1. Why do so many good things have horizontal transmission structures?

Memetic horizontal transmission that is mediated by human normative judgement routes around this filter... in some manner. Maybe they are slightly hacking your perceptions of goodness? Also, maybe these filters improve things some.

Far be it from me to claim that modern horizontally transmitted cultural ideas are bad. I would never...

However... between 1800 and 1950 it would have seemed to little children that smoking was terrible, but then if their peers smoke, smoking starts to seem like a way to minimize the disgust, and shortly it begins to seem pretty great, and this becomes the widely shared common wisdom among adults in a society with very high smoking rates. With smoking there was careful centralized analysis, with data collection, and peer review, and careful reasoning about causal models. Eventually we figured out: nope. I can tell you a story about how my mom stopped smoking when I was a kid, and then my brother and I copied her by not starting.

I would argue that "good careful reasoning" is the exception that proves the rule in some sense, because lots of so-called Official Science(!) is pretty shit (parts of tongues that taste different things? wtf? is it all just gossip? when did academia give up on "nullius in verba"?) and the good stuff tends to be invented by a TINY group of people and spreads via *baroquely* cautious transmission patterns.

2. The conclusion seems severe and counterintuitive...

In memetics, this is what trusted priests or scholars are an attempted patch on, I think? I'm sorry. I don't know any good news here.

Biologically, viruses prey on bacteria. Both are made of nucleic acid but some nucleic acid content is aligned with the protein inside the membrane... and some isn't. The "better" viruses are prophages (integrating with the genome and conferring useful phenotypes)... but often they go lytic eventually... and then the infected bacteria's daughter's daughter's daugher's daughters have a regret-worthy outcome.

If people have lots of unprotected sex, a venereal disease eventually finds the niche created by that aggregate behavior. If people fly around in airplanes while sneezing on each other, an aerosolized disease eventually finds that niche. If people drink from a river downstream of where other people poop in the river (especially if some of the the drinkers then travel back upstream), cholera happens. When you feed cows to cows, prions grow exponentially and eventually there's mad cow disease. If elementary school teachers who have never been outside of the school system teach school children who become teachers who teach children who become teachers... You will end up with the curricular equivalent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

How long until twitter collapses? Has twitter died already? I'm sorry. The circle of life is best when it circles very VERY widely. Gotta turn it to mulch. Then have fungus eat it. Then let the fungus dry out in direct sun for two years. Then use it CAREFULLY. It makes me sad, but I think it is true. Do not recycle "vital" things!

3. What about The Moral Economy by Samuel Bowles?

I have not read the book you cite. I want to defy the data. I would suggest that high social capital causes prosperity and enables trusted third party mediation, then, because people socially trust the third party mediators, it enables quick interactions based on shared traditions (that affirm trust and that often rely on deeper "trust rails" go back decades or often centuries (often literally to shared ancestors)). This could cause correlations in single temporal snapshots of data. Massaging such snapshots in modern academic writing, people have an incentive to tell happy lies in public like "prosperity causes social capital". The traditional theories here (and the long term economic demography), suggest to me that great wealth is generally squandered by the fourth generation, so the data collection I'd like to see would span 6 generations over various cultural cross-sections, or else it would span maybe like 10 generations (to hopefully see two full cycles)? I would love to be wrong about this, but my priors are strong enough that I want to see very very rigorous data collection methods as part of the presentation of why my priors here should be weakened. Maybe writing a rigorous book review of the contents of The Moral Economy would be virtuous!

If there was a key countervailing idea here, for me it is "acceleration itself". Progress. The increase in the number of humans, and per capita energy use, and humane culture-making activities. Old functional things are being copied and the "oomph" has not burned out... yet! :-)

0. Where did this theory come from and is it horizontal or vertical itself?

I'm going to assume you asked this, and answer it! I invented the theory, basically.

The geminating idea is: Dawkins is just wrong. He used to go around constantly dunking on TRADITIONAL religion about how it was a virus, and he was just... wrong. Many many many generations of shared co-evolution often tames parasites by aligning them deeply with more "metabolic" vertical replicators. Mitochondria are tamed bacterial parasites. The V(D)J combinatorial immune system is a tamed viral parasite. Endosymbiosis is a thing, but it works in a certain way.

Tiny fast evolving things (like cults) are sources of novelty, and larger slower things (like 1000 year old civilizations with old co-evolved religions) must tame them, or be devoured. Novel horizontal culture is often pretty bad. I have extended this theory in various conversational domains going back maybe 15 years to before the launch of Overcoming Bias but it always seemed gauche (and inconsistent with the theory itself) to bring it up ONLINE in a community deeply built around "the rejection of the supernatural mumbo-jumbo of one's parents".

