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How to Change a Culture

5/2/2013

8 Comments

 
Picture
Yes, that is a rugby choir outside of a stadium in Australia. Yes, they have thick songbooks with many, many songs about rugby. No, there is no accounting for taste in different cultures. :-)

I'm widening the aperture again in my quest to know thyself. Last week I moved on from items concerning me to look at items concerning other individuals. Now it's time to scale that up even further to take a look at collections of others - to look at society in general, and at culture in particular. So what is culture?

I come at this question having two particularly relevant experiences in my own background. The first was as a Peace Corps volunteer where we were given 3 months of language and culture training upon arrival at our new post so we could see the world through our host country's citizen's eyes, so we could understand norms and expectations for behavior, and so we would be less likely to misunderstand others' actions and responses. I had traveled a bit before I did this. I had moved to San Francisco from rural Pennsylvania. I had lived in Mexican border towns. I had spent a summer with eskimos in Alaska. I'd been to several foreign countries. I thought I had observed cultural differences in the past and knew a thing or two about dealing with them. But nothing showed me my ignorance of culture as much as living in a truly foreign one for two years did. As much as I studied the language, watched old movies, read history books, and talked with locals over beer (and vodka - it was Ukraine after all), there was always something new that baffled me. Some new turn of phrase, a superstition I hadn't been aware of, or...a cultural reference that I had not known. One that I couldn't possibly have known. (This isn't just a difference between first and second- or third-world countries either. Try going to British pub quizzes for two whole years and continually coming in dead last to less educated drunks.) I left Peace Corps with a deep understanding of what a shallow tourist we all are whenever we encounter a new group of people with a strong culture. I thought I had known this already, but after two intense years of trying to bridge the gap and still seeing a chasm before me, I knew it better.

My second deep experience with culture came when I left the Peace Corps and became an internal management consultant with the FBI and the Secret Service. Both of these proud organizations had century-long histories and were filled with employees who rarely left. And although they were THE two "elite federal law enforcement agencies" in the country with all the similarities around crime and punishment that would seem to entail, they possessed two very different cultures. As a new employee in those places whose job it was to try to create change and improve inefficient business practices, I was keenly aware of the need to fit in and learn the norms of behavior if I was going to get anything done. You can't rock the boat if you get thrown overboard. Looking for help, I studied the literature of organizational change management and found MIT professor Edgar Schein - the recognized guru on corporate culture. Schein was clear about what exactly makes up a culture. To him, culture is simply defined as a shared set of experiences. Over the years, successes and failures of everyone from individuals, to groups, to divisions, to the entire organization, who got promoted, what areas were merged, what spies or shooters (in the case of my odd workplaces) slipped through the cracks - all of these are turned into stories that are passed around for everyone to learn from. All of these are stories that outsiders never hear. These water cooler bouts of gossip are what embed norms of behavior among people who work together. This sub-culture of an office - of any group really - is made up of the experiences and stories that are shared within that group.

Now I'm a writer; one that's driven by my philosophy. I'm trying to study cultures across the globe to see what works and what doesn't. But I'm aware of the knowledge gap that exists between any group of "others." I'm looking for the shared experiences from our evolutionary history to find our universal commonalities. But I know how malleable our cultures can be and how strong an influence they are in all of the many individual places we live and work. I'm trying to write stories that will spread legends of successes and failures. But I want them to inspire new actions for new and better shared histories. As for my take on what an evolutionary philosophy can tell us about culture, here is what I wrote that guides me:

Culture
As Diogenes of Sinope said in the fourth century BCE, we are citizens of the world. Yet we are ensconced in a variety of local subcultures. Understand your local influences. Visit and live in other cultures to see what elements are changeable. Adopt good practices no matter the source. Recognize systemic influences that underlie seemingly singular differences. Learn by looking at the world from multiple perspectives. Gain understanding from this learning and use it to further the happiness of you and those around you.

Cultures are in competition with each other. Cultures that produce robust progress over the long term are the cultures that succeed. This is what makes one culture “better” than another. Cultures that produce large short-term benefits though, may gain enough of an advantage to extinguish other better cultures. Without knowing what is truly best in the long term, it is unwise to judge harshly and attempt to develop a world monoculture. Species remain adaptable when they contain a mix of abilities and allow trial and error to lead to the future. Cosmopolitan advice is therefore wise: accept others as different but equal, until actually proven otherwise.

