“Indigenous” is one of those words that has taken on a dual meaning. At the surface level, it simply means “native to a particular place” and can be applied to any life whose ancestry has lived in that place for many generations.

By this definition, to be indigenous is a matter of degree. New England families who came over on the Mayflower are increasingly indigenous New Englanders over time. Our population is increasingly indigenous to an urban setting.

But it has also taken on a more specific meaning, something like “a person is indigenous to a place if they are one of the descendants of the people who lived there before European colonialism”. This is a subset of the broader term, restricting it to one frame (colonialism).

As a result it has become a political football in the culture war. Which I think is a shame, because the concept of “indigenous” is actually a very powerful one for understanding learning systems. One that gets lost in seeing only one type of “indigenous”, or rejecting it.

Credit for helping me think through these ideas must go first to Tyson Yunkaporta for Sand Talk, a book I found very annoying to read and disagreed w often but that contained many valuable insights regardless.

There are lessons that can be learned up front with reason. There are other lessons that can be learned only with time. Competence vs maturity. Intelligence vs wisdom. Accuracy vs simplicity.

We see “indigenousness” all the time in our own lives. Someone who has been skiing all their life has a way of motion that is effectively impossible to mimic learning it as an adult. A 10 year veteran software engineer knows things a rookie doesn’t — no matter how smart.

And we experience it interpersonally in our lives as well. Your relationship with someone you’ve known for decades, meeting only every few months for a day, has a quality of depth that cannot be matched in a mere months of 24/7 time together.

Learning is about patterns. A pattern always has a fundamental frequency, the size for it to repeat once (either in space or time). Even large spatial patterns may be learned quickly in time, and do not require long experience to apprehend.

But long temporal patterns are invisible in any moment. Learning the long patterns is the benefit of experience. The newcomer may be a quick study, but there is simply a maximum rate that temporal patterns reveal themselves over time.

If you are good at transfer learning, you can accelerate this process via analogy. “Ah, I see I’m in this long pattern, even tho I’ve only been in it for 2% of its length, bc it’s just like this short pattern I know well.” But there is no guarantee of this being possible.

And the most important long pattern that we all must learn is that the question, “what behavior is appropriate in this context?” This crucial question is a long pattern and a wicked one because one’s behavior determines the future context for both acting and learning!

Since the effects of actions compound over time, you cannot evaluate the “full consequences” of your choices ever. At most you have the known consequences in a time window. It is usually only after several repetitions of a pattern within that window that it can be recognized.

If a pattern is on the scale of one human life, it becomes almost impossible to learn as an individual. “This kind of behavior looks good for 35 years then turns out very badly” is not the kind of lesson you get many shots at. It must be learned by the culture instead.

Thus, the value of being indigenous. A culture indigenous to a certain place has learned its long patterns. The individuals may not be able to articulate why the wisdom of the elders is true, but it is.

Not all cultures are indigenous to anywhere. The USA is a very new country on the scale of lifetimes, made almost entirely of immigrants. Immigration resets how indigenous a culture is, by effectively clearing (heavily regularizing, really) the cultures memory.

The people of an indigenous culture forced to move to a new place can be a hard thing, for many of the valuable lessons do not apply. But there is an important meta-lesson every indigenous culture knows: that the wisdom of ages should be attended even when it is not known why.

Chesterton’s fence is, effectively, a restatement of indigenous meta-wisdom. It is ironic that as individuals we can learn indigenous meta-wisdom quickly by observing many events in parallel, and yet knowing as individuals does not mean our culture knows.

How might we inject this meta-wisdom into our broader culture? I do not know. But I think it’s worth pondering…what would it look like for our culture to become indigenous to cities, to technological civilization, to modernism? Bc the context changes so fast!

How do we become indigenous to an environment of extreme change? By increasing our culture’s learning rate. We must somehow learn more of these collective lessons more quickly. Not as people, but as groups. Which means federalism in some way…running many experiments.

But many experiments is not enough. We must be able to allow the successful experiments to replicate and spread, and the failures to dwindle. A living cellular culture is the only one that I believe can survive the coming pace of change.

@tr_babb But (a) it suggests a *huge* amount was lost, in a bunch of ways we aren’t even aware of and can’t really understand, a mass-extinction event that left few fossils and (b) a lot of what was lost would probably be incompatible w living in urban areas and modern tech.

@exhaze I think it’s N-ary distillation but we only are generally aware of our layer, and then the layer above it and below it. Also I think the memetic-cooperative biases are much deeper than you suppose! For game theoretic reasons in this thread I just posted:

@Afinetheorem Longer: I disagree. As I discuss later in the thread, there is indigenous meta-wisdom which are it’s ways-of-knowing that are common to all indigenous cultures and not to uprooted cultures.

@Afinetheorem These are beliefs held at a cultural (not individual) level that cannot be replicated cheaply or easily. I think it’s important also to see that indigenous European culture got wiped out just before most of the others did…the first place “colonized” was Europe itself.

@Afinetheorem This SSC piece is a good version of the argument or The Discovery Of France.

@Afinetheorem But also, I think the “put more indigenous ppl into scientific boards” idea is bad, bc don’t think there’s an obvious way to transfer the knowledge. Putti g more indigenous *people* into positions of influence will not integrate their cultural understanding to the culture.

@exhaze Constraining the flux (via some kind of loss that flattens the output of the model) and constraining the model directly (via some kind of loss that flattens the shape of the model) are always equivalent in theory but not in practice.