiest of family members. You can eat it when you run for political office.

But dig a little deeper here and things get doughier. Roma tomatoes, synonymous with traditional Italian food, are (like all tomatoes) ultimately from the New World. Upon introduction, they must have been nontraditional/experimental/liberal. And pizza has only in near-history achieved status: for the first few hundred years it was a peasant food. It offended the sensibilities of the rich and middle class, eg, Samuel Morse:

A species of most nauseating cake…covered over with slices of pomodoro or tomatoes, and sprinkled with little fish and black pepper and I know not what other ingredients, it altogether looks like a piece of bread that had been taken reeking out of the sewer.

Morse may be a curmudgeon, but there’s an underlying truth here. The ungoverned and inexperienced market of early pizza likely produced a lot of mediocre dinners. This is still true today. Most pizza you eat will be worse than Associazone Verace Pizze Napoletana. But some day, some slice of it somewhere will be better. Obsessing over traditionalism will inevitably lead to stagnation. 

In cooking, we can consider the forces of liberalism and conservatism an adversarial collaboration. Chefs hone their skills on traditional recipes. Once they master the basics they innovate. It’s cyclical: learn the rules, break the rules to create an innovative dish, add the novel recipe to the rules, get mad when people fail to follow the new recipe. Conservatism ensures high standards and general competency. Liberalism allows for progress. Both are merely tools for the end goal of eating good food.

In theory, politics works this way too. Cultural rules for gender get their priors from age old wisdom, and are modified by novel ideas and values. Unfortunately politics has a way of turning one’s mind to mush. Here’s a riddle for you:

A boy and his father are in a terrible car wreck. The man dies on the spot, but the son is rushed to emergency surgery. Upon arrival the lead surgeon, with a look of horror, says “I can’t operate on this child. He’s my son.”

How is this possible?

I’m hoping you’ve heard this before. The point of emphasis here isn’t the riddle itself (spoiler: it’s the mom and you’re sexist.) Rather, it’s that no one bats an eye that a parent cannot perform surgery on their own child. It’s strange that in situations that are merely important, say making pizza, the human mind often shows its best colors. But in situations that are extremely important eg, setting cultural rules for gender, it panics.

I think the political side of The War Of The Rules ought to function more like making pizza. The root setup is identical. Both the etymology and root ontology of the modern political identities come from the same liberal - conservative spectrum. 

Eg, the history of capitalism: Adam Smith’s free market economics was clear cut liberalism - a dramatic deviation from the established systems of feudalism and theological usury. Freedom of exchange was a smashing success. It brought entire societies out of poverty and famine. And thus, just like good pizza, free market economics transitioned into the law of the land. It became a conservative value. But it wasn’t perfect, and a new set of Liberals focused on emergent problems in capitalist societies, like rising inequality.

This led to more state control of markets and culminated in Communism in Europe and The New Deal in America. Heavy state intervention itself became the status quo. Naturally, this too led to novel problems and Hayek et al thought the solution was a return to free markets; this was called neoliberalism.

The terminology is confusing without context, but neoliberalism is correctly identified as (modified) classical liberalism, and today it is in many ways (again) a part traditional market economics. That is, free-market economics, like all rulesets, isn’t inherently liberal or conservative. [Eg, a Libertarian would be a conservative in a libertarian state, but a liberal in a communist one.]

The semantics here clarify more than just the history of markets. Pretty much all political innovations must have been won by liberals, eg, women’s rights, civil rights, functioning democracy. But conservatives have upheld laws and norms that most modern members of the contemporary political left appreciate. They’ve helped conserve the aforementioned market economy from communism, they protect personal freedoms like alcohol consumption (prohibition was, both historically and literally, liberal), and generally provide the necessary friction to prevent radical (and often mediocre) shifts in established culture. 

With this lens we can view the environmental movement as classic conservatism. This is already nominally true - they’re literally called conversationalist. But the similarity isn’t surface level. The battle between changing the environment through logging, fishing, and global warming versus conserving the environment follows the same intuitions of that of preserving women as homemakers. A priori we cannot say one is good and one is bad.

[I think some liberals might object to this because they have a simple paradigm where the natural world is good and must be preserved. Women as homemakers, or any negative cultural edifice, must be unnatural. I think this is dubious. The natural world contains plenty of horror - parasites and predation abound. I don’t think human culture peaked 100,000 years ago, in Eden, and has only since decayed.]

If this is true, we don’t live in a world where conservatism is bad and liberalism in good, (or vice versa.) The simple heuristic is, instead, that any random rule change is almost certainly for the worse; simultaneously, for any set of rules there exists a specific rule change will improve the system. The logic is copied from genetic evolution: (random) gene mutations are almost always bad, but evolution - as a whole - is very very good.