Societies rise and fall on the basis of their balance between competition and cooperation, their balance between the short-term and long-term. The dangerous trap that occurs is that as a society becomes wealthier and wealthier, its citizens' long-term safety seems surer and surer. This safety can easily lead to relaxation and giving in to the ease of short-term pleasures. Society must educate its citizens about the greater benefits of long-term happiness. Even if it seems like you don’t need to, work hard. You will be happier. Successful societies that do not encourage this slowly rot from the inside.


What guides you as you navigate the cultures of your life? Is there something about a culture you deal with that you don't like? You can change it. Systems are stable when winners continue to win and actions that have lost continue to lose. You upend the system when you find a new action that wins, or redefine what it means to win at all. Do that, and you can write a new story. And it will be one that others will want to know and incorporate into their own culture.

8 Comments
Andrej
5/3/2013 07:31:40 am

Thought you might find this interesting....It is kind of what you are fighting against.

http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.pdf

Reply
@EdGibney link
5/5/2013 06:35:18 pm

Yes, that's a big thing EvPhil is fighting to take into account. Good article.

"The uncertainty and error-proneness of our first-order assessments of risk is itself something we must factor into our all-things-considered probability assignments. This factor often dominates in low-probability, high-consequence risks..."

This is exactly the kind of scenario that Nassim Taleb talks about as a Black Swan event. We are too often catastrophically dumb about these kinds of things. Hence my agreement with Taleb on a call for designed robustness over unmanaged fragility. My MBA cohorts have been optimizing redundancies out of the system for decades until we are left with a quite fragile overspecialized economic system. Any of a number of shocks to the system (sunspots, volcanoes, asteroids, viruses, etc.) will be quite problematic for society. That's a problem that governments need to sort out. Free market competition leads to fragility. We need to cooperate more to step back from that brink.

Bostrom is also the guy behind the "are we living in a computer simulation" thought experiment. I can logically tear that apart, but it's a surprisingly fun exercise. (http://is.gd/DQ5EYW)

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Andrej
5/9/2013 12:37:48 pm

I think the issue is we are genetically programmed not to cooperate. As an extreme example, the largest sandshark embryos eat all the other embryos before being born because sandshark females mate with more than one male. If something so primal like that is programmed into our genetic make-up, how in the world can people evolved out of this competition we are all in?

Heck the Germans came up with the perfect word, schadenfreude and it covers so many situations so well. I want you to succeed but not all that much because I will be diminished by your success.

In a world where true hate mongers like Limbaugh and Beck thrive and drive the dicussion, how does EvPhil fit in?

People are the exception to the rule and the earth needs us not and is definitely more healthy without its pesky "dark passengers." We do very little for the good of the earth as a whole and it is sad but few people do anything really except seek rents. As you say, a catastrophy could change things and at the end of the day I don't see people evolving even into a Woody Allen "Sleeper" -type society let alone a utopian paradise.

Best case is we are a bunch of unruly, dirty, and dangerous riders on earth and if we can somehow figure out how to get ordered, clean, and safe it could turn out well. That song, In the Year 2525 is prescient. Three choices for you - society in 9595 (when the song ends) will be:
1 - Star Wars/futuristic with clean air, water, green technology and people scooting around in hovercraft using brain power to develop society along a "what's good for all is good for me" approach.

2- Status quo of today, large unmanageable cities, rampant poverty, and inequity, etc.

3 - Planet of the Apes, some other species has taken over as man has been pushed to the brink of survivial by his own stupidity and hubris. Bonus question - Which new species is dominant
A. Primates
B. Large land mammals
C. Fish
D. Arthopods and things living below ground....

How to get there is the problem. Status quo and Planet of the Apes are easy and unfortunately the solution is one of action not inertia...

Interestingly though, that song hit the top of the charts in the US and UK and the artists never charted again - the only act for that ever to happen in both the US and UK.... Says something/hit a chord to use a pun.

I have got to go though because my social experiment just got a new friend, Edrej is back baby! Nicolas Mario Santillan, a cook at Bandito Burrito in some airport wants to share his views on ObamaCare and how it should be defunded....and about how the Dems are going to take away his guns. I need to rile him up or support him, because he is my new friend!