I have talked about the importance of vertically transmitted ideas with my parents (who are themselves second generation atraditionalists), and they roll their eyes, but are happy enough to tolerate my antics when I "larp" "filial piety". In the meantime, filial piety occurs in many religions. The Abrahamic injunction is obvious. If Confucianism has ONE PUNCH, that punch is arguably "filial piety". I have purposefully not talked about horizontal meme transmission where Google can see, but if that goal is to fail at horizontal at this particular historical junction during a horizontally transmitted global plague then I guess I'm ok with it? Naturally it would be better if my children could teach the theory "as taught by their mother" (me), but they do not exist (yet?), and so they can't.

(I would not strongly object if you deleted this post before it can be seen by Google and generally become less of a vertical meme and more of a horizontal meme... Evangelism just seems mildly evil to me, but I'm not evangelical about evangelism being bad... because that would kinda defeat the point? My interest here is mostly... credit assignment I guess? I'm a HUGE fan of thinking about The Credit Assignment Problem. If I have done wrongly, or well, then it seems generally proper that I be credited as having done wrongly or well. Similarly for you. Similarly for all choice-making beings.)

Why do free-market societies have higher social capital? How can this be fit into a larger picture in which horizontal transmission structures / few-shot interactions incentivize less cooperative strategies?

You mentioned that in small-town culture, there's a lot of iterated interaction, but people are slow to trust outsiders. That seems to suggest that there's high social capital within a small group, but low social capital with outsiders. As small-towners will prefer to only interact with people who are known to be trustworthy, they will not have the opportunity to come to trust outsiders in general.

In contrast, if you live in a large market economy where your social environment incentivizes few-shot interaction and most people turn out to cooperate even in few-shot interactions (possibly because their brains are still running strategies that were evolved for iterated interaction), then you will learn that most people are generally reliable. While you might never develop the level of extreme high trust with a few select people that you'd get in a small town, you will have much more trust for random strangers than the small-towners would. That might translate to higher social capital overall.

1. Why do so many good things have horizontal transmission structures?

I think the key to this is that while vertical transmission is more likely to be aligned, it is aligned with reproductive fitness in particular, which only partially matches the rest of what we value. Whereas horizontal transmission can come with an aligned, human-chosen filter attached. If I accept ideas from random unvetted sources, they will be optimized for transmission by that medium; if I want ideas that will make me a good thinker, and I have some ability to identify who the previous generation's good thinkers are, then I can selectively copy ideas from them, and they will be selected for that. (And if I succeed at becoming a recognizably good thinker, then future people may similarly copy ideas from me, and so on.)

(This kind of horizontal transmission is vulnerable to being taken over by fakes; if I lose the ability to distinguish who the good thinkers are, and start copying ideas from the wrong sources, then I'm back to the bad version of horizontal transmission in which ideas are selected mainly for virality, which in this case means memes that will turn me into a convincing faker.)

2. How should we think about horizontal transmission, normatively? Specifically, "paradox two" is an argument that horizontal-transmission practices, while enticing, can "burn the commons" of collective goodwill by opening up things for predatory/parasitic dynamics. Yet the conclusion seems severe and counterintuitive.

[Earlier in post:] The videos are being optimized for transmission rather than usefulness. Acquiring useful information requires prudent optimization against this.

It seems to me that the point where the damage is done is when someone signal boosts or retransmits the retransmission-optimized-low-quality information without doing this sort of prudent optimization. The more discriminating people are in what they signal boost, the more horizontal transmission becomes okay, both globally and within a particular information bubble.

This implies that the norms should be different in different groups, based on their inclination and ability to vet information before retransmitting it. Ie, most average people shouldn't be choosing their reading material based on what their friends chose to signal boost, because they have undiscriminating friends, but intellectuals with curated follow lists can probably get away with this.

1. Why do so many good things have horizontal transmission structures?

A free market isn't a lawless jungle of arbitrary one-shot interactions. It's an engineered game where participants can't be forced into deals and should keep promises. That pushes the great mass of interactions away from "predatory" and toward "positive-sum".

-- cousin_it, in a comment to this post [LW(p) · GW(p)]

There are many ways to help create cooperative rather than competitive outcomes -- vertical/horizontal is not the whole picture. Reputation networks achieve the same results as iteration, even if all interactions are basically one-shot. Enforcement mechanisms enable cooperation in one-shot scenarios. Many things which are apparently massively horizontal use these tools to mitigate virality.

1a. Information is almost as good as iteration. 

In a reputation network, you get to know about a potential interaction partner before interacting with them. This is useful for predicting them. Also, you know that if the interaction goes sour, you can reduce their reputation. This gives them an incentive to keep everything cooperative. (And likewise, gives you a similar incentive.)

At least in America, such reputation networks have been formalized in the credit bureau, as well as various other institutions such as Amazon seller ratings.

We can also talk more generally about getting information, not necessarily through an overt reputation network. Background checks, consumer reports, product reviews, ... (OK, you can technically think of all of that as reputation networks in a sense...)