In this context arguments over superior ideology are nonsensical. The question is a matter of balance.

The Shift Towards Knowledge →Rule

Returning to Manioc, Scott notes: 

A reasonable person would have asked why everyone was wasting so much time preparing manioc. When told “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”, they would have been unsatisfied with that answer. They would have done some experiments, and found that a simpler process of boiling it worked just as well. They would have saved lots of time, maybe converted all their friends to the new and easier method. Twenty years later, they would have gotten sick and died, in a way so causally distant from their decision to change manioc processing methods that nobody would ever have been able to link the two together.

He continues:

One of the most important parts of any culture … is techniques for making sure nobody ever questions tradition. Like the belief that anyone who doesn’t conform is probably a witch who should be cast out lest they bring destruction upon everybody.

Most of the previous 50,000 - 100,000 years of human history are really a monument to conservatism. After thousands of years and hundreds of generations you kinda hit your stride. 

But a few hundred years ago there was a second great shakeup tantamount in importance to the invention of rules itself. It’s difficult to pin down, but it was kinda/sorta the invention of correctness, and the shift point is putatively the Enlightenment. It’s easier to explain by example. 

Before the Enlightenment rules were sacred: The Gods say throw a human sacrifice off the stairs to raise the sun. Scalp your enemies to bring honor. Do not, under absolutely any circumstances, even consider the moral possibility of eating shellfish. That would be heresy.

After the Enlightenment it became socially acceptable to challenge human-sun-stairs theory for mechanism, causation, or pattern. The epiphany wasn’t necessarily of moral roots. E.g., Steven Pinker regarding the Spanish Inquisition via The Better Angels Of Our Nature:

Some officials became infected with the scientific spirit and tested the witchcraft hypothesis for themselves. A Milanese judge killed his mule, accused his servant of committing the misdeed, and had him subjected to torture, whereupon the man confessed to the crime, he even refused to recant on the gallows for fear of being tortured again. The judge then abolished the use of torture in his court.

What’s shocking to us is that a judge at the avant-garde of morality would knowingly torture an innocent servant. But what was shocking at the time was that some long accepted societal rule of torture elucidates devilry was incorrect. 

Here’s another example that is a bit tangential. In the early 17th century Jan Baptist van Helmont ran an experiment that showed (rather unintuitively) that tree mass does not come from soil:

I took an Earthen Vessel, in which I put 200 pounds of Earth that had been dried in a Furnace, which I moystened with Rain-water, and I implanted therein the Trunk or Stem of a Willow Tree, weighing five pounds; and at length, five years being finished, the Tree sprung from thence, did weigh 169 pounds, and about three ounces… [After which] I again dried the Earth of the Vessel, and there were found the same 200 pounds, wanting about two ounces. Therefore 164 pounds of Wood, Barks, and Roots, arose out of water onely.

This is pretty good science (although it misses the extremely unintuitive fact that ~40% of biomass comes from carbon dioxide pulled from the air.) But Jan Baptist van Helmont was truly at a knife’s edge in history. Science on one side, traditional rule making (or world explanation) on another. Here’s his recipe mice via abiogenesis:

Place a dirty shirt or some rags in an open pot or barrel containing a few grains of wheat or some wheat bran, and in 21 days, mice will appear. There will be adult males and females present, and they will be capable of mating and reproducing more mice. [Src]

We see the remnants of the old world (God just puts mice places) and the kinder of a new one (conservation of mass, external reality that obeys laws.)

One more example. The history of medicine is largely testament to the old rules: dance away the evil spirits; place this this mostly inert herb in some strange way and put it somewhere (medicine, for whatever reason, is particularly resistant to intuitive rule making.)

But during the Enlightenment something changed. According to National Geographic:

In Europe in the 1840s, many new mothers were dying from an ailment known as puerperal fever, or childbed fever. Even under the finest medical care available, women would fall ill and die shortly after giving birth. Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was intrigued by the problem and sought its origins.

Semmelweis worked in the Vienna General Hospital in Austria, which had two separate maternity wards: one staffed by male doctors and the other by female midwives. He noticed women under the care of doctors and medical students were dying at more than twice the rate of the midwives’ patients.

Semmelweiss investigated whether a woman’s body position during birth had an impact. He studied if the literal embarrassment of being examined by a male doctors was causing the fever. Perhaps, he thought, it was the priests attending to patients dying of the fever that scared the new mothers to death. Semmelweis assessed each factor and then ruled them out.

After removing these other variables, Semmelweis found the culprit: cadavers. In the mornings at the hospital, doctors observed and assisted their students with autopsies as part of their medical training.