Reply
@EdGibney link
5/9/2013 05:17:02 pm

Good morning sunshine! I'll take issue with your very first sentence and the rest will fall into line. There's of course the problem of "genetic programming" at all - nature vs. nurture, blank slate vs. human nature, free will vs. determinism, etc., etc. But I'm going to assume you just used that as a turn of phrase and you know we're actually in a middle ground on all of those issues. So then, the real disagreement I have is with your saying that we aren't, I'm going to say, "evolved" to cooperate. That's just not the case as more and more scientists are finding out. One leading book about this is actually called "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod (http://is.gd/gjDV8T). In a nutshell, we see cooperation in infants and other animals and it arose in us because the most successful strategy for survival (according to a game theory computer competition) is called "tit-for-tat" cooperation. If you cooperate with me, I will with you, and we will do better. If you compete with me, I will with you, and we will do worse as a whole. Groups that tend to cooperate outcompete those that don't, and cooperation proliferates. We have to be prepared to do BOTH cooperation and competition though, so yes, I agree with all of your observations that greed, shadenfreude, and oppression do exist, and will exist, but I say we can learn to tame them through our cultural institutions and education. We already have to a very large extent compared with just the middle ages for example. It might take until 9525 to "finish" the job, but that is the role of EvPhil - to make us aware of this dynamic tension that exists in our human nature, and to teach us how to wisely choose the option that is better for us individually because it is better for us all.

Hmm. Bonus question. If humans went away, I suppose primates are the closest to evolving collective learning that has given us a runaway advantage over all other species. If we were still here though, only something we couldn't fight could overcome our huge advantage. They would have to be small and very numerous so arthropods it is. Specifically ants could probably figure out a way to harvest aphids that would endow them with human-killing poisons so they could kill us off one by one at our picnics.

Andrej
5/9/2013 08:09:59 pm

I am gonna go long tomorrow, but for now, a microcosm of tit-for-tat/prisoner's dilemma/game theory in the real world... pro cycling. The evolved way to go and the best way would be for all not cheat as the potential loss is so huge and everyone would be competing on an even keel. Everyone cheating was the worst possible outcome but that is what everyone did... People think in the short term for short term goals and benefits and while they may understand the long term consequences, we all have limited planning horizons.

You stepped into my realm - game theory... More tomorrow.

Reply
@EdGibney link
5/9/2013 09:48:39 pm

I look forward to hearing it. Before you go too long though, I would reiterate that I agree the urge to cheat and the biases that make it difficult for us to think long-term are all there. But we can beat them. We can, we are, and we must. Pro-cycling isn't in a finished evolutionarily stable state yet. I believe all this cheating coming to light is just another step toward catching and punishing cheaters that have always been there in one form or another. Anyway, have at it.

Reply
Andrej
5/10/2013 12:33:33 pm

(wrote this before I read your post, but it fits well)

I love game theory, it was by far the most interesting of the subjects I took in school. However, from the very beginning I always had an issue with it (being a contrarian). First socio/philosophical/economic tests and theory do not hold up in the real world. There is no way to test prisoner’s dilemma or tit-for-tat in the real world because the test is set up in a false environment. Before you get all philosophical on my butt, hear me out…

The game theory tests lack real world consequences. How someone will react in the real world is much more interesting to me than them learning how to play a game and then winning. Also, in the real world you don’t get numerous opportunities to test a hypothesis and then work toward the ideal solution. The shot you get is often riddled with mis-information, lies, and problems that are not replicable in a lab. Add to this that almost every decision that gets made is also made with imperfect information and/or unbalanced information. How often does an clerk at McDonald’s go into a salary negotiation with the upper hand? Never. Does it happen, yep, but when it does it is often times the case of an employer having to over-pay someone (aging sports icon’s come to mind) in order to keep the peace with their fans (Steinbrenner and his contracts) or for reasons unrelated to the players value (Jayson Werth), or because the owner is a rich moron (NY Mets).