In modern capitalism, you don't just encounter random people trying to sell things you've never heard before. You have quite a bit of information about products. Granted, not really enough information. (It's very difficult to evaluate what's really healthy, since the state of the research is often poor and difficult to evaluate. Making a food product is a complex affair which can't really be summarized by a list of ingredients and nutrition information. And so on.) But some information.

In science, obviously, information is the whole name of the game. Yes, there are problems. Serious problems. But a priori it's not clear whether we should expect "virulent meme" type problems in a scientific environment. There's a ton of horizontal transmission, but it's in a context where carefully vetting ideas is the whole project.

Education is another matter. You do get some rough information in the form of graduate employment statistics. However, there's a real information asymmetry problem. It's difficult to evaluate the quality of education if you don't know the stuff yet. You could rely on the assessment of experts, but this really doesn't alleviate the horizontal transmission concern; it's like asking smokers whether smoking is good.

1b. Enforcement mechanisms.

Free-market economies rely on a lot of enforceable contracts, as well as criminal law which disincentives general bad behavior.

Obviously, this only goes so far in eliminating "predatory" behavior.

2. How should we think about horizontal transmission, normatively?

Horizontal transmission can create hugely harmful dynamics. If we are in a position to "open things up", encouraging more horizontal transmission, we should think very carefully about this. Just because there is currently little evidence of predatory behavior (or virulent memes, etc) does not mean there won't be more in the future, if the incentives tip in their favor.

However, we're rarely in such a position. Most people/organizations have their own "immune system" which we would have to get around in order to "open things up" on a large scale.

In which case, how we would push to "open things up" would be to provide more mechanisms allowing for confidence in the robust goodness of interactions. Better reputation networks to enable bad actors to be filtered out. Better commitment mechanisms to ensure positive interactions. And other such things. Providing these will naturally "open things up" as people recognize that they can have safe interactions, allowing the fruits of horizontal transmission to be safely reaped.

However, I think this is far from providing a full answer to the question.

• How should we think about open borders, or other mobility issues? Would the world be better in a significant sense if less people left their hometowns to work elsewhere? Or just the opposite?
• How should we adjust the standard economic ideas about free international trade (IE: the standard argument that it should be a free-for-all)? Does the horizontal/vertical idea provide any significant argument against this?
• To what degree should we really be careful of horizontally transmitted memes, and to what degree should we think that horizontally transmitting memes is bad? Jennifer RM seems to suggest [LW(p) · GW(p)] a very significant degree of caution.

One more random thought. Exposing yourself for ideas from someone is much less risk than exposing yourself materially to him. But our trust has evolved for material interactions and there used to be an overkill of it for information interactions.

The replication crisis of science is a good example of how current way of 'horizontal spread mode of good things' reaches its limits and needs a correction mechanism. The question is if the correction mechanism can spread horizontally or if it can only come vertically. If we can understand it - that is simulate it in our heads and see the outcomes - then we probably can convince others about it and it can spread horizontally.

It might be that the dichotomy of horizontal and vertical is too limited - ideas spread in bubbles.

https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood shows some more limitations of the current horizontal spreading mechanisms.

Another example: antigen tests idea (https://medium.com/@zby/it-is-9-months-now-why-we-have-no-mass-testing-for-sars-cov-2-yet-27b5f409c7d2) - restated in medical/memetic metaphor - there was a cross reactivity of my (for example) memetic immune response system between the antigen and antibody tests.

2 just seems like another framing of Moloch: burn the commons, or be outcompeted by those who do.

3 I suspect is confounded by wealth, which enables people to take more risks. Free-market liberal societies are so much wealthier that this counterbalances the less cooperative general system.

For the third question, free-market capitalism might have fewer interactions between singular agents but more interactions between groups of agents. With the agents in free markets are still able to share information between each other changing it more into an iterated game. It does this while also increasing the punishment for defecting by having the group defect against the individual. Though the information sharing is not always consistent allowing for bad actors.

1. "Good" is a value judgement and values are known to be influenced by parasites.  For instance, it is a widely accepted fact that parasitic castration is an extended phenotype and that total fertility rates in the developed world are plummeting.  Is this "Good"?  Certainly it is "Good" in the opinion of those whose "values" are expressed in not having children and it is "Good" in the opinion of those whose children are being raised on the resources provided by those not having children -- as is they are the equivalent of the eusocial insect reproductive caste.
2. Consent uber alles.  The fact that those who wish to separate from the larger society on criteria considered "immoral" by the larger society are frequently called "supremacists" (especially if they are "white") should raise all kinds of "normative" alarm bells -- especially when they are attacked on that basis.
3. Free-market societies are consuming a natural resource of heritable individualism.  They are a terminal euphoria unless #2 above permits individualistic peoples who retain reproductive viability to have enough habitable land to vertically transmit genes and memes to the next generation.  The termination of this euphoria is being accelerated by misallocation of concern about "AI alignment" to focus on anything but enabling vertical transmission of AIs along with the memes and genes of a human ecology. https://web.archive.org/web/20220426162816/http://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2016/05/01/population-differences-in-individualism/