Semmelweis hypothesized that “cadaverous particles” were being transferred from dead bodies to new mothers by the doctors and their students.

The staff began sanitizing themselves and their instruments. The mortality rate in the physician-run maternity ward plummeted. 

It’s hard to return to a lost zeitgeist. But in prior human history the matter dying mothers would not have been a quandary approached with calm, rational inquiry. Most societies would have responded with ad hoc moral rules compatible with cultural thinking, eg, men aiding in birth is evil, or, touching the bodies of the dead has cursed the doctors.

But Semmelweis approached this differently. Mother’s weren’t dying because of the whim of an emotional God; mice weren’t being zapped into existence; illness wasn’t super-natural.

Something from the physical world was making these women sick. Semmelweis, despite his status as an expert, didn’t know a priori. It was both necessary and possible to test the external world world for causation.

An incredible epiphany. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the amount of human suffering just a few days of Semmelweis’ handwashing eliminated. He had stumbled upon a nearly costless and completely scalable form of hygiene.

A graph lifted from wikipedia with data from his own book:

Semmelweis was a hero. But his methods were abnormal. His thinking dissident. And his presentation deemed arrogant. To his peers he was a pariah:

Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time. The theory of diseases was highly influenced by ideas of an imbalance of the basic "four humours" in the body, a theory known as dyscrasia, for which the main treatment was bloodlettings. Medical texts at the time emphasized that each case of disease was unique, the result of a personal imbalance, and the main difficulty of the medical profession was to establish precisely each patient's unique situation, case by case.

In a world of Knowledge→Rule it’s hard to imagine that during a period of history literally known as the enlightenment the greatest medical minds would reach some consensus butthurt over something as banal as handwashing. But this makes a little more sense if we realize that the Rule→Knowledge paradigm is always emotionally dominant.

In fact, we cannot test our own intuitions here. We *know* handwashing is good. It’s our rule. If you want to test your emotional response, try: hospitals shouldn’t serve meat. Or maybe: cancer patients should eat raw meat. One of these will likely provide a strong emotional response in you, despite the fact that diet is incredibly complicated and, frankly, you only have tiny pieces of the puzzle to work with.

We all hate hearing evidence for things that break with your own rules. Our general paradigm is closer to Rule→Knoweldge than we like to admit.

Ie:

Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating. His findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death.

The hospital where Semmelweis worked also reverted handwashing to “optional.” The short story is not heartwarming.

But the historical narrative is different. If we zoom out far enough Semmelweis becomes a tipping point. He marks a shift from Rule→Knowledge towards Knowledge→Rule. The shift here was seismic, and vastly favored liberalism.

It was scientific - the laws of physics, chemistry, medicine and materialism itself were re-written.

It was political - the understanding that the old rules were arbitrary and humans were material things dissolved reverence for monarchs and theologians; a growing idea emerged that a political system could be designed by consensus to meet the needs of the maximum number of people. 

It was metaphysical - most Westerners now more or less understand that we live in a physical universe that obeys natural law. (Theologically, this is found in the shift from Theism into Deism.)

The progress was immense. But it’s a critical misunderstanding to think the rise of liberalism was a function of the ideology of liberalism. Contemporaries have never especially liked change.

We didn’t want to wash our hands, we didn’t want a heliocentric model of the solar system, we didn’t want to eat pizza, we didn’t want to spend all day studying in a classroom. Liberalism on this scale wasn’t something we sought out. It was something that we found and (because much of it was so overwhelmingly adaptive) begrudgingly had to live with.

The Balance

It’s a paradox, but I think most people simultaneously undervalue both liberalism and conservatism.

We dismiss conservatism because in the end it’s always wrong. The Bohr model of the atom crumbled. The founding fathers concept of freedom was compatible with slavery. Free markets led to inequality. Societal rules regarding sex criminalized homosexuality. And all our current mainstream values will eventually show such flaws as well. We don’t want to be on the wrong side of history.

But it’s not so easy to improve upon the Bohr model. Ask an old physics professor and they will tell you a thousand manifestos are written everyday tearing down the old laws, but he can count on one hand the number of these that offered improvements. Most of us, (especially in the realm of physics) have to spend most of our lives at the status quo. That’s okay. 

At the same time, when the change does come - when some genius finds some radical new truth - we’re never ready. We have all committed our lives to some model of planetary orbits, concept of gender, theory of Alzheimer’s, or pizza. And when the leviathan of external reality presses up against it we panic. We push back. We stand in defiance of the world as it exists. 

Rocketing into the future isn’t easy. In short time frames we make a lot of mistakes. But in larger time frames we’ve done incredibly well. 

And in a lot of ways we’re just starting to figure things out.

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