Another issue I have with game theory is there is no consequence of not getting it right the first time. In the real world if you overpay for a house, negotiate poorly with the police, etc you are stuck with the consequence. People do learn from mistakes but many mistakes are ones you are forced to live with and adapt to and this is more interesting to me in an economic sphere than giving someone 25 chances to learn tit-for-tat. Real world, after 2-3 times of not getting it right, you are road kill.

However the biggest issue and one that I am sure there is a lot written about is that people are presumed to act rationally in these experiments and in the real world I would say that is not even close to the case. Few people make decisions based upon a rational hierarchy of what is good for them and society. Was it rational to take a year off at 31 for me and ride my bike through South and Central America and the US? Was it rational for you to leave your job and pursue EvPhil and good food? The issue is who defines rationality and what is it? For economists it is about rent seeking behavior, which usually means what will bring the most return on investment. For others, it is about reaching a spiritual center, but the whole problem for game theory is that in the real world this rationality is something that everyone defines for themselves and changes almost constantly. I tried in grad school to add “quality” to the discussion (I had read Zen and the Art of… way too many times) but was rebuffed. It wasn’t that people who demand cars at certain price points it was that they had a perceived quality/price point that you had to find which was almost impossible to do because too many variables were involved.

Like I mentioned the classic prisoner’s dilemma was the Tour de France. All the cyclists had a huge incentive to cheat and not to cheat. One can argue the numbers, but most did, even the greatest. All knew the risks far outweighed the rewards, but short term rent seeking took over from long term maximization. If the riders were strong enough to stand up to outside pressure and cooperated and no one cheated, they would have changed history as the first collective group ever to put aside self interest for the greater good. You could also argue that the results would have been about the same most likely. Self interest, pride and other human foibles got in the way as is always the case.

Love game theory as a theory, but in practice, not so much.

@EdGibney link
5/11/2013 06:30:42 pm

You are entirely right with these quibbles about game theory. I think they are precisely the reason why the relatively new field of Behavioral Economics has arisen. We aren't perfectly rationally calculating beings, we are largely driven by our emotional pulls. Behavioral Economics aims to study our actual behavior in the real world, and it does a good job of cataloging exactly the kinds of faulty decision making that you point out.

But(!), to "go all philosophical on your butt", that's exactly why we all need more philosophy in our lives - to know thyself and learn to redirect those emotional pulls through better informed cognitive appraisals. I'm reminded of a project I worked on at the FBI. I joined a "Leadership Development Program" after it had been up and running for several months. (This was just in the lull between my Secret Service and DHS gigs - it was a natural place where I could contribute some help for as long as it was going to take DHS to process my application. We thought it would be < 6 weeks, but it ended up taking 6 months. But I digress.) This LDP was put together in response to a paper from an executive dean at the Northwestern Business School who served a sabbatical as the FBI's Chief Knowledge Officer for about a year. He suggested we needed to build a leadership training program like many of the top private companies have (chiefly GE as the model). The FBI agreed and put together a "task force" to accomplish that and I joined them after they had been working on this idea for a while. When I got there, they were struggling with the results from a survey of current leaders they had just received because they had simply asked open ended questions of "what has helped you become a leader" and they couldn't make use of the extremely random "data" they received in their written responses. I helped the team realize that this was because a) no one in the organization had defined what it meant to be a leader, b) all sorts of varieties of "leaders" (good, bad, strong, weak, front, rear, by example, by words) had been promoted to positions of leadership, and so c) no one "knew" what it meant to be a leader. (And d) essay questions do not yield good data to study.) So of course the responses from our leaders was going to be all over the map and rather unhelpful. What we needed to do instead, was study best practices of what leadership "should" be, find ways to ask people how they had developed those qualities (communication, judgment, interpersonal ability, flexibility, etc. etc.), and then we could start to develop a "Leadership Development Program" that made certain experiences available / mandatory for people to become the leaders we wanted them to be.

Now, what does this have to do with game theory and philosophy? Just that the people who are making mistaken choices in the real world are flying in the dark just like our FBI leaders were. Just like we needed to define leadership for them to learn how to be better leaders, we (as a society) need to define wisdom to help our citizens act more wisely. Gathering the concepts of game theory and behavioral economics is just the first step in learning to understand what it is we are doing wrong. Once we know that, we can then teach what would be better, and correct the course of future actions. Easy peasy. No? ;-)

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