P-Cultures, Median Worlds

Thinking about self-as-society

Dec 09, 2023

Short one this week, as I’m quite ill.

(Also, sometimes there will be short ones even when I’m not ill; not every concept needs thousands and thousands and thousands of words. =P)

My friend and colleague Eliezer Yudkowsky often talks about a concept (which I believe he developed himself) called median worlds. I often talk about Duncan-culture, and what things are like in a “land of Duncans.”

It only recently came to my attention that people thought Eliezer and I were talking about the same sort of thing, but actually the two ideas are very, very different. And as far as I know, there isn’t a primer on either, so … voilà!

Median Worlds

If you are of median height, then two things are true:

Your height is probably also the most common, modal height; more people are your height than any other single height. (This doesn’t mean that a majority of people are your height, but it does mean that a plurality are.)
Of the people who aren’t your height, half of them are taller and half of them are shorter.

Straightforward, hopefully. That’s what it means to be at the peak of the bell curve.

Your median world is an imaginary world in which the same is true for every normally distributed trait. Your G/IQ is the most common G/IQ, and of the people whose G/IQ are different, half of them are smarter than you and half of them are dumber. Half of the population is more athletic than you, and half less. Half is more creative than you, and half less. You anchor the political spectrum, and the entertainment industry, and the education system, and the medical system. It’s a world in which you, as you currently exist, are as normal and unremarkable as it is possible to be.

Naturally, your median world is going to look pretty different from this world. Think of any trait that you have that is at all unusual or extraordinary, and imagine shifting half the population to have more of it than you do. My disdain for professional spectator sports is fairly high; in a world where half the people find them even sillier and more boring than I do, the whole industry likely doesn’t even exist. No stadiums, no ESPN, no Superbowl, no March Madness—none of it.

On the other hand, given that I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars in the past decade to surround myself with trampolines and crash pads and parkour equipment … in my median world, fully half the population wants that stuff even more than I do, meaning that trampoline parks and obstacle courses are near-ubiquitous, as commonplace as football fields and gyms are in our world.

I like thinking about median worlds because they help me think about questions like “would the world be better if everyone imitated me in this domain?”

Some of my unusual traits are good because they’re unusual. Just as a biological ecosystem is more robust and stable if it has lots and lots of complexity, so too are societies better if they are diverse and have lots of people filling lots of different niches. In those cases, if everyone were more like me, something important would be lost.

Some of my unusual traits are good because they’re helping counter an imbalance in the overall culture. Sometimes, my culture has a deficit in X, and so I’ll embody something like 10X, to try to make up for it and set an example and pull the pendulum in the right direction. In those cases, if everyone were more like me, we’d be going too far.

(Of course, I also have some unusual traits that are just plain bad, and I wouldn’t want those universalized, either.)

But some of my unusual traits really shouldn’t be unusual, and there’s something wrong with our culture’s current equilibrium, and it really would be straightforwardly good if the world changed such that my stance on X were completely unremarkable.

Proprius Cultures

(You can say P-cultures, for short, and you’re also welcome to ignore the Latin term and just think of it as standing for “personal cultures” if you want to. Proprius is an excellent word but it won’t be on the quiz.)

When I run around saying things like “in Duncan culture, we do things this way,” I am emphatically not referring to a Duncan median world.

A Duncan culture is not a culture where I, Duncan Sabien, am central and normal and unremarkable in all ways; it’s not a culture pinned to my unique mix of traits and preferences.

Instead, my P-culture is a culture in which “everybody gets it,” where “it” is all of the deep conceptual models that seem obvious and straightforward and important to me. It’s a culture where the inferential gap between me and the median person is small (as opposed to this culture, where I often have to write ten thousand words to communicate something that feels, on the inside, very simple).

Another way to say this: your P-culture is one in which:

Every one of the big Lessons that you’ve learned over the last few decades is in fact seen as important by the culture as a whole
If you were to take a list of those Lessons to a nearby high school, you would find that the students there were capable of comprehending them fairly easily. High schoolers in your P-culture don’t know all of the things that you know, but they’re able to pick up on them all quickly. The insights make sense. They click.

Yet another way to say this is that your P-culture is one in which everyone correctly interprets all of your sazen. Where you don’t have to laboriously rule out each of a dozen nearby misinterpretations in order to clearly communicate an idea.

I like thinking about proprius cultures (specifically, about Duncan-culture) because the concept helps me distinguish crucial or load-bearing elements of civilization and cooperation from things which are optional, incidental, or up-for-grabs.

For instance, it’s not the case that Duncan-culture is incompatible with ESPN and spectator sports, the way that a Duncan median world is. I happen to feel substantial disdain and disinterest for football and basketball and soccer and what-have-you, but that’s not an emergent property of the things that I think are important and meaningful about my character or my values. Similarly, I am big into LEGO and Magic: the Gathering, but those too are not prominent or necessary features of Duncan-culture.

But there are lots of things that humans-writ-large don’t really get, that every single member of Duncan-culture gets.

For instance, humans as a class don’t seem to me to really get that children are (or at least have the capacity to be) capable, relatively autonomous, sovereign people, often by the age of eight or nine and overwhelmingly by the age of fourteen or fifteen. And there’s this deeply messed-up self-fulfilling prophecy that our culture has installed, by which children are cut off from opportunities to practice their independence and responsibility, and then blamed for the atrophied state of those muscles.

In Duncan-culture, everybody gets that a fourteen-year-old who’s put 5,000 hours of practice into a domain is going to be overwhelmingly more competent than a twenty-five-year-old who’s put in 500, even if that domain is something like [driving automobiles] or [managing large sums of money] or [navigating romantic relationships] or [handling firearms]. And so in Duncan-cultures of all kinds (whether they have ESPN or not), there’s much more of a deliberate on-ramp to things which, in our culture, are often blindly gated by age thresholds.

As another example, humans as a class don’t seem to me to understand Red Queen races on a deep, intuitive level, and to recognize and care about the way in which unchecked optimization pressures drive all of the slack out of a system. My go-to example here is college applications; as colleges and universities have grown more and more selective, students are competing harder and harder, taking on more and more courses and extracurriculars to try to stand out, with the ultimate result still being … basically the same? i.e. the best students mostly get into the best schools, and the next tier of students mostly get into the next tier of schools, and so on, except that everyone’s burnt-out and overworked and exhausted and fried because if they do any less than their absolute maximum they’ll be outcompeted and shunted downward.

In Duncan-culture, there’s a class somewhere in middle school on Red Queen races, and after that everybody gets it, and the culture as a whole is much better about spotting and defusing Red Queen dynamics before they can burn up all the spare energy.

(A full essay on this topic is on the list for an upcoming essay, so I won’t go into further detail here.)

If you think about the times when you’ve been exasperated and frustrated because everyone around you seems oblivious—

If you think about the pieces of advice you’ve found yourself giving over and over and over again—

If you think about the tiny niches and enclaves that feel like a breath of fresh air, the friend groups or social clubs or organizations that felt safe and sane and different from everywhere else you’ve been—

Those things are in your P-culture. Those are the elements that distinguish your P-culture from the broader context culture that we’re all embedded in.

(I’m actually working on a book which could be thought of as “trying to make the insights of Duncan’s P-culture available and accessible to everyone else.” Likely one of my upcoming essays will just be a list of 50-200 sazen that make up the table of contents.)

Not much in the way of conclusion (sorry, I’m really quite ill). But if you haven’t ever tried thinking about either of these … give it a shot! I think both median worlds and P-cultures are a great way to sanity-check yourself as you go about trying to be the change you want to see in the world.

Catch you later, hopefully next week if recovery goes well.